Franz Anton Staudenmaier

Who was Franz Anton Staudenmaier?

Franz Anton Staudenmaier was a Catholic theologian.

Born at Donzdorf, Württemberg, he was a pupil at the Latin school of Schwäbisch Gmünd between 1815 and 1818 and at the Gymnasium at Ellwangen from 1818 to 1822. During the years 1822-1826, he studied theology and philosophy at the University of Tübingen, where Johann Sebastian von Drey, Johann Georg Herbst, Hirscher, and Möhler were his teachers. In the autumn of 1826 he entered the seminary at Rottenburg am Neckar, where he was ordained as a priest on September 15, 1827. After performing the duties of a parish priest for a year he became, in the autumn of 1828, a tutor in the Catholic theological seminary, "Wilhelmsstift" at Tübingen

In 1830 he was made regular professor of dogmatic theology in the newly established Catholic theological faculty of the University of Giessen, which owed its brief period of prosperity largely to Staudenmaier and his colleague Kuhn. In the autumn of 1837 he became the regular professor of dogmatic theology at the University of Freiburg. From 1843 he was also a cathedral canon.

Staudenmaier was a major figure in the Catholic theology of Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century and one of the most important writers on dogmatics of the Catholic Tübingen school. He was reported as a scholar of far-reaching knowledge, of great productive energy, and at the same time a philosopher with a talent for speculation. His service consisted in securing a deep speculative foundation for Christian truth and in attempting to defend against other perspective like Hegelian philosophy.