Franz von Baader

[This passage is extracted from Section 3 of Chapter 12 of Richard Falckenbergs History of

Modern Philosophy from Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time, translated by A.C. Armstrong, Jr.
(1893)]
Franz (von) Baader, the son of a physician, was born in Munich in 1765, resided there as
superintendent of mines, and, from 1826, as professor of speculative dogmatics, and died there
also in 1841. His works, which consisted only of a series of brief treatises, were collected (16
vols., 1851-60) by his most important adherent, Franz Hoffman1 (at his death in 1881 professor
in Wrzburg). Baader may be characterized as a mediaeval thinker who has worked through the
critical philosophy, and who, a believing, yet liberal Catholic, endeavors to solve with the
instruments of modern speculation the old Scholastic problem of the reconciliation of faith and
knowledge. His themes are, on the one hand, the development of God, and, on the other, the fall
and redemption, which mean for him, however, not merely inner phenomena, but world-events.
He is in sympathy with the Neoplatonists, with Augustine, with Thomas Aquinas, with Eckhart,
with Paracelsus, above all, with Jacob Bhme, and Bhme's follower Louis Claude St. Martin
(1743-1804), but does not overlook the value of the modern German philosophy. With Kant he
begins the inquiry with the problem of knowledge; with Fichte he finds in self-consciousness the
essence, and not merely a property, of spirit; with Hegel he looks on God or the absolute spirit
not only as the object, but also as the subject of knowledge. He rejects, however, the autonomy
of the will and the spontaneity of thought; and though he criticises the Cartesian separation
between the thought of the creator and that of the creature, he as little approves the pantheistic
identification of the twohuman cognition participates in the divine, without constituting a part
of it.
In accordance with its three principal objects, "God, Nature, and Man," philosophy divides into
fundamental science (logic or the theory of knowledge and theology), the philosophy of nature
(cosmology or the theory of creation and physics), and the philosophy of spirit (ethics and
sociology). In all its parts it must receive religious treatment. Without God we cannot know God.
In our cognition of God he is at once knower and known; our being and all being is a being
known by him; our self-consciousness is a consciousness of being known by God: cogitor, ergo
cogito et sum; my being and thinking are based on my being thought by God. Conscience is a
joint knowing with God's knowing (conscientia). The relation between the known and the
knower is threefold. Cognition is incomplete and lacks the free co-operation of the knower when
God merely pervades (durchwohnt) the creature, as is the case with the devil's timorous and
reluctant knowledge of God. A higher stage is reached when the known is present to the knower
and dwells with him (beiwohnt). Cognition becomes really free and perfect when God dwells in
(inwohnt) the creature, in which case the finite reason yields itself freely and in admiration to the
divine reason, lets the latter speak in itself, and feels its rule, not as foreign, but as its own.
1 Besides Hoffman, Lutterbeck and Hamberger have described and expounded Baader's system. See also
Baumann's paper in the Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xiv., 1878, p. 321 seq.]

(Baader maintains a like threefoldness in the practical sphere: the creature is either the object or,
rather, the passive recipient, or the organ, or the representative of the divine action, i.e., in the
first case, God alone works; in the second, he co-operates with the creature; in the third, the
creature works with the forces and in the name of God. Joyful obedience, conscious of its
grounds, is the highest freedom). Knowing and loving, thought and volition, knowledge and
faith, philosophy and dogma are as little to be abstractly divided as thing and self, being and
thought, object and subject. True freedom and genuine speculation are neither blind traditional
belief nor doubting, God-estranged thinking, but the free recognition of authority, and selfattained conviction of the truth of the Church doctrine.
Baader distinguishes a twofold creation of the world and a double process of development (an
esoteric and an exoteric revelation) of God himself. The creation of the ideal world, as a free act
of love, is a non-deducible fact; the theogonic process, on the contrary, is a necessary event by
which God becomes a unity returning from division to itself, and so a living God. The eternal
self-generation of God is a twofold birth: in the immanent or logical process the unsearchable
will (Father) gives birth to the comprehensible will (Son) to unite with it as Spirit; the place of
this self-revelation is wisdom or the Idea. In the emanent or real process, since desire or nature is
added to the Idea and is overcome by it, these three moments become actual persons. In the
creation of theat first immaterialworld, in which God unites, not with his essence, but with
his image only, the same two powers, desire and wisdom, operate as the principles of matter and
form. The materialization of the world is a consequence of the fall. Evil consists in the elevation
of selfhood, which springs from desire, into self-seeking. Lucifer fell because of pride, and man,
yielding to Lucifer's temptation, from baseness, by falling in love with nature beneath him. By
the creation of matter God has out of pity preserved the world, which was corrupted by the fall,
from the descent into hell, and at the same time has given man occasion for moral endeavor. The
appearance of Christ, the personification of the moral law, is the beginning of reconciliation,
which man appropriates through the sacrament. Nature participates in the redemption, as in the
corruption.