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The phenomenology of religious humility in Heidegger’s reading of Luther

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Abstract

The return to religion in contemporary continental philosophy is characterized by a profound sense of intellectual humility. A significant influence within this discussion is Heidegger’s anthropology of finitude in Being and Time and his later critiques of onto-theology. These critiques, however, were informed by Heidegger’s earlier phenomenology of the lived experience of religious humility performed alongside his reading of Martin Luther’s theology. This article shows that for Luther and Heidegger, religious humility is foremost an affection structured according to the enactment of one’s dissimilitude from God and resulting existential tribulation. During a seminal period in his development, Heidegger’s phenomenology of humility changed from an Eckhartian conception of detachment culminating in the unio mystica to a Lutheran conception of humiliation and Anfechtung. Heidegger’s break from a mystical phenomenology of humility parallels Luther’s own break from that tradition, and anticipates contemporary developments in the continental philosophy of religion.

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Notes

  1. Heidegger [Gesammtausgabe (hereafter GA) 1988, 63:4].

  2. References to Luther in the GA of Heidegger’s early Freiburg lectures include GA, 1987, 56/57:18; GA, 1990, 58:62, 204–205; GA, 1995, 60:67, 281–282, 308–310; GA, 1985, 61:7, 182–183; GA, 1988, 63:5, 14, 27, 46, 106. See also Martin Heidegger, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation)”, (hereafter PIA).

  3. Private correspondence from Husserl to R. I. Natorp from February 1922 quoted in Kisiel (1993, p. 530).

  4. Private correspondence from Heidegger to Rudolf Bultmann, written on December 31, 1927 recorded in Kisiel (1993, p. 452).

  5. See, for example, Edmund Schlink, “Weisheit und Torheit,” Kerygma und Dogma I, p. 6. In 1963, Otto Pöggeler’s remarked on Heidegger’s retrieval of Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation in Heidegger’s 1920–1921 course on Augustine. Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, pp. 27–28. See also Richard Schaeffler’s examination the implicit references to Luther in Sein und Zeit, Richard Schaeffler, Frömmigkeit des Denkens. Martin Heidegger und die katholische Theologie. Hans Georg Gadamer also acknowledges Heidegger’s debt to Luther in Heidegger’s Wege: Studium zum Spätwerk, p. 131. John van Buren has done the most work on Heidegger’s retrieval of Luther in John van Buren, “Martin Heidegger/Martin Luther,” Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in his Earliest Thought, pp. 159–174. See also his work The Young Heidegger: Rumor of a Hidden King, pp. 146–202. Theodore Kisiel also acknowledges the significance of Luther in Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Being and Time, pp. 205–210, 228. Ted Sadler acknowledges Luther’s significance for Heidegger’s retrieval of Aristotle. In the opening lines of his book Heidegger and Aristotle, he notes that “Heidegger’s Seinsfrage, in its confrontation with Aristotelian metaphysics, can only be understood within a context of ‘Wittenbergian’ proportions. Without an appreciation of the role of Luther it is inevitable that Heidegger’s fundamentally polemical relation to Aristotle will be obscured.” Nevertheless, Sadler himself does not specifically analyze the importance of Luther.

  6. Several Luther scholars defend this close association of faith and humility, most notably von Loewenich and Gerrish. Gerrish, for example maintains that “the concept of faith was born out of the concept of humility in the actual development of Luther’s thought” (Gerrish 1962, p. 111).

  7. For more on these distinctions, see the excellent treatment of medieval monastic theology in Leclerq (1961).

  8. The texts of Bernard were highly influential on the monastic piety of Luther’s younger years. Bernard’s sermons, which Luther most certainly would have heard repeatedly at meals in Erfurt, were some of the most popular texts in the monastic world at the time. In this regard, Bernard came to have a profound influence on Luther’s theology of the cross and provided a crucial counterweight to the late Scholastic theology Luther was studying simultaneously. In particular, Bernard’s reflections on the cross and the nature of Christian humility given in his sermons on the Song of Songs would have a most direct impact on Luther’s emerging theological position. While Luther became more critical of Bernard’s theology later in his career, he retained a deep respect for Bernard’s personal piety. The texts of Bernard’s that Luther quotes most often are his Sermons on the Song of Songs within which much of his reflection on humility occurred.

  9. Bernard (1971, p. 16). Heidegger references this sermon in his notes on medieval mysticism. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:334 (252)].

  10. For a descriptive analysis of Luther’s notion of humility as perfected self-knowledge, see von Loewenich (1976, pp. 128–132).

  11. Bernard (1971, pp. 175–179).

  12. Posset (1999, p. 224).

  13. von Loewenich (1976, p. 134).

  14. Luther, Luther’s Works (LW, 1957a, 10, p. 239).

  15. Luther (LW, 1962, 14, p. 51).

  16. Luther (LW, 1960b, 35, p. 369).

  17. Luther (32, p. 224).

  18. Ibid.

  19. Paul Ricoeur writes in his own phenomenological analysis of religious intentionality, “It can be said, in very general terms, that guilt designates the subjective moment in fault as sin is its ontological moment. Sin designates the real situation of man before God, whatever consciousness he may have of it… Guilt is the awareness of this real situation, and, if one may say so, the ‘for itself’ of this kind of ‘in itself’” (Ricoeur 1967, p. 101).

  20. Heidegger expands on Luther’s notion of the horror of sin-consciousness in his 1924 lecture “Luther’s Concept of Sin” (cf. Heidegger 2002, p. 106).

  21. Luther (LW, 1958, 32, p. 240).

  22. Luther (LW, 1960a, 34, p. 156).

  23. “No one can be certain that he is not continually committing mortal sin, because of the most secret vice of pride” (Luther LW, 1958, 32, p. 83).

  24. “Since man never acts without reluctance, he never does good without its being corrupted. Therefore, he never completely fulfills the law of God. There is, however, no integrated will in this life; therefore we always sin even when we do what is right” (Luther LW, 1957b, 31, p. 61). Luther certainly does not deny the power of the moral will. Such a power makes possible one’s subjugation to God’s commandments and the performance of good works. Rather, Luther doubts whether the good moral will sinks fully into the depth of the soul or if there is not some secret harbinger of resistance to God.

  25. The concept of the servile will found its most pointed expression in Luther’s confrontation with Erasmus accounted in De servo arbitrio (1525). Nevertheless, in this work, Luther indicated an important nuance to the concept. Luther avoided denying humanity a passive capacity for receiving divine grace. In The Bondage of the Will he writes, “If the power of free choice were said to mean that by which a man is capable of being taken hold of by the Spirit and imbued with the grace of God, as a being created for eternal life or death, no objection could be taken. For this power of aptitude, or as the Sophists say, this disposing quality or passive aptitude, we also admit” (Luther LW, 1972b, 33, p. 67).

  26. “Where now is free will? Where are those people who are trying to affirm that we of our own natural powers can produce the act of loving God above all things?… It is simply impossible for us of ourselves to fulfill the law… The common saying that human nature is in a general and universal way knows and wills the good but errs and does not will it in particular cases would be better stated if we were to say that in particular cases human nature knows and wills what is good but in a universal way neither knows nor wills it. The reason is that it knows nothing but its own good.” Luther (LW, 1972a, 25, p. 344).

  27. Luther (LW, 1970, 39, p. 379).

  28. Luther (LW, 1955, 12, p. 309).

  29. Luther (LW, 1972a, 25, p. 221).

  30. Luther (WA 56, p. 3), translated by Bernard Lohse in Lohse (1999, p. 248).

  31. Luther (LW, 1972a, 25, p. 214). To qualify his hyperbolic language against good works and the importance of acquiring virtue in the religious life, Luther writes shortly after making this point, “All of the things we have said here must be correctly understood, however, namely that righteous, good, and holy works must not be understood as being disapproved in the sense that they are to be omitted, but only with respect to the meaning… we give to them… that is, we do not trust in them as if we had the strength to be sufficiently righteous before God because of them.”

  32. For an important treatment on the nature of Anfechtung, see Die Anfechtung bei Luther. Paul Beuhler summarizes Luther’s concept, “Through the Gospel the Christian has come to learn of a gracious God in Christ Jesus; however his life experiences present to him a God who is still wrathful and who not only refuses to forgive sins, but reminds him of them. The hard, concrete experiences of life contradict what he has learned by faith. God on his side through the Anfechtungen is drawing him closer to him and throughout the Anfechtungen always intends that they should be beneficial to the Christian. The Christian, however, interprets them as forms of God’s retribution for sins and as signs of his wrath… Anfechtungen are an aspect of faith, not as that faith trusts in God and relies on him for all good, but as that faith faces realities in life and in the world different from those offered in the Gospel.” Beuhler (1942, p. 7) quoted and translated by David Scaer in “The Concept of Anfechtung in Luther’s Thought” (Scaer 1983).

  33. Luther (LW, 1957b, 31, p. 128).

  34. Other descriptors used by Luther include persecutio, tribulation, percussio, mortificatio, and perditio.

  35. Luther (LW, 1957b, 31, p. 35).

  36. Luther (LW, 1956, 21, pp. 314–316).

  37. Luther (LW, 1956, 21, p. 314).

  38. Luther (WA 4, p. 111ff).

  39. Heidegger addresses humility (humilitas) most explicitly in his lecture notes on medieval mysticism. See, for example, his note on the difference between the humilitas of mysticism with that of Luther in Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:310 (235)]. In the early hours of his WS 1919–1920 course Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Heidegger cites the following passage from Dilthey: “The famous crede ut intelligas says first of all that the full range of experience must be present to analysis if it is to be exhaustive. The distinct element in the content of Christian experience lies above all in humility, which is grounded in the seriousness of the conscience when it passes judgment” [Dilthey (1922, 1973) translated in Betanzos (1988)]. In a letter to Elizabeth Blochmann, Heidegger notes the receptive and submissive attitude necessary for both phenomenology and religion as an “inner humility before the mystery and grace of life” [Heidegger and Blochmann (1989, p. 7) translated in Kisiel (1993, p. 112)].

  40. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:303 (231)].

  41. Heidegger will later come to call this regressive thinking “destruction” (Destruktion).

  42. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:307 (233)].

  43. Heidegger (GA 1:198). Heidegger borrows the term from Emil Lask, who in his Logik der Philosophie, describes the immediate experience of the categories of meaning. According to Lask, in moments of aesthetic, ethical or religious experience, we find ourselves already given over to meaning prior to our theorization of it. In such experiences, Hingabe connotes a pre-theoretical, immediate experience of meaning marked by an attitude of dedication, self-resignation, devotion, and submission. Whereas Lask used the term to describe categorical intuition, Heidegger applies the term more generally to describe the phenomenological intuition.

  44. Van Buren (1994, p. 303).

  45. Heidegger retrieves both Eckhart and Schleiermacher by connecting Hingabe with Schleiermacher’s description of feeling absolute dependence on the divine. For example, Heidegger writes “Devotion (Hingabe): original stream in of fullness, without restraint, letting oneself be excited. To get back to the experience of the inner unity of life. Religious life is the constant renewal of this procedure” [Heidegger GA, 1995, 60:322 (243–244)].

  46. Kisiel (1993, p. 82).

  47. Abgeschiedenheit is usually translated “detachment,” though the English translators of GA 60 use “seclusion.” Detachment is a more accurate translation of than seclusion. Abgeschiedenheit articulates an attitude toward that which distracts one from the divine, and not the attitude toward the divine itself.

  48. “Detachment [is] not a theoretical not-seeing, but an emotional one; in its primordial form [it is] precisely religious, and accordingly the ways and steps to it as ‘repulsion’” [Heidegger GA, 1995, 60:308 (234)].

  49. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:316 (240)].

  50. Sonya Silka offers a helpful examination of Heidegger’s use of Eckhart’s Abgeschiedenheit in Silka (1997, pp. 133–141).

  51. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:316–317 (240)].

  52. Eckhart (1981, p. 197).

  53. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:309 (235)].

  54. Ott (1993, p. 109).

  55. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:308 (234)]. See also Kisiel’s explanation of Heidegger’s “Theo-logical Beginnings,” in Kisiel (1993, p. 111).

  56. There were various definitions for faith in late medieval scholasticism, of which fiducia was just one. Others included fides informis, fides formata, fides implicita, fides explicita, fides quae, credulitas and fiducia (trust in the promises of God). For Heidegger to isolate the distinction between fides, as something akin to credulitas, and fiducia, is telling of Heidegger’s dualistic categories for an intellectual, theorizing belief and an existentially, enacted trust. Such a categorization is a particularly Protestant way to establish a difference between the two.

  57. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:310 (236)].

  58. Luther (LW, 1962, 14, p. 60; LW, 1969, 42, p. 75).

  59. We must acknowledge that this phenomenological description is incomplete. In order to take reassurance from our insecurity, we must already trust in the divine in a way that both appreciates one’s own sin and the promise of divine grace. This suggests that the religious life is a circular movement of affections, which is always incomplete and fraught with frustrations, but propelled by the hope that frustration is not all there is.

  60. “A thorn was given in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated… Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more of my weakness, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.” II Corinthians 12:7–10. (NRSV) Interestingly, this passage was also a favorite of Luther’s when explaining the theologia crucis.

  61. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:98 (69)].

  62. The emphasis given to the Corinthian passage does not suggest that the tribulation of Paul is only related to the expectation of the Parousia as is often emphasized in the secondary literature on Heidegger.

  63. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:98 (69)].

  64. Theodore Kisiel notes the striking similarity between Heidegger’s interpretation of Augustine and Luther’s theologia crucis. He writes “[While interpreting Augustine’s emphasis on the inner religious life] Heidegger does not even mention Luther’s distinction [between a theologian of the cross and a theologian of glory] at this point in the course, but his entire interpretation in this excursus, down to his selection of texts from the Augustinian opus, is clearly being guided by that distinction… Thus Heidegger is now subtly bringing the full possibility of his own methodology of formal indication to bear onto such a theology of the cross, as he extends his two conceptual diagrams prefiguring what it means to be (= become) a Christian, one Pauline [in the 1920–1921 course] and one Augustinian [in the 1921 course], in the direction of a verbalized ‘crucifixion schematism’ of the Christian factic life, which is at least in the spirit of Luther.” Kisiel, Genesis of Being and Time, p. 210.

  65. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:283 (214)].

  66. Wills (1999, p. xiv).

  67. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:177–178 (129–130); 263 (198); 280–285 (212–115)].

  68. “The problem of the confiteri arises from the consciousness of one’s own sin. The tendency toward vita beata [the happy life]—not in re [in actuality] but in spe [in hope]—emerges only from out of the remissio peccatorum [remission of sins, the reconciliation with God]” [Heidegger GA, 1995, 60:283 (214)].

  69. Ibid.

  70. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:283–284 (214)].

  71. Heidegger notes that in Augustine, “These are Plotinian ideas that connect to a certain conception of Paul’s thought in the letter to the Romans” (Ibid.).

  72. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:280–281 (212)].

  73. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:282 (213)].

  74. As early as 1963, Otto Pöggeler noted, “Heidegger referred to Luther in his lecture course on Augustine and Neoplatonism and indeed to the theses of the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation. These were still not well known in 1921, but in the meantime have received notice to a great extent through the introduction of ‘dialectical theology.’… In his ‘Theology of the Cross’ Luther thus retrieves the ‘factical life-experience’ of primordial Christianity. Such Christianity renounces all visions and revelations, above all even the visions of metaphysics, and by appropriating weakness plumbs the depths of the factical, the essentially ‘historical life’” (Pöggeler 1987, pp. 27–28).

  75. Luther (LW, 1957b, 31, p. 51).

  76. Quoted and translated from the Latin in Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:274 (206)].

  77. This repulsion is an affection akin to Luther’s description of the horror (affectus horrens peccatum) that one feels toward oneself as sinner. See Heidegger’s lecture on Luther’s concept of sin in Heidegger (2002, p. 106).

  78. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:283 (214)].

  79. Along the same lines, Heidegger cites Adolf Reinach in his lecture notes from 1918, “I experience an absolute dependency on God. Insofar as I myself am participatory in this experienced relationship, this state of affairs does not stand before me—rather I myself experience myself in this relationship, a relationship then which, naturally, cannot become an object to me.” Adolf Reinach, Sämtliche Werke, 607 cited in Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:327 (247)].

  80. Cf. Heidegger (2002).

  81. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:284 (214–215)]. See also Heidegger’s early description of the meaning of becoming a question to oneself, “Moving away from God, increasing the distance. In the question of possessing God: The more he advances toward the authentic conditions of enactment, the more dangerous these conditions turn out to be, in hostility to himself” [Ibid. 264 (198)]. Though we do not have the space to examine these remarks, it is interesting to point out the similarity to Heidegger’s statements about the atheism of philosophy. For example, compare the above remarks with these more philosophical ones. “Philosophy, in its radical, self-posing questionability, must be a-theistic as a matter of principle. The more radical philosophy is, the more determinately is it on a path away from God; yet, precisely in radical actualization of the “away”, it has its own difficult proximity to God” (Heidegger GA, 1985, 61:148). Also, “Any philosophy that understands itself in terms of what it is, that is, as the factical how of the interpretation of life, must know—and know it precisely if it also has an “intimation” of God—that the throwing of life back upon itself which gets actualized in philosophy is something that in religious terms amounts to raising one’s hand against God” (Heidegger 2002, p. 194).

  82. We might speculate that the reason why Heidegger claims he cannot go further with this interpretation with his students. He claims he will not go into more detail on the theological conceptualizations “because they are very difficult and require conditions of understanding that cannot be achieved in the context [of this course].” This may be because they have little understanding of the Lutheran theology that shapes Heidegger’s reading of Augustine. Kisiel remarks that “It might well have been controversial, if not scandalous, had Heidegger taken this Lutheran tack in “Catholic Freiburg” so early in his public career and at such an early stage of his Lutheran studies” (Kisiel 1993, p. 111).

  83. Heidegger (2002, pp. 105–110).

  84. Ibid., 106.

  85. Ibid., 109.

  86. Heidegger [GA, 1995, 60:284 (215)].

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Clifton-Soderstrom, K. The phenomenology of religious humility in Heidegger’s reading of Luther. Cont Philos Rev 42, 171–200 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-009-9102-4

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