through theology to phenomenology
But it is important to note that it is also in the young Luther that
Heidegger finds a positive impulse to access a primordial Aristotle
without passing through the “scholastic doctors”: “It is highly doubt-
ful that Aristotle’s thought can be found in the Latins,” as Luther
affirms in the thesis 51 of his Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam
(1517).^27 In fact, Luther reads Aristotle — as we can see for example in
his commentary (Divi Pauli apostoli ad Romans epistola, 1515/16) of Rom
12, 2 where he borrows terms of Aristotle’s Physics to articulate the
process of justification^28 — to find in his philosophy what could be
useful for theology.
My guiding hypothesis here is that the program of the early
Heidegger could be read as fundamentally configured by the New
Testament filtered through Luther’s Theologia crucis^29 and Aristotle:
two correlative matrices (categorial structures and operative pre-
suppositions) of Heidegger’s conceptuality. The name “Bultmann”
stands here for one dimension of this program: Heidegger’s analysis
of Dasein is a secularized New Testamentarian, especially Lutheran,
anthropology.^30 But it has to be completed and thus complicated by
the Aristotelian dimension, which is precisely to say, the secularizing
operator: Heidegger reads Aristotle, the “culminating point” of
ancient thought, very intensely between 1922 and 1926, and retrieves
some of Aristotle’s fundamental concepts to articulate the life-world
of the New Testament, translating both into the conceptuality of Being
- Luther, WA 1, 226.
- Luther, WA 56, 441f.
- In the foreword of his lecture course of 1923, Heidegger indicates: “Young
Luther has been my companion through my search. Aristotle, whom Luther hat-
ed, was my model. Kierkegaard spurred me on and Husserl implanted eyes in me
to see” (GA 63 [SS 1923], 5); GA 63 [SS 1923], 106. - Cf. G. W. Ittel, “Der Einfluss der Philosophie M. Heideggers auf die Theologie
R. Bultmanns”, Kerygma und Dogma 2 (1956), 108: “Further, according to Bult-
mann [letter 13/5/1955], Heidegger’s ‘existential analysis of Dasein appears to be
nothing more than a secular philosophical presentation of the New Testamentar-
ian view of human Dasein”; 92: “Bultmann underlined several times that Heid-
egger himself was influenced by the New Testament, and Heidegger himself
‘never made a secret of the fact that he was influenced by the New Testament,
especially Paul, and Augustine, and particularly Luther.’”