BROGLIE, AUGUSTE-THÉODORE-PAUL DE. - French apologist and philosopher, b. at Auteuil on 18 June 1834, d. by assassination in Paris on 11 May 1895. Left motherless at the age of four, he was entrusted to the care of his aunt, Baroness Augusta de Staël, who, although a Protestant, gave her nephew an education inspired by the most orthodox Catholicism. In 1867 he cut short his military career in order to follow his vocation to the priesthood. Ordained a priest on 18 Oct. 1870, he devoted his first apostolate to the suburbs of Paris, at the same time beginning those courses of apologetics, among the middle and student classes, which attracted the attention of Msgr. d'Hulst, by whom, in 1879, he was called to the chair of apologetics at the Catholic Institute of Paris, which he held until the day of his tragic death at the hands of a deranged woman whom he had frequently befriended. De B.'s vast work embraces a great part of the problems of apologetics and of related subjects (philosophy, history of religions, biblical studies) and developed according to the intense rhythm of his academic courses, his lectures and his oratorical activity. His apology is directed against scientific positivism, which held the whole culture of the second half of the 19th century in its grip; philosophical, ethnological and historical positivism. To philosophical positivism is devoted the penetrating analysis of epistemological problems that occupies the two volumes of Le Positivisme et la science expérimentale (1880-81). This work opens his activity as a writer and lays the foundations of his apologetic work.
Moving the attack directly to first principles, de B. contests point by point, without bitterness but with gentlemanly firmness, the metaphysical agnosticism professed by the positivists with regard to substances and causes, unmasks its gratuitous assumptions and its deficiencies of method, while at the same time bringing out the good and usable aspects that it presents even within traditional philosophy. Taking his inspiration from Helmholtz himself, he does not fear to defend the immediate perception of substances and causes, both in inner experience and, albeit with certain cautions, in outer experience. Such perception, immediate as an act, presents itself in its actual unfolding as a process of interpretation, as an immediate translation of certain sensible "signs" that we feel in our organs. There are therefore in perception three moments: 1) the perception of the sensible "signs" in the impression made by the stimulus on the sense organ; 2) the interpretation of the sensible "signs," or perception of bodies, through which there is "seeing" and "touching"; 3) the decomposition of the crude notion obtained from the senses, the distinction of qualities and phenomena, that is, the description of the object "seen" and "touched." Distinct moments, but ones that follow one another with the greatest rapidity (I, 167-169). The inner process of perceptual organization is attributed by de B. to "unconscious induction," which consists in connecting a "sign" to that object which in previous experiences has shown itself united to it, so that, at the appearance of the "sign," the mind, by a spontaneous movement, thinks and apprehends the object. "Unconscious induction" must be carefully distinguished from scientific induction: while the latter tends to the formulation of general laws, the former precedes it in clarifying in consciousness the first notions and the first principles, without which thought of any kind, including scientific thought, cannot take a single step. It is therefore in the very interest of science to secure the first persuasions of reason, unless positivism wishes to condemn itself to a voluntary suicide.
Inadequate in its theoretical claims, positivism is no less so on the plane of lived life: such is the thesis of the mature work La réaction contre le positivisme (1894), in which the emptiness of the so-called aesthetic "neo-Christianity" of E. Renan is also denounced.
Science, one must by now agree after so many social experiences, is not capable of providing man with the principles necessary to govern himself. It leaves both the individual and society abandoned and without guidance to the caprice of others' wills and to the tyranny of the passions. There is instead in souls a profound suffering, a painful anguish, a dull restlessness that persists, despite all the efforts made to shake it off, which demands the outlet of a return toward forgotten ideals, toward a faith, or rather the acceptance of a superior principle that is not reducible to science. The itinerary for regaining the lost values takes place in two stages: 1) affirmation of philosophical theism, which reason can demonstrate with conclusive arguments; 2) passage to revealed Christian religion, a passage that is obligatory, both in order to secure the notion of the true God and of the last destinies, so difficult for the mass of men, and also because the existence of the Catholic Church poses for every man the problem of placing himself in that Church which preserves in its original integrity the evangelical doctrine: every man is therefore bound to raise the question of the truth of the evangelical facts and to draw from it the immediate and logical consequences (p. 227). This is what de B. called the "transcendence of Christianity."
De B. had undertaken a first positive proof of the transcendence of Christianity in Problèmes et conclusions de l'histoire des religions (1885), where, while knowing how to recognize with serene loyalty the merits of the other religions and the partial similarities that each presents with the Christian one, he places beyond all dispute the superiority of the latter by reason of the firmness of its rational and historical foundations, the loftiness of its doctrines and the purity of its morality. A second proof de B. found in the biblical sciences. In L'idée de Dieu dans l'ancien et dans le Nouveau Testament (1892), he examined some of the more important facts of the history of Israel (the exodus from Egypt under the guidance of Moses, the promulgation of the law that affirms the dogmatic principle of monotheism...) and set about demonstrating these facts solely by the unfailing tradition of the Jewish people. Once this basis was established, it would then have been easy to recognize de iure the Mosaic authenticity of the Pentateuch and with it to demonstrate the existence of revelation and its progressive realization up to the appearance of Jesus Christ, who completes it and transmits it, perfected, to his Church.
De B.'s work, outside a narrow circle of faithful friends, did not have the resonance it deserved, perhaps also because of the by then occurring decline of positivism: not so among hostile and secular circles, which esteemed him so highly as to place him alongside Gibbons and Newman. The defects inevitable in a copious production and in a life kept at the maximum of tension are abundantly compensated by the frequent intuitions rich in suggestions, by the vastness of his culture, by a style that is always elevated but without any encumbrance of technicalities, and above all by the restful certainty of the possession of truth, which this faithful worker of the Church knows how to communicate to the reader.
Bibliography
Cornelio Fabro