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Heideggerâs Catholicism (1889â1915)
Heideggerâs home: Ultramontanism and anti-modernism
Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in the small town of Messkirch in Baden, a semi-autonomous Grand Duchy in Southern Germany. His father was sexton and cooper at the local Roman Catholic church, and the Heidegger family lived in a Church-owned house near the parish church. This was a difficult time for Roman Catholics. Historically a Catholic state, Baden still had a predominantly Catholic population: two thirds â rising to more than nine tenths in rural districts â were Roman Catholics.1 However, the majority of Catholics were rural and other manual labourers who lived in villages and small towns away from the centres of power, and remained marginalized in the political and cultural life of the time. This marginalization also had to do with the resistance to current trends written into Roman Catholicism: the consolidation of the German Reich under Kaiser Wilhelm and Chancellor Bismarck did not sit well with traditional Catholic ultramontanism, that is, its general orientation towards the pope in Rome. Similarly, the liberalism of German Protestantism (which was also the driving force of national education and culture) went against the nineteenth-century Catholic resistance to modern trends. In the decades preceding Heideggerâs birth, the Catholic Church had tried to gain more independence from the increasingly overbearing influence of Protestant Prussia and of Badenâs own liberal Protestant cabinet, particularly by gaining or maintaining control of its denominational education and appointments. Although this Baden Kulturkampf was neither as drastic nor as hostile as Bismarckâs own Kulturkampf in Prussia, it resulted in an increasing sense of marginalization and oppression on the part of Catholics, and so stoked a political and intellectual backlash in which the young Martin became directly caught up.
In Messkirch, and especially in the sextonâs family, the ultramontanist and anti-modernist cause had a particularly high profile. In the decades before Martinâs birth, a majority of the Messkirch population had, for a time, joined the Old Catholic movement, relinquishing strict adherence to Rome in favour of a more autonomous and local Catholic life. From the 1870s until the re-establishment of Roman Catholicism in 1895, Martinâs father was among a small minority of ultramontanists, a commitment which incurred discrimination and even, for a while, the loss of the home (which belonged to the parish church).2
Martin could not fail to imbibe some of this entrenched religious commitment. The oldest son of the family, he was intended for the priesthood from an early age, and was sent to the (recently re-opened) episcopal schools in Constance and then in Freiburg from 1903 to 1909. The local community, once more rallied around Rome, also encouraged support for the ultramontanist cause by founding the Catholic daily Heuberger Volksblatt (1899). The ensuing (and locally famous) âMesskirch newspaper warâ between the Volksblatt and the liberal local daily Oberbadischer Grenzbote (founded 1872) continued until the demise of the Weimar Republic, and became the main local vehicle for carrying out the modernist controversy in Baden.3 The Volksblatt was both Heideggerâs first organ and one of our primary sources for his early public activities, which are often enthusiastically reported in its pages.
The dominant intellectual and cultural aspect of Heideggerâs Catholic milieu was its so-called anti-modernism. The First Vatican Council of 1870, with its formal declaration of papal infallibility, had established the Catholic Church as a fiercely counter-cultural and, to some extent, counter-political body. In the intellectual sphere, this opposition was directed against a wide range of trends which were seen as threats to a traditional Catholic understanding of existence, knowledge, faith and morality. In 1907, Pope Pius XI published an encyclical entitled Pascendi dominici gregis (âFeeding the Lordâs flockâ), in which he summarized these trends and threats under the term âmodernismâ, slated as âthe synthesis of all heresiesâ.4 The term âmodernismâ remained notoriously multivalent throughout the ensuing Modernismusstreit (modernist crisis), but was generally agreed to include methodical agnosticism (the use of secular methods in theology), vital immanentism (an understanding of religion as primarily a matter of feeling and experience), symbolism (the view that doctrines are only symbols of inner beliefs) and evolutionism (the view that authority and dogma undergo historical development).5
At home and in school, Heidegger imbibed a distinctly anti-modernist attitude.6 The pugnacious counter-cultural perfectionism of the anti-modernist movement suited his own temperament, and in his final school years, according to his headmasterâs graduation report of September 1909, he decided to seek admittance to the Jesuits, the most vocally anti-modernist society within the Church.7
Martinâs âpassion for apologeticsâ8 soon came to public notice. On 6 September 1909, he presided over a 200th-anniversary celebration of Abraham a Sancta Clara (1644â1709), an Augustinian priest-orator from the nearby Kreenheinstetten. Abraham was revered as a patron by the literary circle surrounding the famous anti-modernist historian and writer Richard von Kralik,9 whose project of a cultural renewal based on Catholic principles strongly attracted the 20-year-old Heidegger. At the anniversary celebration, he encouraged all young people present to subscribe to Kralikâs journal Gral and âbecome its disciplesâ.10 The rival Catholic journal Hochland, Martin opined, should be shunned for âsailing more and more in the fairway of Modernismâ.11 His speech was recorded enthusiastically in the Heuburger Volksblatt.
From 1909 to 1910, Heidegger also contributed directly to the ânewspaper warâ by writing polemical pieces for the Volksblatt as well as several conservative Catholic journals, especially Der Akademiker and Allgemeine Rundschau.12 The rhetoric of these essays is typical of the anti-modernist literature of the period, but also reflects emphases and concerns that are distinctly and recognizably Heideggerâs. Modernist attitudes, in these short pieces, are to be despised because they emerge from and encourage weakness, delusion, and enslavement to the superficial, ephemeral and âlowâ. Similar emphases, though with very different philosophical and political backgrounds, will persist in his critique of âthe crowdâ (das Man) in the late 1920s, and his short-lived support for National Socialism in the early 1930s.13
Heideggerâs earliest known publication is a lyrical short story about the dramatic conversion of a young atheist on All Souls Day, published in November 1909. It opens with a damning description of the urban âModernsâ, whose wilful confusion of their âpassion [for] lustâ for âintelligenceâ and âfreedomâ has so deluded and sapped their strength that they can no longer distinguish the âdark, agonising nightâ from sunlight, and âno longer hear the clangourâ of the âchainsâ in which they âdrag their tired, overwrought body through existenceâ.14 In evading the divine judgement call that sounds in the bells of All Soulsâ morning, these âModernsâ run away from âseriousnessâ, which âonly befits the strongâ: âThe feeble soul, the dull, creeping soul flees from the redemptive seriousness of life which is eager to overcome; it shirks the self-reflection which is glad to make sacrifices.â15 In a book review in March 1910, Heidegger assimilates this contrast to Darwinist biology, which, during this period, he regards as a particularly fascinating corroboration of Christian belief.16 Just as all âhigher life is predicated on the demise of the lower formsâ, he argues in the review, so the higher, âspiritual lifeâ requires the âkillingâ of âwhat is lowâ in oneself.
In a May 1910 review of a work by the moral philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, Heidegger transposes these concerns to a philosophical register.17 While the modernists demand free scientific enquiry and free thought, he argues after Foerster, true freedom of thought and joy of life require a habit of self-discipline: âTruly free thinkingâ, as Foerster puts it, âpresupposes an heroic act of moral self-liberationâ.18 Heidegger echoes this conviction almost verbatim elsewhere: âStrict logical thinking that hermetically seals itself off from all affective influences of the emotions, all truly presupposition-less scholarly work, requires a certain fund of ethical power, the art of self-collection and self-emptying.â19 Such self-liberation, however, according to Foerster, can only be achieved through obedience to the Catholic Tradition: âNot I should judge the highest Tradition from my perspective, but I should learn to evaluate myself in a wholly new way from its perspective: That is true emancipation, that is the service which firm objective authority can render the personal life.â20
Intellectual honesty or objectivity is here coextensive with personal truthfulness or âWahrhaftigkeitâ (authenticity). Church doctrine is authoritative precisely because it contains not only factual truth but also the âlight of truthâ that enables an authentic life. Heidegger echoes this idea in the conclusion of his Foerster review, borrowing the language of the Judeo-Christian Wisdom tradition. Here as ever after, Heidegger displays a remarkable sensitivity to the vision implicit in a particular language or semantic field; in this case, the fact that the biblical Wisdom genre inflects the classical ideal of knowledge with a specifically moral and spiritual emphasis culminating, for the Christian, in the Incarnation of the âWisdom of Godâ (1 Cor. 1.24):
To him who has never set foot on straying paths [cf. Ps 1.1; Prov 1.15, 2.18, 4.14] and has not been blinded by the deceptive dazzle of the modern spirit; who can dare to walk through life in the radiance of truth, in true, deep, well-grounded offering-up of self [cf. Wis 9.11]; to him, this book bears tidings of great joy [cf. Lk 2.10], and conveys again with startling clarity the high joy of possessing the truth.21
Several themes with which readers of Heidegger will be familiar from his later work are reflected in this brief review of his earliest writ...