Jaime Balmes

Catalan priest, philosopher and apologist (1810–1848), born in Vic into a modest family of craftsmen, a precocious seminarian who earned a doctorate in theology at Cervera, a prolific author who died prematurely of tuberculosis at thirty-eight, yet who in little more than a decade of intense, feverish output became the most influential Spanish Catholic thinker of the nineteenth century, read, translated and debated throughout Europe, from France to England and Italy. His work Fundamental Philosophy (1846), in four volumes, is a systematic treatise against scepticism, pantheism and Kantian subjectivism that defends, with an informed and original eclecticism removed from the more rigid scholasticism, the capacity of human reason to attain objective certainties about the world, God and morality, midway between the Thomist tradition and the modern philosophical currents he knew firsthand and with which he engaged critically. His most widely read and politically influential work, Protestantism Compared with Catholicism in Their Relations with European Civilisation (1842-1844), responds directly to the thesis of the French historian Guizot that Protestantism had been the decisive engine of modern progress, and argues, with notable historical erudition and methodical argumentation, that it was precisely Catholicism —through the medieval universities, canon law, institutionalised charity, the gradual abolition of slavery and European cultural unity— that was the true architect of modern Western civilisation. Founder and chief editor of the influential political journal El Pensamiento de la Nación, he took an active part in the turbulent Spanish politics of his time as a proponent of a compromise solution between Carlists and Isabelinos through the proposed marriage between Queen Isabella II and the Count of Montemolín, a plan that ultimately failed, and he is regarded, alongside Donoso Cortés, as the central, founding figure of nineteenth-century Spanish conservative Catholic thought.

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9 works

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