SCHELL, HERMANN.—Catholic theologian and apologist, b. 28 February 1850 in Fribourg (Baden), d. 31 May 1906 in Würzburg. He studied theology in Fribourg and Rome, and philosophy in Würzburg, where he heard F. Brentano. In 1884 he was called to the Faculty of Theology at Würzburg to succeed F. X. HETTINGER, FRANZ (v.) as professor of apologetics and the history of Christian art.
He proposed a modern apology for Christianity, idealism (v.), monism (v.), and historicism (v.). In carrying out his aims, he failed to reconcile his philosophical conceptions, influenced by modern currents, with the teaching of the Church. His theology of the Holy Trinity, his interpretation of Christ’s «Kenosia», and his eschatology contain erroneous and dangerous propositions. The office of rector magnificus of the University of Würzburg, to which he was elected in 1896, gave him the opportunity to expound his ideas concerning the cultural problems of German Catholicism and to invite Catholics to adopt a new orientation in their attitude toward the cultural ideals of the age. His two «reformist» writings Der Katholizismus als Prinzip des Fortschritts (Würzburg 1897) and Die neue Zeit und der alte Glaube (Paderborn 1898) provoked a heated controversy; by decree of 15 December 1898 the two works, together with the Katholische Dogmatik (4 vols., ibid. 1889–93) and Gott und Geist (2 vols., ibid. 1895–96), were placed on the Index. S. submitted and undertook, before his own bishop, not to uphold the errors identified in his teaching. After S.’s death the controversy broke out again when his friends promoted the project of a monument. Pope Pius X, in an apostolic letter of 14 June 1907 to Msgr. E. Commer, while acknowledging S.’s zeal and integrity of life, insisted on the decision of the S. Congregation of the Index of 1898.
The orientation and methodological principles of S.’s apologetics are substantially in accord with traditional doctrine. S. defends the possibility and value of metaphysics against empiricism (v.) criticism (v.). He does not reject the moral-psychological considerations of the apologists of immanence (L. Ollé-Laprune, M. Blondel); but he maintains that they can attain probative value only on the basis of the principles of metaphysics and within the framework of an intellectualist philosophy. Against the relativism of scholars of comparative religion he defends the doctrine of faith as revealed truth, demonstrating the greatness and uniqueness of the biblical conception of God and explaining the history of the chosen people as the development of a communicative presence of God that culminates in the Incarnation of the Word.
S. was a theologian of considerable speculative power who, as a consequence of his apologetic tendencies, the influence of the Tübingen theological school, and, indirectly, of German idealism, tended to expound and interpret the doctrine of faith in such a way as to give it the logical structure of a philosophical system. The basis of his speculative thought consists in a metaphysical conception which, like Neoplatonic philosophy, seeks to reconcile Aristotelian ontology with a dynamic spiritualism. God’s aseity signifies not only the exclusion of every form of dependence in being, but also self-actualization and self-position (positive aseity); God is «ratio et causa sui» (Kath. Dogmatik, I, p. 238 ff.). The Trinity of the divine Persons is the expression of this perfect actuality; «the Trinity is the aseity of the living God, explained by Revelation» (ibid., II, p. 21). S. did not succeed in convincingly eliminating the serious difficulties and dangerous implications of this theory; it leads, in fact, to the consequence that God realizes, in the trinitarian productions, the aseity of his nature, and that the distinction of the Persons in God is reduced to the diversity of moments and aspects of a single process.
The actualistic conception of the person also makes itself felt in the definition of mortal sin and in the explanation of eternal punishments. According to S., damnation can be conceived only as the consequence of a free and willed hardening that is total and definitive for the will of the human being himself. Mortal sin therefore presupposes that the subject, through an act arising from the center of his spiritual nature, decides and formally and explicitly rebels against God himself. If the will acts under the influence of passionate impulses, it does not decide with the perfect freedom that alone can establish a person as an enemy of God and fix him in absolute obstinacy toward Grace. According to S., the sinner who has not voluntarily hardened himself retains, even after death, the possibility of repenting and purifying himself of his sins (ibid., III, II, pp. 721 ff., 879 ff.). These opinions, with which S. placed himself in evident opposition to the doctrine of the Church (cf., e.g., Conc. Tridentinum, sess. VI, cap. 15), seem to derive from an unwarranted identification of the formal denial of God with the explicit denial and, moreover, to confuse the conditions of its totality with those of its definitiveness.
Other principal works: Das Wirken des dreieinigen Gottes (Magonza 1885); Apologie des Christentums, I: Religion und Offenbarung (ibid. 1901, 3rd ed. 1907), II: Jahre und Christus (ibid. 1905, 2nd ed. 1908); Christus, Das Evangelium in seiner weltgeschichtlichen Bedeutung (Magonza 1903); S.: kleinere Schriften, ed. C. Hennemann (Paderborn 1908).
