Marburg or Bennington

One thing that I admire about Bennington College in Vermont is the lack of a chapel.  One thing that worries me is the occasional Heideggerian tone and the recent firing of an Arendt critic.

Jaspers could not conceive of a university without a Faculty of Theology.  Perhaps he was right: better to have theologians in the open than disguised as philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, social commentators, journalists, feminists or literary critics.

Consider the Jonathan Miller interview with Denys Turner.  Turner need not be troubled by the loss of the Ontological Argument to scrutiny by philosophers - he has the really big question enshrined by Heidegger.  He may not talk freely of Satan as a peripatetic, but he is very free to talk about Nothing.  He follows certain steps.  The chorus is dispersed.

Suppose we follow Turner's lead to consider the "gift".  This theme comes validated by both Gabriel Marcel and Heidegger.

We do not consider the world as given.  We encounter the world as "gifted" to us.

We are but one step from the "gift of the Son"? His only begotten Son?

And from there it is but a few steps to squash the Arian and other inevitable heresies.  We come full circle, common in many folk dances.

But was the great gift not Mary devoid of sin - and the physical assumption to heaven - this may be the judgment of Hispanic Catholicism in the New World (and how much is this a reaction to the fact of the Magdalen?)

Were Bolzano alive in 2002 when America went to war on the grounds of lies and suspicions, we can imagine what he might have said.  Were Brentano alive when the physical ascension of Mary became dogma, we can imagine what he might have said.  And Heidegger on this new dogma - this incontrovertible thesis, true for all time and ever, hidden, unspoken,  true since the event?

Here is Heidegger's trinity from "What is Metaphysics?" [Krell]

1. relation to the world
2. stance
3. irruption

I imagine Master and wood-nymph together in the carefully cleared woods of the Lahn Tal that I know so well.  Imagine what you will.  He has left us that opening.

Both Heidegger and Wittgenstein end with a Catholic burial.  Heidegger only asks that we follow the train of his thought.  Wittgenstein asks us to stop thinking as we tend to [conatus ? Treib?] and to listen to pluralities of speech instead [not singular, eidetic reflection or Wesenschauung]. We talk around and spare the listener our positive theses.  Unlike judgement, there is no end to it, and still there is no end to it, no result: mere polemos.  But the theologians have been able to keep talking - unlike those asserting a flat-earth but rather like those asserting a recent Earth -say, 5000 years old or so.  They need not assert it, but only remind that the Word says it is so.  True historicity.  Embrace your faith.  In speakings such was and ever is given unto you.

Are we to "follow" a "way of thinking" that brings us to the physical ascension [1950]?  As Lutherans? As Anglicans? As Orthodox?  Had She first died?  Must She not have first come to her death?

What have the philosophers laid at theology's threshold?  Serious questions about omnipotence.  Serious questions about omniscience.  Serious questions about prayer.  Serious questions about evil.  Serious questions about prophetic revelation.  The theologian in the West stands at one remove, out of reach, the simple side-step of faith.  But what is fide without credo - or failing those asertions, at least doxa?

Would Bultmann have chided Denys Turner for making of Heidegger a new myth?  Why embrace Heidegger? Why not Mohamet? Why not Buddha?  Because of who we are as a people.

Habermas' followers may yet sell this Tao to China as a post-Confucian discursive-action tonality.  But who could sell this in a Souk?  The text of the Koran, for all its commentaries, is what it is.  The divisions of that faith need no lesson in historicity, bound as they are to nephews and sons-in-law.  "Paul" was not another name for a brother named "John of Jerusalem".

see: Hans Jonas, Memoirs with Christian Wiese and Krishna Winston
see Hans Jonas on Heidegger and the theologians in The Phenomenon of Life.