Ignatius Eschmann

Ignatius Eschmann (13 November 1898 – 11 April 1968), born Karl Theodor Eschmann, was a German-Canadian Dominican priest, philosopher and theologian.

Biography

Eschmann was born in Düsseldorf, the son of the railroad official Karl Eschmann and his wife Anna (née Buschmann). He had a brother, the musician Hans Eschmann.

After graduating from the Royal Prussian Hohenzollern Gymnasium in Düsseldorf in the summer of 1916, Eschmann took part in World War I, where he served as a machine-gunner until the end. In the trenches, he read the Confessions of St. Augustine.

After his discharge from the army, Eschmann entered the novitiate with the Dominicans. On May 19, 1920, he adopted the first name Ignatius as his religious name. At the end of the same year, Eschmann went to the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome to begin his philosophical and theological studies. He completed these by receiving an ecclesiastical doctorate. On July 12, 1925, he was ordained to the priesthood. In 1928, Eschmann received an ecclesiastical teaching license and a little later began teaching moral philosophy at the University of St. Thomas Aquinas. He continued teaching until 1936.

In 1936, Eschmann returned to Germany, where he came into contact with resistance groups against the National Socialists in the Rhineland. In March 1937, as a pulpit preacher in Cologne, he proclaimed the contents of the papal encyclical On the Church and the German Reich.

When in 1937 a propaganda campaign of the NSDAP began against the Catholic clergy because of alleged moral offenses, which culminated in a speech of Joseph Goebbels in the Berlin Sportpalast on May 28, 1937, Eschmann consulted with Edmund Forschbach, a lawyer and former member of the Reichstag who was a friend of his, on how to counter this activity. Forschbach, who was part of the secret resistance against the Reich in the Rhineland, convinced Eschmann that for him the only way to effectively counteract it would be through public sermons. Together with Forschbach, he then determined the content of sermons critical of the regime in which he would counter accusations of NSDAP propaganda. Forschbach also provided Eschmann with material for the legal illumination of the staged criminal proceedings against the clergy.

The sermons subsequently preached by Eschmann at Sunday masses in the Dominican Church in Cologne met with a strong response. Already during the second sermon it was noticed that it was co-written by a man. After the third sermon, Eschmann was arrested in the Dominican monastery in Cologne on July 2, 1937. On the same day, the pastor Martin Niemöller was taken into custody in Berlin. Eschmann remained in custody in Cologne's Klingelpütz prison until the fall of 1938. His defense was taken over by Forschbach, who, in order to obtain Eschmann's release, negotiated, among other things, in October 1937 with Werner Best, the deputy head of the Secret State Police Office in Berlin, a conversation that their mutual friend Erich Müller had arranged for him.

In 1939, Eschmann went to Canada as an emigrant. During the Second World War, still a German citizen, he was under constant surveillance by the Canadian police as an Enemy alien. In 1939, he began teaching at Université Laval in Quebec, but this ended the following year as a result of a dispute with Cardinal Villeneuve and Charles de Koninck. He also collaborated in Ottawa with Canadian Dominicans on the critical new edition of the Editio Piana of the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas (1941).

In 1942, Eschmann joined the faculty of philosophy at the University of St. Michael's College and the Pontifical institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto. Until the end of his life, at the latter institution, he imparted to graduate students a knowledge of the works and thought of Thomas Aquinas and the ability to pursue the study of moral philosophy in a critical and historically conscious manner. He was naturalized in Canada in December 1945.

After his death at Wellesley Hospital in Toronto, Eschmann was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery.

Works

• "A Thomistic Glossary on the Principle of the Preeminence of a Common Good," Mediaeval Studies 5 (1):123–65 (1943)
• "In Defense of Jacques Maritain," Modern Schoolman 22 (4):183–208 (1944)
• "Studies on the Notion of Society in St. Thomas Aquinas. II. Thomistic Social Philosophy and the Theology of Original Sin," Mediaeval Studies 9 (1):19–55 (1947)
• "The Quotations of Aristotle's Politics in St. Thomas' Lectura Super Matthaeum," Mediaeval Studies 18 (1):232–40 (1956)
• "St. Thomas’s Approach to Moral Philosophy," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 31:25–33 (1957)
• "St. Thomas Aquinas on the Two Powers," Mediaeval Studies 20 (1):177–205 (1958)
• The Ethics of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Two Courses (1997)

References

• L. K. Shook: Ignatius Eschmann, O.P., 1898–1968, in Mediaeval Studies 30 (1968, v-ix).
• J.A. Weisheipl: Eschmann, Ignatius, in: New Catholic Encyclopedia, Bd. xy (Ead-Fre), Catholic University of America, 2003, S. 352.
• Who's Who in Germany, Teil 1, 1990, S. 343.

External links

• Eschmann, Ignatius T.