The early Heidegger and medieval philosophy: phenomenology for the godforsaken

9. Being-Before-God in the Middle Ages

Chapter Nine B E I N G - B E F O R E - G O D I N T H E M I D D L E AG E S The human being is directed to God as to a certain end that exceeds the comprehension of reason. Thomas Aquinas Scholasticism did not leave the Jewish-Christian sense of history as it found it nor did it annul it. It sublated the early Christian understanding of time, fusing it with Hellenistic theoretical structures into a distinctively new way of being Christian. Greco-Roman “circular thinking” (the emphasis on the eternity of form) and Jewish-Christian historical thinking (the emphasis on the singularity of event), which initially tended to conflict with one another, achieved a precarious balance in Scholasticism. The Jewish-Christian historical sense was initially antagonistic to cultural and scientific life. There was no sense in building up culture when the Last Day was imminent. Greco-Roman circular thinking, on the other hand, lacked a sense of haecceitas. If every moment was an eternal repetition of what has been, nothing was genuinely singular. The Scholastic task was to raise up these two extremes into a synthesis that would preserve what is true in each.1 243 1. Rosemann, Understanding Scholastic Thought, 185: “The conflict between Greek wisdom and the ‘foolishness of the Cross’ can thus, from another coin of vantage, be viewed as a conflict between Greek circularity and Christian linearity. I submit that, when the heritage of Greek thought became fully accessible to the Latin West in the thirteenth century, the tension between the ‘circle’ and the ‘line’ was the basic structure underlying the Schoolmen’s attempts to reconcile the newly discovered sources with the Christian tradition.” The question of the legitimacy of the fusion of the horizons of Paul and Aristotle was hotly debated by the Scholastics. As the condemnations of 1277 show, even after Aquinas, Christendom was not perfectly comfortable with the theological appropriation of Aristotelian science. But Christianity is not a thing that could be preserved in the purity of its original manifestation. It has itself the mode of being of Dasein. Its essence only emerges through its history, its Wirkungsgeschichte. Thus it had to change and grow to remain itself. As Christianity developed into Scholasticism, it absorbed impulses from Greco-Roman culture that exceeded the theological horizon of the early Christian community. The early Christians lacked the temporal distance necessary to make a definitive judgment about pagan culture. Augustine was reaching for a synthesis that was yet to come. Aquinas and Scotus, emboldened by twelfthcentury Christian humanism, assumed that something good and true had come forward in the ancients, which it was the duty of the Christian thinker to take up once again. Certainly the religiosity of the Middle Ages was different from that of early Christianity. The apocalyptic edge was in one sense gone. In another sense, it was internalized. Thus it could be compatible with the pursuit of culture and science. Apocalypse no longer meant expecting the end of the world; it meant transparently living one’s being-toward-the-end. Medieval religiosity was both messianic and mystical. It lived in the already /not yet, perhaps even more emphatically than the early Christian community itself. This delicate balance is evident in much medieval art. A late medieval wood-carved crucifix, life-sized, from the Rhineland, shows the Man of Sorrows dead on the Cross, his thorn-crowned head bowed on his chest. Blood runs down his face and his tortured body. But his hands are no longer fastened to the wood; they are folded upon his chest in a gesture of peace. The symbols of the four Evangelists are painted on each of the four ends of the cross: a bull, a lion, an eagle, and an angel. This cruci- fix is a paradox: it says two seemingly opposed things at the same time. On the one hand, it speaks of the suffering servant (Is 53:3–5), a favorite theme of late medieval art: the innocent man, who has taken on himself punishment for sin, so disfigured by pain that we cannot bear to look at 244 BEING-BEFORE-GOD him. On the other hand, it speaks of the glorious kingly Christ of John’s Gospel, the one who has conquered death. He does not cry out in Godforsakenness (Mk 15...