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Chapter One H E I D E G G E R A N D T H E M E D I EVA L T H E O L O G IC A L PA R A D IG M Everything we think is the fruit of the Middle Ages and indeed of the Christian Middle Ages. Carl Gustav Jung Like a great oak tree that has colonized a grove by driving roots deep into subterranean springs not reached by lesser trees, Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit has dominated the twentieth century by feeding off traditions that lesser philosophical works cannot access. Not only a forgotten Aristotle , but also Martin Luther, Duns Scotus, medieval mysticism, and early Christianity are connected in numerous hidden ways to this massive monument to modern angst. These roots are buried deep beneath the surface of Sein und Zeit’s transcendental phenomenological discourse, but they are the source of the book’s strength. A central root runs through Heidegger ’s biography: his defection from the reactionary Catholicism of his seminary days, a protest that required him to disentangle his spiritual and intellectual life, and then philosophy itself, from the neo-Scholasticism in which he had been schooled.1 Another root stems from medieval Aristotelian ontology. The last philosophers prior to Heidegger to ask ques1 1. On Heidegger’s Catholic roots, see Alfred Denker, “Heideggers Lebens- und Denkweg 1909– 1919,” in Heidegger-Jahrbuch, ed. Alfred Denker, Hans-Helmuth Gander, and Holger Zaborowski, vol. 1, Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens (Freiburg and Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2004), 97–202; Holger Zaborowki, “‘Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft.’ Anmerkungen zur religiösen und theologischen Dimension des Denkwegs Martin Heideggers bis 1919,” in Heidegger Jahrbuch, 1:123– 58; Ott, Biographie; Ott, “Zu den katholischen Wurzeln”/”Heidegger’s Catholic Origins.” tions about the nature of being, the distinctions between different modes of being, and the difference between the being of beings and the being of being, were the “medieval schoolmen.”2 The largest root runs deep into the early Protestant objection to medieval theology, and, through Luther, into the faith of primal Christianity.3 Heidegger was as intimate with this intellectual history as if it were his very own. His internalization of these ideas lends Sein und Zeit a historical gravitas lacking in other contemporary works. And yet Sein und Zeit is a Godless eschatology. It is a phenomenological analysis of what Dilthey described as “historical consciousness,” which Dilthey discovered, not in the Greeks, but in early Christiani2 . On Heidegger and the Middle Ages, see Quaestio. Annuario di storia della metafisica, vol. 1, Heidegger e i medievali. Attti del Colloquio Internazionale Cassino 10/13 maggio 2000, ed. Costantino Esposito and Pasquale Porro (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001). This volume contains an exhaustive bibliography of the literature on Heidegger’s relationship to medieval philosophy. I have made use of Heidegger und das Mittelalter, ed. Helmuth Vetter (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999); Robert Bernasconi, “On Heidegger’s Other Sins of Omission: His Exclusion of Asian Thought from the Origins of Occidental Metaphysics and His Denial of the Possibility of Christian Philosophy,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1995): 333–49; John Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas : An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982); Johannes Baptist Lotz, Martin Heidegger und Thomas von Aquin. Mensch—Zeit—Sein (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1975); Thomas J. Sheehan, “Notes on a ‘Lovers’ Quarrel’: Heidegger and Aquinas,” Listening 9 (1974): 137–43; John M. Deely, The Tradition via Heidegger: An Essay on the Meaning of Being in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971). 3. On Heidegger’s early religion lectures, in addition to Kisiel’s Genesis of Being and Time and van Buren’s Young Heidegger, see A Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life, ed. Sean J. McGrath and Andrzej Wiercinski (forthcoming); Jean Greisch, L’Arbre de vie et l’arbre du savoir: Le chemin phénoménologique de l’herméneutique heideggérienne (1919–1923) (Paris: Cerf, 2000); Gerhard Ruff, Am Ursprung der Zeit. Studie zu Martin Heideggers phänomenologischen Zugang zur christlichen Religion in den ersten “Freiburger Vorlesungen” (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997). For a more general treatment of Heidegger’s appropriation of Christianity, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). On Heidegger and Luther, see Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Luther-Lektüre im Freiburg Theologenkonvikt ,” in Denker, Gander, and Zaborowski, Heidegger-Jahrbuch, 1:185...

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