SABATIER, AUGUSTE. – Protestant theologian, born on 22 October 1839 in Vallon (Alsace), died on 12 April 1901 in Paris. He was professor of Protestant theology, first in Strasbourg, then in Paris.
Principal works: Essai d'une théologie critique de la connaissance religieuse (Lausanne 1893); Esquisse d'une philosophie de la religion d'après la psychologie et l'histoire (Paris 1897); La religion et la culture moderne (ibid. 1897); La religion d'autorité et la religion de l'esprit (ibid. 1903); La doctrine de l'expiation (ibid. 1903).
S.’s theology has been designated by the term “symbolic fideism” or “critical symbolism” and is directly connected with Schleiermacher (v.), insofar as it derives the religious act from the affective and irrational sphere: hence the only valid analysis of religion, both of its object and of its value, is psychological reflection in the analysis of one’s own states of consciousness, as Pascal did, to whom S. explicitly refers. The fundamental realization, which each person is soon compelled to make, is the inner contradiction of consciousness, which on the one hand aspires to the infinite good, truth, and beauty... and yet finds itself distressed and prevented on every side from attaining them, because it is prey to suffering, error, death, and miseries of every kind; it is from this sense of distress that religion arises. Religion is therefore defined as the commerce, the conscious and willed relationship, in which the anguished soul (en détresse) enters with the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend and upon which its destiny depends (Esquisse, p. 24): consequently, the essential act of religion is “prayer,” in which the soul enacts this commerce of its own with God. In this line of thought, “revelation” cannot be a communication of objective doctrine, but is the fact and the growth of God’s presence to the soul and of the soul’s presence to God, or rather the “creation and progressive clarification of the consciousness of God in the individual human being and in humanity” (ibid., p. 35). The essential characteristics of Revelation, therefore, are that it is “interior, evident, and progressive” and thus fundamentally individual, so that every divine Revelation and every religious experience have value insofar as they can be repeated and relived in every soul in the “historical situation” in which it finds itself (ibid., p. 60). It is therefore clear that, in this view, the miracle and biblical inspiration have no value as external facts, but solely within the sphere of interior and individual piety; dogma is reduced to the transcription, in objective terms, of the interior experience through which every Revelation must pass “before reaching historical objectivity.” Thus the constant element in dogmas is precisely affective emotion, whereas the intellectual element is essentially variable because of the diversity of the expressive means proper to each period (ibid., pp. 268-308). On the basis of these principles, S. affirms the necessity of the unlimited evolution of dogmas and this, given that in Protestantism no Church can claim infallibility, obliges the believer continually to renew himself in his inner aspiration, to take refuge in the “religious instinct,” which defends the spirit against the threats of nature. Hence the provisional and purely “symbolic” character of every dogmatic formula and every theological elaboration: only in this way, according to S., does the river of divine truth flow through the centuries in human consciousness as ever-springing life (ibid., p. 389). S. was the inspiration behind the so-called “Ecole de Paris,” which sought to interpret Christian dogma in terms of modern thought, modernism (v.) drew from his “critical symbolism” the fundamental principles of religious immanence, extending their sphere of application to the entire field of the sacred sciences.