Erich Przywara

Erich Przywara (12 October 1889, Katowice – 28 September 1972, Hagen near Murnau) was a Jesuit priest of German-Polish origin and a prominent Catholic philosopher and theologian of the twentieth century. He is best known for advocating the metaphysical principle of the analogy of being—analogia entis—as a formal principle of Catholic philosophy and theology.

Przywara (pron. pshih-VA-ra) was born in 1889 to a Polish father and a German mother in the upper Silesian (Prussian) town of Kattowitz, today Katowice in Poland. Due to anti-Jesuit laws still in effect in Germany, in 1908 he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Exaten, Netherlands, concluding his philosophical and theological studies at nearby Ignatius College in Valkenburg. From 1913 to 1917 Przywara taught at Stella Matutina, in Feldkirch, Austria, where he also served as the prefect of music. In 1920 he was ordained and in 1922 he moved to Munich, where from 1922-1941 he was part of the editorial team of the journal Stimmen der Zeit.

During this period, Przywara held hundreds of lectures all over central Europe, most famously at the Davos seminar in 1928 and 1929. He was also extremely prolific, authoring between 1922 and 1932 as many as 17 books and 230 articles and reviews (and eventually over 40 books and 800 articles and reviews). During this time he also engaged in ecumenical dialogue with the Protestant theologian Karl Barth, who considered Przywara to be his most serious opponent, indeed "the giant Goliath incarnate," inviting Przywara to his seminars in 1929 (in Münster) and 1931 (in Bonn).

On the political front Przywara preached against the Nazis, viewing the Nazi regime as a "distortion of the Christian imperium of the past." For example, in 1933 on the eve of the Machtergreifung, he argued in a significant public lecture in Berlin that Christianity and Nazism, with their competing understandings of "Reich," are ultimately incompatible. In 1934, in the spirit of the Barmen declaration, he published an article in which he repudiated the notion of a "people’s church" or Volkskirche, writing that Christians belong ultimately not to any particular people, German or otherwise, but to Christ. And in 1935, during a public lecture in Munich, he was interrupted, jeered, and egged by the Hitler Youth for challenging their understanding of "heroism." From that point on it appears that the Gestapo began to keep tabs on Przywara, leading to an anxious condition from which he never fully recovered. In the words of Thomas O’Meara, "The priest who had appeared to possess energy without limits became anxious, incapable of work, and erratic, a condition only heightened by the opinions of others that it was partly psycho-somatic, exaggerated, or easily remedied." Przywara’s anxieties turned out to be well founded. From December 1935 to March 1936, the Gestapo suppressed his editorial office in the Veterinärstrasse; it continued to be under surveillance until it was shut down permanently in 1941.

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