Martin Heidegger
Fr. Engelbert Krebs, a Catholic priest and professor of theology at Freiburg University, was a close friend of Martin Heidegger, who invited the former to officiate his wedding in Freiburg Cathedral on 21st March 1917.
Since 1916 Heidegger had been teaching Catholic philosophy at Freiburg University, and as a quasi-theologian and deeply religious man, had been taken as a Catholic philosopher of the future. But in 1919 he had to tell Krebs that he had abandoned dogmatic Catholicism both in philosophy and in his personal life:
Freiburg
9th Jan 1919
Esteemed Professor,
Over the last two years I have set aside all scientific work of a specialized nature and have struggled instead for a basic clarification of my philosophical position. This has led me to results that I could not be free to hold and teach if I were tied to positions that come from outside of philosophy.
Epistemological insights that pass over into the theory of historical knowledge have made the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me – but not Christianity and metaphysics, although I take the latter in a new sense.
I believe that I – perhaps more than those who work on the subject officially – have perceived the values that the Catholic Middle Ages bears within itself, values that we are still far from really exploiting. My investigations into the phenomenology of religion, which will draw heavily on the Middle Ages, should prove beyond dispute that in transforming my basic standpoint I have not let myself be dragged into abandoning my objective, high judgment of and esteem for the Catholic life-world, in favor of the empty polemics of an embittered apostate.
Therefore, it is especially important to me – and I wish to extend you my heartfelt thanks for this – that I not lose the benefit of your invaluable friendship. My wife, who first told you about this, and I too would like to preserve the very special confidence we share with you. It is hard to live as a philosopher – inner truthfulness toward oneself and those one is supposed to teach, demands sacrifice, renunciation and struggles that remain forever foreign to the academic “tradesman”.
I believe that I have an inner call to philosophy and, by fulfilling it in research and teaching, a call to the eternal vocation of the inner man – and for that alone do I feel called to achieve what is in my powers and thus to justify, before God, my very existence and activity.
With cordial thanks,
Yours,
Martin Heidegger
