Valroger, Hyacinthe de

VALROGER, HYACINTHE de. - Oratorian, b. Jan. 6, 1814 at Caen, d. at Bayeux on Oct. 10, 1876.

After studying medicine he was ordained a priest in 1837. Director of the minor Seminary of Bayeux, then lecturer in philosophy at the Seminary of Sommervieu, he collaborated in 1852 with Fr. Oratry on the restoration of the Congregation of the Oratory and was professor of theology, master of novices and assistant general. Endowed with a stringent dialectic, he fought with his pen against scholars who intended to deny or in any case diminish the value of the Sacred Scriptures. Against those who maintained the derivation of Christian doctrine from the religious beliefs of India he published, from 1839 to 1840, in the Annales de philosophie chrétienne, six articles on Les doctrines hindoues examinées, discutées et mises en rapport avec les traditions bibliques. He also fought that philosophical eclecticism which sought to undermine the authority of the Church's magisterium with the aid of rationalist logic. In various writings, later collected in a volume (Etudes critiques sur le rationalisme contemporain, Paris 1845) he criticized the philosophy of Cousin, of Schelling, of Hegel. In 1847, in reply to Strauss, he translated and annotated A. Thouluch's Essai sur la crédibilité de l'histoire évangélique, and treated the same subject also in various articles in the Correspondant and in the Revue des questions historiques; finally he drafted the work La genèse des espèces. Etudes philosophiques et religieuses sur l'histoire naturelle et les naturalistes contemporains (Paris 1873).

Silvio Furlani