We all know that Balmes is a street in Barcelona. Many of us have bought and sold it in Monopoly. But there are very few who read Jaume Balmes and that is why his serene voice, which seeks new recipients in us, is lost in oblivion. However, its message could not be more pertinent: it is a call to think on our own, to search in books and facts for what there is, and not what we want to find, and to understand that the merits of our ancestors are only ours. if we imitate them. Balmes is waiting for us to confront him with a disarmed look.
After completing his studies and being ordained a priest, he moved to Madrid in January 1844. He was preceded by the respect he earned with his essay Protestantism Compared with Catholicism. He took with him the decision to found a weekly newspaper, The Thought of the Nation, of which he would be the director and sole editor.
He dedicated enormous energy to an illusion, perhaps the noblest of his time: that of ending the civil war through the marriage of the Carlist claimant with the young Isabel II. He was more aware than anyone of the need to win the support of the firm sociological basis of Carlism to provide Spain with a constitution similar to the English one. Things went in other directions and his optimism was seriously hurt. To his friend Viluma, he writes: “Poor country! Always military power, as if governing were fighting and a nation could become a camp.”
His last reserve of optimism was shipwrecked, in 1847, after the publication of Pius IX. As Cánovas recognized, there were many who came to think that this pope was capable of assuming the main liberal postulates to put an end to the discord between religion and politics. Balmes participated in this enthusiasm and his courage in defense of the pope took a heavy toll on him. The criticism that many Catholics did not dare to direct at Pius IX was diverted towards him. The same people who had seen him as a beacon of the Christian faith called him “black,” that is, a liberal, and turned their heads when passing by him. He didn’t defend himself. He believed he had the alliance of time and retired to die in Vic (at only 37 years old, in 1848). Although he always knew that “the best school is misfortune,” because it “makes us wise and cautious,” he was too generous to apply this lesson to himself.
Death could reconcile him with his detractors, but it did not protect him from the opportunistic sectarianism of some of his apologists, who equated him with Donoso. But Balmes was more political, less showy and more conciliatory. It is no coincidence that he dedicates four chapters of Protestantism to encouraging us to coexist with the dissident. He was always determined to “live in the light of day, breathe the air that permeates the atmosphere and accept the conditions and means established by the ideas and customs of modern society.” He knew that “to obstinately avoid transformation is to precipitate death.” He had the courage to dare to be moderate in a country consumed by fanaticism and, although he lacked political ambition, he had plenty of political ambition.
He closely studied the revolutions of his time and that is why he was able to advise – and advise us: “Do you want to avoid revolutions? Make evolutions.”
He saw so closely the underlying current that drove the revolutionaries that he was the first social thinker in Spain. “I find no subjects that please me more,” he wrote, “than the study of great social questions.”
Jaume Balmes The many are silent and the few shout. Rosameron. 234 pages. 19.85 euros