Louis-Auguste Sabatier

Career

It makes its secondary studies at the Institution Olivier de Ganges (Herault) where, with some comrades, it founds a “Christian union”. Of 1863 with 1864, it studies with the faculty of Protestant Théologie of Montauban and at the universities of Tubingue and Heidelberg.

Initially Pasteur with Aubenas in Ardeche (France) of 1864 with 1868 it is elected professor of Dogmatique reformed at the university of Strasbourg for which he had been the candidate of the orthodoxe (or evangelic). Its definitely francophile sympathies during the war of 1870 lead to its expulsion of Strasbourg in 1872.

At the end of five years of efforts in 1877, it succeeded in founding a university of Protestant theology in Paris, the School of Paris (today: Institute of Protestant theology of Paris ) with Etienne Mennegoz of which he becomes professor, then senior in 1895. The characteristic of this institute since its foundation consists in giving the same formation to the students Lutherans and reformed.

In 1886 he becomes professor at the department of religious sciences today lately founded with the School of the High Studies by Victor Duruy in 1868 (: École Practices High Studies in Social sciences , better known like EPHESS ) of the Sorbonne. According to Auguste Sabatier, the young science of the religions did not obstruct of anything the theologist since the expression of the faith in the form of statements which vary with the history does not reach of anything the heart religious experiment. There is thus no for him problem so that faculties of Protestant theology belong to public education.

Philosophy

According to him, the religious faith is born from an aspiration of the human spirit towards an ideal which is expressed in the form of a certain number of beliefs which can take the form of Dogme S religious, and which those follow one another in a nonunspecified order. One regards it as the founder of the symbolo-fideism , current of thought due to his association with Mennegoz which finds an echo at Charles Wagner, his contemporary.

He insists on the fact that the world changed since the beginnings of Christianity so that the terminology describing the biblical faith are incomprehensible for the people of today. He supports that the Christianisme always adapted its forms and its language to the particular cultural situations which he met and with the modernisms of each time. In same time, the catholic epistemology supported that, as of the made Revelation with Adam, the principal doctrines of Catholicism are already clearly taught what leads to the theological surdetermination of the comment. The main assertion of catholic science consists in supporting that there no was substantial evolution of the faith (F. Laplanche, introduction to the Dictionnaire of the religious world into contemporary France, Tome 9, religious sciences , Beauchesne, 1996.)

A second key point of its thought is the rejection of a religious belief based on the only authority. All the belief must pass the filter of the reason and the experiment, and the spirit must open with the new facts, the events and the Vérité S, whatever is the source. No question is closed or given and the Religion cannot be a field protected from the critical examination . If the Bible is the work of authors integrated and determined by their contexts history and social, this text is neither supernatural nor the infallible deposit of the divine revelation; the book does not have anything inherent and does not have any absolute authority. The gasoline of Christianity replaces the authority of the writing and the institutions connected with the church.

He concludes from it that there is no inherent contradiction between the kingdoms of the faith and the laws of physics, the revelation and science, crowned and the secular one, either which enters the religion and the culture. The Théologie is moulted in science of the religious experiment what leads certain readers of its work to consider that it rejects the transcending character of the God to the profit of the immanence. On the contrary, strongly influenced by Kant, he thinks that religious knowledge is symbolic system. God is located beyond our ideas, of our representations, and our formulas: they direct towards something which exceeds them and which concerns the inexpressible one.

In 1880, Auguste Sabatier writes the article Jesus-Christ in the encyclopedia of religious sciences where it develops the thesis of the spiritual character of resurrection. A scandal occurs, and a terrible reaction is orchestrated by the Company of the evangelic Missions and Edouard de Pressensé. On this occasion the faculty of theology of Lausanne had been founded (of Mômiers) intended to empty the faculty of Paris of its students. The offensive fails, thanks to the situation of Auguste Sabatier to the newspaper “the Time”, of which it was the n°3, immediately after the two directors, Hébrard father and wire, situation due to the talent of Sabatier, its incredible generosity towards the contradictors more the dishonest persons, and to the approval of a mass whose faith was certainly disturbed, but which trusted its spiritual authenticity. Maurice Goguel can be counted with the number of the recipients of this spiritual heritage. Sabatier always made a point of remaining above the problems of the Church and the quarrels party, as its participation in the attempts at reconciliation shows it after the meeting of the national synod of 1872 which seals a Schisme between the conservatives (related to the Alarm clock) and the liberal.

He a long time directed the school of Sunday of the reformed Church of Star to Paris. The failure of Sabatier was not to have succeeded in making a catechism. Little before its death it had been due at Crest, in Drome, with the invitation of franciscanisant Paul.Sabatier (no report/ratio of relationship) a series of discussions with forty pastors on this problem of the elementary teaching of the Christian faith. This attempt did not have a following day, Auguste Sabatier having died in 1901.

Friend of Gustave Flaubert, it seems to have launched the thought of the young person Jean Piaget in the direction of the study of the psychological genesis of the ideas if one believes of it Piaget itself: I have good fortune to find in the library of my father “the philosophy of the religion based on the psychology and the history” of Auguste Sabatier .

The republican action

Taking into account the confrontation of the two Frances , namely that of the clerical and that of the laic , Sabatier considers that the Protestantisme is the natural ally of the Republic, as the participation of its members shows it:

with the drafting of the law of separation of the Churches and the State of 1905,
with the creation of the rooms of Asylum ancestors of our nursery schools ,
with the creation of the laic and free public school, under the influence of the small schools of Jean-Frederic Oberlin (1740 - 1826),
with the emancipation of the women by their accession with the baccalaureat then with the higher learning under the ministry Ferdinand Bush.

Auguste Sabatier will be elected appointed of Paris under the Third Republic

Works

the Apostle Paul (3rd ED. 1896)
Mémoire on the Hebraic notion of the Spirit (1879)
the literary Origins of the Apocalypse (1888)
Of the life intimates dogmas and of their power of evolution (1890)
Religion and modern culture (1897)
historical Évolution of the doctrines of the hello (1903)
Equisse of a philosophy of the religion (1897)
Religion S of authority and religion of the spirit (1904, posthumous), prefaced by a court memory of his/her Jean colleague Revile.
a choice of its weekly articles was published under the title Lettres of Sunday (1900).

Cet article uses some elements copyleft review of May 1999 Évangile and Liberté (monthly of theological liberalism protesting since 150 years)

See too

Protestant Theologies of today

To see too

Bernard Reymond Auguste Sabatier and the theological lawsuit of the authority

Philippe Cardoon-Bertalot, Auguste Sabatier, theologist of the Holy Spirit, RHPR 2001, t.81, n°3

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