Sean McGrath

With the publication of Martin Heidegger's early Freiburg lectures , we have for the first time the full textual evidence necessary to interpret Heidegger's changing readings of Scholasticism. In his 1915--1916 Habilitationsschrift, Duns Scotus's Doctrine of Categories and Meaning, Heidegger approached Scholasticism as an undeveloped source for phenomenology, a tradition unburdened by the modern epistemological dichotomy and rich with phenomenological moments: being as the basic field of intentional acts , the primal intention of givenness , and the unobjectifiable thisness of historical life. After 1917 Heidegger argued that the Scholastic notion of the Creator God precludes a genuine interpretation of the being that we are. Following Dilthey, Heidegger came to understand the God-intensified self-world of primal Christianity as the birth of historical consciousness in the Western tradition. The Christian insight into temporality is betrayed by Scholasticism's fusion of theology with ancient science. Scholasticism's causal reduction of beings to an a-temporal principle eclipses the Christian disclosure of primordial temporality and instigates the modern hegemony of theory. In Martin Luther, primal Christianity erupts in rebellion, tearing down the constructs of Scholastic onto---theological science overlying it and retrieving Christianity's sense for historically saturated being-in-the-world. Heidegger's hermeneutics of facticity was constructed as a secular complement to Luther's theology. If metaphysics does not belong in Christianity, then Christianity does not belong in metaphysics. Luther's Theology of the Cross, which cleaves to revelation on the presupposition of the God-forsakenness of reason, became Heidegger's paradigm for separating theology, the ontic science of the revealed and eternal, from philosophy, the ontology of the factical and temporal. Within this Lutheran-Diltheyan horizon of interpretation, the early Heidegger rethought Scholasticism; it was not as he read it in 1916, a theologically grounded disclosure of facticity, but a historical root of the forgetfulness of the being that we are. By bringing Heidegger's critique of Scholastic philosophical theology into question, a way opens toward a more positive evaluation of the philosophical significance of Medieval theism