文档介绍：Ignatius Eschmann, . (1898-1968) was a most distinguished interpreter of Saint Thomas Aquinas, if we take "interpreter" in the double sense of one who knows what Thomas meant and who brings to that interpreta- tion what our century has made available. During the First World War Eschmann served in the German Army; later he spent a year in a Nazi prison as a result of having explained Mit brennender sorge in German churches. He had received his post-secondary education at the "Angelicum," the Dominican University in Rome, and on receiving his degree was transferred to its teaching staff. It is a curiosity that although his official training was in theology, he always taught phi- losophy. But as Shook, . pointed out in his funeral homily, the troublesome philosophy-theology conundrum may be solved better on the personal plane, as Eschmann had done, rather than by abstract definition and legislation. English-speaking readers will be glad to find that Eschmann could cite . Eliot to make a point, that he knew there is more in the OED than linguistic lore, and that he could adduce Bertrand Russell within two lines of citing Walter Winchell. Eschmann was a linguist of formidable exper- tise; he was the opposite of the party-line "manual" Thomist The ethics he found in Saint Thomas is an ethics for adults, an ethics of Christian liberty, an ethics of splendour, but an ethics ruled by the virtue of pru- dence. Lest we misjudge all this as ethical laxity, let us remember that Eschmann obeyed his Superiors without question when he was assigned to Germany in 1936. All those who studied under him will hear Eschmann's voice and re- member his presence in reading these transcriptions of two courses he gave on the ethical teaching of Aquinas. What they cannot be expected to have known is that he had written out verbatim every course he gave, although his rhetorical expertise gave an impression of the ex tempore. For those to whom Eschmann has been no more than a legen