Jeremias Drexel

IUS) (1581-1638. German spiritual writer. Born at Augsburg in 1581 of Lutheran parents, he was converted to Catholicism in his youth and educated by the Jesuits, which order he joined in 1598. He was later professor of humanities at Munich and Augsburg, taught at the Jesuit seminary at Dillinger, and was court preacher to the elector of Bavaria. Between 1620 and 1638 he wrote a series of twenty works, mainly of a devotional nature, which were eagerly read and translated into many languages. Among the most popular were Considerations on Eternity, four separate English translations of which had appeared by 1710 and which discusses man's apprehension of the eternal dimension, and the Heliotropium (1627; ET 1682), on the nature of revelation.