Johann Sebastian Drey

Johann Sebastian von Drey (16 October 1777 – 19 February 1853) was a German Catholic professor of theology at the University of Tübingen. With Johann Adam Möhler, Drey was the founder of the so-called Catholic School of Tübingen.

He was born in Killingen, in the parish of Röhlingen, in the then ecclesiastical principality of Ellwangen.

The parish priest of Röhlingen, an ex-Jesuit, noting the boy's talents, instructed him in the elements of Latin, and persuaded his parents to send him, in 1787, in spite of their extreme poverty, to the gymnasium of Ellwangen. There he lived partly on the charity of the townspeople and partly by tutoring, especially in Latin, mathematics, and physics.

He studied theology, 1797–1799, at Augsburg; after 1799 he lived in the diocesan seminary at Pfaffenhausen and was ordained in the summer of 1801. During his five years as assistant in his native place, Drey studied the then paramount philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, as appears clearly in his works. His position, from 1806, as professor of philosophy of religion, mathematics, and physics in the Catholic academy of Rottweil, formed a good preparation for his subsequent academical career.

When in 1812 King Frederick I of Württemberg founded the University of Ellwangen as a Catholic national university for his recently acquired Catholic territory, Drey was called to lecture there on dogmatics, history of dogma, apologetics, and introduction to theology. There he published two Latin dissertations: "Observata quædam ad illustrandam Justini M. de regno millenario sententiam" (1814), and "Dissertatio historico-theologica originem et vicissitudinem exomologeseos in ecclesiâ. catholicâ ex documentis ecclesiasticis illustrans" (1815), the latter of which was denounced to Rome, but without serious consequences for its author, at least for the time being.

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