Pierre Johanns
indologist, missionary, priest (1881–1955)
Pierre Johanns (1 April 1882, Heinerscheid, Luxembourg – 8 February 1955, Arlon, Belgium) was a Luxemburger Jesuit priest, missionary in India and Indologist.
Education
Johanns was ordained priest on 1 August 1914 at Louvain, three days before World War I broke out and Germany invaded Belgium. He had studied philosophy under the prestigious metaphysician and mystic, Pierre Scheuer. Johanns' superior intelligence, nearing genius, had been recognized and he was destined to further studies while awaiting a still impeded passage to India. He took a full Licentiate in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), and was then sent to Oxford as soon as the end of the war permitted it, in 1919. To evaluate his doctoral dissertation on "The Agent Intellect in the Western and Eastern Philosophies," Oxford University could not find suitable examiners, and had to have recourse to Cambridge. From there came the extraordinary verdict: "only once in a hundred years does one meet such an intellect." Oxford gave him the doctorate with the highest honours and offered him, despite his being a Roman Catholic and Jesuit, a professorship. But his call was for Calcutta, which he reached in November 1921. He taught philosophy at St. Xavier's College, Calcutta, at St Mary's, the Jesuit theologate at Kurseong, Darjeeling, and even in a Vaisnava monastery.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pierre Johanns” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.