putting Hartmann in the shade (Gadamer, 1985: 23–26; Schnädelbach, 1984:
209–216).
Scheler, who occasionally visited Marburg in the 1920s from his chair in
Cologne, mixed cultural capitals in a fashion similar to Heidegger but with an
opposite trajectory; having become a follower of Husserlian phenomenology
around 1910, at the end of the war he converted to Catholicism. Scheler arrived
in 1919 at his religious turn by claiming to uncover an objective hierarchy of
values: at lowest, the utilitarian plane of pleasures; next, vital values promoting
health and social well-being; still higher, spiritual values of justice, beauty, and
truth; at the apex, the spiritual values embodied in religion. In action, the lower
values are to be sacrificed to higher ones. After 1924 Scheler converted again,
giving up the Catholic personal God for a kind of vitalist pantheism. Heidegger,
who remained sympathetic to Scheler’s restless searches until his death in 1928,
was moving in a similar path of recasting theology in a depersonalized form.
We find the same again in Jaspers: technical borrowing from phenomenol-
ogy around 1913, in this case for the psychiatric description of pathological
states;^39 teaching in a Neo-Kantian stronghold (Heidelberg), in the 1920s
moving toward what later became called existentialism (in Germany, Existen-
zphilosophie). Jaspers’s major works, emerging in 1931–1932 on the heels of
Heidegger’s fame, preserve traditional Christian themes of God, freedom, and
immortality, not as demonstrable truths but as existential questions and choices
beyond the limits of scientific reason.
Marburg at this time was a center of controversies in Protestant theology.
Traditionally it had been a leader of the liberal historical school; out of this
camp had come Bultmann, theology professor at Marburg from 1921 onward,
who became Heidegger’s close friend.^40 Also visiting at Marburg in 1924 was
Paul Tillich, a leader of the Christian-socialist movement in the postwar revolts,
just beginning to move into existentialism. The major stimulus in Protestant
theology was Karl Barth, professor at Göttingen since 1921; Barth had just
launched neo-orthodoxy in 1919, overthrowing the liberal theology of his
youth, as a series of false steps in the direction of secularism. Schleiermacher
had subjectivized the path to God into seeking within oneself. From Kant
onward God had been narrowed into ethical and social concerns. Historical
and textual scholarship was another false path: it is not man that seeks God
but God that seeks man; true religiousness consists in making oneself open to
revelation. Bultmann, as a leading New Testament exegete, entered into cor-
respondence and controversy with Barth, seeking a way to reconcile textual
scholarship and Christian revitalization. In the face of scientific criticism, the
historical reports of Jesus’ life and resurrection cannot be accepted; the mes-
sage, however, is to be not merely ethicized but taken as the expression of
universal religious experience, the sensations of awe and dread, of being a
stranger in the world and open to something beyond it.
746 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths