Product Overview
In his earlier work Romantic Idealism and Roman Catholicism: Schelling and the Theologians, Thomas F. O'Meara, O.P., traced the course of theology and philosophy developed by German Catholics from the Enlightenment to romantic idealism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Now O'Meara presents an overview of the second half of the nineteenth century in Church and Culture. This new book focuses on German Catholic systematic and fundamental theology from the 1860s to the onset of World War I.
The volume begins with an introduction to the cultural and philosophical patterns of the period. O'Meara then sketches the two competing Catholic theologies in Germany: the modest continuance of a historical and idealist thought, and the expansion of neoscholasticism favored by the Vatican. The book examines in detail five significant theologians who developed dogmatic and fundamental theology in light of the movements of the time: M. J. Scheeben, Alois Schmid, Paul Schanz, Herman Schell, and Carl Braig.
Church and Culture concludes by tracing the historical shift from theology to social action after 1890, demonstrating that the theologians who argued for an alternative to neoscholasticism and for theologies created out of the modernity of their own century were not modernists in the eyes of their German colleagues or according to the Roman decrees. O'Meara's book is one of the few sources for understanding late nineteenth-century theology, a philosophical theology that wanted to address and learn from the modern world. But it was challenged by a Vatican prone to see modernity becoming modernism and by a Prussian establishment suspicious of the Catholic faith and church.
