The Analogia Entis as a Standard of Catholic Engagement: Erich Przywara's Critique of Phenomenology and Dialectical Theology

Abstract

AbstractThe purpose of this article is to introduce the reader to the twentieth‐century Jesuit, Erich Przywara (1889‐1972), who was arguably the most brilliant and prolific Catholic philosopher, theologian, cultural and literary critic of the 1920s and 1930s, but is known today more by association with his friend Edith Stein or his protégé Hans Urs von Balthasar than for anything he wrote. Rather than focusing on any single work, however, this article focuses on his early understanding of the analogia entis as a synthesis of the teaching of Augustine, Thomas, and the IV Lateran Council, and on his subsequent deployment of the analogia entis as a Catholic standard in response to the dialectical theology of the early Barth and the phenomenology of Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger, respectively. Looking back to Vatican I and anticipating Vatican II, it is clear that Przywara was in the vanguard of the Catholic Church’s engagement with the modern world. What remains to be considered today, aside from his immense contribution to modern theology, is the merit of his responses to Barth and Heidegger at this time, e.g., his claim that dialectical theology, instead of being a corrective to modernity, was only a symptom of its fundamental imbalance, and that phenomenology, rather than overcoming or displacing a Catholic metaphysics of the analogia entis, is fulfilled in the ontological openness signified by it.