WUST, PETER - Enciclopedia Cattolica, Vol. XII, p. 1063

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

WUST, PETER. - German Catholic thinker, born on 28 August 1884 at Rissental near Trier, died in Münster on 3 April 1940.

After an initial phase of adherence to neo-Kantianism alongside Paulsen, he turned toward metaphysics through the influence of Kentenich and Troeltsch. Max Scheler, whom he met in Cologne (1921–28), drew him to phenomenology, which Wust considered the most effective method for the resurrection of metaphysics within contemporary culture. The task of metaphysics, in his view, was the foundation and interpretation of the person as a spiritual reality in the Augustinian and Bonaventuran sense, oriented toward embracing the demands of modern thought (especially Nietzsche and Kierkegaard) for the constitution of an authentic Christian existentialism.

BIBL.: Principal works: Die Auferstehung der Metaphysik, S. Isburgo 1920; Natività und Pietà, Tübingen 1923; Die Dialektik des Geistes, Augsburg 1928; Ungeschicht und Wagnis, 4th ed., Munich - Kempten 1937; Der Mensch und die Philosophie, Einführung in die Hauptfragen der Existenzphilosophie, Regensburg-Münster 1947 (posthumous), edited by A. Borgolte, who provides the biography and a concise outline of Wust’s thought on pp. 117–46. Cornelio Fabro