Successful detachment
The facts – a theologian who, just before Christmas, receives Germany’s most important research award, the Leibniz Prize, and who quickly achieved much as a researcher at a young age – might suggest that writing a portrait of Prof. Michael Seewald would be an easy undertaking, would practically write itself. But the Professor of Dogma and the History of Dogmatics in the Faculty of Catholic Theology does not make things that easy for his interviewer.
This is because Seewald keeps a detached attitude to many things such as titles, prizes, appreciations – and even to his own subject. He even maintains this position vis-à-vis his biography as a description of his life story. “Self-reflexion or the idea that there are chains of biographical events decreed by fate are alien to me. I don’t look for any common threads in my life,” he explains. This comes across neither as conscious understatement nor as forced aloofness. There simply appear to be things to which Michael Seewald attaches no (great) importance. However, such things need not therefore be unimportant or uninteresting: born in 1987 in Saarbrücken, where he grew up with joint German and French nationalities, Seewald studied Catholic theology, philosophy and politics in Tübingen, Pune (India) and Frankfurt am Main. He wrote his PhD in Munich, received his habilitation there after lengthy periods studying in Boston, and in 2017 he was appointed to a professorship at the University of Münster. At school, while studying for his Abitur, he won a national debating competition for young people, and in 2013 he was ordained as a priest. Since 2022 he has been the spokesperson for the “Religion and Politics” Cluster of Excellence, and since 2024 a Permanent Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin.
Even though Michael Seewald (37) describes all these roles as “labels”, they are useful for this portrait. He says, for example, when asked about the debating competition, that debates are simply essential and that he is especially motivated to engage in debate when someone declares a discussion to be over. In his subject – Dogmatics – in particular, he says, it happens repeatedly that people aim to have teaching posts in order to propagate “supposed truths, in an authoritative way”. This is not what concerns him, he says, either as a university lecturer and researcher or occasionally in his role as a priest. “What’s important is always the persuasive force of the best argument,” he declares. Studying philosophy was useful, as the subject “requires that statements display analytical clarity”, he says.
For this, he needs language. His aim is always to write clear, accessible texts. Not in kitsch-laden texts but “cloaked in simple beauty” such as he seeks daily in “beautiful literature and music” after reading an unsatisfying academic text. In this act of distancing himself from other people and their sometimes tedious texts, and in his wish to do things differently, there is a special feature which Seewald calls an “ironic detachment from theology and from my occupation”. Perhaps, he says cautiously, this approach might be a reason why for example his books or some of his – deliberately restricted – appearances in the media “seem to strike a nerve” when, seen from the outside, he either talks of “other things” or talks of “things differently”. In conversation, Seewald constantly refines what he says, formulates different views, pre-empting them in order to keep the matter at a slight distance, as it were. On the award of the Leibniz Prize, for example: he was simply lucky, he says, because there are other people who are just as proficient but who didn’t receive it. “I have a reserved attitude to awards and titles,” he says, in his customary detached way.
This attitude certainly raises the question of how this researcher, who is both experienced and, at the same time, still quite young, can have achieved so much without describing himself as being ambitious in the conventional sense. Michael Seewald would certainly object to this psychological approach, but some things may be due to his roots. He speaks animatedly of his homeland, the Saarland. He gives the listener the impression that, located on the French border and between France and Germany, it gave him a special identity: not entirely German, not entirely French, but something else in itself – simply somewhat detached.
André Bednarz
This article is from the brochure "Twelve months, twelve people", published in February 2025.
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