Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice by Laurence Paul Hemming (review)

Heidegger's Atheism: The a Voice. L\URENCE PAUL HEMMING. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. Pp. 344. $45.00 ISBN 0-268-03058-8. Readers of Laurence Paul recent book on should not neglect to recall the extent to which Heidegger himself radically transformed our understanding of what it means to give an "interpretation." Hemming's discussion displays a constant awareness of our indebtedness to Heidegger in this regard. His book is best conceived as a careful to and thinking with Heidegger rather than as a more traditional exegesis of the w1•u"~"· This is not to imply that Hemming is unconcerned about Heidegger's meaning. But from a Heideggerian itself has an event-like character, so that it can never be "fixed" or determined once and for all. Moreover, it is revealed as much in what Heidegger suggested but left unsaid as in what he actually wrote had to say. Readers of The Thomist wi!l be familiar with Hemming's essay on "Heidegger's God," in 1998; this new hook on Atheism represents an amplification and a of the argument sketched in that article. Here the juxtaposition of titles is itself informative about the author's original Heidegger's atheism is the portal which any interpreter must peiss in order to have the opportunity even for a glimpse of Heidegger's God. Regeirded separately, neither title would seem to represent a that is particularly startling or A number of have insisted that Heidegger is best understood as an atheist even as a and that he said so for anyone who has ears to hear. been those commentaries with Heidegger's God; Heidegger nn,?~'"«'7Pn as a thinker of great significance, eJnd few ,,.,,,,,,,,.,,,,.. exercised as powerful an influence over developments in twentieth-century Christian theology. Hemming, however, wants to mainteiin both perspectives at once. It is to describe Heidegger as an atheist, while also regarding him eis a deeply religious thinker, albeit as one whose God does not appear in those places where his have been inclined to look. 306 BOOK REVIEWS 307 Heiddegger's writings embody a lifelong meditation on the history of the concept of being. Hemming notes that the Heideggerian corpus "reeks of God" without actually saying very much about the Deity. Some scholars-most notably Karl Lowith-have tried to account for this peculiar fact by suggesting that Heidegger "supplanted God with being" (2); and many readers who discern in Heidegger's works a perspective friendlier to theology than the one that LOwith delineated are nevertheless inclined to conflate Heidegger's idea of God with his concept of being. Hemming emphatically rejects all such readings. Being, for Heidegger, is always finite and can never be spoken of God. Moreover, Hemming's account "decidedly overlooks the understanding of the holy that Heidegger develops, particularly in relation to Holderlin" (17). Consequently, his discussion either rebuts or circumvents the two most common strategies for explaining Heidegger's religious significance. Hemming's own strategy is to argue that "Heidegger's atheism ... is an explicitly Christian affair"; moreover, that his atheism consists precisely in his refusal of "the way the Christian God has been woven into human thinking" (18). Atthe same time, Heidegger's refusal is conceived as a "vibrant pedagogy," one that brings the reader to address the question of God in the very process of exposing "the extent to which so much which claims to speak of God does not do so" (50). This is a clearing away of the God of metaphysics in order to make room for the God of faith, but not at all in the sense that Kant proposed. It is not essentially an epistemological move, exposing a gap in the order of knowledge that only faith can fill. The atheistic refusal of God as being (highest being, ground of being, first cause, etc.) is simultaneously the coming to myself as this being, my being, grounded in nothing; and "this groundlessness is the ontological grounding possibility of discovering (in faith) myself to have been created by God" (59). The rejection of a "God already known to me as what grounds me" (162) is the preparing of a space within Dasein to...