BALMES, JAIME. — Philosopher, apologist, sociologist, and politician, born at Vich, in Catalonia, on 28 August 1810, and died there on 9 July 1848. Having completed his studies in the humanities (1817–22), philosophy (1822–25), and a course in theology (1825–26) at the seminary of his native city, he transferred to the University of Cervera, then the only university in all Catalonia. After another eight years of study, during which he devoted himself almost exclusively to deepening his knowledge of the thought of St. Thomas, he obtained a degree in theology in 1835. Ordained a priest at Vich on 20 September 1834, he taught mathematics there, while at the same time devoting himself to literature and poetry.
His life as a Catholic journalist may be divided into two periods. In the first, which began at Vich and continued at Barcelona, where he ordinarily resided from 1841 to 1844, he wrote his best-known apologetic works: Memoria o Reflexiones sobre el celibato (Madrid 1839), Observaciones sobre los bienes del clero (Vich 1840, Barcelona 1840), and above all El protestantismo comparado con el catolicismo en sus relaciones con la civilización europea (4 vols., Barcelona 1842–44), translated almost simultaneously into French, German, and Italian. At the same time he published apologetic and social essays in the Barcelona journals La religión, La civilización (1841–42), in collaboration with Roca y Cornet and Ferrer y Subirana, and La sociedad (1843–44), founded and written by him alone.
The second period, during which B. generally resided in Madrid, lasted from 1844 to ’48 and included writings chiefly philosophical and political in nature: El criterio (Barcelona 1845); Cartas a un escéptico (1846), at once apologetic and philosophical; Filosofía fundamental, in 4 vols., in which he set forth the fundamental points of his philosophical thought, soon translated into French and Italian and reprinted in 1848; and Filosofía elemental, in 3 vols. (1847), for which he personally prepared the Latin translation for use in seminaries. In Madrid he founded the political periodical El pensamiento de la nación, which sought to bring about the pacification and union of Spain through the marriage of the young Queen Isabella II with don Carlos de Borbón, leader of the Carlists; this would have contributed to the consolidation of the throne and made possible a political evolution without the dangers of revolution. B. also took an interest in foreign policy, particularly in events in Rome, and wrote the pamphlet Pío IX (Madrid 1847) in defense of the reforms of the new Pope. The opposition he encountered in this sphere from Catholics, and the failure of the proposed royal marriage, led him to leave Madrid. He returned to Barcelona and died shortly afterward, at only thirty-eight years of age.
As an apologist, B. belonged to a Catalan school to which, together with him, belonged the two companions mentioned above, La civilización, Joaquim Rubió y Ors, and the Majorcans Tomás Aguiló and J. M. Quadrado. In their ideas, all were dependent on the French apologists, with many of whom—for example, Ozanam, Lacordaire, and Dupanloup—B. had personal relations during the three journeys he made to Paris.
Although B.’s apologetics is dispersed among two principal works, the Letters to a Skeptic and Protestantism, as well as many separate pamphlets and articles, it nevertheless constitutes an organic body of doctrine. He develops three points at greatest length: religious skepticism, the human value of the Catholic Church, and that of the clergy. These were three questions of lively contemporary importance. Even before the Letters, which are rather philosophical, B. had opposed in individual articles the rationalistic atheism of the eighteenth century and the two fundamental principles of nineteenth-century religious liberalism. The Cartas a un escéptico, rather than being a systematic work, are a collection of friendly conversations concerning the most vital themes of the mid-nineteenth century: the cause of the multiplicity of positive religions, hell, the philosophy of the future, the martyrs as an argument for the divinity of the Church, tolerance, French philosophical spiritualism and German idealism, the Gospel, the necessity of Baptism for salvation, the veneration of the saints, religious Orders, and so forth.
Il Protestantismo, by contrast, is a systematic book in which, in the face of Protestantism’s sterility, he proves the divinity of the Catholic Church precisely from its human values in the development of European civilization. Finally, B. responded at length to the customary accusations against the Catholic clergy, so widespread throughout nineteenth-century Europe, in his writings on celibacy, the property of the Church, the modern education of the clergy, and religious Orders. As examples of popular apologetics, one must also recall the widely circulated pamphlet La religión demostrada al alcance de los niños (Barcelona 1841) and the Conversa d'un pagès de la muntanya sobre la papa (Barcelona 1842), one of the few of his writings in his native Catalan language, then undergoing a revival.
As a philosopher, although he had certain points of contact with the Catalan philosophical school of his time, represented above all by Martí d’Eixalà and quite close to the Scottish tendency of common sense, B. was more closely connected with the eclectic scholasticism of the University of Cervera. This had been formed there before the expulsion of the Jesuits and was transplanted to Italy chiefly by the two brothers Baldassarre and Giuseppe Antonio Masdeu, teachers of V. Buzzetti.
At the foundation of B.’s entire philosophy unquestionably lies St. Thomas, even though he often accepted Suárez’s interpretation, as, for example, in the question of the distinction between essence and existence. A determined opponent of the sensualists and idealists, he showed a certain predilection for Descartes and Leibniz, and maintained a constant deference toward the scholastics, even when he departed from them, as in the hylomorphic theory and in the doctrine of act and potency. His philosophical thought is to be sought above all in Filosofía fundamental, a work that is both critical and constructive, entirely founded on the broadly human spirit of El criterio, which, although it perhaps prevented him from being a bold thinker, nevertheless made him a solid and reliable guide.
The first fundamental problem of philosophy is that of certainty, which B. sought to resolve by recourse to consciousness, evidence, and common sense, understood as an “intellectual instinct,” not as something sentimental or sensory, as in Reid or Hamilton. Departing from scholastic terminology, B. maintained that “the principle of evidence is not evident.” This assertion caused a certain stir, but wrongly so, since, if common sense is an intellectual instinct, it falls within the broad concept of evidence proper to scholasticism. In any case, the above thesis, together with certain Cartesian-leaning ideas concerning the souls of animals, provoked against B. a petition for the condemnation of Filosofía fundamental, though it led to no result. In the problem of the origin of ideas, B., while acknowledging a “mysterious” influence on the part of sensations, abandoned the Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of the agent intellect. In metaphysics he did not admit a single philosophical principle, but three equally necessary principles, perceived as such by common sense: that of existence, that of evidence, and that of contradiction.
Alongside the constructive part, what deserves emphasis in B.’s philosophical work is its critical discussion, always conducted with clear acuity, particularly of Kantian and idealist doctrines.
V. BARCELONA, BIBLIOTECA BALMES.