The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken

289 Pages·2006·6.088 MB·English

by  S. J. McGrath

THE EARLY HEIDEGGER &
MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY

THE EARLY HEIDEGGER &
MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY
Phenomenology for the Godforsakeŋ
S. J. MCGRATH
The Catholic University of America Press
Washington, D.C.
Much of chapter 6 appeared in “The Facticity of Being Forsaken:
The Young Heidegger’s Accommodation of Luther’s Theology of the Cross,”
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (Spring 2005): 273–90. “Heidegger and Duns
Scotus on Truth and Language” appeared in Review of Metaphysics, vol. 57 (2003): 323–43.
Andrzej Wiercin´ski, editor and president of the International Institute for Hermeneutics,
Toronto, published my papers in Between the Human and the Divine (2002): 355–77;
Between Description and Interpretation (2005): 265–73; and in Studies
in the Philosophy of Religion, no. 3 (2005): 283–306.
Copyright © 2006
The Catholic University of America Press
All rights reserved
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standards for Information
Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1984.
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGrath, S. J., 1966–
The early Heidegger and medieval philosophy:
phenomenology for
the godforsaken / S.J. McGrath.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8132-1471-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8132-1471-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. 2. Philosophy, Medieval.
3. Phenomenology. I. Title.
B3279.H49M3755 2006
193—dc22
2006006391
For Sheilagh
Have I spoken of God, or uttered His praise, in any
worthy way? Nay, I feel that I have done nothing
more than desire to speak; and if I have said
anything, it is not what I desired to say.
—Augustine
CONTENTS
Preface ix
1. Heidegger and the Medieval Theological Paradigm 1
2. Heidegger’s Religious-Philosophical Itinerarium 25
3. The Phenomenology of the Early Heidegger 60
4. Duns Scotus 88
5. Mysticism 120
6. Luther 151
7. Primal Christianity 185
8. The Effort to Overcome Scholasticism 208
9. Being-Before-God in the Middle Ages 243
Selected Bibliography 257
Index 267

PREFACE
After Nietzsche, after the Holocaust, after modernity, can philosophy
still ask about God? In the following work, I dare to suggest that not
only can philosophy presume to ask about God, it must ask about God.
Philosophy must lift the censure placed upon it by the main currents
of twentieth-century thought. The two most influential thinkers of the
twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, both in-
tensely preoccupied with religious questions, silenced any philosophy
that presumed to speak of God. For Wittgenstein “God” belonged to the
domain of that about which clear speech was not possible. “What we can-
not speak about we must pass over in silence.”1 Heidegger makes an equal-
ly ambivalent gesture of reverence and censure toward the religious: “We
honor theology by remaining silent about it.”2 I wish to bring these well-
known acts of prohibition into question. Wittgenstein I do not discuss,
although much of what I will say about Heidegger’s silence has some ap-
plication to Wittgenstein’s “mysticism.” The present work is an examina-
tion of the motives, justification, and tenability of Heidegger’s theological
silence.
As Jean Luc Marion points out, silence is an ambivalent thing. “Si-
lence, precisely because it does not explain itself, exposes itself to an in-
finite equivocation of meaning.”3 Marion rightly questions whether the
silence that Heidegger has enjoined upon us has any relation to the theo-
logical silence of a via negativa such as the one prescribed in the sixth
century by Pseudo-Dionysius, who asked theologians to “honor the inef-
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuin-
ness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), prop. 7.
2. Martin Heidegger, quoted in Ebehard Jüngel, “Gottentsprechendes Schweigen? Theologie in
der Nachbarschaft von Martin Heidegger,” Heidegger. Fragen an sein Werk. Ein Symposium (Stutt-
gart: Philipp Reclam, 1977), 42.
3. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1991), 54.
ix