SABATIER, Auguste. - Protestant theologian, b. Oct. 22, 1839 in Vallon (Alsace), d. Apr. 12, 1901 in Paris. He was professor of Protestant theology, first at Strasbourg, then at 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).
Sabatier’s theology has been described as “symbolic fideism” or “critical symbolism,” and it is directly connected to the positions of Kant and Schleiermacher (q.v.), inasmuch as it derives the act of religion from the affective and irrational sphere: hence the only valid analysis of religion, both in its object and its value, is psychological reflection upon one’s own states of consciousness, as Pascal did, to whom Sabatier expressly refers. The fundamental observation, which soon everyone is compelled to make, is the inner contradiction of consciousness, which on the one hand aspires to the good, the true, the beautiful... infinite, yet finds itself constrained and hindered from all sides in attaining it, because it is prey to pain, error, death, and every kind of misery. It is from this sense of unease that religion arises. Religion is therefore defined as the commerce, the conscious and willed relationship, in which the anguished soul (*en détresse*) enters into with the mysterious power upon which it feels itself dependent and from which its destiny depends (*Esquisse*, p. 24). Thus the essential act of religion is “prayer,” in which the soul enacts this commerce with God. Along these lines, “revelation” cannot be a communication of objective doctrine, but is the fact and the progress of God’s presence to the soul and the soul’s to God, or rather the “progressive creation and clarification of the consciousness of God in the individual and in humanity” (*ibid.*, p. 35). The essential characteristics of revelation are therefore that it is “interior, evident, and progressive,” and thus fundamentally individual, so that every divine revelation and every religious experience are valid insofar as they can be repeated and relived in every soul within the “historical situation” in which it finds itself (*ibid.*, p. 60). It is clear, therefore, that in this way miracles and biblical inspiration have no value as external facts, but only 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 arriving at historical objectivity.” Hence the constant element in dogmas is precisely affective emotion, while the intellectual element is essentially variable due to the diversity of expressive means proper to each epoch (*ibid.*, pp. 268–308).
With these principles, Sabatier affirms the necessity of the unlimited evolution of dogmas, and this, given that in Protestantism no Church can claim infallibility, obliges the believer to renew himself continually in his interior 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 Sabatier, does the river of divine truth flow through the centuries in human consciousness as a spring ever gushing forth (*ibid.*, p. 389). Sabatier was the inspirer of the so-called “École de Paris,” which sought to interpret Christian dogma in light of modern thought, and to his “critical symbolism” Modernism (q.v.) drew the fundamental principles of religious immanence, extending their sphere of application to the entire domain of sacred sciences.