CATHREIN, VIKTOR. - Moral philosopher, b. at Brig (Switzerland) on 8 May 1845, d. at The Hague on 10 Sept. 1931. A Jesuit from 1863, he was a professor in the studentates of the German province of the Order (at Blijenbeck, Exaten and finally at Valkenburg).
His principal works are: Moralphilosophie (2 vols., Freiburg im Breisgau 1890-91; 2nd ed. 1924; Italian trans. by E. Tommasi, Florence 1913-20); Der Sozialismus, eine Untersuchung seiner Grundlagen und Durchführbarkeit (Freiburg im Breisgau 1890, 14th-16th ed. 1923; a work translated into 11 languages including, in Italian, by G. Cecconi, Turin 1906); Recht, Naturrecht und positives Recht (Freiburg 1901); Grundbegriffe des Strafrechts (ibid. 1905, 2nd ed. 1909); Die Grundlage des Völkerrechts (ibid. 1918); Die Einheit des sittlichen Bewusstseins der Menschheit, eine ethnographische Untersuchung (3 vols., ibid. 1914). He was moreover an active contributor to the journal Stimmen der Zeit (formerly Stimmen aus Maria-Laach) and to the Philosophisches Jahrbuch der Görresgesellschaft, and to the journal Scholastik.
The significance of C. lies in the systematic overcoming of positivism in the field of ethical and juridical notions and in the struggle he waged against every form of morality divorced from religion. On the basis of Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics he regards the real order of every being as the natural principle of action, grounding the inner necessary transcendence of ethical obligatoriness in the will of God the creator. Thereby he secures the fundamentally intellectual character of the ethical life against every one-sided emotional, existentialist or purely philosophical tendency. The systematic force of his work on socialism remains unsurpassed even today.
Bibliography
Gustavo Gundlach