Louis Bautain

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Louis Eugène Marie Bautain was a French priest and philosopher whose name is attached to one of the nineteenth century’s sharpest statements of fideism: the claim that human reason, left to itself, cannot demonstrate the foundational truths of religion — the existence of God, the spirituality and immortality of the soul — and that real certainty about them comes only through faith resting on revelation.

He came to that position the long way, through its opposite. Born in Paris in 1796, Bautain studied at the École Normale in the years when the school was the forge of France’s academic philosophy, and there fell under the spell of Victor Cousin, whose eclecticism promised to gather the truth scattered across the systems and to reground religious and moral conviction in reason itself. For a young man of the Restoration that was the confident program of the age: philosophy would carry what the Revolution had shaken loose, and the mind would re-establish on its own authority what tradition could no longer simply assert. Bautain absorbed it, taught in its key, and then lost his footing in it. What unsettled him was, in part, the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, already pressing into France: if reason cannot reach things as they are in themselves, only the order it imposes on appearances, then the rationalist’s promise to prove God and the soul by unaided argument looks like a promise the faculty cannot keep. The eclectic’s optimism and the Kantian’s restriction met in him and left a void where the proofs were supposed to stand.

Conversion and the School of Strasbourg

A period of illness and personal crisis turned that intellectual impasse into a religious one. In 1819, under the influence of Louise Humann — an unlettered but formidable Alsatian Catholic whose spiritual direction shaped a whole generation of converts — Bautain returned to the faith of his childhood and began studies for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1828. The figure who had set out to ground religion in reason now held that reason had been the obstacle, and that what he had been missing was a different mode of apprehension altogether.

He gathered that conviction into a teaching circle. Settling in Strasbourg, where he held a chair in the faculty and would become dean of its faculty of letters in 1838, Bautain drew around himself a band of students and collaborators — the School, or Circle, of Strasbourg — that met first in Humann’s house and became one of the more remarkable religious milieus of the period. Its members included Théodore Ratisbonne, later founder of the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion; Henri de Bonnechose, the future cardinal-archbishop of Rouen; and Auguste Gratry, who would become one of the century’s notable Catholic philosophers. The circle was, in Thomas Kselman’s reconstruction (2006), a meeting-ground of Catholic and Jewish seekers in which Bautain for a time urged the Jewish members to deepen their own observance; in the event several, Ratisbonne among them, were baptized and ordained, and the group consolidated around Bautain’s own foundation of priests, the Society of Saint-Louis, with its college established at Juilly outside Paris in 1842. From this base he set out the doctrine for which he is remembered.

Théodore Ratisbonne (1802–1884), a member of Bautain’s Strasbourg circle who was later baptized, ordained, and founded the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion — Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The doctrine: a faculty above argument

Bautain’s central works — among them De l’enseignement de la philosophie en France au XIXe siècle (1833), the Psychologie expérimentale (1839), and above all the Philosophie du christianisme of 1835 — turn on a distinction he drew within the knowing mind. Discursive reason, the faculty that moves by inference from premise to conclusion, is for him a passive and combinatory power: it can order and develop what it has already received, but it cannot of itself reach the spiritual and invisible truths on which everything turns. Above or alongside it Bautain set a higher capacity, which he called intelligence — an apprehension of the spiritual order more akin to vision than to proof, and which receives its objects rather than constructs them. The truths of God and the soul are not conclusions the mind argues its way to; they are given, and the mind’s reasoning comes after, to articulate and defend what faith has already grasped.

The position was not that reason is worthless. It was that in the highest matters reason is structurally insufficient — capable of receiving and ordering revealed truth, not of generating it. What grounds belief is a prior, trusting assent; the demonstrations follow that assent and depend on it, never the reverse. Pressed to its edge, the doctrine held that the very existence of God, the spirituality and immortality of the soul, and the credibility of revelation itself lie beyond the reach of unaided argument and must be received before they can be reasoned about. Bautain stood, with some mitigation, within the wider current of post-revolutionary traditionalism — the tendency, sharpened in the wake of de Maistre and Lamennais, to seek the foundations of certitude not in the solitary intellect but in a truth handed down and held in common. Where the traditionalists located that deposit in the transmitted wisdom of humanity, Bautain located it in revelation received by faith; the family resemblance was close enough that his critics read him as one more voice telling the modern mind it could not stand on its own.

What gives the position its edge is the company it kept and the company it broke. The high-scholastic settlement Bautain found himself ranged against was that of Thomas Aquinas, for whom the existence of God is among the truths reason can reach by demonstration — the praeambula fidei are the work of natural intellect, and grace builds on a nature that can already climb part of the way. To deny the climb was, in effect, to deny the Thomist staircase, and that is precisely what the church’s theologians heard in him. Against that staircase Bautain set something nearer the wager of Blaise Pascal, for whom the God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham and the heart has reasons reason does not command — though Pascal kept a place for the demonstrative mind that Bautain’s sharper severance of the faculties tended to close. Behind both lies the older Augustinian order of credo ut intelligam, belief preceding understanding: Augustine had made faith the condition of insight rather than its conclusion, and Bautain’s intelligence is in part an attempt to give that priority a faculty-psychology. And there is a longer genealogy of doubt feeding the same stream. The skeptical fideism of Pierre Charron two centuries earlier had argued that reason cannot reach certainty in the highest matters and that religious truth must rest on faith and authority — a precedent close enough in form to Bautain’s that the two are often read along one line, though Charron’s wisdom inclined toward a self-standing natural morality where Bautain’s drove back toward revelation. Even the Renaissance had supplied a precedent in Pietro Pomponazzi, who argued that the soul’s immortality could not be proved by natural philosophy and had to be held on faith — the very claim, transposed to the modern key, that would cost Bautain his signature.

The contrast that sharpens him most, though, is with the rationalist confidence he had himself once shared. The whole modern project of grounding certainty in the self-evident, running from René Descartes forward, took the solitary mind as a sufficient foundation — I think, therefore I am, and from that fixed point outward to God and the world. Bautain’s mature philosophy is in one sense the inversion of that movement: the first certainty is not the cogito but the received word, and the mind that thinks it can build from itself alone has, for him, mistaken a borrowed light for its own.

The propositions, and the signature

That conclusion brought Bautain into collision with church authority, and the episode is the reason his name survived in the manuals. To deny that reason can prove God’s existence at all is, in the eyes of Catholic theology, to saw through the branch on which it has long sat: the praeambula fidei, the rational preambles — that God exists, that the soul is spiritual, that revelation can be shown credible — were held to be accessible to natural reason and to make the act of faith something other than a leap in the dark. His bishop at Strasbourg, Jean-François Le Pappe de Trévern, judged that Bautain had conceded far too much to skepticism, and twice — in 1835 and again in 1840 — required him to subscribe to a set of theses affirming reason’s reach. The propositions of 8 September 1840 put it without softening: human reason can prove the existence of God with certitude; the use of reason precedes faith and, helped by revelation and grace, leads toward it. He signed. Four years later, before the Roman Congregation of Bishops and Regulars and with the approval of Gregory XVI, he subscribed again, promising to teach no longer that the existence of God, the spirituality and immortality of the soul, the first principles of metaphysics, and the grounds that make revelation credible lie beyond unaided reason’s grasp.

There is a sharp irony in the shape of the affair. A man whose whole work distrusted what reason could establish on its own was compelled, as the price of remaining within the church, to set his name to the proposition that reason can establish exactly the things he had said it could not. He held to the signature and remained obediently within the communion he had returned to in 1819 — the disagreement was over the powers of the mind, never over the faith itself.

Historians of doctrine read the whole sequence as one of the controversies that pushed the church toward a formal settlement of the faith-and-reason question. Bautain’s case stood alongside that of Georg Hermes, the German theologian whose attempt to demonstrate the rational necessity of Christianity — Hermesianism — was condemned under Gregory XVI in 1835, and that of Anton Günther, whose rationalizing system was censured in 1857: a trio of opposite errors, two crediting reason with too much and Bautain with too little, that between them marked out the ground the church meant to hold. The formula came at the First Vatican Council. Its constitution Dei Filius, promulgated on 24 April 1870, declared that God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason from created things, while faith and reason are distinct orders that cannot truly conflict — the rational preambles affirmed against the fideists, the autonomy of faith protected against the rationalists. Bautain had been dead three years; the question he had pressed was answered, on its central point, against him.

The First Vatican Council in session at Saint Peter’s Basilica, 1870; its constitution Dei Filius declared that God can be known with certainty by natural reason — the central point against Bautain’s fideism — contemporary engraving, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Paris, conscience, and the moral life

The condemnation did not end his career; it redirected it. Bautain moved to Paris, where in 1849 he served as vicar-general to Archbishop Marie-Dominique- Auguste Sibour, and where in 1853 he was made professor of moral theology in the faculty at the Sorbonne, a chair he held until his death. The later writing turned from the contested metaphysics of God and the soul toward the terrain where his temperament was most at home: the moral and interior life. He wrote on ethics in the Philosophie morale (1842) and La morale de l’Évangile (1855), on the philosophy of law, and — drawing on a long practice as a pulpit orator — on the craft of preaching in his Étude sur l’art de parler en public (1856), a study of sacred eloquence read well beyond his own circle. Conscience became a recurring subject of his last years: the inner voice through which the moral order is apprehended fit naturally into a philosophy that had always trusted a direct apprehension over a chain of inferences. He founded, besides the priests of Saint-Louis, the teaching Sisters of Saint-Louis, whose schools long outlasted him. He died at Viroflay, near Paris, in 1867.

Scholarship and reception

The standard study in English remains Walter Marshall Horton’s The Philosophy of the Abbé Bautain (New York University Press, 1926), which set out to recover a thinker Horton judged to have been flattened by the single word “fideist” — arguing that Bautain’s account of intelligence as a distinct mode of spiritual apprehension was a more interesting epistemology than the controversy over the proofs allowed posterity to see. Later scholarship has largely followed Horton in distinguishing the man’s positive doctrine from the caricature, while still placing him squarely among the disciplined cases: Thomas Kselman’s study of the Strasbourg circle situates him within the social and confessional history of Restoration France, and surveys of nineteenth- century Catholic philosophy treat his subscription as a textbook instance of how the church handled the post-Kantian challenge before Dei Filius fixed its language. He is often read against his English contemporary John Henry Newman, the other great Catholic convert of the century to make the act of belief his lifelong subject — but the comparison turns on a difference. Newman, in the Grammar of Assent, sought to show how the mind can hold a real and certain assent on grounds that fall short of formal demonstration, enlarging the account of reason to take in the convergence of probabilities by which people actually come to conviction. Bautain went the other way, fencing reason off from the truths it could not prove and handing them to a separate faculty of spiritual sight. The one was never condemned and the other was, and the divergence is instructive: where Newman defended the rationality of faith by broadening reason, Bautain defended the priority of faith by narrowing it. The primary works survive in their period editions — the Étude sur l’art de parler en public among them, digitized in full by the Bibliothèque nationale de France — and that study in particular has had an afterlife among students of homiletics independent of the doctrinal quarrel.

Bautain set out to prove that the mind could carry religion, found that it could not, and built a philosophy on the discovery — and was then required, by the authority he had submitted to, to affirm in writing the very power he had spent his life doubting. He kept the signature and kept the faith; what he could never quite bring himself to keep was the confidence, in reason alone, that he had arrived with at the École Normale and surrendered in 1819.

→ Related: Pietro Pomponazzi · John Henry Newman · Pierre Charron · Blaise Pascal · Thomas Aquinas · Immanuel Kant · Rene Descartes · Augustine Of Hippo · Reason · Revelation · Preaching