Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, was one of the most influential thinkers of our times. The fact that his attraction to Nazism, which he later rejected, was a reaction to his struggle with Catholicism and the Catholic Church is of considerable significance for these times of ours, … and can even be instructive. [1] What is now clear is that this struggle and conflict marked Heidegger’s entire intellectual life in significant ways.
Heidegger grew up a Catholic and sought to study theology and become a Jesuit. This goal was prevented by poor health. At university he came under the influence of Protestant historical-critical scholarship and was thrown into personal turmoil by the Church’s tenacious opposition to what it was calling ‘modernism’. Heidegger switched from theology to philosophy motivated by a desire to overcome what he regarded as the anti-modern scholasticism in Catholicism by bringing medieval thinking into dialogue with Immanuel Kant and his followers.
Heidegger had his personal issues with the Church accompanying his failed engagement to a Roman Catholic woman and later marriage to a Lutheran. There was his failure to obtain a prominent academic position in Catholic scholarship to which he had aspired. Nevertheless, there also was this growing intellectual conviction he carried that Catholic theology needed a radically different approach. The change he saw as necessary was from an approach that attempted to erect a complex scholastic conceptual system to one that utilized a more phenomenological language and approach. This new approach intended a more honest and direct expression of our lived spiritual experience such as that of our bodily and emotional limitations and afflictions, and of our profound sense of existential inadequacy.
Heidegger’s efforts to develop an anti-metaphysical theology through his study of Luther led, it seemed, to a deeper estrangement from Christianity in its essential structure where the foundational doctrine of God’s free bestowal of grace upon a sinful humanity was rejected by him as having the effect of invalidating our human experience rather than of redeeming it. The doctrine of sin and of our redemption by God’s freely given grace through the paschal mystery of Christ came to be considered by Heidegger as a distortion of our real human situation. Our alienation from ourselves, he became convinced, was because of our condition of existential incompleteness all along the way and our final inescapable mortality. Our human situation finally ends in death and not in any grace given fulfillment. Our task as human beings is to accept the truth of this fate without retreating into fantasy or succumbing to apathy.
It was during this troubling intellectual journey which is now regarded by many to have been seriously myopic [2] in its understanding of Catholicism and its theology, that Heidegger became attracted to the Nazi view of German history and its aspirations for the German nation state. He found Christianity and particularly Catholic theology, in what he regarded as its tendency to impose false conceptual structures and meanings on human experience, to be the great enemy of the Nazi project to achieve authenticity for the German nation. But the Black Notebooks show something more, for Heidegger also had come to certain deeper conclusions about modernity and the modern project – that it was unable to resist its own inner tendency to reduce everything in the world to material for the use of an overarching and totalitarian technology. The fundamental source of this inexorable tendency was, for Heidegger, Christianity itself with its ‘doctrine’ of a Creator God fixing the natures of his creatures for human use.
Eventually Heidegger came to see Nazism as just another misguided expression of this totalitarian technological tendency that he saw as having its roots in Christianity and its most sophisticated expression in Catholic theology.
In his later period Heidegger turned to a mystical quietism though it is believed he finally reconciled himself in some manner with his Catholic tradition, saying at one point “one’s origins always remain one’s future”.
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[1]This reflection is based upon Judith Wolfe’s essay “A philosopher’s dark secret”, The Tablet, August 19, 2017, pp.14-15. Wolfe writes about Heidegger’s journaling in his Black Notebooks recently published in 2014. Though there are many anti-Semitic passages, she is most struck in these journals by how his conflict with the Catholic Church and Christianity dominated his thinking.
[2]It is important to note that this metaphor of the ‘myopic’ in Heidegger’s understanding of Catholicism and its theology carries three varying critical connotations in keeping with the visual reference – blurriness, short-sightedness, and finally a refusal to ‘look and see’.
