Ernst Commer

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Ernst Ludwig Theodor Commer (born February 18, 1847 in Berlin , † April 24, 1928 in Graz ) was a German Catholic theologian and philosopher . He is considered an important representative of neo-scholasticism in the German-speaking area.

Life

Ernst Commer was a son of the German composer and music researcher Franz Commer . He passed the Abitur and then studied law in Berlin , Bonn and Göttingen . In 1869 he became a doctor of civil and church law and then worked as a court trainee, but in 1870 he turned to studying philosophy and theology in Tübingen and Würzburg . From 1870 he was a member of the Catholic student association AV Guestfalia Tübingen . On 28 June 1872 he was in Breslau for priests ordained and served as chaplain in Hirschberg in the Giant Mountains . In 1873 he continued his studies in Rome at the Pontifical Gregorian University and at the Collegium San Thomas and in 1880 obtained the academic degree of Doctor of Theology at the latter institution .

Before attaining this title, Commer worked from 1875 as a repetitor for philosophy at the seminary in Regensburg and from 1877 as a philosophy lecturer at St Edward's College, a seminary in Liverpool . On October 9, 1884, Commer became associate professor for moral theology at the University of Munster and on April 4, 1888, full professor for fundamental theology and philosophical-theological propaedeutics at the University of Breslau . In 1886 he was co-founder and until 1920 editor of the yearbook for philosophy and speculative theology (from 1914 called Divus Thomas ).

After the turn of the century, Commer switched to the theological faculty of the University of Vienna on October 1, 1900 as a professor of Catholic dogmatics . His appointment to this chair was disrupted by professors such as Franz Martin Schindler been operated herein support of Education Minister Wilhelm von Hartel and Emperor Franz Joseph I had experienced. In Vienna, Commer soon came into contact with the Catholic student associations Norica and Rudolfina .

First Commer was open to modernism in the Catholic Church and advocated the reform Catholic course of the theologian Herman Schell . But when Pope Pius X violently attacked these modernist currents in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis in 1907 , Commer transformed himself out of a belief in authority into a leading exponent of a rigorous, strictly Roman-oriented neo - scholasticism . From now on he was also a resolute opponent of reform Catholicism and came into opposition to Schell and Albert Ehrhard . The disputes within the theological faculty of the University of Vienna intensified around 1910 when the Pope decreed the taking of the anti-modernist oath. This fact may have contributed to Commer's retirement at the end of the summer semester of 1911 due to illness. On this occasion the Pope awarded him the honorary title of Apostolic Protonotary .

Commer, who showed himself to be a follower of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas in his philosophical and theological works , spent his twilight years in Graz and died there on April 24, 1928 at the age of 81. He was buried in the crypt of the former Dominican Church in Graz .

Works (selection)

  • Catholicity according to St. Augustine , Breslau 1873
  • Philosophical Science , Berlin 1882
  • System of Philosophy , 4 volumes, Münster 1883–86
  • The logic , Paderborn 1897
  • The Perpetual Philosophy , 1899
  • The Church in Her Life and Being , 1904
  • Hermann Schell and progressive Catholicism. A word for orientation to devout Catholics , Vienna 1907
  • The latest phase of the Schell war , Vienna 1909

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ August Vezin : 100 years of Tübingen Guestfalia. Cologne 1965, p. 69.
personal data
SURNAME Commer, Ernst
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Commer, Ernst Ludwig Theodor (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Catholic theologian and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH February 18, 1847
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 1928
Place of death Graz