Johann Sebastian von Drey

Dr. J. S. von Drey (lithography by Ludwig August Helvig, 1834)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 a founder of the Catholic Tübingen school.

Life

He was born 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. He 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.

When King William I (1817) incorporated the University of Ellwangen with the old national University of Tübingen as its Catholic faculty of theology, Drey with his colleagues, Peter Aloys Gratz and Johann Georg Herbst, joined the staff of the new school. He co-founded (1819), together with Gratz and his new colleague, Johann Baptist von Hirscher, the "Theologische Quartalschrift" of Tübingen;

Mein Tagebuch über philosophische, theologische und historische Gegenstände, 1812–1817 Introduction to the Study of Theology (Einleitung in das Studium der Theologie, Tubing. 1819) Researches on the Apostolical Constitutions and Canons (Untersuchungen fiber die Constitutionen und Canones der Apostel, Tübingen, 1832) Apologetics (Christliche Apologetik, Mainz, 1838–47, 3 volumes) Die Apologetik als wissenschaftlichen Nachweisung der Göttlichkeit des Christenthums in seiner Erscheinung (1844)