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Heidegger and Voegelin on Augustine

Fred Lawrence, Theology Department, Boston College

Introduction

Eric Voegelin diagnosed the “murderous grotesque” of Nazism as an outgrowth of

modern deculturation generally; Martin Heidegger became entangled with National
Socialism. Voegelin’s philosophy is a resistance to social disorder that explains the
importance of differentiations in consciousness and its equivalent expressions, ranging
from more to less compact. Heidegger responded to the baleful effects of technology as
the underlying ontology of the modern age by an apparent de-differentiation of
philosophy, so that its purpose is to enact an ongoing attunement to the fateful
dispensations of being, and it is questionable how much it can support or guide serious
resistance to our personal, social, cultural disorder, or how much it nourishes complicity
with the very “murderous grotesque” it is meant to overcome.

Still, to suggest the profundity of Voegelin’s work, David Walsh’s Introduction to

the Collected Works edition of Anamnesis compared Voegelin to Heidegger. This enabled
Walsh to point out Voegelin’s strengths in relation to Heidegger’s handling of similar
concerns in poetic and apolitical discourse, and to underline the relative lack in
Heidegger’s work of the massive empirical study of materials from the manifold cultures
of world history that was so integral to Voegelin’s philosophical anthropology.

Here I want to examine Voegelin’s and Heidegger’s respective retrievals of

Augustine’s Confessions.

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.”

Hans-Georg

Gadamer shared this estimation of Heidegger. 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. Since the publication of Heidegger’s early Freiburg and Marburg
lectures, Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren followed earlier leads of scholars like Karl
Lehmann, Otto Pöggeler, Thomas Sheehan, et al., 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.”

This

turns out to be at least as, if not more, crucial than the influence of Nietzsche upon him.

Indeed, long before the stream of research on the early Heidegger became a torrent,

Gadamer illuminated Heidegger’s close relationship to Christian theology in an essay for
the Bultmann Festschrift (for which Voegelin wrote “Ewiges Sein in der Zeit”) entitled
“Heidegger und die Marburger Theologie.” And in “Aus einem Gespräch von der
Sprache,” Heidegger wrote: “Without this theological heritage I would have never gotten
on the path of thinking. But provenance always remains future.”

Voegelin, in his brief against post-Reformation and post-Enlightenment

Not a new topic for me. See Frederick G. Lawrence, “The Problem of Eric Voegelin: Mystic Philosopher and

Scientist,” International and Interdisciplinary Perspective of Eric Voegelin, edited by Stephen A. McKnight and
Geoffrey Price (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 10-34; 35-58.

Leo Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism.

Essays and Lectures by Leo Strauss edited by Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28.

Fergus Kerr, Immortal Longings (1997), 47.

Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Stuttgart, 1993, 10

ed), 96.