Cornelius Ernst

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.^[1] 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.^[2]

While at Cambridge (1946–7) he attended lectures by Ludwig Wittgenstein,^[3] which had a lasting impression on him, leading him to attempt a synthesis of the ideas of Wittgenstein and Aquinas.^[4]

Ernst was significantly influenced by Karl Rahner and acknowledged "my profound debt" to him.^[5] He produced the first English translation of Rahner's Schriften zur Theologie which he penned the foreword to and named Theological Investigations.^[6] This title choice was influenced by Wittgenstein's book Philosophical Investigations.^[7] Ernst edited a series of volumes entitled Sacramentum Mundi: an Encyclopedia of Theology alongside Rahner and Kevin Smyth,^[8] and also Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler's Theological Dictionary.^[9]

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.^[7][10] In 1974 he published a book, The Theology of Grace.^[11]

He was a long time contributor to the New Blackfriars journal.^[12]

In 1979 many of his essays were posthumously published as a book, Multiple Echo,^[13] featuring a foreword by Donald M. MacKinnon.^[14] Ernst work influenced theologians Nicholas Lash,^[15] Fergus Kerr,^[16] and Timothy Radcliffe.^[17]

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