ABSTRACT
The Heideggerianism we knew was not pure by any means. It was part of a cultural milieu of Christian idealism preoccupied with suffering. All the authors usually associated with spiritual ism, all the Russians, were present in this type of Western Christian thought-a curious Cold War amalgamation of writers, from Dostoevsky to Kafka, who appeared to have little connection with Christian spiritualism. In reality there was a great deal of theoretical confusion. And then there were the hard-line Catholics, Thomists who paid no
attention to anyone else and who believed that the conception of Being in the great Greek classical tradition was fundamental, and that it had to be deepened. Here, too, there was a point of contact with Heidegger, though their conception of Being was nonetheless extremely different. For in Heidegger, of course, the linking together of causes does not lead to God, whereas in classical metaphysics, in the conception of Being upheld by the Scholastics, one always arrives at God. In both cases, then, there is a coherent system in which the Church-or, rather, the doctrine of the Church-is an instrument for maintaining order. In fact, this Being (whether or not one accepts the possibility of demonstrating it to be God) is essentially an ordered Being, with fixed characteristics. The infinite is not identified with an opening up. When one is operating with this conception of Being, Heideggerian thought winds up imposing itself in an almost natural manner. The only real novelty arises from all the linguistic aspects associated with the appropriation of the Romantic heritage, with anxiety and the concern for Being and so on.
