Part Nine - Atheism and Salvation
The Sacred
The German and Hebrew languages [1] have a single term, heilig, and qadòsh respectively, to express the two Roman concepts of sacrum, that which pertains to God but is distinct from God, for example, sacramentum, as opposed to prophanum, that which pertains to the world, and sanctum, that which participates in God Himself, i.e., sanctum, divine grace.
Heidegger shows a great interest in the sacred [2], but not in the holy. For him, the sacred is indeed divine, endorsing and preparing for the divine, but it is not, by his express declaration, the sacred of Christianity, connected to the holy and ordered toward the holy, which is divine grace and God Himself.
Instead, as Heidegger openly and repeatedly declares, it pertains to the sacred, the divine, the daimonion of the gods of Greece, as he extensively explains in his book dedicated to Hölderlin's poetry. He rightly connects the sacred with the divine, distinct from the god or God, but specifies that this sacred refers to a god, not to God, particularly the Christian God.
Moreover, for him, the divine is synonymous with the demonic, the daimonion, just as in paganism. In this sense, Scripture considers the pagan gods as demons, bearing in mind that the biblical concept of daimon does not exactly coincide with the pagan one, as the pagan demon, as we have seen, can be good or evil, while Scripture, when speaking of the demon (devil or Satan), refers to the fallen angel, hence an evil creature.
The Boast of Rediscovering the Sense of Being
Heidegger's fame is due to his skill in convincing broad sectors of contemporary philosophy, including Catholics, that he has rediscovered the truth, value, and sense of being after 2600 years of forgetfulness since Parmenides' discovery of being.
He accuses both Catholic and non-Catholic metaphysics of limiting themselves to the consideration of beings, preoccupied with establishing a supreme being, of forgetting that truth belongs to being before judgment, of forgetting the relationship between being and human destiny, and therefore of imprisoning man in a hopeless anguish, in the chatter of hearsay, in the idolatry of technology, in the dispersal of worldly things, in the empty finiteness of meaning and inauthentic existence because it forgets its ontological and existential value, hence ethical, sacred, and divine.
The trouble is that Heidegger, in his rightful apology and assertion of the ontological difference between being and beings, in all the immense studies he has conducted on the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Nietzsche, has never realized the existence of a philosopher who ultimately must be considered the guardian of being, and that is St. Thomas Aquinas.
The fact is that Heidegger's being is not the true being—creator, analogical, hierarchical, and pluralistic—as illustrated by St. Thomas based on the biblical conception of being (Exodus 3:14). Instead, it is the monistic, abstract, and univocal being of Parmenides, an identity of thought and being, alien to plurality and becoming, mixed with the material, empirical, and temporal being of Heraclitus, contingent and in continuous evolution, and the indeterminate and athematic being of Anaximander.
Without the analogy, the reason for the pluralization, stratification, diversification, and graduality of being, and based on Parmenides' singular and unified concept of being, Heidegger compromises the fundamental ontological distinctions between the eternal and the temporal, the finite and the infinite, the actual and the possible, potency and act, matter and form, substance and accident, intentional and real. He also compromises the differences between being and beings, essence and existence, singular and universal, which Heidegger attempts to salvage [3].
Furthermore, the assumption of a phenomenological being and the identity he posits between the subjective and objective are clear signs of idealism. Heidegger deludes himself into proposing a perspective superior to both idealism and realism, but such a perspective does not exist, just as there is no mediation between the true and the false or between yes and no.
It is also noteworthy that Heidegger's entire discourse on the difference between being and beings has nothing to do with the transcendence of ipsum Esse concerning beings. Heidegger explicitly states that being and beings refer to each other, and one cannot exist without the other. Just as for Husserl, consciousness and being are correlative. This is akin to saying that God (being) and man (entity) are essentially connected, so that one cannot exist without the other, lacking the concept of the true God, Who can indeed exist perfectly well without man. He would exist perfectly well even if I were not here. This depends on the fact that being for Heidegger is not being in itself independently of me (the thing-in-itself has already been abolished by Fichte), but rather a "phenomenological" being, i.e., being-that-appears-to-me.
An Incomplete Notion of Truth
Heidegger has also claimed to propose his notion of truth in contrast to the spontaneous notion of natural reason illustrated by St. Thomas Aquinas [4] in the famous formula adaequatio intellectus et rei, the correspondence between intellect and thing, thought and being, ideal and real. Leveraging the Greek etymological meaning of the word aletheia, which means non-concealment, hence appearance, manifestation, revelation of being or reality, Heidegger supports a realist position that honors him, opposes Cartesian and Hegelian idealism, and even Platonic idealism. He opposes Husserl's intuition of essence, admitting that the object of thought is being, is the thing, and not thought itself, not the idea. He even speaks of an original and pre-conceptual experience of being in the Parmenidean-Heraclitean-Anaximandrian sense.
Here, he certainly goes off track by claiming, against Thomas, that truth belongs to being before judgment. It may seem like a smart profession of realism, but it is not. On the contrary, Heidegger, without realizing it, falls back into the phenomenological idealism of his teacher Husserl, despite his efforts to distance himself from it.
St. Thomas notes that the notion of verum is not necessarily linked to that of ens, which only says what exists but supposes a reference to the intellect. The intellect either adapts being to itself based on the formative idea (here are the rights of Platonic idealism!) or adapts itself to being and here is the truth of knowledge or judgment.
Heidegger intends to recognize that judgment can grasp the truth, so he acknowledges the truth of judgment. However, according to him, this truth is not original, not absolute but relative to historical, psychological, and environmental contexts. It is not the directly original and genuine truth derived from being but only a derivative truth, an imitation of an imitation, to put it in Platonic terms. It is a truth that, to be possible, must be based on the truth of being as the immediate presence and revelation of being to humans—a truth of being as pre-categorical truth, preceding that of conceptual representation.
Indeed, for Heidegger, the Concept or Representation (Vorstellung), as he calls it, does not grasp the real; it does not reach, contact, or touch it. Instead, it remains at a certain distance and tends to replace itself with the real. It merely points to it; it is like a signpost, a directional sign indicating the right path. However, if we see the sign "Rome" on the street, we still cannot know what Rome is. To know that, we must have been there.
Similarly, it is only in the prior horizon of the experience of being that I can know beings. However, this raises the suspicion that Heidegger falls into - we could say - an ontologist vision similar to the one already condemned by the Church in 1681 [5].
[ Though in traditional philosophical discussions, "ontological" typically refers to concepts, arguments, or methods related to ontology—the study of being, existence, or reality, encompassing both deductive and inductive reasoning about the nature of existence, including arguments for the existence of God, in this specific context or defined framework, I'd like to use the term "ontologist" referring to the philosophical current implying in some way the method deductive of the existence of God, and "ontological" to the one referred instead to the inductive method, such as from the effect to the cause (Ed.)]
It is the old mistake, already implicit in Descartes, in which we know things start from God and do not reach God starting from things.
For ontologists, to represent things, we must start from the experience of being and therefore from the truth of being. And while the pre-conceptual experience of the real in the light of being gives us the real at the source, its knowledge through concepts, whether the dogmas of the Christian faith or other concepts, gives us a view that is not source-based but degraded by debris and waste that the stream of water carries downstream: out of metaphor, these are the naiveties of common sense and the repetitions of the it is said or worn-out interpretative models.
However, with such discourses, Heidegger does not realize that he is giving idealism everything it desires: esse est percipi, being is what appears to humans, being is appearing-to-me; being is thought-by-me, being is being-for-me.
Heidegger, despite criticizing Descartes, does not realize that he is setting himself on the path that leads to cogito, as I, thinking to be, posit my being, as Fichte had already understood. Going further, we arrive at the biblical I Am (Exodus 3:14), only that here it is God and not man speaking of Himself.
So, what is this being that Heidegger continually speaks of? "It is not God," he asserts. Indeed, Heidegger's being is finite, temporal, borders on nothingness, emerging from nothing. However, it transcends beings. But it cannot exist without beings. Thus, on the one hand, it seems to be related to ipsum Esse subsistens, that is, God, but on the other hand, it seems to take the form of created being, precisely finite and temporal. On the other hand, Heidegger also speaks of Nothingness in an extremely positive sense, as if it were the principle of salvation for humanity.
The Nothingness he speaks of is not the void from which God creates beings; it is not the ens rationis, i.e., the imaginary, privation, or negation; it is not simple non-being but being itself insofar as it is hidden from us. Not seeing anything in the hidden, hidden being seems like nothing to us.
The Problem of Nothingness
Even Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckhart, call God Nothing for this reason. But there is a difference. For Heidegger, being is still for humans; as he says, "being and beings imply each other." For the theist, however, God exists independently of humans and could exist even if humans did not. Instead, for Heidegger, being exists because humans exist, experiencing it, and to whom being appears or before whom it disappears. Here, man becomes the absolute, the primum, the presupposition, the foundation, the original, on which being itself depends. There is an implicit atheism here.
It is also necessary to observe that Heidegger's being, from a Parmenidean beginning around the 1920s as pure thought, in the 1930s, encountering Nietzsche, takes on a Nietzschean character [6], namely pure will. And indeed, it makes sense: if we, in the manner of Parmenides, confuse being with absolute being, and this is the identity of thought and being, being will also be the identity of thinking and willing.
Moreover, it can be noted that Nietzsche's voluntarist conception was already prepared by Fichte's conception of being as "setting" (setzen); that is, doing. But in this way, Heidegger does not realize that he is falling into pantheism or self-worship because if being identifies with the absolute being, then everything is God, as every being is the Being, and therefore, I am the Being.
The "Divine God"
When Heidegger says that one cannot rejoice and dance in front of a God conceived as a being, it is evident that he does not have the Thomistic-Biblical concept of ipsum Esse, Father and Lord of immense majesty (immensae maiestatis), most loving and lovable before him. Instead, he has an abstract entity, the universal, undetermined, abstract, and univocal being of Duns Scotus or Suarez, which has nothing to do with the divine being. There, it is simply the predicate of everything, a generic mental content that can be applied univocally and indifferently to all things, including entities of reason and even God. Even I know that in front of a God conceived in such a way, which ultimately is just an object internal to my mind, produced by me, one cannot dance.
But the worst part is that a God so understood, which is an abstraction, is a pure idea of reason; it cannot speak to us, and we cannot speak to it. This is why Kant, on his deathbed, refused to pray when invited. He might have said: Should I pray to my idea? Similarly, a fellow pantheist, who admits ‘ipsum Esse’ but believes himself to be ipsum Esse, wrote: Pray to God? What sense does that make? Should I pray to myself?
Now, Heidegger never says that the experience of being is the experience of God or the experience of the self. It is simply the human experience of the finite and time within the ontological difference between entity and being. In other words, it is the human being who, in the anxious consciousness of his precariousness, questions being.
Heidegger's being is the Parmenidean one, dynamicized and historicized by Hegelian becoming and Fichtean, Schellingian, and Nietzschean voluntarism. It is Hölderlin's sacred, which does not allude to God but to "the God," a sign of a polytheistic orientation, also traceable in Nietzsche alongside the Parmenidean monotheistic orientation.
Heidegger cunningly attracts both realists and idealists
One might wonder what is behind Heidegger's success among both realists and idealists, theists and atheists. It is due to his ability to navigate between them, attracting some to pass on to others when they thought he understood and agreed with them. However, if I were to express an opinion after fifty years of studying his thoughts, I see Heidegger as more of a failed theist than a hidden atheist.
I do not mean by this that we should not find what is useful in modern thought to advance theology and to dialogue with today's man. But modern man already knows his troubles, and we do not need to linger on them. What he wants, if not in bad faith, is for us to help him get out of them clearly, without equivocating and procrastinating.
The conclusion is clear: the reader now understands who Heidegger is dealing with. He is a deep, creative, suggestive, suffering, nostalgic thinker of the sacred, cultured, bothered by the invasion of technology and the banality of inauthentic existence, sharp in existential analyses, continually addressing themes closely related to theology and the question of God. He always stands at the entrance, but it seems he never enters. He approaches, but when it's time to enter, he stops. We don't know why. The path is interrupted. Perhaps someone is waiting for him beyond.
Heidegger, Luther, Thomas, Aristotle
On the question of the existence of God, it is interesting to compare the attitudes toward Aristotle in Luther, Thomas, and Heidegger. All three are aware of the fundamental importance of this philosopher regarding the question of reality and truth, the first and supreme being, divine personality, the first cause, and the ultimate end.
Thomas realized the possibility of using Aristotle for the rational demonstration of the existence of God and, therefore, for the interpretation of the Christian God [7]. Luther and Heidegger, on the other hand, deny the compatibility of Aristotle with Christianity, but for opposite reasons and with opposite intentions: Heidegger, anti-Christian, would like to wrest Aristotle from Christianity and grab him to fit into his phenomenological ontology.
Therefore, his statement:
"The first unmoved mover of Aristotle has nothing to do with God or religion; it has a purely ontological meaning. Aristotle's 'theology' has nothing to do with clarifying the relationship between man and God. This has been transformed in scholastic interpretation and integrated into the Christian understanding of God and man, but it is misleading to interpret Aristotle in Christian terms"[8].
Even Luther, polemicizing with St. Thomas, argues that he made a mistake in wanting to use him in theology. However, unlike Heidegger, who believes he can understand Aristotle better than anyone else and therefore use him for his Dasein, Luther lashes out against Aristotle with false accusations of foolishness and materialism [9].
Luther and Heidegger's opposition to Thomas on the interpretation of Aristotle depends on a different approach to the question of reality and its foundation. Luther and Heidegger, following a characteristic German spiritual inclination, already present in ancient Germanic pagan mythology, understand the divine as a powerful, warlike, and superhuman reality that appears in an emotional experience, divine energy, whose existence is not proven as the cause or mover of effects from which, by reasoning, it is possible to trace back to discover precisely the cause, the object of the intellect.
In this sense, the German follows Plato's bonum (agathòn), not Aristotle's noetòn loghikòn, the rational intelligible. For this reason, the German has no interest in the cause (aitìa) or the mover (kinùn) as Aristotle does. The German is not struck by intelligible light but by stormy power.
Now Plato's being (on) is not Aristotle's being. Plato's truth is not Aristotle's truth. For Plato, it is about the unveiling (aletheia) or appearance of the Good; for Aristotle, the truth (alethès) is in judgment. This means that while Aristotle makes one reason and understand, Plato excites and makes one feel. For this reason, the German prefers Plato, and Luther, as has been said by many, is the emblem of the German, with his merits and faults.
We can still say that undoubtedly in Plato there is intellect and being as idea and eidos, there is speculative knowledge. But true knowledge is affective; it is the effect of eros. Therefore, although Plato privileges affective knowledge, he does not neglect or deny conceptual and speculative knowledge. Thomas, a Latin and logical mind but at the same time a mystical soul [10], knows both forms of truth and knowledge very well. From this, he derives speculative and affective theology.
Instead, in Luther and Heidegger, there is a unilateral tendency. Pathos replaces logos; mythos, the narrative, replaces noesis, thought; alethès identifies with agathòn; eros replaces nus, namely, the intellect. The rationality of how God manifests to our mind is then compromised, and only feeling remains, which, if in agreement with logos, certainly manifests the presence of God. Still, if left alone, it envelops the mind in a fog in which nothing is seen. And not because of divine nothingness but precisely because there is nothing to see. Then where is the difference with atheism?
Heidegger's Polytheism
It is interesting how Heidegger does not speak of God but, like Hölderlin [11], of God (der Gott), and the ancient Greek gods. For him, the name God is not a ‘proper’ name, not univocal but analogical; it is not a name exclusively assignable to a single subject, a single person so that it is distinguished from every other being, but it is a common name used to designate a plurality of subjects, precisely the gods, just like in Greek paganism and any form of polytheism. Heidegger, therefore, is not a monotheist but a polytheist.
In this way, just as we distinguish “a” good from “the” good, and so, alongside goodness, we admit many goods, just as we distinguish man from a man, that is, men, allowing us to distinguish a single human nature from many human individuals, Heidegger distinguishes God from a god. For him, the divine nature is not a separate species, but a species under which many individuals fall. Clearly, from how he expresses himself, it is evident that for him, there is no single God, but there is a god among other gods.
It is essential to pay attention to the use of the indefinite article "un" before the word God because it can have a dual meaning: it can express both monotheism and polytheism. When Moses says, "He is a true God and without malice" (Dt 32:4), he is not referring to a god among others but is referring to an indeterminate concept of God, which determines itself as a true and without malice God, as the true God.
Therefore, Heidegger does not believe in God but in the gods. As we have already seen, he does not lack the notion of the divine or, as he says, the "sacred." However, in polytheism, the concept of God is insufficient for salvation because it lacks the fundamental note of uniqueness. The true God, as taught in the Bible, must be one, as insinuated in Plato, Aristotle, and Brahmanism, because it must encompass within itself all perfections.
But if we admit a plurality of gods, we are forced to admit, to distinguish them from each other, that one possesses a perfection that the other does not have. Because of this lack, in Heidegger, of the concept of God endowed with the minimal notes to constitute the true God, it can be said that Heidegger is an atheist if it were not for his concept of being, which, taken from Parmenides, certainly has a univocal sense and refers to the absolute Being, although then, as we have seen, Parmenides identifies necessary being with contingent being.
It is interesting to note, as we have seen, how he subtracts the category of being from the Christian God to transfer it to the gods of Greece. Therefore, to understand Heidegger's conception of being, it seems best to read these extremely explanatory passages:
"Unlike all others, including the Christian one, the fundamental essence of the divinity of the Greeks is based on the fact that the Greek gods originate from the 'essence' and the being that 'essentially is,' namely, ipsum Esse. Thus, the conflict between the 'old' and 'new' gods, the Olympian ones, is nothing but the conflict that, rooted in the essence of being, determines its opening in the unfolding of its essence.
The gods of Greece are not 'personalities' and 'persons' who dominate being, but being itself looking within the entity. However, it is precisely because being, everywhere and at all times, infinitely surpasses every entity and distinguishes itself from it, that where, as in the case of the Greeks, the essence of being has initially come into the revealed, the gods are even more 'superior,' or, in Christian and modern terms, more 'spiritual' and 'immaterial,' despite the 'human' elements that can be identified in them"[12].
Therefore, being is not God, but the gods. Here is the secret of Heidegger's ‘sein’. There is no need for laborious investigations, scholarly discussions, hypotheses, and comparisons, questioning and exhausting the brain, reviewing all of Heidegger's works to discover the meaning of Heidegger's sein: he tells you himself with all desirable clarity in these surprising words, and you don't have to look far: it's the gods of Greece! Is that all? That's all Heidegger would say. But you say so because you do not realize the boundless ontological and existential sublimity of the gods of Greece, far superior to that of the Christian God.
But at the same time, it is worth noting the complete arbitrariness with which any connoisseur of Greek mythology would refuse to see in the Greek gods the expression of the sacred concept of being, here debased with effortless manipulation into vain pseudo-metaphysical ravings.
Formally, Heidegger states that being is not God. This could even be acceptable, understanding being a common being, being in general. However, God is a being in the sense that he is a subsistent being. And Heidegger does not mention this.
Indeed, for Heidegger, as he tells us in other well-known contexts, being is finitude and temporality, open to nothingness because it is nothing but man, in his care, in his anguish, in his guilt, in his being-towards-death, who questions being, man who is the “being-there” (Da-sein) of being because being is essentially being-there, event (Ereignis), happening, historicity, situationality (Befindlichkeit) of being.
The Greek word daimon means God; however, the Greek do not understand this term to refer to a single and unique God, a most perfect being, the creator of the world, and infinite goodness. The pagan Greek does not perceive God as ipsum Esse, hence a single and unique God, the creator of being.
For the Greek, it is not so much about God existing but rather the divine (theion) or the demonic (daimonion), which is multiple and diversified in modes and degrees. When the Greek thinks of the entity, the on, it does not at all envision a supreme entity whose essence is that of einai, being. The only one who did so was Parmenides but entangled in his polytheism, he did not conceive ‘einai’ as an essential attribute of God.
Thus, the Greek, as known from mythology, regards gods as a plurality of imaginary, anthropomorphic, spiritual entities, more or less powerful and differentiated, sometimes in conflict with each other according to a plurality of values, ideals, or hypostatized modes of being — the gods or daimonia. They can be beneficial or malevolent, adversarial or favorable, truthful or deceptive, all under the presidency of a supreme divinity, all subject to Fate.
While in Greek paganism, the divine (theion), synonymous with demonic (daimonion), is ambivalent and can be either beneficial or malevolent, the Bible separates theion from daimonion. In the biblical context, theion is beneficial, whereas daimonion is harmful. We no longer have the demonic but the demoniac. In this light, St. Paul reminds us that "the sacrifices of the pagans are offered to demons" (1 Cor 10:20). The demonic becomes demoniac, diabolical, and satanic.
Plato and Aristotle, exceptions in the Greek thought horizon, associate theion with agathòn, the good, so that daimonion represents an evil power. Therefore, unlike other Greeks who understand the divine theion ambivalently as synonymous with daimonion, Plato and Aristotle are those pagans who, among all others, most know how to distinguish the beneficial from the malevolent in the spiritual world.
This explains why, in the last years of his life during a lengthy interview with Der Spiegel [13], which was somewhat embarrassing as the interviewer probed into his Nazi past without having the courage to go all the way and evoke what would have cornered Heidegger, preventing him from making a fool of himself, Heidegger uttered that famous phrase: "only a God can save us." Better late than never. It's already something. But why a God and not God? Is it still Hölderlin there? Fifty years of research on being to arrive just at this conclusion? We would like to know more, and yet, expectations feast, disappointment's fast.
End of Part Nine (9/10)
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, November 3, 2023
source:
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/ateismo-e-salvezza-nona-parte-910.html
[1] Umberto Regina, Heidegger. Existence and the Sacred, Morcelliana, Brescia 1974.
[2] Heidegger expresses this with depth and not without suggestive accents in his book The Poetry of Hölderlin, Adelphi Edizioni, Milan 1988.
[3] Edith Stein wrote her treatise Finite and Eternal Being (Editrice Città Nuova, Rome 1988) specifically to remind Heidegger of these distinctions. But it served him nothing. The radical opposition regarding the essence of being manifested in the existential fate of the two authors: the former, a servant of Nazism, and the latter, a victim of Nazism.
[4] Bertrand Rioux, Being and Truth in Heidegger and Saint Thomas Aquinas, Presses de l’Université de Montréal-Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1963.
[5] Denz.2841-2847.
[6] As evident from the already-mentioned book on Nietzsche.
[7] The use of Aristotle by St. Thomas Aquinas has brought immense benefits to the ecclesiastical interpretation of Scripture and the development of Catholic dogmatics. A splendid demonstration of how Thomas grasped the value of Aristotelian philosophy and its usefulness for understanding Christian revelation can be found in the masterful synthesis elaborated by a German "in whom there is no deception," the Benedictine monk Joseph Gredt, in his Elementa philosophiae aristotelico-thomisticae (Elements of Aristotelian-Thomistic Philosophy), Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1937, 2 vols., a brilliant synthesis that formed generations of priests in the last century, unfortunately no longer in use today, with the result that heresy has now insinuated itself even among bishops and cardinals.
[8] The Fundamental Concepts of Ancient Philosophy, Milan 2000, p.54.
[9] Cf. Maritain's Three Reformers, Morcelliana, Brescia 1964, p.70.
[10] Biologically, he was a mix of Italian and German race.
[11] The Poetry of Hölderlin, Adelphi Edizioni, Milan 1994. Cf. also Identity and Difference, Adelphi Edizioni 2009, p.69.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Martin Heidegger, Now Only a God Can Save Us. Interview with "Der Spiegel," Ugo Guanda Editore, Milan 2023.