Balthasar and Heidegger: Theology and Binding the Strongman
It is not always easy to distinguish between complaint and inquiry, but over the years I have had emails about when the second volume of Anatomy of Misremembering, that is, the volume on Balthasar and Heidegger, was coming out. What was more interesting than my internal groan, and subsequent apology that I had a draft of the complete text, was the sheer number of inquiries. After all, when I launched the Anatomy of Misremembering project, I had contemplated starting with Balthasar and Heidegger, but changed my mind because I thought, given the state of theology and Catholic theology more specifically, that Balthasar’s reception and resistance to Hegel should come first.
Though I knew I was merely guessing, I had two reasons, one sound, the other not so sound. The sound reason was and remains that the reader is going to understand better Balthasar’s relationship to Heidegger after she sees Balthasar’s relation to Hegel, since both are reacting negatively to him in complex ways that bring them together and also separate them. The not so sound reason was that, as a practical matter, I was convinced that there would be much less interest in the Balthasar-Heidegger relation. On the basis of the number of inquiries I have had, it appears that I was wrong on that count.
For those of you who are anticipating this second volume and also for those who are not, but who find themselves broadly interested in Catholic reception of Heidegger and its limits, as I continue my clean-up of a long and complex text, I would like to provide a broad outline of how I configure this relationship. Given the textual scope (over a hundred books to their credit in the case of each), cultural level (vast knowledge of European intellectual and artistic history), and intellectual range of both authors (philosophy, Christianity, relation between philosophy and theology, art, and culture), not to mention shifts, subtle and unsubtle, in the their thought over the decades, it has always seemed to me to be antecedently unlikely that an account of this relation would be simple.
Simplicity, however, might not be the loss that at first it might seem to be. Not only is “simplicity” at best a functional variable, that is, it really refers to what is the most parsimonious presentation and/or explanation of a phenomenon that is possible without distortion, as a mandate it can encourage us to overlook complexities when they are staring us in the face and thereby facilitate misunderstanding rather than understanding. It is not difficult to “manage” a discussion between Balthasar and Heidegger. The range of options is rather wide. The scholar or thinker can be textually determinate in either or both cases, for example, in the case of Heidegger restrict Balthasar’s engagement with him to Being and Time (1927) and the Kantbuch (1929) and/or alternatively restrict Balthasar’s engagement with Heidegger’s texts to Heidegger’s later hermeneutical phase in which the figures of Heraclitus, Hegel, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche are central.
Similarly, on the side of Balthasar, one could limit the conversation between Balthasar and Heidegger to those texts from Apokalypse der deutchsen Seele (1939) to the Epilogue (1986) to those sites in which Heidegger is a determinate object of analysis. Relatedly, on the side of Balthasar, one might limit engagement not only to his great triptych, but focus solely The Glory of the Lord and leave out Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic, or again simply focus on volume 1 of Theo-Logic that recycles with a new Preface the much earlier Wahrheit der Welt (1947), which is, arguably, Balthasar’s most sophisticated philosophical text and most extensive engagement with phenomenology. Again, one might limit one’s interpretive and comparative responsibilities in the staged encounter between the two thinkers by privileging a particular theme, for example, the fate of metaphysics in both discourses, the ontological difference, or how it does prayer and ritual or both, or the understanding of history and tradition, or what are the relations between art, religion, and philosophy.
What if, however, one saw that Balthasar’s engagement with Heidegger over a fifty-year period is truly comprehensive, is conducted across all of Heidegger’s literary production, phenomenological and hermeneutical, and is in play whether Heidegger is explicitly the object of analysis or not, and is in evidence everywhere Balthasar speaks to the crisis of the modern moment and its attendant amnesia to truth and its relation to other transcendentals, in Balthasar’s plotting of the history of philosophy, in his analysis of Heraclitus, Hegel, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, but in a different way also Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Eckhart, and Leibniz, as well as his discussion as to how to order the discourses of art, religion, and philosophy which became a major problem in the wake of Kant in German Idealism, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the various life-philosophies (Lebensphilosophie) to which Nietzsche gives birth.
Now, it is this comprehensive nature of the engagement that makes Balthasar’s engagement different in kind from other major Catholic engagements with Heidegger. Rahner’s engagement with Heidegger in Spirit in the World (1939) and Hearers of the Word (1941) is attentive to the phenomenological reduction and focused on the issues of question, truth, and their relation. Not a great deal else of Heidegger other than Being and Time and what came in English to be called Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics comes into view, though it should be noted that Rahner’s appropriation of Heidegger is not only selective, but from a descriptive rather than evaluative point of view, it is entirely opportunistic. Whatever the warrants or lack thereof, Rahner feels free to pay little or no heed to Heidegger’s stipulation about the ontological difference, casually identifying summum esse with God.
In addition, he thinks of Heidegger’s notion of “being-towards-death” (Sein zu Tode) as a manifest of our journey into the mystery of God rather than our interrupting and swamping by “nothing.” The Catholic philosopher-theologian, Bernhard Welte (1906-83), who is more of an enthusiast than a critical appropriator of Heidegger, sings the praises of Heidegger’s phenomenological reduction and applies it to the doctrinal tradition of the Church that got caught up unfortunately in the web of truth as correspondence and correctness. From the Thomist side, one has to mention the great Cornelio Fabro (1911-1995), who is anxious to posit the real distinction of essence and existence and fundamentally question Heidegger’s account of the history of philosophy, especially his reading of Aquinas, while using Heidegger’s declension of the Western philosophical tradition in his monumental God in Exile (1968; original Italian 1964) to map the rise and maintenance of modern atheism.
There exists, however, another group of other twentieth-century Catholic thinkers who more nearly approximate to Balthasar in terms of scope of appropriation of Heidegger and critical intent. First among equals is the Jesuit Erich Przywara (1889-1975), who grasped early that Hegel, Heidegger, and Nietzsche were the thinkers with whom Catholic thought would have to engage. Like Rahner, he found in Heidegger’s ontology of finitude a mode of thinking which, while it could not replace Aquinas’s notions of essence and existence, could refresh both and speak concretely to their relation. Moreover, Przywara also engaged the later hermeneutical Heidegger, the Heidegger of the poets, and especially of Hölderlin, and astutely observed that this hermeneutic Heidegger essentially involved the return of myth.
Gustav Siewerth (1903-1963) proved himself to be a real aficionado of Heidegger, signing on to his critique of metaphysics, endorsing his view of the ontological difference between Being and beings, and adopting as his own Heidegger’s conviction that poetry, as well as theology and philosophy, were sites of authentic thinking (Denken). In doing so, Siewerth paid close attention to Heidegger’s famous connection between Denken and Danken. He wrote a great deal on Aquinas’s epistemology and metaphysics and mounted a steady defense of Aquinas against Heidegger’s fundamental objection that not only did Aquinas confuse the disciplines of philosophy and theology, but also happened to confound Being with the highest being, that is, God (ontotheology). Siewerth, however, did not think that Aquinas was the only exception, and greatly extended the range of Catholic exception beyond him.
The last of the distinguished trio of influencers on Balthasar’s interpretation of Heidegger is Ferdinand Ulrich (1931-2020). While Ulrich’s scope on Heidegger is neither as broad as either that of Przywara or Siewerth (with whose views on Aquinas and Heidegger he is familiar), his argument that the theological difference between God and world is anterior rather than posterior to the ontological difference between Being and beings exerts an enormous influence on Balthasar in Glory of the Lord. While the intensity of each of these three thinkers’ engagement with Heidegger matches that of Balthasar, the level of comprehensiveness falls well short of what one finds in the Swiss Catholic theologian. Perhaps a useful way of organizing Balthasar’s deep and comprehensive engagement with Heidegger is to speak of it under the headings of “battle of apocalyptic forms,” “misremembering,” and “genealogy.”
Battle of Apocalyptic Forms
Perhaps the best way to capture the scope of Balthasar’s critical engagement with Heidegger is to consider it to be apocalyptic in three different but related ways. First, Balthasar understands his encounter with Heidegger, as is the case with his encounter with Hegel, to be a battle between global visions (Apokalypsis) that relate not only to discourse, but also practices (prayer, celebration) and forms of life (saintly, poetic, etc.). For Balthasar, the stakes could not be higher. He thinks that given the unravelling of Christianity in the modern period, there is an openness to a visionary alternative in the West. Heidegger in both his phenomenological and hermeneutical (poetic) registers is a major claimant, and thus needs to be engaged, but critically and with a view to mastering him.
Second, this battle is not only an apocalyptic battle between truth and falsity, it is a battle between apocalyptic forms of discourse in the sense that both discourses are discourses of advent, event, or irruption that displace and replace what has been taken as truth in discourse and form of life. Third, and especially, Heidegger’s apocalyptic thinking, while explicitly denying and refusing Christianity, is deeply Christianly coded. Though with respect to Christianity Heidegger’s thought is selective and fragmentary, nonetheless, it is seductive because it effectively constructs a Christian simulacrum in and through its promiscuous mixing of falsehood and truth, and especially the forgetting and remembering of Christianity that can be summed up under the auspices of what I have called “misremembering,” that is, memory at a slant. Thus, for Balthasar, Heidegger is the other great “misrememberer” of Christianity and the Christian tradition in modern thought. As such, he is far more dangerous than the thinker who understands himself to be absolutely opposed to the Christian tradition or who forgets it. Either of the latter presents us with a cogent and straight-up choice of yes or no. In the case of Heidegger, however, this does not happen. Balthasar sees his task as the complex one of diagnosing the way Heidegger systemically borrows Christian themes, disguises and recycles them, while undermining their real meaning, while raising the genealogical question of whether and where we might have seen this kind of disguising and subverting of the meaning of a Christian basic assumption, practice, or form of life.
Now, there can be no doubt that throughout Balthasar’s long career, whether we are speaking of his treatment of Being and Time (1927) or Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics in Apokalypse 3 (1939) or his much later treatment of Heidegger in Glory of the Lord 5 in which Heidegger’s hermeneutic work is the object of analysis, the Swiss theologian constructs Heidegger’s discourse as fundamentally apocalyptic. It is apocalyptic in as much as it is both a figuration of crisis and a response to it in a situation where the crisis is not being taken seriously in that either there is no response to it or the responses turn out to be entirely inadequate. This is not to say that Balthasar regards Heidegger’s discourse as repeating biblical forms of apocalyptic, and certainly not as repeating canonic forms of biblical apocalyptic with their vast visionary schemes, cascading images, complete knowledge of the plot of history and its guaranteed outcomes, and the spectacular scenarios of catastrophe that bring all natural and human existence to an end.
Across the shift from the phenomenological account of human being-in-the-world to the more mystical account of Being’s deliverances in his work from the middle of the 1930s on, in Heidegger’s discourse apocalyptic is reduced to its barest essentials. There are two features responsible for the relative stability of Heidegger’s discourse across quite different discursive protocols. First, a philosophical style or set of such styles that has pared down apocalyptic to the barest minimum of content. And second, a correlative mode of “decision” that defines the human responder as at the limit and thus exceptional. With regard to the first, there are significant continuities in terms of apocalyptic style across texts that variously have human being and Being as their focus: in the former case, the future that is the future of one’s death, that is, the future that comes towards you and is not the future extrapolated from the present or past you; in the latter case, the enigmatic giving of existence and situation without rhyme or reason, or as Heidegger sometimes says, miming the late seventeenth-century Protestant mystic, and aficionado of Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), a giving (es gibt) without “why” (ohne Warum). It is not incidental that Silesius is almost, but not quite, the contemporary of Leibniz, who famously articulated the principle of sufficient reason, that is, that every observable phenomenon can be accounted for as the effect of some intelligible cause. With regard to the second, decision as definitional of human existence is a major unifying motif across Heidegger’s oeuvre, though the accent is different in the two main fields of Heidegger’s inquiry. That is, it is active in the case of the phenomenological-existential horizon of Being and Time wherein Heidegger speaks of “resolve” (Entshlossenheit), passive in the case of his later work in which, if there is a dominant trope, it is Ereignis or event.
Now, it is obvious that neither Heidegger’s form of apocalyptic nor his characterization of decision correspond to what we find in Christian apocalyptic discourse. In the case of Being and Time the trajectory of human being appropriating his “being-towards-death” is towards a horizon of nothing, not the good and all-powerful personal God of humanity, and certainly not to a personal God defined by his saving action in the world in Christ. In the case of the later hermeneutical Heidegger, not only are there no ethical constraints, as the student of Hans Jonas has pointed out, on the giving, the giving is essentially without a giver, one to whom we owe thanks. The irony here is that through the exceptions and the great poets in particular, Heidegger is arguing for a transition from a disposition of power and accomplishment to a disposition of gratitude and praise without there actually being a giver to thank and praise.
With regard to decision correlative to apocalyptic as disrupting our everyday world of assumption, in the case of Being and Time the model for the appropriation of one’s “being-towards-death” that defines authenticity is tilted strongly towards an immanent heroics that would prohibit the Christian consolations of the afterlife and being in communion with and participating in the imperishable divine life. Correlatively, in the case of later Heidegger, and especially in his manifold writings on Nietzsche and Hölderlin, the register of decision is passive; it is what happens to one, what can be grasped in Gelassenheit, a concept borrowed from the German mystical tradition and understood by him to be a form of dynamic detachment or letting be. Should we look for a template for form of decision, which involves the disowning of the self, then fate in the original Greek sense of moira that one can find in Heraclitus and Sophocles provides the template, rather than election of a human being by a personal divine with a view to communicating God’s word of judgment and hope in a time in which the sense of the sacred is almost entirely lacking.
Because of Heidegger’s astonishing intellectual authority in the German-speaking philosophical and theological world, which Balthasar takes to be on the level of that of a Nietzsche or a Hegel, Heidegger’s discourse across its whole length and breadth must be critically engaged and ultimately resisted. The form of resistance is nothing short of a call to apocalyptic action that is suggested in and by the biblical theme of “binding the strongman.” The theme finds its strongest expression in Mark 3.27: “No one can enter into the strong man’s house and take his goods, unless he binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house” (also Matt 12.29; Luke 11:21). Biblical scholars are in general agreement that the “strong man” can be identified with Satan. If Christianity is the witness to the truth of Christ, then it is put into a situation of confrontation with the “strong man,” since Satan is the Father of Lies. At the same time as the passage makes clear, containment by a counterforce in excess of what Satan can levy is insufficient. The “strong man” is defeated, if and only if the charisms of the “Father of Lies” can be expropriated for divine purposes, and what is poisonous in them is made therapeutic. Still, that supposes that there is a measure of truth in Heidegger—something that would be denied by Heidegger’s neo-Thomist critics. This means then that, for Balthasar, in the apocalyptic confrontation, there is effectively a blurring of the two biblical personae of Satan and the Antichrist.
Balthasar leaves us in no doubt that Heidegger’s discourse is a discourse riddled with error. For him, however, the fundamental issue concerns its attractive force, and even more specifically its attractive force for Christians who are dealing with the loss of the authority of Christianity. To be only a lie would make it too easy to resist. What if some of the more convincing aspects of Heidegger’s discourse were due to the fact that it mimicked Christian truth, but in defamiliarizing it helped making it more glamorous and appealing than the original. What makes the Antichrist effective is simulation of the real thing. “Simulating” is a worry for Balthasar from Apokalypse on and through his great triptych. What if Heidegger, like Hegel, can convince that his discourse remains truer to Christianity than its own unfortunate history? Thus, the need for a discernment of the order of the apocalyptic watcher is required to see and call out the counterfeit. This is an essential part of Balthasar’s theological task, indeed, the complement or supplement to his task of remembering the Catholic tradition in all its depth and breadth over two millennia.
Heidegger the Misrememberer
As argued in the first volume of Anatomy of Misremembering, “misremembering” is an important category of analysis of Balthasar’s relation to modern German philosophy. Before we get to it, however, we need to introduce more explicitly than we have up until now the two other constructs in play, that is, “forgetting” and “remembering.” As a ressourcement theologian, Balthasar presupposes as established that secular modernity is constituted by forgetting (both voluntary and involuntary) of the Western past bound up with the history of Christianity and its dogmatic, ethical and moral, and political or quasi-political authority. For the critics of Christianity a new world order struggles to be born beyond Christianity and its construction of a terrorized and limited subject. For many of these critics the bankruptcy of Christianity is absolute; there is nothing worth rescuing. In fact and by right a secular world is displacing the Christian world.
On the basis of this reading of secular modernity, Balthasar supposes that its dissemination is the main source of forgetting of tradition over the past centuries and that it also provides the context and incentive for the introduction of forgetting into the Church. To complicate matters somewhat—and to prevent the Church operating complacently and triumphantly—Balthasar also suggests, however, that there are any number of home-grown species of forgetting within Christianity onto whose stem Enlightenment modes of forgetting can be grafted. Balthasar provides a number of different examples in Glory of the Lord 5, for example, devotio moderna, the univocal metaphysics of Duns Scotus, and the identity- metaphysics of Nicholas of Cusa that ploughs an Idealist furrow through Giordano Bruno to German Idealism in and through which it becomes the common intellectual property of European intellectual elites and perhaps also their emotional property, since one of its main features is a Promethean elevation of the individual or and corporate self or will.
Balthasar no more grants the validity of modernity’s self-justifying story about the bankruptcy of Christianity than does de Lubac or Ratzinger. Secular modernity is the scene of the most injurious form of forgetting that offers a distorted view of the self, interpersonal and social relations, and under the name of the pursuit of meaning and truth, essentially compromises on the former and opts out on the latter. To counter the extent and depth of modernity’s forgetting, what is required is more than the recovery of Christianity’s commitment to reason, as recommended by Neo-Thomism and influential throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Nor does Balthasar think, after Chateaubriand, that a full-scale retrieval of medieval thought and practice either can and should be effected. He thinks of tradition in a far more dynamic manner than the conservative French Catholic, and, in addition, has little enthusiasm for the restoration of Catholicism’s high place in the social hierarchy. Chateaubriand represents a reaction-formation that necessarily has to be set aside. Balthasar advocates instead for a memory that while not total is, nonetheless, extraordinarily capacious in that it extends beyond thought to practices (prayer, liturgy) and forms of life (saints) and beyond theology to philosophy and art (especially literature) and involves considerations of the complex relations of each to each.
We are not in a position to make the truly important point: granted Balthasar’s status as the great remembering of the Catholic tradition in the twentieth century, he also should be known as the great Catholic diagnoser of “misremembering.” Misremembering is not the same as forgetting. Analytically, “misremembering” is different from forgetting in that it involves remembering Christianity selectively and often in a distorting way. Historically, the phenomenon of misremembering in Western history comes after the Enlightenment, characterized by forgetting, while supposing its break with Christianity. This is the situation, according to Balthasar, of many of the more significant European intellectuals of the past two centuries, but particularly true of giants such as Hegel and Heidegger.
How, according to Balthasar, does misremembering work in the case of Heidegger? First, according to Balthasar, though Heidegger’s thought should not be welcomed without reserve into Christianity, nonetheless, he remembered some important truths which, despite their being native to Christianity, were in danger of being lost. Without proposing anything like a comprehensive list of these truths, I present the following five as being particularly important: (1) The diagnosis of modernity as a crisis and rupture none greater than which can be thought when it comes to our understanding of ourselves, our world, and reality in general. More specifically, Heidegger reminds us that modernity is hubristic in terms of its knowledge claims, Promethean in its aspirations to conquer the world, and ultimately nihilistic in its insistence on measuring of a reality that will not be measured. The rise of technology is a real symptom of modernity’s baleful influence. Either or both would find that the problem is exacerbated in the contemporary crisis established by AI and ChatGPT. (2) The crisis has a long history in the West and is embedded in particular kinds of rationalist philosophical and theological discourse. (3) The shared emphasis on the centrality of the question and the “questionability” of human being with a view to gain separation from and traction against a modernity in which questions are locked out by a regime that aims towards complete transparency and certitude. (4) The real value of truth as disclosure (event) rather than the correspondence of a proposition to reality or the correctness or verifiability of a statement. (5) The shared conviction that art, and particularly literature, is a site of genuine disclosure and, in consequence, is a genuine conversation partner in the ongoing dialogue of religion, philosophy, and art in the Western tradition.
Now, it is precisely because Balthasar finds these features in Heidegger that he engages him in dialogue over a period of fifty years. The dialogue necessarily turns out to be critical, however, in that it is precisely where Heidegger appears to have most in common with Christianity that we see both the swerves from it and the distortion of those truths or attitudes that apparently they have in common. With regard to each of the truths that Balthasar and Heidegger share, there are fundamental elements of untruth in Heidegger’s particular version that must be resisted. I will speak briefly to each in turn, though divide them in blocks of two, the first taking up Balthasar’s qualification of Heidegger’s diagnosis of the crisis of modernity and the degree of Christian culpability in the areas of philosophy and theology, the second dealing with the second band of overlaps from the assertion of the priority of the question, the disclosure model of truth, and consideration of other religious and artistic discourses as possible alternatives to the disclosure inherent to the biblical text and the theological tradition.
(1) Balthasar agrees with Heidegger regarding the essential lineaments of the crisis of modernity constituted in large part by the epistemological turn and a scientific method whose ambition is the complete understanding of the world and where, in addition, technology is the essential expression or symptom of a deformation in fundamental disposition that lies deeper than the machine. Nonetheless, no more than Romano Guardini before him or Popes Benedict and Francis after him, does Balthasar think that secular modernity is inscribed in the order of reality itself. Nor does he think that we can indulge the notion that technology is a fatum such that when the critical threshold is reached, technology becomes the master of its producers and heralds the end of human being.
(2) From the triptych on—with intimations before—Balthasar thinks that while Christian thinkers can accept certain features of Heidegger’s story of the discursive fall that is the philosophical tradition and accept a degree of culpability when it comes to the Christian tradition and its connivance with rationalism and/or the objectification of reality, nonetheless, the Swiss theologian is persuaded that Christian thinkers should reject the monolithic nature of Heidegger’s decline narrative, in which classical philosophy is the poisoned root of all subsequent Western thought, medieval the confounding of philosophy and theology and most importantly the confusing of Being with the highest being (ontotheology), and modern thought a continuation of thinking fatally misdirected into a cul de sac, only this time operating under the illusion of a mastery of reality based upon a self-certain cogito.
(3) When it comes to the functional priority of question over answer and the questionability of human being, the issue for Balthasar who appreciates Heidegger’s Augustinian-like tack, is that Heidegger unjustifiably leaves out the prospect that, if questions are permanent, their real value comes to light only in and through the answers they provoke, even if these answers are necessarily partial, and the questionability of human existence is deep.
(4) Balthasar is prepared to countenance Heidegger’s notion of truth as disclosure to the degree to which it suggests that propositional truth is tested and verified, that is, to the degree to which it can be lead back (destruction) to a more primordial appearing,. Yet, he refuses to sanction Heidegger’s stronger claim that truth in disclosure mode and propositional mode are essentially contraries, and in particular that truth as disclosure is inevitably distorted in and by propositional discourse.
(5) Though Balthasar welcomes Heidegger’s elevation of art and poetry in particular as a means to limit the scope of philosophy’s claims, especially in its standard propositionalist idiom, Balthasar not only thinks that Heidegger goes too far and essentially subverts the philosophical tradition as we know it, but that he also makes Christian theology impossible not only by suggesting that it deforms revelation, but also by suggesting that in any event, there are forms of disclosure, instanced, for example, in Heraclitus, Sophocles, and Hölderlin, that are plausibly superior even to Christian revelation and thus in a sense out-scripture the biblical text.
For Balthasar, Heidegger articulates a series of partial truths, or truths mixed with error which, while it does not rule out deep conversation with Heidegger, demands that a Christian thinker break the spell of Heidegger’s intellectual authority on threat of having theology colonized by an alien discourse. As Catholic thinkers such as Przywara and Stein determined before him, Balthasar is clear that there is only so far a Christian can go with Heidegger, as evinced even in those places where Catholic thinkers might be presumed to have most in common with him.
The necessary Catholic distance is different with regard to Heidegger than with Hegel and is so for obvious reasons. Hegel purports to render in a philosophical idiom the entire network of Christian theological concepts and in the process intentionally distorts the entire system of theological concepts. Certainly, from Being and Time and, arguably, even before, Heidegger’s philosophy is a species of “methodological atheism” that, while recognizing the sovereignty of philosophical discourse, puts the truth claims of Christianity in brackets. Put roughly, over the course of his career, Heidegger seems more nearly to be offering an alternative to Christianity while sprinkling his discourse with Christian traces, rather than, as with Hegel, taking up in a systematic way all of Christian thought and translating it into a post-Kantian philosophical idiom, and with respect to Christian practices and forms of life essentially giving them a new meaning, one that meshes better than historical Christianity with the demands of freedom and reason in the modern age.
As witnessed in particular by Balthasar’s Epilogue (1986) to the entire triptych of Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama, and Theo-Logic, the Swiss theologian never ceases to admire Heidegger. By the same token, however, he never ceases to have reservations. It is not simply that in due course Christian thinkers will find out that there are limits regarding Christian appropriation of Heidegger due to Heidegger’s obvious departures from positions articulated in and by the broad Catholic tradition of philosophy and theology, but also that many of Heidegger’s ideas have Christian precedents that he either self-consciously downplays or whose presence he goes to great lengths to disguise.
For example, the crisis that motivates Heidegger’s phenomenological and hermeneutical discourses and that is to the forefront of the latter, certainly seems to suppose something like a Judeo-Christian apocalyptic pattern, albeit one now operating in a more minimal register and emptied of theological substance. Heidegger’s decline narrative of the philosophical tradition seems to translate into another environment the story of the fall. Heidegger provides some evidence that his elevating of question and questionability owes something to both Augustine and Kierkegaard, while proceeding to suggest, appearances to the contrary, that he owes them nothing whatsoever because he puts their insights on a new basis more fundamental than theirs.
Similarly, it is not only the case that Heidegger’s concept of truth as disclosure has elements that are inhospitable to Christianity, it is also the case that his articulation betrays that it is built on the basis of Christian views of revelation that one might find in Saint Paul and a view of authentic existence (later “poetic” existence) patterned after Christian views of the martyr, who is witness, and the saint and mystic who live eccentrically and exceptionally. And finally, when it comes to parsing the relationships between art, religion, and philosophy in favor of the kind of linguistic art that one might find in Sophocles, Pindar, and Hölderlin who sanction ethos and the festival, a critical Catholic theologian might wonder to what extent Heidegger’s notion of “ethos” represents a substitution for the notion of Church and the truth-disclosing “festival” a chthonic substitution for the liturgical and presence of a tri-personal divine that at once gives and defers itself.
Genealogy
It is only to the extent that Heidegger is understood to be one of the main instances of misremembering in the Western philosophical tradition that the apocalyptic battle between Balthasar and Heidegger not only makes sense, but also proves necessary. It shows that Heidegger’s discourse is not simply one of the many discourses that might provide an alternative to Christianity, but that in a sense it is from beginning to end a kind of Christian Ersatz that troubles Christianity in a way, for example, the elucidation of Husserl’s phenomenology as “rigorous science” that brackets religious belief does not—or at least might not. Again, the way in which it represents a challenge to Christianity is different in kind to that of Hegel, since its parasitism with respect to Christianity is both less overt and more sporadic in kind. Given the way that the term “genealogy” functions currently, that is, essentially to unveil traces of other discourses beneath the discourse presented to the public (albeit discourses with different fundamental commitments), we have perhaps done enough to justify its use.
Still, there is another and stronger sense of genealogy operative at least in the Christian tradition where the question is asked whether a later discourse can be seen to be a repetition of an earlier discourse, whether that of Arianism or Sabellianism, or Nestorianism or monophysitism, considered to distort the original revelation and the text (Bible) that gives testimony to it. Sometimes the connections between later and earlier discourses is patent, but mostly not. And the question about whether a later discourse in fact recalls a particular earlier discourse becomes even more salient when the two discourses do not look like each other. This is the case, for example, if one were to connect Hegel’s very obviously historically situated post-Kantian philosophy with ancient Gnosticism. This is a move I made on my own recognizance in the The Heterodox Hegel (1994) and which, I argued in Anatomy 1, that Balthasar also ultimately makes.
Given Balthasar’s unveiling of the parasitism and deviance from Christian standards in Heidegger’s discourse, he compels us to ask whether it too can be tracked back to a prototype. As indicated, given his post-Idealist and post-Nietzschean situation, we should not expect that his discourse would look like the prototype. Can we plausibly trace Heidegger’s discourse back to that of ancient Gnosticism, as Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin suggest we can and should? Elsewhere I have argued that we cannot, and in Anatomy 2 I argue that given that Heidegger’s discourse is “Christianly” inflected largely despite itself and relatively fragmentary, and that Heidegger is himself invested in a battle of strength with Hegel, it seems dubious then that in any genealogical account they would track back to the same prototype.
If not Gnosticism, then what? The answer I provide is at first incredibly unlikely, that is, that Heidegger’s “Christianly inflected” philosophical discourse represents the return of Marcionism in the modern period in its rejection of the creator and legislator God, of any figure connected with him, and any ethics or institution that derives from him. Here is not the place to produce the argument even in outline, not to mention detail. The one point I would make at this juncture is that this return itself also has a history in modern thought and especially in German Romanticism, and that, indeed, it is provided a plenary expression in the figure who, for Heidegger, is the poet of all poets in modernity, that is, Friedrich Hölderlin.
