Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

212 JOSEPH CHAPEL
(1882-1931) to despair of the value of philosophy as he had
known it, the scandal of Christian fighting against Christian,
brought Ebner to an interior conversion toward Christ. A sickly
man, both physically and psychologically, Ebner became a daily
reader of the Gospel Word, yet remained somewhat aloof from
the institutional Church until returning to the sacraments near
the end of his life.
Ebner would bristle at being called a “philosopher” or a
“theologian”; his thought and his sometimes polemical, aphoristic
style do not fit neatly into any one discipline. He attempts no
“system” of philosophy or theology but he hits the core of dialogical
thought by offering a particular way to “read” some
philosophical and theological questions.
The core of Ebner’s major work, Das Wort und die geistigen
Realitäten (The Word and the Spiritual Realities), 15 is the notion
15 FERDINAND EBNER, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten. Pnuematologische
Fragmente (Innsbruck, 1921), republished in Schriften, vol. 1: Fragmente,
Aufsätze, Aphorismen. Zu einer Pneumatologie des Wortes, ed. FRANZ SEYR (Munich:
Kösel Verlag, 1963), 75-342 (hereafter WR); English translations are taken
and used with permission from HAROLD JOHNSON GREEN, “The Word and the
Spiritual Realities: A Translation of and Critical Introduction to FERDINAND
EBNER’s Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten and a Comparison with Martin
Buber’s Ich und Du” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1980), (hereafter
Green). Part I is the “Critical Introduction” and is paginated in Roman numerals;
Part II is the actual translation, paginated in arabic numerals.
Throughout his life, Ebner made “aphoristic” notes on his wide-ranging
studies, some of which were published posthumously as Wort und Liebe (Regensburg:
Friedrich Pustet, 1935), a title given by the editor, HILDEGARD JONE,
which contains Ebner’s 1916-17 diaries, Aus dem Tagebuch 1916/17, and his final
work, Aphorismen, written in 1931 at the request of his friends, Hildegard
Jone and Josef Humplik. Both were republished in EBNER, Schriften, vol. 1, 19-
74 and 909-1014 respectively. In 1949, HILDEGARD JONE edited another selection
from Ebner’s 16 diary notebooks, entitled Das Wort ist der Weg (n.p.: Herder,
1949), but it was not included in the Schriften, nor is it any longer in print, and
thus the Italian translation of Ebner’s Das Wort ist der Weg will be used here: La
parola è la via, edited and translated by EDDA DUCCI and PIERO ROSSANO (Rome:
Anicia, 1991). Translations into English are my own, except where noted.
While there is little written in English on Ebner, an Italian journal has
recently devoted an entire issue to his thought. See the Italian edition of
Communio: Rivista Internazionale di Teologia e Cultura 175-176 (January -
April 2001).