Gaston Frommel

Who was Gaston Frommel?

Gaston Frommel, French theologian, professor of theology in the University of Geneva from 1894 to 1906.

An Frenchman by birth, his family fled Alsace under German occupation in 1870 and he spent the rest of his life in Switzerland. He may best be described as continuing the spirit of Vinet amid the mental conditions marking the end of the 19th century.

Like Vinet, he derived his philosophy of religion from a peculiarly deep experience of the Gospel of Christ as meeting the demands of the moral consciousness; but he developed even further than Vinet the psychological analysis of conscience and the method of verifying every doctrine by direct reference to spiritual experience. Both made much of moral individuality or personality as the crown and criterion of reality, believing that its correlation with Christianity, both historically and philosophically, was most intimate. But while Vinet laid most stress on the liberty from human authority essential to the moral consciousness, the changed needs of the age caused Frommel to develop rather the aspect of man's dependence as a moral being upon God's spiritual initiative, "the conditional nature of his liberty."