Hügel, Friedrich von - Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. VI, p. 871

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

HÜGEL, FRIEDRICH von. – Religious writer, born in Florence to an Austrian father and a Scottish mother on 5 May 1852, died in London on 27 January 1925. From 1873 he settled in England, where he remained until his death.

A profoundly religious soul (he was called the “learned saint”), he was one of the most distinguished scholars of the problem of religion. His relations with the most celebrated modernists (Loisy, Tyrrel, etc.) are to be explained by reasons of friendship and belong within the profound and wide-ranging interest he took in religious questions. The influence of Newman is evident in his writings. On the one hand, in reaction to modernist “immanence,” he emphasized the absolute transcendence of God; on the other, following Newman (and not far from Blondel’s position), he maintained that the objective fact of Revelation (absolutely supernatural) itself presupposes in man the subjective “predisposition” to receive Grace from God, which nevertheless remains entirely gratuitous. In other words, human nature is predisposed to the supernatural (Blondel would say that it is in a state of “transnaturality”), but this predisposition is in no way necessitating, and Grace remains a gratuitous divine gift.

H. worked for approximately 30 years on The mystical element of religion as studied in st. Catherine of Genoa and her friends (2 vols., London 1908; 2nd ed., ibid. 1923); and he dealt with eternal life with the profundity of a great mystic in Eternal life: a study of its implications and applications (Edinburgh 1912; 2nd ed., ibid. 1913). In old age he collected his numerous articles, some of them extremely important, scattered through American and European (English, French, and Italian) journals, in the volume (dedicated to his “fellow citizen Dante”) Essays and addresses on philosophy of religion (2 vols., London 1921–24). Published posthumously were the volume The reality of God (ibid. 1931), considered by some to be his principal work, and the Selected letters (ibid. 1927, edited by B. Holland), an extremely interesting source for the history of modernism.

BIBL.: M. D. Petre, I miei rapporti con F. von H., in Ricerche religiose, 7 (1913), p. 202 ff.; id., Von H. and Tyrell, the story of a friendship, New York 1938; M. Schlüter-Hermkes, F.v.H., in Hochland, 22 (1924–26, 1), p. 706 ff.; id., Die geistige Gestalt F. V. H., ibid., 24 (1926–27, 1), pp. 52–63, 196–214; J. Rivière, Le modernisme dans l'Église, Paris 1929, pp. 243–44 and passim; A. Loisy, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire religieuse de notre temps, 3 vols., Paris 1930–31; M. Nédoncelle, La pensée religieuse de F. von H., ibid. 1935 (extensive bibliography); W. Ziegenfuss, s. V. in Philosophen-Lexikon, I, Berlin 1949, pp. 559–60 (with bibliography).