Cornelius Ernst

Cornelius Ernst (1924–1977) was a Sri Lankan Dominican theologian.

Biography Ernst was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1924 to an ethnically Dutch Anglican father and Sinhalese Buddhist mother. For a period he was a member of the Communist Party of Sri Lanka. He shared the Anglicanism of his father, but later converted to Catholicism after reading John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. He was ordained in 1954, following this he taught at Hawkesyard Priory in Staffordshire, England from 1957 until 1966 when he moved to Oxford Priory.

Work While at Cambridge (1946–7) he attended lectures by Ludwig Wittgenstein, which had a lasting impression on him, leading him to attempt a synthesis of the ideas of Wittgenstein and Aquinas.

Ernst was significantly influenced by Karl Rahner and acknowledged "my profound debt" to him. He produced the first English translation of Rahner's Schriften zur Theologie which he penned the foreword to and named Theological Investigations. This title choice was influenced by Wittgenstein's book Philosophical Investigations. Ernst edited a series of volumes entitled Sacramentum Mundi: an Encyclopedia of Theology alongside Rahner and Kevin Smyth, and also Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler's Theological Dictionary.

A major focus of Ernst's work was on grace. He edited and wrote the introduction to a Latin-English bilingual translation of the section on grace in Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, which he published in 1972. In 1974 he published a book, The Theology of Grace.

Ernst was a long time contributor to the New Blackfriars journal.

In 1979 many of his essays were posthumously published as a book, Multiple Echo, featuring a foreword by Donald M. MacKinnon. Ernst work influenced theologians Nicholas Lash, Fergus Kerr, and Timothy Radcliffe.