The early Heidegger and medieval philosophy: phenomenology for the godforsaken

6. Luther

Chapter Six LU T H E R An original form of religiosity breaks forth in Luther, which is not even seen in the mystics. Heidegger The year 1917 was a turning point for Heidegger. Prior to 1917, he never openly questioned the Roman Catholic/Scholastic appropriation of philosophical methods into theology. After 1917, Heidegger began to regard Scholasticism as the site of the hegemony of theoretical speculativeaesthetic concepts in Christianity and the consequent forgetting of factical Christian life. The catalyst in this reversal was Heidegger’s discovery of Protestantism, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and above all, Luther. We know Heidegger was reading Luther as early as 1909, although evidence of an intensive study of Luther only appears ten years later.1 Heidegger came to believe that Luther had correctly identified Scholasticism as an illegitimate fusion of Christianity and Greek metaphysics. Luther’s purge of Christian theology of Aristotelian-Scholastic concepts became Heidegger’s paradigm for the phenomenological destruction of the ontological tradition. Luther reduced theology to primordial Christian faith; Heidegger would reduce ontology to historical life.2 In the 1919 letter to Krebs breaking with “the system of Catholicism,” 151 1. Otto Pöggeler reports that in a conversation, Heidegger told him that he studied Luther’s lectures on Romans as a theology student, that is, between 1909 and 1911. Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Luther-Lektüre,” 194. 2. As van Buren puts it, when Heidegger returned to full-time teaching in 1919, he understood himself to be a Luther of Western metaphysics. Van Buren, Young Heidegger, 167. Heidegger had pledged not to sink to “the peevish and intemperate diatribes of an apostate,” nor to forget the “values [that] are enshrined in medieval Catholicism” or the Catholic tradition, which he continued to hold in “high regard.” He would prove his abiding esteem in his “phenomenology of religion,” which would “draw heavily on the Middle Ages.”3 From the 1917–19 notes and the early Freiburg lectures, we see that this irenic tone was for Krebs’s benefit alone. At the time he wrote the letter, Heidegger regarded mysticism as a proto-Reformation of isolated voices asserting the claims of “the genuine primordial Christian standpoint” against the overpowering system of Christendom. “The ancient Christian achievement was distorted and buried through the infiltration of classical science into Christianity. From time to time it reasserted itself in violent eruptions (as in Augustine, in Luther, in Kierkegaard). Only from here is medieval mysticism to be understood....... [T]he struggle between Aristotle and the new ‘feeling for life’ continued in medieval mysticism and eventually in Luther” (GA58 205). Primal Christianity broke with Greek cosmology, asserting the primacy of the concrete and historical over the ideal, universal, and formal. “The historical is somehow co-given in the essence of Christianity itself” (GA56/57 26). In the Middle Ages, Greek cosmology prevailed over Christian facticity. The Scholastic appropriation of Plato and Aristotle eclipsed the primordial Christian experience. “The inner experiences and the new attitude of life were pressed into forms of expression in ancient science” (GA58 61). Heidegger’s early phenomenology of religion (1920–21) was an effort to rehabilitate and formalize the historical self disclosed in early Christian experience, in medieval mysticism, and in the Reformation. Philosophy shares with Luther the task of emancipating “inner experience” from ancient science (GA58 61). The significance of Luther for the young Heidegger has long been a topic of discussion, even if we are only now, with the publication of the Gesamtausgabe, in a position to evaluate it.4 The early Freiburg lectures are full of scattered references to Luther.5 From 1919 to 1923, Heidegger 3. Heidegger, quoted in Ott, Biographie, 107/107. 4. See, for example, Schaeffler’s 1978 examination of Lutheran themes in Sein und Zeit, Schaef- fler, Frömmigkeit des Denkens, chap. 1. 5. References to Luther in Heidegger’s early Freiburg lectures: GA56/57 18; GA58 62, 204–5; GA60 283; 308; 309; GA61 7, 182–83; GA63 5, 14, 27, 46, 106; in SZ: 10, 190 n. iv. 152 LUTHER immersed himself in private research on Luther.6 Jaspers remembers visiting Heidegger in April 1920. He “watched him at his Luther studies , and saw the intensity of his work.”7 Julius Ebbingaus tells of spending evenings with Heidegger in 1921 reading Luther.8 Heidegger planned to publish a paper on Luther and the ontological foundations of late medieval...