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131 CHAPTER 16 Heidegger’s Existential Domestication of Luther David Vessey By the early 1920s Heidegger was already famous among German university students , though he had published virtually nothing. Hannah Arendt recalled that ―in Heidegger‘s case there was nothing tangible on which his fame could have been based, nothing written. . . . There was hardly more than a name, but the name traveled all over Germany like the rumor of the hidden king.‖1 When in 1926 his fame led him to be considered for professorships at both the University of Berlin and Marburg University, he was pressured to publish something. Heidegger rushed into print the first two sections of Being and Time. The anticipated third section never appeared and, in fact, Heidegger abandoned the project, but his philosophical brilliance was confirmed. He was quickly appointed to a professorship at Marburg. Then, when his teacher Edmund Husserl retired, he was appointed to fill his position at Freiburg University. For almost fifty years Being and Time, one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, seemed to have sprung fully formed from Heidegger‘s genius like Athena from Zeus‘s head. Only in 1975, with the beginning of the publication of 102 volumes of Heidegger‘s Gesamtausgabe, a publication process that still continues thirty-five years later, did the world start to see the contents of Heidegger‘s lecture notes and studies from the early 1920s. It was not until 1995 that the archives published Heidegger‘s 1919–1921 lectures on the phenomenology of religion; as a result, only in the last fifteen years have we come to understand how central Martin Luther‘s writings were for some of the key themes of Being and Time. Here I will lay out some of the important ideas of Being and Time that can be traced back to Heidegger‘s study of Luther: substantially, ideas of fallenness, conscience , and being-toward-death; methodologically, the idea of destruktion. What we will find is that while they originally provided Heidegger with religious inspiration , he attempted to transform them entirely into philosophical categories while still preserving their existential force. More than that, he was seeking the existential , phenomenological roots for views that would take hold not just in Lutheran 132 THE DEVIL‘S WHORE theology but in various ways across various theological traditions. So, even as in 1927 he could write to Rudolf Bultmann about Being and Time that ―Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard are philosophically essential for a more radical understanding of Da-sein,‖2 he also could say that philosophy is essentially atheistic and all theological views need to be clarified in light of their existential origins.3 Luther’s Influence on Heidegger Heidegger made no attempt to contribute to Lutheran scholarship; instead, Luther appears in his writings as a source of influence for some of Heidegger‘s most significant views. To ask about Heidegger and Luther, then, is to see the way that Luther‘s views function in the background of Heidegger‘s views as developed in Being and Time.4 I must stress in the background, as Heidegger does not give Luther any credit as a source for his views in Being and Time. Being and Time only mentions Luther twice.5 Were it not for the publication of the lecture notes in the Gesamtausgabe, we would not know the importance of Luther for Heidegger‘s early thought. Heidegger had a thoroughly theological education. He was raised Catholic and from 1909 to 1911 studied to be a priest. Influenced by his reading of Edmund Husserl, he shifted to seeking phenomenological foundations for Scholasticism ; his habilitationschrift was a phenomenological analysis called ―The Theories and Categories of Meaning in Duns Scotus.‖ His wife was Lutheran, but they were married in 1917 in a Catholic church, in part, according to her, to help reinforce his waning Catholicism. As early as 1917 Heidegger realized that ―The ‗holding-to-be-true‘ of Catholic faith is founded entirely otherwise than the fiducia of the reformers.‖6 By 1918 they had decided not to baptize their son in the Catholic Church, and in 1919 he had written a letter to his priest and close friend Engelbert Krebs stating that ―the system of Catholicism‖ had become ―problematic and unacceptable.‖7 He made clear that he thought Catholicism had lost touch with the primal experience of Christianity; for example, in his 1919 winter semester course on Basic Problems of Phenomenology he writes, ―the ancient Christian achievement was distorted and buried through...

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