Augustine Our Contemporary

Examining the Self in Past and Present

Willemien Otten, Susan E. Schreiner, Willemien Otten, Susan E. Schreiner

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780268103484
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

In the massive literature on the idea of the self, the Augustinian influence has often played a central role. The volume Augustine Our Contemporary, starting from the compelling first essay by David W. Tracy, addresses this influence from the Middle Ages to modernity and from a rich variety of perspectives, including theology, philosophy, history, and literary studies. The collected essays in this volume all engage Augustine and the Augustinian legacy on notions of selfhood, interiority, and personal identity. Written by prominent scholars, the essays demonstrate a connecting thread: Augustine is a thinker who has proven his contemporaneity in Western thought time and time again. He has been "the contemporary" of thinkers ranging from Eriugena to Luther to Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. His influence has been dominant in certain eras, and in others he has left traces and fragments that, when stitched together, create a unique impression of the "presentness" of Christian selfhood. As a whole, Augustine Our Contemporary sheds relevant new light on the continuity of the Western Christian tradition. This volume will interest academics and students of philosophy, political theory, and religion, as well as scholars of postmodernism and Augustine. Contributors: Susan E. Schreiner, David W. Tracy, Bernard McGinn, Vincent Carraud, Willemien Otten, Adriaan T. Peperzak, David C. Steinmetz, Jean-Luc Marion, W. Clark Gilpin, William Schweiker, Franklin I. Gamwell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Fred Lawrence, and Françoise Meltzer.

TWELVE

Cor ad cor loquitur

Augustine’s Influence on Heidegger and Lonergan

FRED LAWRENCE

In the first nine books of his Confessions, Augustine’s recollection of his peregrinatio as a gradual movement from youthful hedonism (Book II) to his conversion to God (Book VIII) and vision with his mother Monica at Ostia (Book IX) reveals a divinely orchestrated reading of key books in diverse communities of friends—the Manichaeans (Book III); Cicero’s Hortensius, the academic skeptics, and Aristotle’s Categories (Book IV); St. Ambrose (Book V); Alypius, Nebridius, and the new community of friendly readers (Book VI); the libri platonicorum and the Pauline writings (Book VII), and finally the Bible, read by a hermeneutics of love enabled by his conversion (Book VIII).

My topic is the influence of Augustine on Martin Heidegger and Bernard Lonergan—a philosopher haunted by theology and a theologian best known, when known at all, for his work in philosophy. I regard these two figures, along with Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Barth, Leo Strauss, and Paul Ricoeur, as leaders of the twentieth-century hermeneutic revolution, which is the reorigination and Aufhebung of Augustine’s hermeneutics of love in the face of the hermeneutics of suspicion that dominated the modern age. Augustine taught Heidegger and Lonergan to link serious reading with something like a conversion, although each of them understood that revolution in concrete personal living differently.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

Early Development

Here I want to examine Heidegger’s retrieval of Augustine’s Confessions.¹ I believe that Leo Strauss was right when he told his friend Franz Rosenzweig “that, in comparison with Heidegger, Weber appeared to me as an ‘orphan child’ in regard to precision and probing and competence.”² Hans-Georg Gadamer shared this estimation. Although Strauss considered Heidegger to be the greatest exponent of Nietzsche in our time, to the extent that this is true, it is only part of the story. After the publication of Heidegger’s early Freiburg and Marburg lectures, Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren followed earlier leads of scholars like Otto Pöggeler, Karl Lehmann, Thomas Sheehan, and others to spell out Heidegger’s dependence on Christianity. Gadamer and Karl Löwith, Strauss’s student colleagues in those early years, both stressed what Fergus Kerr phrased as follows: “Heidegger’s attitude to Christian theology, hostile at one level, overtly and explicitly so, attributing the monstrous invention of the transcendental subject to Christian theology, is also proprietorial, indeed exploitative of and even parasitical upon Christian theology.”³ This Christian theology turns out to be at least as crucial as, if not more than, the influence of Nietzsche on Heidegger. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was educated in Germany under the auspices of what Joseph Komonchak has found to be the post-1815 social construction of the Catholic Church in reaction to the traumas brought about by the rise of the scientific revolution in the sixteenth century and of the critical-historical method in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, combined with the political collapse of the Holy Roman Empire at the time of the Reformation, together with the repercussions of the French Revolution, by means of a “Romanized control of meaning.”

Heidegger described himself after being a seminarian in 1909 as “particularly agitated over the question of the relation between the word of Holy Scripture and theological speculative thinking.”⁴ This eventually led him in 1919 to declare to his friend and sponsor, Fr. Engelbert Krebs, that he no longer believed either in das System der Katholizismus or in Scholasticism’s carapace of conceptualist metaphysics, which had been devised to bolster the rampant ahistorical orthodoxy.⁵ In 1911 Heidegger began to study mathematics and then philosophy, where his real questions were. By 1916 Husserl could say that Heidegger was no longer a Roman Catholic but still considered himself a Christian. Heidegger’s pivotal encounter with Augustine took place during the years 1919–27, after his break from “the system of Catholicism.” Heidegger’s biographers Hugo Ott and Rüdiger Safranski⁶ support Nicholas Boyle’s statement that “in the aftermath of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Church the air of the second-rate, rightly or wrongly, still hung about Catholic institutions, and ambition in the end meant more to the young Heidegger than faith. By going over to a nominal Lutheranism, he secured a position at the heart of the intellectual establishment of the Weimar Republic.”⁷ But this is only partially true. His reading of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Dilthey, and Franz Overbeck gave Heidegger experientially based and intellectually motivated questions about the Church and its teachings. In 1919, in a letter to Engelbert Krebs, he made the oft-quoted statement that “epistemological insights, groping toward a theory of historical knowing, . . . [have] made the system of Catholicism problematic and untenable—but not Christianity and metaphysics, yet these at least in a new sense.” What became problematic for him was not Christianity as such, but the Roman Catholic version of it he himself experienced.⁸

Gadamer recounts that Heidegger questioned “whether there is not a more adequate self-understanding than what is offered by contemporary theology. . . . The theology that he had learned, which was largely based on Aristotelian metaphysics, did not at all match up with the real motives of Greek thinking, and had to have only made more acute for him the coming-to-grips (die Auseinandersetzung) with that thinking.”⁹ Heidegger’s complaint against Scholastic theology was twofold: first, much of what purported to be speech about God was not really about God at all but just a scandal to the intellectually honest and meaningless to those for whom God was dead; second, the abuses Aristotle’s philosophy suffered as the handmaiden of Scholastic theology repelled him. So he devoted himself to philosophy in the form of dismantling pseudophilosophy. Estranged from the Catholic Church, Heidegger searched for a way to remain a Christian, even if not an officially Catholic one, and he explored the nondogmatic evangelical Christianity that Husserl told him he had found.

More recently scholars have stressed how indebted Sein und Zeit’s terminology and framework are to Book X of Augustine’s Confessions. Kisiel and van Buren emphasized the role played by Heidegger’s Aristotle interpretation (during the semester immediately following the Augustine lectures) in expunging the context and connotations of Christian revelation from what Heidegger had learned in studying Augustine. Following the lead of Jacques Taminiaux, Jean-François Courtine, and Jean Greisch, among others, Christian Sommer’s Heidegger, Luther, Augustine expanded on the profound influence upon Heidegger of Luther’s rejection of the theologia gloriae (roughly equivalent to what has been called the standard Roman Catholic interpretation of Romans 1:20 in terms of natural theology) in favor of what one can learn only at the foot of the cross and express in a theologia crucis (including both the accusatio sui that reveals our sinfulness and guilt and the promise of salvation vouchsafed by God in virtue of Christ’s death on the cross). Besides showing the effect of his reading of Luther on Heidegger’s interpretations of both Paul and Augustine in his 1919/20 lectures on the phenomenology of religious life,¹⁰ Christian Sommer reconstructed the complementarity between what Heidegger had gleaned from Augustine and his understanding of Aristotle.¹¹ This tendency to downplay the contrast between the Augustine analysis and the reading of Aristotle is supported by Benjamin D. Crowe in Heidegger’s Religious Origins, which stresses the continuous significance of the religious dimension exemplified by the Augustine course throughout Heidegger’s life.¹² Among senior scholars, Karl Cardinal Lehmann, who had been an intimate friend of both Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar and whose two-volume doctoral dissertation, Vom Ursprung und Sinn der Seinsfrage im Denken Martin Heideggers, has recently been republished,¹³ has always reinforced Gadamer’s insistence that the religious dimension in Heidegger’s thought possesses an irreducible ambiguity.¹⁴

Gadamer’s description of Heidegger’s 1927 Marburg lecture on philosophy and theology encapsulates Heidegger’s attitude toward theology: “After evoking the Christian skepticism of Franz Overbeck, he said it was the true task of theology, to which it must again find its way back, to seek the word which is capable of calling to faith and keeping in faith.”¹⁵ Heidegger’s question was how to appropriate a faith that had become meaningless. Convinced that “[the self-understanding of philosophy] . . . can only be attained by the act of philosophizing itself, not by scientific proofs and definitions, i.e., not by integration into a universal, objectively formed material framework,”¹⁶ he decided to leave a system in which philosophy was domesticated in the service of dogmatic theology.

As befitted one who was no longer a believer, Heidegger held that “philosophical research is and remains atheism,”¹⁷ for, he claimed, “only then is [philosophy] honest . . . before God.”¹⁸ Heidegger used methodological atheism to face the challenge of intellektuelle Redlichkeit (intellectual probity) that Nietzsche posed to twentieth-century theology. The motive for this methodological atheism was a passionate search for both authentic God-talk and authentic philosophy—the latter for the sake o...