Yves de Montcheuil

Yves de Montcheuil (* 1900 in Paimpol , † 1944 in Grenoble ) was a French philosopher and theologian .

biography

Yves Moreau de Montcheuil was born in 1900 in Paimpol in the French department of Côtes d'Armor in Brittany . He spent his school days with the Jesuits and finished them in a school they run on the island of Jersey . He then intended to join the Navy in 1916 . But he changed his plan and entered the Jesuit novitiate a year later . His brother had been killed in the Battle of Verdun , which contributed significantly to this decision. After completing his military service, he began studying philosophy in 1922 . This was followed by the usual training in the order, which he accepted and ultimately criticized. He completed his training with a job in which he dealt in particular with the philosophical writings of Maurice Blondel , but also with the philosophy of Kant and Bergson . In doing so, he acquired a wide range of cultural knowledge with which he astonished many an audience.

In 1931 he began his theological career without giving up philosophy. In 1936 he submitted his habilitation thesis Malebranche and Quietismus , in which he rejected any harmful separation of theology and mysticism from philosophy. In the same year he received a professorship at the Institut Catholique de Paris . Outside of his teaching activities, he put himself at the service of various religious communities. He helped students, teachers, home residents, the Christian youth workers and the Action catholique féminine.

During the war and the German occupation, he advocated intellectual resistance. He demonstrated the incompatibility of anti-Semitism and Christian faith and called on Christians to become aware of this and to communicate it. From 1942 he participated in the preparation of the weekly magazine Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien and its distribution in the occupied northern zone. He was a close confidante of Cardinal Henri de Lubac .

In the summer of 1943 and at Easter 1944 he took part in youth camps. During this time he received a call from the resistance fighters of Vercors , who asked him to come to the mountain range to take care of the Christians there. The Christians fighting in the Maquis of Vercors received no sacraments and suffered severe conscience. Yves de Montcheuil accepted the call. Soon after his arrival, there was a German attack in which numerous war crimes were committed. Instead of fleeing with the unscathed people, Yves de Montcheuil stayed with the wounded. The doctors and nurses present as well as Yves de Montcheuil were arrested on July 27, 1944 in the Grotte de la Luire, where they had set up a hospital . Thirty-five wounded resistance fighters were murdered. Yves de Montcheuil was imprisoned in Grenoble and shot together with several other prisoners on the night of 10-11 August 1944.

After the war, Henri de Lubac helped Yves de Montcheuil's works to be published.

Works in German

• Yves de Montcheuil, Basic Questions of Inner Life , Religious Series of the Journal Documents , Issue 2, Offenburg / Baden, 1948
• Yves de Montcheuil, The Kingdom of God and its Demands , Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1957
• Yves de Montcheuil and Alice Künneke, Church and Risk of Faith , Herder, 1957
• Yves de Montcheuil and Inge Klimmer, Testimony to the Truth , Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1965

bibliography

• Henri de Lubac, Resistance chrétienne à l'antisémitisme. Souvenirs 1840-1944 , (Paris: Fayard, 1988); [see Chapter XIV, dedicated to Yves de Montcheuil, pp. 233–260]
• David Grumett, Yves de Montcheuil: Action, Justice and the Kingdom in Spiritual Resistance to Nazism , Theological Studies 68,3, (2007), pp. 618-641
• Yves de Sagazan, Yves de Montcheuil , in: Les carnets du Goëlo, n ° 13, (1997), published by the Société d'études historiques et archéologiques du Goëlo
• Bernard Sesboüé, Yves de Montcheuil (1900–1944): Précurseur en théologie , (Paris: Cerf, 2006)

Web links

• Literature by and about Yves de Montcheuil in the catalog of the German National Library
• Fondation de Montcheuil