SCHEEBEN, Matthias Joseph (1835–88), German Catholic theologian. He was educated at the Gregorian University in Rome (1852–9), ordained priest in 1858, and was professor of dogma at the seminary at Cologne from 1860 to his death. Already in his first speculative work Natur und Gnade (1861) he outlined his doctrine of the supernatural, which he describes as a participation in the Being of God, and popularized this conception in Die Herrlichkeiten der göttlichen Gnade (1863, an independent version of a work of the 17th-cent. author, E. Nieremberg), which had an immediate success and was translated into many languages. In his profound, though sometimes obscure, Mysterien des Christenthums (1865) he attempted to build up the whole organism of Christian doctrine, viewed as a supernatural cosmos with the mystery of the Blessed Trinity as its centre.

[[He made much more extensive use of patristic authors than was common in the scholastic tradition of his day.  A central concept in his understanding of the incarnation and divinization/theosis is the biblical (and patristic) interpretation of ritual burning - the offering of a sacrifice that produces a sweet fragrance, pleasing to God (Ex 29:41, Lev 8:21, etc.).  This contrasted with a more Thomistic/scholastic emphasis on ritual sacrifice as complete immolation, reflected in a spirituality of detachment and negation of self.

See esp. The Mysteries of Christianity, ch 16, “Activity of the God-man in the Execution of His Divine Plan.” 421 ff., esp 436 ff.]]

In the following years his dogmatic work was interrupted by the controversies raised by the impending Vatican Council, in which he took a vigorous part as one of the chief opponents of J. J. I. von Döllinger and a passionate defender of Papal Infallibility. Between 1873 and 1887 he wrote his Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik, a work of immense erudition, based on Thomist principles but also making extensive use of the Fathers as well as of modern theologians. Scheeben stood for the rights of supernatural faith against the rationalist and naturalist tendencies of 18th- and 19th-cent. theology which had been rife esp. in Germany and Austria.

Gesammelte Schriften, ed. J. Höfer (8 vols., Freiburg i.B., 1941–67). Eng. trs. of Die Mysterien des Christentums by C. Vollert, SJ (St Louis, 1946), and of Natur und Gnade by id. (ibid. and London, 1954). J. Hertkens, Professor M. J. Scheeben: Leben und Wirken eines katholischen Gelehrten im Dienste der Kirche (1892). K. Feckes and others, M. J. Scheeben (Mainz, 1935). F. S. Pancheri, OFM, Il pensiero teologico di M. J. Scheeben e S. Tommaso (1956), with bibl.; B. Fraigneau-Julien, PSS, L’Église et le caractère sacramentel selon M.-J. Scheeben (1958); N. Hoffmann, SSCC, Natur und Gnade: Die Theologie der Gottesschau als vollendeter Vergöttlichung des Geistgeschöpfes bei M. J. Scheeben (Analecta Gregoriana, 160; 1967); E. Paul, Denkweg und Denkform der Theologie von Matthias Joseph Scheeben (Münchener theologische Studien, II. Systematische Abteilung, 60; 1970), with extensive bibl; U. Sander, Ekklesiologisches Wissen: Kirche als Autorität: Die ‘Theologische Erkenntislehre’ Matthias Joseph Scheebens als antimodernistische Theologie der Moderne (Frankfurter Theologische Studien, 54; 1997). T. F. O’Meara, OP, Church and Culture: German Catholic Theology, 1860–1914 (Notre Dame, Ind., and London [1991]), pp. 53–67. K.-H. Minz in Dict. Sp. 14 (1990), cols. 404–8, s.v.

David Augustine: Christ and the Altar Fire: Sacrifice as Deification in the Theology of Matthias Scheeben

The topic of this dissertation is the center and culmination of the systematic theology of the German Catholic dogmatic theologian Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1835-88)—the deification of the human being through sacrifice. I argue that Scheeben is able to conceive of sacrifice as the ultimately perfective process of human deification due to his use of the Old Testament (OT) type of the God-given altar fire as a type for grace, charity, and glory in the New Testament (NT). A corollary of this idea is that the non-rational sacrificial victims of the OT (plants and animals) were stand-ins for the human offerer. It is the human being that therefore needs the NT counterpart to the sacrificial treatment the substitute victims received in the OT rites of sacrifice.

Offered up in sacrifice through the divine grace-fire, Scheeben holds that the human being is called to rise up to God in a transfigured form that is the NT equivalent to the odor of sweetness that resulted from the ritual burning of a sacrificial victim in the OT. As sacrifice is about the deification of the human being, this work focuses extensively on Scheeben’s understanding of Jesus Christ’s status as primordial priest and archetypal sacrificial victim, a status that arises from his deification par excellence through the hypostatic union.

Scheeben grounds Christ’s unique priesthood 1) in the grace of union and 2) in his attendant accidental graces. In Christ’s actual redemptive deed, Scheeben applies the altar fire typology twice over to 1) Christ’s charity in his Passion and 2) to his bodily glorification in the resurrection. Scheeben’s dual use of the altar fire typology is what allows him to give a coherent account of the unity of Christ’s Paschal mystery in accomplishing redemption since it 1) preserves the properly atoning-meriting modality of the Passion, while 2) accounting for the sacrificial character of the resurrection and the latter’s role in effecting human justification. Overall, this work demonstrates how Scheeben’s sacrificial theology utilizes the grammar of the OT sacrificial rites to give a lucid account of the Christological mediation of grace to humans.

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