Ferdinand Ulrich - Böcker

Homo Abyssus is one of the most significant works of Catholic philosophy in the twentieth century. In this speculative appropriation of Aquinas, Ferdinand Ulrich lays out a vision of being as an image of divine goodness, drawing out as-yet-undiscovered treasures from Aquinas’s texts through a fundamental engagement with modern philosophy, above all Hegel and Heidegger. One of the most unique features of this vision is, as Hans Urs von Balthasar observed, “It stands face-to-face with the innermost mysteries of Christian revelation, and opens them up, without ever departing from the strictly philosophical sphere. In this respect, it overcomes the baleful dualism between philosophy and theology perhaps more successfully than any previous attempt.”The first part of the book offers a fundamental metaphysics, expounding in detail the basic structure of being in the light of creation ex nihilo interpreted as an act of radical generosity. This discussion presents novel insights into traditional themes such as the real distinction between essence and existence, participation, causality, and the analogy of being; and it explores from the same perspective of radical generosity themes associated more with modern philosophy, such as the relationship between being and nothingness, the ontological difference, and being and time. The second part of the book is a speculative anthropology, which proposes to think through the constitution of the human being as a kind of dynamic exemplar of the meaning of being: man not only shows the meaning of being, but co-enacts it in his relation to himself, to the world, and to God.In addition to offering the first major work of Ulrich to appear in English, this translation includes a substantial introduction by Martin Bieler, and a helpful lexicon to help elucidate the book’s unusual vocabulary.

Ferdinand Ulrich has been hailed by some as one of the greatest Catholic philosophers of the Twentieth Century. Though he ceased writing in the 1980s, his works are only now being translated into English. The three works collected in this volume present dimensions of Ulrich's unique philosophical anthropology, which he developed in the light of the metaphysics laid out in Homo Abyssus. The first work, Atheism and Incarnation, reflects on man's personal and cultural attempt to be fully human in the context of contemporary culture, showing how the question of God emerges right at the heart of this effort. The second work, Man in the Beginning: Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Childhood, offers a remarkable metaphysical exploration of the child's development of personality in relation to his mother and father, in critical dialogue with several "prophets" of modern thought: Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. He shows that, far from presenting a problem that needs to be resolved or overcome, the child reveals a fundamental truth about human existence: namely, that we become ourselves in receiving ourselves from others. The third work, Prayer as the Fundamental Act of the Creature, presents what Hans Urs von Balthasar called a "summa" on prayer, which contains everything essential. One of the things that makes Ulrich's essay unique is his rooting of prayer, and so the encounter with God, in the person's very act of existence. This approach brings to light depths of the spiritual life that have rarely been explored before. Altogether, the three works offer a pathway into Ulrich's philosophy that is more accessible than that given in Homo Abyssus, and show some of the concrete implications of that earlier, groundbreaking work.