Some Hermeneutics implications of Heidegger ’ s phenomenology of religion

The phenomenological understanding of religion begins within the ambit of the ontotheological. That is, the relationship between the mortal and the divine is in essence, one of the sharing of a spiritual form of Being. The ‘mode of Being spiritual’ is the factical manifestation of the spirit-Being. That which we are a vehicle for, the breath of life and consciousness becomes conscious for us through the immanence of history. Each event in our own lived time has within it the kernel of the meaning of existence proper. Each moment as spontaneously occurring is thus kerygmatic, or potentially through a reflection of a phenomenology. It is Heidegger perhaps more so than any other phenomenologist who begins this task of represencing the essence of the historical as the momentary existence of the factical. Yet what is this facticity? If the study of Beings can be read as the hermeneutics of facticity, cannot the Being of Beings recur through reflection on the moment of irruptive singularity, the sudden call of the anxious, the realization of the hopeful? It is Heidegger’s reading of Paul and Augustine, respectively anxious and immanent and then aspirational and affirmative, that provides the textuality for our discussion.


INTRODUCTION
Anxiety and introspection are felt and practiced respectively by all of us.They are in fact intimately related.The one often leads to the other.Indeed, anxiety left alone does not leave us alone, but rather forces us to engage in some kind of self-reflection.In modern Western consciousness, these concepts are associated with the likes of Kierkegaard and Freud.Their roots lie, however, in two ancient authors, Paul and Augustine.Heidegger's phenomenology of religion addresses these tow historical interlocutors as if they can speak to us in our own time.Avoiding the Diltheyan cul-de-sac of historicism while at the same time displacing their textualities as 'origin' points or absolute goals, as a followers of Schleiermacher may have done, Heidegger not merely re-reads Paul and Augustine but represences them in all of their immanentiality.
In order to trace this radically phenomenological exegetic, we will first examine the juxtaposition of Paul and Augustine as living at the beginning and the end, respectively, of the period of development of Christianity from a cult to an official institutional religion.The objecttive history does not reflect the subjective experience of history in either writer.Paul is thus exposed to the nakedness of the end of time, even though he stood at E-mail: gloewen@stmcollege.ca,Tel: (306) 966-8956.
Author agree that this article remain permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License the very start of the new.His anxiety may be seen as one of basic and fundamental change.In this, his voice speaks for all of us who are conscious of the trepidatious character of personal changes.Augustine stood at the far end of the changes and yet he voices the beginning of the inward journey to know the soul and self in the light of the sacred.The surrounding landscape of empire and collapse had occurred.The world had fulfilled its destiny.The time was ripe for Man to become authentic through introspection of the most persistent sort.Nothing should be left unturned and the world which had been turned to ruins, turned on its head, might well be mimicked by every subject.
So Paul and Augustine become vehicles for the authorship of a new self.The one in the face of personal death, the other in the wake of the demise of the world.Heidegger's hermeneutic implications of a represencing of the immanence of beginnings and endings provides for all those who live on in the face of both an introduction to the necessity of reflection and faith which are hallmarks of a finite consciousness that knows its finitude in principal but not in history.i Because Heidegger's text is constructed of course notes which include a clear break, perhaps in mimesis of the passage of time between Paul and Augustine, we will adopt the expedient of referring the reader to two methodological and two results sections, one set for each of the writers examined, before making some general conclusions based on the upshot of his overall analysis.

METHODOLOGY The 'book-ends' of the new faith
We will examine first how Paul acts as an irruptive presence in the factical structure of the lifeworld.Not the one of history, but of ourselves.Heidegger must liberate his analysis from historicism.He accomplishes this by the simple maneuver of represencing Paul as a vehicle for anxiety, one of the most transparent signs that something in our lives has gone awry.
Both Paul and Augustine are phenomenological reporters.This is the base statement that animates Heidegger's use and analysis of these ontotheological bulwarks in a time far out of their own time, from a time equally outside the temporality of the phenomenon so conjured and thence defended.This is so due to the privileging of lived experience or Erlebnis.Although Paul accounts for his experiences as living-on in the face of the end-times and Augustine recounts the facticity of the time of the living ends, both shelter themselves away from the sometimes apocalyptically despairing scenes of the margins of the empire and its demise.The turning away from the world as it was, is accomplished with creative aplomb by both and both can thus be regarded as versions of the mystic; one who through vision or introspection is compelled to retire from the routines of the factical day to day and account for this through either a hortatory return-in Paul, an attention seeking new life that rescues his alienation as an 'dual citizen' on the farthest horizon of the East-or a minute accounting of the soul's progress in a world without spirit-for Augustine, the attentiveness to purification when confronted with the historical demise of the West.
The phenomenological import of these writings is grounded in their non-theoretical timbres.Not analysis of these events, earthly and personal, is what is needed or desired, but a marked exegesis in the light of spirit must be undertaken.The meaning of the world is shot through with the message of the other-world.The vehicle for understanding the kerygmatic content of this message is within us, inhabiting us as the spirit of life.What is meant by this cohabitation of world and spirit is something beyond all histories and beyond all analyses.It is not a social meaning, but one that is irruptive and alien to the hyletic realm, though it may be perceived as the essence within it, akin to the 'irreal' of Husserlian eidetic apperception.Though Dilthey abruptly extinguishes this line of thinking in his own-"The human Being as a fact which precedes history and society is a fiction of genetic explanation."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :94 [1923]]).-Heideggerargues that this kind of turning away is premature.It is perhaps true that social categories cannot be used to scientifically describe and interpret social phenomena, but if the socially accepted meanings of other kinds of events are shown to be steeped in the extra-social, from the native's point of view, then we must also account for the presence of these meanings in history as demarcating the meaning of that which is not historical.ii More than a history of meaning must inform hermeneutics and this is precisely what phenomenological hermeneutics, the third 'phase' of our journey through the modern social study of religion attempts to provide.
The dilemma for Dilthey was obvious for Heidegger.Dilthey himself states it with characteristic lucidity.Speaking of those selfsame socially constructed categories of thought, he suggests: Even when we cannot do without them in a description, we must never forget that they have had their living origin in the experience the individual has had of himself; consequently we cannot explain more by referring back to the lived experience which the individual represents for himself in society than experience is capable of telling us in its own right.(ibid:94).
And yet the juxtaposition of Erlebnis and Erfahrung is telling in a novel way.Phenomenology suggests rather that we can indeed tell more, not from their juxtaposition, as Dilthey rightly rejects, but from their fusion.This is accomplished by the process of the livingthrough of factical life experience, which is at once both personal and given to the oneself in an ipsissimous relation and simultaneously-though realized through reflective states-that very experience must also be social to be communicated.The essence of memoria is this double communication, to oneself as the living meaningfulness of the moment and to others as the recounting of life as one is living it with others.Communication in this form is more like communion and it is plausible that such may mimic itself across millenia by ironically the new history which in the cases of Paul and Augustine is also the history of the new.
In phenomenology, the matter at hand becomes more than the 'what has been' or the 'what can be ascertained'.For Dilthey, "... we attain a conception of matter on the basis of spatial characteristics, but only by way of the facticity of the sense of touch, in which we encounter resistance.(ibid: 81).One of the essential characteristics of facticity is the encountered resistance to all forms of action and thought in the world as it is.At the same time, it is said, either as proclamatory or as evaluatory in our two ancient would be phenomenologists, that precisely what is beyond the factical is beyond resistance.This non-resistible state is immanent in Paul as the apocalypse and then as self-knowledge of soul in Augustine.It is not irresistible, as would be the case for temptation, as we will see analysed in Augustine below, nor is it the unresistable of the inertia of tradition and social stigmata.Indeed, the non-resistible is a species of the non-rational.When we thus encounter resistance, we know we are within the realm of factical life experience.Phenomenology attempts to make both these kinds of experiences generally knowable, as well as accounting for the experience of the non-rational of the non-resisting religious life.The seeds for this kind of study can also be found in Dilthey, though still-born.The 'making scientific' of experience involves us in psychical life and its denizens: "But if we are to make them scientific, the effort to do so will take us back to considering personally the connection between our knowledge of the reality of the individual (der Lebenseinheit) and our consciousness of the mutual value-relations our will and our feeling encounter in life."(ibid:96).iii That we know resistance to our will and that we must resist in turn our feelings about this facticality must turn us to another kind of experience, says this new credo of non-resistance.Kindred with the new faith as an essentiality of the 'sciences of the spirit' is the apparently 'spiritual' study of phenomenology as a new science, resurrecting philosophy as once again the 'queen of the sciences'.
Heidegger is the scion of this new challenge, arguably Husserl's most brilliant protégé, five years into his famous Freiburg position and throughout the early texts, brashly assertive in his momentary criticisms of his peers and elders alike.Yet mostly he lets the analyses do the speaking and the suggestions are often surprising.iv The enactment of a science and a philosophy must be different as well in their actuation and in their scheme.The backreading of philosophy as science and as an understanding of the world in which a nascent science is present is but a figment of modern thought.The analytical clarity of philosophy is relevant only if science is held to be normative and virtuous and so on (Heidegger 2004(Heidegger :5,6 [1921]]).Specifically in relation to Dilthey's work, he suggests that one cannot simply inverse the objectifying ideals of science into a neo-Kantian subjectivism, where the world becomes as an environ of surrounding what is the communal and what is the self and come out with the genuine lifeworld (ibid:8).Such significance as there may be in the context of living-on may be shaped into an objective reality, but this does not yet give us the character of the object in its facticity (ibid:10).Instead, rather than seeing the entire history of philosophy as a cultural possession as the most convenient route of what may now be considered the fashionable proper philosophy of analysis, enthralled to science and only attaining 'objectivity' through the use of the methods of science and its disregard for metaphysics, science must be defended against and yet it can also be used, if possible, as an instrument to prove the history of faith (ibid:13, 20).Dilthey recognizes this problem of what can be factual within the natural science method and what has the facticity of lived experience; Durkheim's interpretive validity, if you will, for his concept of the 'social fact': "... the demands which logic makes on concepts and propositions lead us back to the chief problem of all epistemology: the nature of immediate knowledge of facts of consciousness and relation of this knowledge to knowledge which builds on the principle of sufficient reason."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey : 147 [1923]]).This is a problem that mere epistemology cannot solve, states Heidegger.Rather, an ontological attempt must be made without the return to the metaphysics of nonpresence and without apparent recourse to ontotheological foundations.This is 'apparently' so, because the phenomenology of the religious life must deliver a kind of existential suasion involving itself in ethics.This seems so due to not only the material at stake, but also the sense that an history of phenomenology itself, at this time it is seen as still holding forth the dream of the 'things themselves', including the foundation for all knowledge.To understand the question of Being as an enactment of historicity in this realm is to leave open the aperture of irruptive religious or spiritual essence which has become historically laden with either rationalized structures or at best, hermeneutic meaningfulness.Neither of these grasps the factical life experience of the extramundane.One either turns against the vicissitudes of history as concernful Being in demanding (in Paul), or the meaningful is derived from the concrete and objective relating to history as a whole Being (as in Augustine).v Interpreting either figure as only the locus of this kind of action in the world is to misinterpret them (Heidegger 2004(Heidegger :35 [1921]]).
This misinterpretation in part stems from the inability of the mere empirically observed facticity of life experience to explain its full That the breadth of the phenomenological problematic includes but is not limited to the 'hermeneutic experience' of encountering the quality of the radically alter, is justification for the latent invocation of the concept of the 'fusion of horizons', which we will see appearing later in Gadamer.For now, we can treat this purposive motion in analysis as a general principle of ideal comprehension.vii That these horizons never quite adhere is another matter and that they cannot do so by ontological means other than perhaps by an ironic acceptance of one of the key structures of the emic texts themselves-that of transcendental empathy through the logos, for instance-is yet a further discomfort.Instead, the smaller steps that can be taken in the direction of the horizon of both the ancient and yet still radical outcomes of the interpretation of 'what is to be' as over against the 'what has been' lensed through the 'what must be', involve asking questions like "What does it mean to confront history as 'historical Beings in factical life'?and 'To what extent does something appear as becoming-perhaps even something of the what can becomeappearing in facticity, as historicality but not yet as history?' (cf. ibid: 36, 38).Without presupposing the objectives of this new history of both old and new Beings-including the interpretation, even documentation of the irruptive force of the new Being of Beings-as well as without attempting at first to comprehend its objections to history; that is, the history of the what has been-we ourselves must understand our own objections to a position which stands in an entirely new relationship with what we have been as historical Beings.Rather than ourselves confronting the tradition or in some kind of daily dialectic with histories, including our own, here '"... history hits us and we are history itself."(ibid: 124).One perhaps simpler understanding of this kind of inversion of general historical relations with the present is the sense that we were present when history was made, as it were; we were 'a part of history'.This kind of scene is of course a narrow sample of what could become historical and indeed is already an insignificant caption of the total human history of what has been the case.Yet the happenstance of history-making in this Whiggish sense does capture part of the essentiality of the phenomenological event as irruptive into the skein of temporal history in that it has the timbre of spontaneity.History can occur to us in spite of ourselves.We can be changed without willing ourselves, as was the case with Saul, for example.Now the world itself has been changed and if, in our further travels, we find much the same as it always was, then the world is excluding itself from its own history and we, the once-born, are hiding in the vanguard of its vanity.For phenomenology, this represents more than the schism of the enlightened one appearing to return to the world of the mundane.Here, as with Paul, the world actually already is what he now knows it to be and furthermore, has always been so.This new fact obtrudes rather relentlessly into the facticality of living in such a world unknown to the actually worlds.No doubt such a discovery-which is also a self-discovery as well as a discovery of the nature of the self etc.-would leave us rather anxious, perhaps in a cold sweat of anguish that indeed we did not know and on top of this, we may be the only ones knowing and to yet a further horror, that we may in fact remain the only ones ever to know!To avoid such torment one must take action.In some conversion experiences, the course of action is laid out for one.Whether or not this is the case, the experience is enough to warrant, at least in the West, the ethical soteriology of the itinerant earthly analog of Hermes, saddled as one would be with the more difficult task of translation.Here, Paul wishes the message would speak for itself, but it cannot do so but through the experience of irruption itself.That the Being of Beings appears on the stage of Being-there is for Heidegger a moment which makes history anew, even as it is subject to phenomenological analysis and indeed, might be considered its ideal analogue.
This ideal function does not retreat in the face of Beings.Akin to the 'glad tidings', the promise of phenomenology in its relation to the sciences is that of grounding.The act of grounding the fragmentedness of historical Being in a form a Being which is immanent to history is seen to issue forth a future humaneness which involves both validity constructs of actual reflection of historical truth and the more radical structure of eidetic consciousness (cf.ibid:30).To know this as other to an acolyte was for Dilthey to engage in a kind of 'psychology of knowledge' (ibid:28).The question 'How does experience become historical?' when pitched at the level of discourse rather than that of factical activity in the world is for Heidegger only narrowly responded to in historical hermeneutics.For example: "One will not recognize Augustine's true greatness as a writer until one develops the psychological structure which he has and does so without the systematic structure which he does not have."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :238 [1923]]).Before such a question can be asked, we must first respond to the problem of how experience is in fact experienced, both as made manifest in facticity and as escaping the formalism which falls outside of attitudinal meaning (the meaningfulness of the emic lifeworld, for instance, cf.Heidegger 2004Heidegger :41 [1921]]).Similar to the problem of the difference between the world taken for granted and the scientific attitude, the attitude of the phenomenologist rather than the empiricist proper, the factical life, as it heeds culture only semi-consciously, cannot be the sole source of experience (ibid:153).As well, the full facticity of experience includes the Being of Being hidden (ibid:161), the occlusive which at the time of Heidegger's work was rapidly Being enveloped by the concept of the unconscious and yet this hiddenness is not always subterranean.It may also be atmospheric, as it were, in that it can emanate, as can be seen in Weber, from positions which though not entirely outside culture and are excerpted from the mundane facticalities of subsistence, tradition and ritual.If 'factical expression' is concerned in its Being to add the new (ibid:163), then Paul is evidently a worthy candidate as the 'informant' of such a concernfulness.
This 'Paul' is of course not epistolary, but proclamatory (cf.ibid:61, 83).This figure is indeed enactmentally within all of us as those who live on having the foreknowledge of that which has been and the present experience of the facticity of the having become.Not so much the becoming itself is known, as this requires reflection, but the once present having become part of knowable history places us in the ever momentary space in which the momentous can occur to us.The knowledge of one's own 'havingbecome' is a fundamental element of factical life experience and cannot be part of 'fore-having' in the usual predicatory sense (ibid:65-6).It is rather reflected on as anew.In some perhaps grotesque manner but certainly hyperbolic, the Pauline anxiety regarding the momentarily immanent is the knowledge of one's own finitude hypostasized.Heidegger suggests that this construct becomes part of the factical life experience of the early Christians and that thus this living on begins with the proclamation (ibid:83).Assuredly this consists in a new life 'comportment', as it were, but just as assuredly the mundane facticality of the world remains unchanged.Hence at least the evidence for the anxiety is presented as this tension between ongoing expectation-ironically, more akin to the ongoing expectation of the demise of ongoingness-and thus also a constant reaffirmation of the world as askew.It is in the manner of the 'enactment-structure' that one's perception of the world of action shifts and as we might expect given the relative imperviousness to the radically new of what has been the mundane and extramundane alike-the latter at least in its policy and ritual interpretations-it is the relations to the self-world which are most radically altered (ibid:84).As such, this life experience does not change by the 'having-become'; it is a revolution 'within ' (ibid:86).
In this process, phenomenology is set up as a latter day guest for imagined historical hosts to inform and perhaps even entertain, if this term is taken only in the sense that the host takes its intrusiveness seriously as a plausible part of its own lifeworld, in the way we would 'entertain an idea'.As such, historical life is not laid bare as an object but we access what is akin to its own manifold (ibid:92).Further, we enter into a processualization 'as each' attitudinally motivated understanding is 'surpassed' by phenomenology, as it remains within the natural attitude.This encounter as a ground for the enactment into factical life is of course once again akin to the 'new' of the hermeneutical experience (cf.ibid:101).The 'thing in itself', however veiled by the hyletic, might be experienced by taking the original historical object-here, primordial Christianity as vetted by the Pauline documents and their translators-and using it to experience the object originally, with no guarantees regarding its historical objectivity (ibid:53).Historical types are here becoming ideal, not dissimilar to Weber's structural analysis (ibid:52, 79).The risks are great, no doubt.What are essentially proclamatory or evaluative documents seen to reflect intense self-enactments are Being taken for public monuments of the new faith, or at least, as having faith anew.Can we ourselves have faith in what now is very much part of the 'has been' and the 'having become' of tradition that at the times in question was antitradition or was nascent tradition?
If no history of culture, science, or dogma can be objective history and yet the historical and the relative value of what can be meant by the history of ourselves cannot be brought together, (cf.ibid:119), interpretations we bring to the texts must be considered to be the beginning of the historical, literally its 'renaissance' (ibid:132).Is their an existential lineage to be had with the nonconscious of cultural and historical life?Perhaps the scaffolding of this kinship network produces memorialization and even memory itself, although Heidegger suggests that the memoriam is still an aspect of consciousness in itself (ibid:136).Given that it is normative to hear something about one's current concerns, even if the commentary be revolutionary or revelationary in character, the ability to search for such a comment suggests a 'fore-presence ' (ibid:139, 150).These current concerns are themselves 'objects of concernfulness' and may be mitigated or absolved by concernful Being.If Paul's comments are akin to radical policy makeovers within the mode of Being concernful, then Augustine critiques the careless 'as-is' and rejects the 'as-if ' as irresponsible (ibid:190).This as is, is accepting of the present as it has been and is passive in the becoming of history.The prescience we have of what has been is seen as an alienating distribution of fragments of facticity (ibid:147).The mundane life of inactive acceptance lacks its 'veryown-ness'.It literally does not have itself, in the sense that we cannot find a home within its language.On the one hand, the proclamation of an eschatological immanence which also has within it the soteriological destination can move us to save ourselves.
Introspective critique and evaluation, on the other hand, moves the soul away from internalizing itself as indeed part of the mundane world into the lighted space of Being.One cannot be discovered by the truth in either formula.The former announces its truth to us, while the latter discovers it (cf.ibid:148).The comprehension of belief -or that this new belief results from such a comprehension of the truth of the world which is also not of this world as it remains in the face of truth -is likened by Heidegger to the proverbial difference between logoi and logos (ibid:130).We have already seen how a kerygmatic moment becomes diffuse in its communication to the world.Part of the strategies of both Paul and Augustine can be seen as keeping this message 'fresh', as it were.Paul, in his itinerant and even 'serpentine' vocation has no need to repeat the message, as his audience is always new.His documentation of such efforts serves to reinforce the momentary of the text.A letter as proclamation, as a postcard, lets one know 'what is going on', up to the minute.Augustine also writes, but here it is monolithic and 'for all time', as if to capture and preserve a moment; more like a panoramic photograph than a postcard.Both of these strategies are also elements of the Heideggerian represencing of phenomenology.As with Durkheim, he sees the genesis of any analysis of religion laying in its primordialities and as with James, he understands the living present and the living on with the 'what has been transformed' as the space of religion proper (ibid:232).As such, religious phenomena must be gleaned from both the historical and the factical, in that the institutional has its own history and it is not strictly speaking, 'religious' (ibid:231).To understand the emic from the standpoint of a philosophy of history, whether or not this philosophy contains the elements of the religious life, is to have only partial access to religious phenomena and no sign of its original manifestations as a new form of the factical within a history that has been changed (cf.ibid:25).The evidence that what has been is now only history and not productive of the new factical life experience of those who have also been changed is interpolated from the book-ends of Paul and Augustine.The tenor and the enactment of these two sets of texts is at once entirely different because of institutional changes, but this is one of the reasons why the space of the historical and the factical must take precedence for phenomenology as opposed to the structures of social and economic organization, even if it is these structures which enable the difference in the religious life to persevere in the face of original stigma and persecution.That something has been changed may be taken as the direct antecedent of the brief history of the 'becoming able to be changed'.The full presence of anxiety in Paul-as well as the sometimes muted presence of ressentiment which is also opaque in Heidegger's analysis-and yet its penultimate expulsion in Augustine is testament enough to know that this form of religious life has succeeded in transforming the world, as it itself has been transformed.

The routine of the factical in Augustine
Heidegger now turns this question over to Augustine.We will first attempt to understand how a turning away from the world can create a new world.We will then examine how the world is reintegrated into the search for the meaning of the spirit.It turns out that this reintegration does not merely involve a series of definitions by negation.The question of Being anew in the light of history is always our own question thanks to the radically reflective subjectivity that Heidegger examines.
That we can now ask such a question becomes a crucial aspect of the new faith's self-interrogation and evaluation in Augustine.This is the hinge upon which Heidegger opens the new similitude of Being in the world.This world has been made routine by Being subject to the objective conditions of rationalization.Personal ends are always and already upon us, coming and going as the process of living-on.The worldly apocalypse has come and gone and yet the world remains.The previous life of the world returns as a means to understand the new world.Thus the world can only be truly overcome through introspection and self-reflection in the light of the sacred.The authenticity of the world can only be found within, not without.The Pauline ressentiment is precisely the liminality occurring to us in the motion from the one to the other.Akin to a new rite of passage, this motion must be scored by the writhing of the liberating conscience.No struggle can be taken up and endured unless its stakes are intimately known.The world into which we are thrust can mediate only so long the fires from which we were made and the abyss into which we will be thrown.
Once this rite has been accomplished, however, one still awaits the ultimate judgement of whether or not one has been successful.At least the scorns of this world are overcome in spirit, however, if not always as historical record.We also need a new way of recordkeeping, as it were; to keep the enactmentally stringent bracketing of what must have been in the 'what has been' from becoming once again.It is in Augustine that we finally encounter, after the three century genesis of the new faith, such a station: For theology there were fixed points available for such a construction at the beginning and the end of all history; thus arose a truly feasible task of pulling together connecting threads through the course of history between the fall of man and the last judgement.In his mighty work [The City of God] Augustine had the course of history on this earth originate from the metaphysical world and then dissolved it once again into this metaphysical world.For according to him the battle between the heavenly and the earthly city already begins in the regions of the world of spirits... (Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :135 [1923]]).
Not that this was as easy as it appears.If there is no judgement available to us about history from that self-same history, the leap of faith associated with reconstructing such a space from without, emanating from the other world which is always already beyond history-akin to its creator, the designer is himself not part of the design-must include with it the sense that such an evaluation was our own and was of and about us, if not created by us.Only then can such an edifice as the new metaphysics join itself with the call towards a new mode of Being which can live without history.No doubt such an existence is at first anything but routine.There are no social support networks, as it were, for such a way of life.Indeed, it cannot be called a way of life at all, until such social institutions that arose in the periods preceding Augustine began to shift their content and favor toward the rising classes and their beliefs.Yet by the time of Augustine, in the late fourth century, the politics was opportune to begin the first overview of what could now constitute the ideal form of the new life.How could one live the good life was not the first question which animates the 'phenomenology' of Augustine, but in fact the very framework for what could be called good in life is our task.There was no obvious appeal to what had been history, given the collapse of the Classical world and the transient and regional voids of power and belief that echoed around the Mediterranean, not to be fully absolved until the Islamic conquest of its southern coast centuries later.For Augustine needed to answer all of the questions such a birthright in the Pauline anxiety and ressentiment would bring about and "... out of the massive reality of that plan a metaphysical shadow play emerges.Out of the darkness of an unknown beginning, mysteriously intricate processes of the historical world course now make their appearance, only to lose themselves in the same darkness in a forward direction."(ibid:136).The problems of suffering, injustice, 'evil' and labor are of course modern questions as well, although we no longer have the ability to answer them in any one allencompassing narrative.The grandest of archaic narratives opened up to the West by Augustine of course was able to respond promptly and succinctly to these kinds of problems in the realm of theodicy.And it was by the means of theodicy that indeed they were answered.And the only way in which to be certain of the truth of these answers was by examining the inner life of the spirit of humanity; in individuals, the status of their respective souls.It is not within the world as such that we can see the truth of things, for it is precisely this world which is the scene of the doubts of evil, suffering, injustice and the like.Is this world all that can be?Is this world all there must be?Similar to the original call, yet here reproduced from a social location which accrues much less anxiety and where the spiteful hatred of the artisan class is muted to a point of at least self-misrecognition, Augustine's treatises chart the relationship conscience has to the empirically knowable world and its relations with those aspects of the world that occur within the meaningful: "Hence the expression world signifies for him a phenomenon of consciousness.And the progress in knowledge of the phenomenality of the world we find in Augustine is determined by the fact that he is interested in the entire external world only in as much as it has meaning for the life of the soul."(ibid:234 italics the text's).Within this world, the very definition of uncertainty as it is, after all, an historical and transient entity-in all metaphysical systems, such a world comes to life and meets its end-the only certainty we can know is life itself.Yet more than this, "... he designates the object of self-certainty as life."(ibid:234 italics the text's).The 'love' we have for our own knowledge appears profoundly true to us because it is with this that we have grasped the hand that the original spark of life has given us, akin to the Promethean gift of human life and community to the proto-human huddle.Yet we must become aware that in fact our knowledge of life and that which we can love are not the certainties of what love and knowledge are.We rather must gain an insight through selfreflection that our existence is proof of life even when we are mistaken about its purposes: "In this reflection a man becomes aware of the essence of his very self and this conviction of the reality of the world is at least assigned its own proper place."(ibid:234 italics the text's).viii  This place is still within a historicity that makes routine any possibility of remaking the history of consciousness.Such a problem is the problem of all human life as it occurs in the 'factical historical complex of enactment' (Heidegger 2004(Heidegger :146 [1921]]).Not only because of the inertia of what has been, that we also saw plagued the reception of the Pauline gospel outside of the specific social locations, there is also the obvious fact that not all aspire as individuals, no matter their relation to the means of production, to the authentic life (ibid:145).Having become a Being in this sense of what is the good life attains its happiness not through any sensuous pleasure or by any desire to possess happiness through another either within eros or even friendship.All of the classical ideals are eschewed in this radical departure from the ancient world (ibid:143).Yet Augustine maintains in an Aristotelian fashion that the best mindset of humankind would desire this new authenticity, as it is in truth the only real happiness finite life can attain.This forward thinking is in direct contrast to the sense that the heavenly city is conjured only out of the ressentiment lodged against the classical world and emboldened by the Visigothic defeat of Rome and the pillage of the city itself in August of 410.Although this low motive is present in Augustine it no longer styles the rhetorical arguments of the texts in question.Rather, as Heidegger, suggests, Augustine is placed in the position of taking stock of the knowledge now at hand given the demise of the ideals of classical civilization, at least in terms of their Western dominance (cf.ibid:123).Augustine's world is already as Christian as it is Greek, very much unlike Paul's.As well, what remains Greek in neo-Platonism is already subject to Christianity.The syncretism of historical ideals and theories of belief is a sure sign of routinization.Whereas precisely it is Augustine's advantage to be in a position resting on networks and even an official monopoly of state belief, with the further advantage of having a recently constructed set of texts to be promoted as the official narrative of both the new faith and everything deemed relevant in those faiths more ancient, Augustine is able to set the task of taking into the new structure that which the purely religious narratives of the Hebrew and Christian testaments ignored.At the same time, however, all of this 'making official' and creation of church bureaucracy, alliances with the weakened Roman state and the setting up of a new Imperial capital in the East demotes any possible remaining charismatic authority to the same margins that ironically Paul occupied at the beginning of this process.
Therefore a new problematic asserts itself.Instead of the communication of a radicality to a world that cannot hear it, that once world now must be appropriated as part of the communication apparatus, both at the level of individual action and self-knowledge, as well as within the region of social institutions.Both of these spaces of 'Being' are new and must be forward looking, at least for the time Being.Ressentiment has served its purpose for now.The old regime is gone.Anxiety also is released.The crisis of the fall of Rome, mimicking the primordial fall of man in both cultural consciousness-without the interest in archaeology begun in the renaissance one could not imagine anything extant before the great civilizations of the Mediterranean, hence the sack of Rome is kindred with the expulsion from a timeless state of grace-occurs in the full blood of apprehension.Such an event is phenomenologically rendered as Being apprehended from the diffuse and elusive state of anxiety.The sacrifice for the movement away from both spiteful resentment and the trepidation of weltshmerz is of course the loss of charismatic suasion and ironically, the enactmental complex of authenticity in the light of the end of time.ix This end has already passed and the world, though shaken, resumes its course.The course that must be set for the new world is contained in the structure and contemplation of the Augustinian texts.x  Augustine takes up the problem of the good as 'cultural property' (ibid:116).The question is now of the legitimacy of an entire philosophical history of religion.He is never a theorist in the sense that all is reflection on either memoria or factical experience (ibid:157).We are led in our piety from ritual to heartfelt action, but the heart does not feel the sensuous or the non-sensuous.These feelings are false passions, though that we knew this is not in itself false (ibid: 117, 134-6).The example of the sensual, or the feeling of sensuality, although false, is not fictional, as it is always with us and in us.It is also not an aspect of theory because we know it, even though we know it to be false (ibid:158).In other words, we do not know the sensual falsely, even though there is a further risk to our heartfelt action by passing from any need, including that of the sensual perhaps most powerfully, to its satisfaction, in that the very passage is itself addicting (ibid:159).Thus this general 'theory' of 'access' to the feelings of the heart is motivational -it prescribes a specific direction of the passions while proscribing others and we are to take action from this parsing -and the value of the motive lies in the happy life (ibid:141-2).All of this is merely one small example of what Heidegger suggests is a 'cognizance' taking, or a searching for significant connections that gives at least the appearance of a phenomenology of self in Augustine (ibid:12).In fact, given that phenomenology itself was markedly interested in the crisis of knowledge that the philosophy of history had approached but not yet enveloped, it does not appear coincidental that "The origin of [this understanding of history] lay in the Christian idea of the inner connectedness of progressive education in the history of mankind."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :130 [1923]]).In doing so, the introspection of an interiority constructed of prior experience of the factical nature of what has been, allows history to lose its radicality to what is of the present (Heidegger 2004(Heidegger :29 [1921]]) and thus reminds us that to stand within the mere historical experience is a kind of 'fallen' knowing (ibid:188).xi This expulsive space is, however, not yet humble before either itself or its own history, because it attempts to use the knowledge of what it has been as a bulwark against both the fragility of the present in its worldly sense as well as the immanence of judgement.Rather, the interior journey of the new pilgrim recognizes that one's self-reflection should consist in the valuation of what one is in the light of the Being without a history: "The distinctive element in the content of this Christian experience lies above all in humility, which is grounded in the seriousness of conscience when it passes judgement."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :235 [1923]]).The routinization of the factical experience of introspection does inevitably manifest itself in the world, because for the followers of this new faith, even before it had a state sanctioned monopoly on public ritual and the expression of legitimate religion, "... the authority of the state even when exercised by unbelievers, might be evaluated positively, due to our condition of sin, as an indispensable instrument, based upon a divinely implanted natural knowledge of religiously unilluminated heathen, for the social control of reprehensible sins and as a general condition for all mundane existence pleasing to God." (Weber 1963(Weber :231 [1922]]).
The 'city' metaphor in Augustine itself is not a mere repetition of the 'republic' of Plato (in general cf.Heidegger 2004Heidegger :212 1921)), but could be said to both lead to and follow from the investiture of the new faith into the structures of urban life through the artisan classes.The departure of this ancient 'phenomenology' of religious life, or more aptly, the 'to be the religious life' is a deep understanding that such experience and sense of engagement once enactmentally brought together as a horizon of self-formation is guarded in the 'fully present having of oneself', although this still gives both trouble and temptation alike (ibid:182).This having of or for oneself is also the concern of Being for itself and occurs as a 'how' of experience rather than of facticity (ibid:183).At the same time, the more than distracting aims of the worldly Being that lives within an ongoingness of not only the factical but also the historical also emanates 'hows' of experience, such as those within the ambit of temptation (ibid:186).Such practices and pleasures that Augustine claims occupied him night and day for his first thirty-two years aside, it is clear that he singles out a kind of experience which in principle conjures a kind of 'false time' for us.Just as the meditative and contemplative states within the ken of grace allow for a lapsed sense of the temporal-the Being that now must live without history must first get beyond history-there are the sensual states emblazoned with the passions of the world that also stop time, or at least allow us to forget about not only our own history but as well the passage of external history occurring around us even as we depart from it.This is the deeper meaningfulness of Heidegger's interest in Augustine's pet biographical topic; how temptation is also fully present within history even though historicity has a sense of its own-most within the flow of living-on (ibid:189).Further to this, it also presents itself as a factical how of experience-a highly valued and socially sanctioned one, even if it be so negatively, as it attracts us all the more with rumor of charms untrammeled by civil circlesand thus has its own special 'charity'.It becomes in its Being-ness a trouble and burden on oneself even though it represents an opportunity with oneself (ibid:190).This is, after all, the self in the world.This self and its living-on as worldly is, as we have often seen above, one of the prime bases for revolutionary religious plaintiff, whether charismatic or reflective, with the to be enacted 'policy' of possessing this as historically remonstrated (cf. ibid:191).None of this is of course predetermined, but it always seems dolefully so from the perspective of the social critic, which is also what Augustine must be seen as.Given the lack of authentic action in the world and by it, temptation and its corresponding coping regulate the choice of projects of action and modes of decision.This sensual symbiosis overtakes us (ibid:196).Ultimately, "... the human becomes a question to himself."(ibid:206) and this underscores the real temptation beyond that of deception and probation-that is, the tribulatory judgement.As well, authenticity is distorted by feigning its presence through the passions.The worldly loves must indeed captivate us but they always remain as passing as this world must also be.We know empirically that the sensual at length fails in its conquest of excitement and addiction.We are, as finite Beings, no longer capable of loving in this way.Perhaps even friendship must also pass even though it nobly strains to resist Changes both in oneself and in the other.The 'conceded calculations' of all forms of the sensual and the 'a-tempted' abruptly truncate the action of the spontaneous love of God in humanity (ibid:197, cf. also Ricoeur 1955).Fever and reverence are not merely linked etymologically here (Heidegger 2004(Heidegger :202 [1921]]).Even so, we still detect the Augustinian 'delight' in life itself, as if it has been transmuted from the earlier more earthy delights of youth in general.This delight is itself rooted in facticity, but sublimates itself in the light of truth (ibid:205).This involves Augustine, as it does for ourselves, in a constant struggle in overcoming the 'castration' of the present attempted overcoming (ibid:208).No matter what activity he engages with, his consciousness of historical Being intrudes sensually and passionately, so that by the time he writes the account of the first half of his life to document his final conversion and sea-change, not even constructive actions are spared from self-conscious criticism: "I read and understood by myself all the books that I could find on the so-called liberal arts, for in those days I was a good-for-nothing and a slave to sordid ambitions.But what advantage did I gain from them?I read them with pleasure, but I did not know the real source of such true and certain facts as they contained."(Augustine 1961:88 [c.388]).We are reminded that these kinds of activities become all the more dangerous if rationalized, ironically, not unlike the ethics of cultic beliefs themselves, as they are subject to trends of routinization and massification (cf.Heidegger 2004Heidegger :213 [1921]]).xii Augustine is no doubt at ease parsing 'sin' into various categories of the Being within history as it attempts to live beyond history using only the knowledge of the world as it is, that is, with only knowledge that can be historically attained.This predicament should sound immediately familiar.As well as confronting every living Being with the foreknowledge of our own deaths to come, the limited and always passing escape from this 'running on' turns on the knowledge of the world, whether theoretical, aesthetic, or even enactmental (cf.ibid:214, 216).Our 'comportment' within history is such that we are all as Dilthey was in his philosophy of history as it takes respite in a new philosophy of the human sciences.Heidegger's insight here is that Augustine already provides an ancient model for the overcoming of this historical dilemma.In a different manner from Paul, whose resolution is immediate and immanent and cannot live within any kind of history, Augustine is not placed 'between' metaphysics and epistemology, as Dilthey suggests and as Dilthey himself as a thinker was (cf.Dilthey 1988Dilthey :237 [1923]]), but rather is placed precisely at the nexus of the two.This confluence of fusing knowledge with spirit, the having of and the Being of, epistemology and metaphysics occurs first in Augustine and what is more, occurs only through his phenomenological stances.What is objective also becomes something which is a co-enactment of seeing and Being (ibid:168).The work of self-reflection on the nature of human will in the light of God's will allowed a further amalgam-that the will of the worldly was at best, the will of knowing, at worst, of having or desiring or tempting etc.-but that the will of Being was in truth the Will in Being, the Being of Will itself.This constituted the originary source for the metaphysical realm and its ordinations, mimicked, so Augustine came to believe, by both the farcical fabrications of the Greco-Roman pantheons and their attendant city-states, and, he hoped, to be exemplified by the becoming fully present of the new culture of Christendom.
That Augustine is able to accomplish this 'phenomenological' reduction of knowledge which was hyletic and is to be bracketed through the reflective interiority of Being is for Heidegger, a tremendous moment in the history of what cannot exactly be called historical, and remains for us the archetype of what was telescoped in Paul.What occurs in conversion and thence what can motivate the new Being living without history and without a history is painstakingly revealed and excavated in Augustine's life's works.What is exposed is each of our most intimate anxieties and resentments yet newly bathed in the light of our very-own-ness and the truth that even this cannot be our own.

Anxiety and ressentiment as vehicles for a new mode of Being in Paul
Because anxiety does not leave us alone, it can easily create resentment.This may be in time breed an authentic ressentiment, a malicious existential envy that becomes obsessed that I am the very thing I do not want to be and someone else, living or imagined, has all that I desire.Yet it is precisely the problem that we are no longer, in our ressentiment and anxiety, within the very time resentment requires to ingratiate its fullest detrimental effect.So Heidegger sees in Paul a portable character set that any one of us can take on as oneself.This is so because for Heidegger, we meet in Paul the archetypical problematic of communication and the other to self.The extremity of the context of Paul's message and its atemporal implications are only a difference in degrees within the spectrum of the phenomenology of the other and further to this, the problem of intentionality.Neither for James nor Weber is this problem a crucial one.In the first instance, religious experience is selfdefining and need not be shared in order for its life to be known as part of the human condition.What is communicated without corresponding vision or enlightenment is certainly still worthy of the name of religion, but it falls into the secondary behavior and institutional life of those who hold a creedal meaning to themselves, with only the weight of cultural tradition to both show and to vouch for such.For the second, the primary life of religion is in fact these self-same institutions and their histories, as well as the observable behavior of their followers.The problem of communication does not arise in James, and in Weber it is solved by the tradition.As well, neither of our first two vehicles of the modern career of hermeneutics is interested in the problem of origins.We know the merit of religious life and experience through its fruits, in James and not its roots, has he consistently reminds us and in Weber, the origins of belief systems in their local or regional environmental and socio-economic structures as abstract spaces of gradual development, sometimes spurred on by specific sentiments demonstrating either marginal or centered social locations is enough (although cf.Heidegger 2004Heidegger :251 [1921] ] for some equivocation here).It is only now, with Heidegger, that both problems simultaneously arise.xiii The use of Paul and later Augustine, will exemplify the scope of the phenomenological project with regard to the problems of origin and communication.
We have already seen that 'Paul' attempts the resolution of the problem of communication by the itinerant immanence of his kerygma.The problem of origin is similarly ameliorated-if not solved outright due to his lack of empirical witness to the core events at the revealed and claimed source of the 'what will be' and the'what must be'; his first letters date about twenty years after the supposed moment of the execution of Jesusby the perhaps more substantiated empiricity of Paul's own presence at different times and places.He appears here and there for the first time and his message does not presage him in any substantive manner-only sometimes are towns forewarned as to keep him away, for instance-and thus the origin of the immanential understanding of the new history is in fact Paul himself in each of these new spaces of proclamation, confrontation and attempted charisma.It is an interesting insight of phenomenological hermeneutics that such could be the case and we are of the sense that in only such a context could this conceivably be relied upon as working within the historical problematic of the inertia of traditional authority-in spite of its challenger in that charismaticand the problem of cultural difference which is carried on the wave of this inertial history.Yet the situation is not so radical as it might first seem.There were many itinerant preachers, magicians and sermonists of all stripes in the Near East at this time-Jesus himself was not exceptional to this regard-and the cultures that the Roman Empire had enveloped were familiar with major mythic tropes upon which these rested their messages, such as the Orphic cycles or those Dionysian.In fact there is no hermetically sealed problem of the other if we take as our origin the humanity of existence and as our terminus its mortality.Perhaps this is the key reason why we eventually find that the Pauline resolution of this dialectic becomes quite popular, aside from its at first nongendered welcome of 'come as you are'.
Even so, the problem of communication of the new to another who is still within the not-new remains as at least a pragmatic inconvenience.If we understand Paul to be sincere about the fact of spreading this message, his enactmental complex would have to include the concernful Being which is precisely concerned with becoming in the presence of the Being of Beings.For the moment, we can cast his vilification of the what has been aside as what may have been a typically Greek theatre of rhetoric in order to make more fundamental points.The messianic preface 'you have heard it said, but I say unto you' is much in evidence, but we may take this as standard practice of all work which is of the new, and which is becoming in the self as it aspires to become in the other.It is the primordial policy statement, as it were, for it says to the Being of tradition that this way of Being and its lifeworld is in error, at least in some substantial manner and usually this error is made concerning the meaning of life in this world in light of an occluded other world.We cannot hear the song of this other world if we continue to live our lives in such a manner as is cultural and traditional -and thus is also what the 'has been' of all history up to this point is constructed of -and thus we must change.Why would we change?First we must be convinced of the importance of the meaning the other world imparts to this one.This is accomplished by the claim that the other world in fact has created this one with its history and memory intact from the beginning of time until the end.Life indeed has a purpose and one cannot change that purpose from this world, as this world is but the stage for the playing out of the existential drama; the Greek trope of Moira would also have been familiar to Paul's audience, in a variety of forms.Even so, if all this is true, then how do we change?We need then to be convinced that the message of the charismatic policy maker is at first realistically realizable in this world as it is and that we can follow it without any real loss.Of course, this is precisely what we cannot do with the soteriological eschatologies of the Pauls and the Bodhisattvas, for example, and this is likely the major reason why such messages appeal only to the marginal social locations who have little if anything to lose by adopting this new kind of history and making themselves, if only for a moment, part thereof.At the same time, this is also the reason why the centered and elite social locations convert to such an originally trophotropaic calling after it itself has been invested in the institutions of power, as for example, in Weber.
For the moment-which is indeed all this new policy of concernfulness of Being in the face of immanence really has to utter, after all-we are placed within the radical disjuncture of time and Being.Paul accosts us in much the same manner as Heidegger suggests history does.We must become as Paul himself.Not to 'share' his vision, but to be that vision in the very manner we assume he has been.How is this task accomplished?It is Dilthey who frames the experiential problematic which faces Paul and from which Heidegger interprets its egress: When Jewish Law, Pagan consciousness of the world and Christian faith clashed with one another in Saint Paul's struggles of conscience; when in his experience faith in the law and faith in Christ were juxtaposed as two living experiences of his innermost understanding, both based on the experience of the living God, coexisting in his consciousness were a great historical past and a great historical present, both in their deepest, that is, religious foundations and he experienced the interior transition by which the total consciousness of a historical development of the entire life of the soul awakened in him.(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :230 [1923]]).
The important nexus of conflicting loyalties is one with which we can all take part.This is not empathy in the strict sense, but a kind of recognizance of the essence of the struggle for life in the face of the inertia of history and culture.xiv We must make our own way in the world and yet to suddenly understand that our way is not our own but is the way of all persons and cultures is at once as alienating as it is profoundly comforting.No doubt the factical reality of Paul's time in fact reflected neither the Jewish law-as it was very local in extent and at the time was subsumed under the policies of the Roman Empire-nor the new faith-which had only a handful of scattered adherents, disagreeing in detail and proto-doxa the import of the phenomena of Christ-but precisely the 'Pagan' world consciousness, which in fact Paul, as a Roman citizen, exploits.Although we take his interiority as the space of becoming, producing the synthesis of Faith out of the struggling dialectic of Law and Culture, we cannot take as seriously the pronouncement of the world historical implications of this synthesis until we attain the space in which we encounter Augustine.However true it is that "... we understand only the facts of history which we relive in the richness of our souls.And our experience mediates this understanding to us to the extent that it reaches down into the deep and central basis of culture, although all of us, to be sure only partially understand what is past."(ibid:230), we cannot become the vehicles for entire cultures' and their historical facts in the same way we imagine we take on what is a new experience to our personal selves.Yet this analogy is more than a phantasm even if it be in part delusion, for the mode of self-importance is characteristic of every enactment of one's self-world in that such an ipsissimous un-restraint marks the non-good-the previous cultural world and its ignorance of the purpose of life or the previous law and its relation to mistaken faith-as generating the good.It inverses the authentic relating to the self-world which for the time Being, is unbalanced by these conflicts (cf.Heidegger 2004Heidegger :178 [1921]]).In agreeing with James, Heidegger takes as a given that the religious person is not a philosopher of religion (ibid:235).Even so, the problem of hermeneutics as radically anti-conventional and not merely dialogic, appears as part of the struggle for consciousness in Paul (ibid:202).First he and then ourselves, must clear the subjective space of religious experience (ibid:238).This is akin to the clearing of traditional space by the experience of charisma.It is not surprising that given the confluence of the subjectivity of the new which cannot at first attach itself in whole cloth to what has been, that there is an introspection which irrupts through the proclamations and tirades leveled at the different urban cultures along Paul's routes.Ultimately, what is Being communicated rhetorically is the essence of the new life housed for the moment in the spirit: "The inwardness of Christianity found the focal point of its conception and treatment of all reality, indeed entry into the mysterious metaphysical world as well, in the life of the soul."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :231 [1923]]).Even the background of its first franchise, those to whom the glad tidings made their most direct appeal, were elements of Classical society which had already prepared the individuated ground through their specializing division of labor as local technical monopolies.Such knowledge was theirs and theirs alone and others came to them for the services they could render.It is not a social stretch to see them adhering to a faith which ministers and proclaims a monopoly of relevant knowledge: "From the time of its inception, ancient Christianity was characteristically a religion of artisans.Its savior was a semi-rural artisan and his missionaries were wandering apprentices, the greatest of them a wandering tent-maker, so alien to the land that in his epistles he actually employs in a reverse sense a metaphor relating to the process of grafting."(Weber 1963(Weber :95 [1922]]).The very process of reconstructing the world and its raw unfinished materials into a useful product serves as a potent experiential 'homology' to the remaking of the life of the world with the new knowledge of its design and light.The artisan of the spirit becomes a fisher of men.xv The faith we already have in our stock of knowledge at hand, the kind of how-to skill and familiarity that serves others and fulfills our vocation is already also present in our interiority when conjoined with the new spirit-at-hand: "Through this sort of faith we are in the first place certain of the external world, as long as we are engage in practical activity.Then, in the same context of practical behavior, we find ourselves referred to a Highest Good, a Good accessible to us only in faith, because it is invisible and in hope, because it is not present to us." (Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :237 [1923]]).The process of having faith in one's skills and having the hope that they will effect a transformation of the concrete is the same as the process that these elements share in the realm of the spirit.The spiritual stock of knowledge at hand, or as well, the stock of spiritual knowledge at hand, is also kindred with the process of phenomenology as the new guiding hand of the geisteswissenschaften.
Just as we experience the facticality of everyday life as completely imbricated within our consciousness, its facticity present at first as the experience of ongoingness-whether as a constructive process by which the world is transformed in normative and mostly instrumental fashion, or even if such experience is touched by the extramundane movement of the spirit in life-for the earliest Christians "Everywhere we find revealed faith interwoven with religious life in which, in the inner recesses of one's will, one experiences God as will, person to person."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :232 [1923]]).Here, as one would expect from the aspirations of a disenfranchised class which is yet forced to serve those above it, the syncretism of the new faith and the factical life experience of endurance becomes a new way of life.As Heidegger suggests, 'no one loves what he endures, even if he loves to endure' (Heidegger 2004(Heidegger :152 [1921]]).The 'hows' of facticity are the aspects of experiencing all of the special senses of one's task at hand.It is precisely this sense that is missing in the mere historical; the authentic historicity of Beings is absent from it (ibid:172).Thus the experiencing self is not a reflective self (ibid:10) and following from this, we do not get a clear theoretical interpretation of the kerygma in this first period of the new faith.Instead, we have at least two major glosses on factical experience which are continuous in their subterranean activity: anxiety and ressentiment.Neither of these is new in itself.They are borrowed and continued from the ever-present emotional life of the margins.Anxiety stems from the need to make one's way in the oppressive and at best anonymous world of one's betters, with the clearest expression of one's worldly fate surrounding one's arts of subsistence and loved ones in those who are even more marginal than oneself.xvi Will one and one's family survive the next day or week?The monopolistic services that the various artisans through their specialization and division of labor contrived in the small centers of the Eastern Mediterranean obviously aided their cause.Yet as well, the other continuing presence in their lifeworld was the hateful resentment of an underclass who may well exhibit much more useful skills and arts than those 'merely high born'.This potent combination 'keeps one going', as it were.Ironically, the negative emotion of ressentiment abets a thirst for revenge which cannot be satisfied and thus, as we have seen, engenders a life of its own, even if this life then is placed in a competition with the new faith as love for the interiority of our Beings.Anxiety too, also a negative emotion in a different sense, works itself into an inertia which is semi-conscious and has no need of calculation.Thus it is but a small step to understand each of these as necessary spaces of fertility for the religious imagination, especially if the savior promises relief from both.
Given that all of this is pre-theoretical and is an internalization of the factical life experience of those who can hear Paul and take his vision into themselves, how are these emotional proclivities utilized?The calculative efforts of revenge appear as rhetorical promises in Paul, whereas the sudden and irruptive anxieties appear as the process of the apocalypse itself.If the historical as homeless must be derived from factical life, (ibid: 24), than there is both a gift and a task that the what has been continually represences.There is both a continuous burden and promise within the facticality of historical life.Only the end of history as the appearance of the moment of salvation can put an end to these processes.The contemporary spirit, whether our own or of this Pauline period, appears to be unaware of its own confrontation with history (ibid: 26).This confrontation with history is of course the struggle with skepticism and relativism and also one for a new culture (ibid: 32).We are, with Heidegger, placed in a situation where we are unsure who is reading whom.Are we projecting our lifeworld back into time, or in doing so, is this other time now reading us in its own terms?For the Pauline period is also fraught with seemingly similar tropes.The rich cultural diversity of the cosmopolitan empire and its attendant relativism in all things of belief and practice appears strongly there.Those who wish to proclaim anything at all are met with the stringent skepticism of the worldly person.Paul's attempt is to then become as worldly, through his missions.The Pauline religion is not truly based on an empirical experience of Jesus, but is rather intent on migratory experiences (ibid: 49).Finally, the struggle for the new culture, though it may animate us in the concrete, can surely serve only as a metaphor for the Christian of Paul and for that matter, the Augustinian, as this 'culture' of the interiority of faith and God as the will of the other world precedes and adjudicates in a final manner the fate of worldly cultures.This is why the basic proclamatory facticity of the early Christians and its corresponding enactment of life is 'decisive' for experience to occur at all (ibid: 56).Akin to the beginning of any process by which the artisan crafts the world anew, one begins with an object which cannot be perceived as such.Yet the radicality of the new faith rests not in the mature process of the master but in the grasping of the young apprentice.This is so because the Pauline object can also not be apperceived by any observer (ibid:57).This phenomenological term denotes a process of the mind's eye that, through experience, knows the formal forms of life and thus also objects that can be brought to life.The apprentice cannot tell what is to be, but can only practice and attempt the object until through the repeated formula of a certain technical, but perhaps also spiritual, process arrives at mastery.This 'mastery' is the end time of the apperceptual process.So the early Christian lives time as an end time and 'experiences' the end of history moment by moment.This is the only way by which to 'practice' for this new kind of spiritual mastery.Paul's distress for his own life and of his life, is magnified the cultural distress for the end-time (ibid:67), to represent some sort of solidarity for those others who also are apprentices in the face of the new Being which must, for the first time, live without history.
The apprenticeship to Being involves a kind of para-Being.Parousia is the kind of presence those without history exude.This formal apperception is a 'clasping to' while still bracketing the ability to act-or in the case of the apprentice, to continue our artisan template, a true inability to judge the series of actions necessary to change the world while still handling it-and this existential status arises out of the ever-present tendency of what is projected to be accompanied by 'verfallen' in facticity (ibid:44).Our concern for judging and then taking the first step becomes the 'prejudice' of an object (ibid:35), whether that be simply material or construed as a purpose or goal.Yet we notice the relation between the goal of apprehending, as well as its shadow, apprehension, only with a phenomenological analysis that brackets the hyletic.Hence the Pauline presence of parousia is imminent and is inclusive of the mysterious and disconcerting feeling of 'Being awry', a mystery which to the spiritual apprentice is the first step toward faith (ibid:75, 81).If such an existential situation is thus radically perplexed at both itself and its place in the unchanged world (ibid:102)-unless of course the world is now worlding so differently, the revelation has occurred within the history of culture appropriate to and appropriated by this moment, that we ourselves are now forever lost-this bemusement is not a sign of present authenticity, but only its potential enactment.Paul characterizes himself as a 'pneumatic', which is understood here to mean a Being-spirit living in the 'spirithaving-become' (ibid:88).Given this, factical life experience is more of a mood rather than an attitude and still less an attitudinal structure and like other kinds of moods, its passage entails a coming back to something other than itself (ibid:95).This mood, however, can only pass with the end of history and thus, like anxiety and ressentiment, is continuous with living-on towards death.The mood of this new vocation as well seeks another kind of death in transfiguration.Such a vocation appears in Paul and must not forsake, but rather proclaim, that its phenomenological standing is that of the enacted 'Beingthere' of this new end (ibid:99).Even granting that factical life experience of the what has been has its own genuineness as its auto-explanation (ibid:103), that is, no pre-theoretical accounting of this or that lifeworld as it presents itself to us has a need for a theory of itself -the 'pre' in this sense is an etic fiction -one must forget or bracket out what one knows of culture and history if one is to approach the new calling, the new object and its process of authenticity.One has never before been the one that makes the tent or the pot, but now, akin to what has not been said and to what this new Being says unto us, we will be the ones to construct it, as we must be the ones to live the new faith.Both of these movements are at first unbearable and not merely because one is responsible in a new way to others.Rather, one is made co-responsible for God's purposes in this world and such a kerygmatic calling as this can only be experienced in the apparent tortuousness of the authentic (ibid:104).Yet we cannot become reflective about such a change-it is action itself -as such sadness born of nostalgia or remorse for the fallen life can erode or interrupt this new Being.In this way, the concern about parousia can be in fact worldly (ibid:109).With such a bracketing accomplished, however, we become aware that forgetting is also present in fulfilling in that it fills in for the absence of the forgotten.This is not quite aporetic, as such a Beingabsent is grasped enactmentally and not reflectively in comparison to the other former Beings of one's own history and the history of culture as a whole (ibid:137).xvii  The Pauline anxiety is precisely that we are able to forget what has in the world made us indebted to it.These processes construct a false love, just as we are often unable to 'let go' of the relations we have had since our childhood, motivated as many of them are by at least equivocal emotions.This inauthenticity is the brand of all worldly life, as so much, if not all of our adult roles take up the altered scripts of those we fulfilled in childhood, without not only reflection but also without auto-conversion.The revelation of the new Being is very much an ironic theory of what has happened to us, with the demand that we now escape it given our self-knowledge.It is as much hermeneutic, in that it calls for a mature Being understanding of its own finitude through the demise of the history of that Being, as it is phenomenological, bracketing out the 'what has happened to me' in light of the question 'what can I be now regardless of what has been?'

The Absolute as Absolution
Because of Heidegger's sense that what is historical may be resolved and overcome by what is ontological, and that Augustine is a benchmark of this resolution, we may now examine how the quest for a wertrationales for life takes its cues from the finite tasks of living-on.We will then suggest that the calling of oneself to the other within factical existence is in fact the necessary first sign of the irruptive project of Being called by the Otherness of Being.In this, rational action directed at an absolute value grows out of similar projects which have mere means as their ends.
Hence, whether in the fusion of knowledge and Being, or in the overcoming of history, it is the search for the absolute that animates the hermeneutic pilgrimage of phenomenologically driven social study of religion.Suggestive first of Augustine, and then of Paul, Dilthey reminds us of the function of the two major forms of experience: "Inasmuch as we co-experience something in the past through the art of historical representation, we are taught as though by the drama of life itself.Indeed, our Being is expanded, and psychic forces stronger than our own intensity our existence."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :131 [1923]]).Although Augustine is prosaic, and Paul 'epistolary', their texts have the timbre of the poetic, for they both seek action in the light of an absolute value, and know this value to be the most generalizable.Akin to the human scientist or the philosopher, "... generalization serves the poet also in this way, inasmuch as for a moment it elevates the soul of his listener out of the turmoil, sufferings, and passions he is describing and into the world of untrammeled thought."(ibid:99).This kind of gestalt involves us either an external action that suspends the time of the what has been and proclaims the end of history, or as an internal set of contemplations on the nature of the timeless spirit.This duet of radically new kinds of experiences of course are not ahistorical, as both reference themselves as a moving away from the temporal flow of facticity, and seek anew the concept of factuality which, for the bookends of the new faith, can be apprehended only in the authenticity of what is.For the phenomenologist, the recognizance of the two major 'methods' of working this kind of analysis-the bracketing of the hyletic facticality of what has been history and the mundane world, as well as the noetic progression of the introspectively 'pure ego'-must have been revelatory.Heidegger does caution our enthusiasm somewhat, as he notes that the noetic experience is still in fact an historical one, and that it may be foregrounded as well as directed (Heidegger 2004(Heidegger :253 [1921]]cf.also 1999), and that religion belongs to both the active (Pauline) and the contemplative (Augustinian) (ibid:242).He agrees with James (2002 throughout) that the specific meaning-value of religion must be sought in the world of experience (ibid:244), and that the seemingly intuitive processes of phenomenology still require interpretation which is not 'eidetically neutral', as one must 'drink if one is thirsty' (ibid:254).Even so, we are more aware of the absolute value to which is directed the new definitions of rational action or thought, either as the life-changing giving over of one's Being to live without history and thus the preparing of each moment in the enunciative light of immanence, or to undertake complete and scrupulous accounting of all of that which passed for action and thought in the old life.The absolute value that frames the horizon of both of these incipient phenomenologies is the nature of the eidetic itself: In the same sense God is also the object of search as such.The restlessness of the inner life, constantly altering the objects of mental images, here finds its absolute object; a particular object is no longer soughtwhich always means a particular search-but the search finds its goal in God.This corresponds to the undercurrent of searching, of the 'gone, gone', of the unrest, by which all the particular yearning for a change becomes just a phenomenon or a part.When God is 'the end as such', He is indeed the end of the search as such.(Simmel 1959(Simmel :36 [1905]]).
The wertrationales that culminates in the whole of the vision of Godhead, in whatever cultural form in which we aspire to its light, constitutes a definite end to both knowledge of objects as things -as in the phenomenological reduction-and to objective knowledge-as in the eschewing or bracketing of the ontic or epistemic discourses.Instead, what is revealed are the 'things themselves', the forms of eternity and the eternal formula of existence as essence, and the apprehension of the structure of experience, rather than the veils of the structures of the lifeworld which has been.For Paul, the amanuensis of 'his' texts was but the first call to the other as the call of the ultimate Other.A call away from the otherness of the world as it has been, from its mundane facticality which betrayed the world to its worldliness, yet as well betraying the world to its fate as alienated from the other world, impels us to the new activity of creating life without the instruments of the living-on.For Augustine, the texts now explain the variety of betrayals, both to ourselves from within ourselves, and both of ourselves by the world into which we are thrown unawares.We suspect that one of largest regrets Augustine had to overcome was that it took nearly half his life to realize this betrayal by the world and his willing participation in it.xviii Yet ultimately this lengthy apprenticeship to the faculties of Being was necessary, much in the same way that the conversion of Saul carries the latter over the bridge that touches both the world as it now was and the hitherto undiscovered country of the sacred and the authentic: "In a profound way, these writings traced the connection of psychical facts with the will and the whole person, whereas those facts had until then been explained predominantly as cognitive life."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :238 [1923]]).More than this, both sets of texts' poesis is an example of the new rational realization that authentic loving is possible only before or 'amongst' God (Heidegger 2004(Heidegger :221 [1921]]).Is this but a subtext that historicism would inevitably miss as local or even idiosyncratic?The generalization of which Dilthey speaks must also include a kind of romanticism in lieu of ethnographically documented universal human traits.We must rather look in Durkheim, for example, to provide a more grounded sense of what might be eidetic in this sense.Even so, it is surely appropriate to concur with Heidegger when he suggests that the replication of God in Augustine as still partial to Greek metaphysics present a problem for the phenomenologist-both then and now, perhaps-and the interpretation is forced into the claimed experience of the absolute as its absolution; such an experience of God for Augustine (and for Paul) rather must be "...an experiential complex of the historical facticity of one's life."(ibid:222).This is likely the only way in which to surpass Dilthey's problem of the lack of 'analytical system'.If Augustine as well as Paul appears to us as inchoate, then this is the telling and inevitable sign of their access of the eidetic space of Being.Such essentiality, though absolute, is hardly 'thing-like', hardly the kind of thing that one can either objectify in a system of knowledge, or object to as an element of facticity.This said, the prelude to phenomenological hermeneutics still admits that: Augustine, like no one else in the centuries since Paul, was able to evaluate the intellectual forces around him on the grand scale and in consequence of that, surrounded as he was by the ruins of ancient speculation, he rightly understood the truth of Greek skepticism as compared with the objective worldview.He then was able to discover the decisive point at which Christian experience cancelled out ancient skepticism and so was able to grasp a standpoint akin to the critical one.But he unable to carry it through.(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :238 [1923]]).
We have already suggested that both Paul and Augustine may be less conservatively held to be social and cultural critics of immense proportions.Perhaps the phenomenological guise of their works is not the most radical one after all.xix CONCLUSIONS If 'philosophy arises from factical life experience' (cf.Heidegger 2004Heidegger :6 [1921]], then we must be assured that our reflections on living-on will return to life and thus also be reassured that through living on we will continue to be placed in a mode of self-reflection.This tandem of action and contemplation stands exemplified only in its most extreme form in Paul and Augustine, respectively.The idea of an absolute as both a theoretical option for the space of comprehension of that which appears at first accidental and endless is given in our fore-having of each sense of presence, in that the experience of self as a subject and what is experienced as an object are part of factical life experience and that this is not a confrontation between a sense and a form, but rather a self-assertion (cf.ibid:7).There is a fusion of momentary horizon of both our Being as experiencing and the world as experienced, suggesting a moment of resolution which cannot be duplicated.Each 'now' is unique.And yet the 'how' of this presentation of facticity is not experienced other than as part of the foregoing content (ibid:9).In this way we come to know that factical life experience is ultimately both indifferent and insufficient (ibid:11).In turn, the knowledge of the creative is muted by the ongoingness of the placid, which appears to us as anonymous and impersonal.At once allowing the Beingabsolute and the Being-resolute of present history in the facticality of the mundane, they originate both from 'rational moments and the spontaneous forces of life' (ibid:18).This sense of having to face up to the passage of time with some resolve is part of the gradually solidifying aspiration to resolve oneself to such a history.If the historical opens up the self-understanding of philosophy, phenomenology is a mode of access of this 'selbstverstandnis' through factical life itself (ibid:24).xx One of the ways we today show resolve to that which is immanent in living-on and also by which hope to resolve that which is mysterious in its making, is through the veneration of scientific knowledge as if it has some timeless or absolute validity (ibid:22).Phenomenology is also originally a 'science' of the object, but not an empirical science of observation.Here objects indeed are things but this is not always equally the case for things Being objects 'in themselves' (ibid:25).In Husserlian phenomenology, if consciousness becomes a region of investigation and also of experience, much as we see the self-reflection of Augustine carving out this territory from within -or, if the sculptor's metaphor be better apprehended in the light of fore-having of the soul, then the investigator and evaluator discards the detritus of the worldly self and exposes the essential form hidden beneath it -then phenomenology delineates the 'what is' content of experience, the 'how' of relation and thus also how it is enacted in ego's relation to the apperceived (ibid:39, 43).Phenomenology is thus beyond the binary of rational and irrational experience.It is more akin to the non-rational of pre-modern metaphysics, which is also why for Heidegger it appears to suit the proclamation and the evaluation of this worldview (ibid:54).Ultimately, however, it remains the presence and our experience of 'the absolute un-repeatability of originary acts' that conjures immanence and suggests the notion of both the technical process of the original conception of the apperceived and the more abstract and perhaps romantic idea of the absolute (cf.ibid:62).If the latter becomes over-valued -that is, valued above and beyond the mundane values appended to other kinds of originary acts in the world as it is, as well as becoming overcompensatory in its value aspiration from that world thereby creating an other world to appear in contradistinction to this worldthen not only is authenticity defined by the 'having in so far one is' but hope becomes the 'exactitude of knowing' as a kind of transportation (ibid:70).Authenticity in hoping can no longer be, in the light of the over-valued as absolute and the absolute as the space of true valuation, that the 'when' is grasped as an horizontal finitude, nor is it the verfallen as a moment, even the next one, of factical life (ibid:72).Thus we approach a kind of 'enactmental-not' where this situatedness of Being is opposed to any scene of the natural attitude in which 'not-truth' lies.The character of enactment cannot be objectified as it is not a 'happening', or occurrence in the usual sense of the passage of time (ibid:77).This enactmental space precedes the a priori, though it also gains proceeds from the concept of the 'beforehand', which animates our reflections of fore-having (cf.ibid:105).xxi Anticipation is the character of the momentous gathering of the enactmental-not, just as there is between the two ancient sets of texts a waiting period.This period sees of course the historical and structural shift in belief from the fading classical systems of thought to those more mystical and elemental, though mysticism and Christianity are said to still hold some deep antipodes by Heidegger (ibid:89).This shift in timbre of belief mirrors the self-same fading of the stability of the classical regimes and territories to the often intruded upon regions of the early Christian empire, where the other forces itself upon us in an irruptive sense, much in the same way as the aspired to absence of the enactmental.The invasions of the Northerners may well have seemed to be false idols or alarms of the true apocalypse, but it is easy enough to imagine how by the end of Augustine's life the idea of living eschatologically would make eminent sense to those in what was left of the Western Empire.Just so, the 'how' of the factical life then becomes the obstinate wait and weight, of living on (ibid:106).
If it was at first incomprehensible for observers of the fall of Rome-or even the death of Jesus, for that tiny group of concernful Beings enacted by the supposedly originary acts of the absence of history-who still used the analytics of the classical epistemes, the phenomenology-of archetypical guideposts of Augustine and Paul for instance-seeks to understand the incomeprehensible in itself.It 'lets it be' as philosophy proper has nothing to do with the subject-object distinction (ibid:93).As well, the radicality of hermeneutics is supposed to be akin to the utter sudden 'new-ness' of the kerygmatic quality of the gospel's new life (ibid: 95).Such problems as are regarded as announced or enunciative as well as those apprehended as interior and reflective do not lie in historical enactment (ibid: 124).Rather, they appear at the uttermost horizon of our momentary overcoming of all finiteness in the face of the next appearance of all finitude.
The catalyst for the approach of a Being without history is ironically memory itself.A memorial can unlock authenticity through confessional reflectivity, as it furthers the 'enigmas of enactment' in its represencing of that which is past as an originary act and it can constitute a regaining presence as a mnemonic (cf.ibid:133).We are, in the space of all memorialization, linked to parousia.Indeed, memoria may be seen as a kind of mortal parousia.Even if we here involve ourselves in the problematic nature of the sign as a sense referent, although deeply metaphoric and playing without the cloisters of empirical referentiality (cf. ibid:210), what can occur or be present for us as objectivity is given to its own-most Being (ibid:184).This sense of ipsissimosity in Augustine for example rests not in analytical power but in "... the genius of his personal feeling for life."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :237 [1923]]).It is the same for all of us.Phenomenological hermeneutics repositions the originary as radical immanence to that which has been, to that which is 'received' by us from our social location within the this world.Hermeneutics has always practiced in the light of the new experience a replacement of previous prejudice.The ever shifting light of experience cannot complete the resolute aspiration to the absolute.The fusion of horizons does not abandon its approach, but then neither does it overtake the proclaimed absence of history.It remains a question of multiple witnesses to proclamation and diverse introspection of numberless selves to construct the essence of what must be the religious life.Each of these points has its very own-ness and it Being concernful for itself.Each becomes its own origin even if in turn, each also becomes its own self-annihilation.Autohagiographical similitude is what the Pauline and Augustinian texts present to us, as we rewrite them in the invisible ink of both the mnemonic and irruptive.Their points are also our own as autochthonous and must be an origin of the religious experience while not encompassing it: Not without reason each point in the whole circle of psychological impulses has been considered as 'the origin' of religion: fear and love, the cult of ancestors and self-idolatry, ethical considerations and the feeling of dependency.Each of these theories is erroneous insofar as it claims to explain the origin; it is correct insofar as it tends to imply one of the origins of religion.(Simmel 1959(Simmel :74 [1905] ] italics the text's).
Simmel continues by stating that the religious life and its ongoing experience can appear in realms far removed from the centers of what has been taken for religiosity or even where the sacred has been identified.This is as it should be, given that the life of religion as essence lies in its procreative spontaneity, at the level of individuated experience.The proclamation of the 'having had' which is now the already 'having of' is the necessary testimonial to what is living within finitude.In this view, we are what we need to be and have what we need to have.This existence must end as it began and no amount of factical history can assuage our fore-knowledge of the absence of events and eventualities.To act and reflect within this space of absence is to know our true beginnings and our authentic ends.
Notes: i Jonas' project of metaphysics lies in contradistinction to Arendt's general agreement with Heidegger that our own time is that of a denouement that we stand at the end of metaphysics in principle.Yet while the first seeks a new beginning, the second speaks of 'thinking outside', without the safety nets of the rails on which we had been riding.Jonas is Augustinian in this sense, and Arendt Pauline.Yet at the same time these successors of Heidegger may have reversed the role of anxiety and introspection.In Jonas, to project anew is to confront the anxiety of an age of absence, a time out of Time.In Arendt introspection is called for precisely because we can no longer rely on the 'banisters' to maintain our ontological grip.(cf.Vogel 2008 for a more detailed accounting of these ironies).
ii Ample though diffuse evidence of these points may be had throughout the text: Weber, Troeltsch and James are all given their brief due, for example, as clearing the space for a phenomenological foray where no analysis has gone before (cf. Heidegger 2004:14,15,20, 115,117); that we cannot view the object as a mere historical artifact-it has more meaning for us perhaps than it ever did for the ancients, especially if it requires an actual textual literacy to attempt its comprehension -but as well in separating ourselves from the 'objecthistorical' sense, we cannot be guaranteed a superior objectivity in relation to what has been (ibid:120, 122); the use of 'lifeworlds' and 'modes of being' link the work to previous phenomenological studies, and create from each of these links a kind of reconstructed 'field of objectivities ' (ibid:173, 248) which can be analyzed in the presence of both their having been, which is a part of our own history -though we are not sure as to the import of this knowledge-and their presence anew within that history as 'refreshing' their calling and preserving their kerygmatic mnemonic; generalization is distinguished from formalization as not 'object-bound' to the hyletic realm, whereas an ideal types analysis of institutions places one at a remove from the 'sources' of how one is to become religious (Paul), or how one is to remain religious (Augustine) (ibid:40-42); an analysis of tradition is also removed because we do not have an objective way to 'measure' or even understand how much of the 'tradition' is left to us (ibid:62), and that we may not have the 'I' of Paul in terms of the calling to change the self with the reflective knowledge of what is to be (ibid:63) -such a facticity is part of mere temporality and is not even an action of the negation of the self that once was in the face of the hermeneutical experience which involves apprehension.This must be taken as meaning both the anxiety or trepidation in the face of the existential and historical change to be, and that one must capture this change in oneself before the world can change (cf.ibid:79, 85).
iii Dilthey is again mistaken in placing the origin of historical consciousness within the self-knowledge of a kind of auto-epistemology (ibid:118)."We have to know what knowledge can master with its instruments and what resists it and remains an irreducible fact; in short, we need an epistemology of the human sciences or, more profoundly, we need self-reflection, which would secure to concepts and principles of those sciences their relation to reality, their evidence, and their relations to one another."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :132 [1923]]).It is clear that Heidegger understands the new phenomenology to be just this kind of self-reflection with the listed properties and aspirations, but it cannot be truly located in the 'apologetic' or the 'empathic ' (cf. ibid:59 and 198).iv Including perhaps what is the first statement regarding Heidegger's vocational vision of becoming the philosopher of the 'end' of ontotheological metaphysics (cf.ibid:96).
v Another way of framing this phenomenological project as it projects itself into the life of religion asks the question "Concretely, to what experience do you refer here?"(Courtine 2000(Courtine :124 [1992]]), and then suggests an archetypical example of the nature of which Heidegger problematizes by removing its originary space to re-mark upon, as Courtine observes, the aparadigmatic status of an event unknowable to either Paul or Augustine as historical: "A cardinal experience, in a Christian milieu and according to a dominant tradition, would naturally be that of the Disciples, or of the Apostles when faced with the appearance of Christ, or, better, of God in Christ.But the relation to the Other or to the world could be thought of as its vehicle, since of such an experience there is on principle no paradigm."( ibid:124 italics the text's).
v Dilthey originally concurs with this, or at least admits to its problematic quality, especially in the case of histories and actions which are noninstrumental, or which have to do with either a current ethics or one which his to come: "... where one makes the ethical in motivation the object of investigation, analysis is very difficult.For only the connection between motive and action is clearly apparent to us; motives themselves appear in a way quite mysterious to us.Hence man's character is a mystery for him, which only his mode of behavior partially unveils to him."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :113 [1923]]).The aesthetic life of intuitive resource of the self is yet more knowing and knowable even than the empirical character of mundane activity exhibited by others.We, in reading Paul or Augustine, are left with no doubt about their own understanding as to their beliefs, but we cannot be entirely convinced of their motives resonating in others as an ethics through epistemology alone.This problem is, for Dilthey, 'outweighed' by the relationship between self and society, and this route, though tenuous, does first expose us to the ontological path that debarks from it, the path of a phenomenological analysis which seeks to know both how religion can become an object for philosophy and also how it has been an objection to it (cf. Heidegger 2004(cf. Heidegger :19 [1921]]).
vii Such an ideal remained aloof to historicism, and was only rendered as being beyond phenomenology perhaps beginning in 1925, with Husserl's Cartesian where the problem of the other sabotages at least immanent intimacy and the knowing of minds.Schutz partially solves this crisis through his cartography of the social distribution of knowledge, where the contours of being in the world map out the topos of being-there.Knowledge of intimacy differs in kind from the 'stock of knowledge at hand', from 'knowledge of acquaintance' and so on, in a way that preserves the privilege of the other either as the mysterious distance which must be respected in the ironic manner that all ignorance brings us to pause, or as the not quite self to whom we owe ourselves.For Dilthey, "The difficulties in knowing a single psychical entity are multiplied by the great varieties and uniqueness of these entities, [ ] which does not allow us to deduce directly from human nature as we now know it the state of affairs of earlier times or to infer present states of affairs from a general type of human nature."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :98 [1923]]).This is typically cautious.Yet immediately afterwards there is a leap that at first appears to discriminate between the present lifeworld of contemporaries and the world of predecessors, as Schutz would have it, but opens the door to a phenomenologically inspired clasping of interiority: "Nevertheless, all this is more than outweighed by the fact that I myself, who inwardly experience and know myself, am a member of this social body and that the other members are like me in kind and therefore likewise comprehensible to me in their inner being."(ibid).Heidegger asks, 'Are these others truly like me in kind?' 'Of which others do we speak here'?If we are able to identify an historical, or social context, and demonstrate its enacted diversity as against what we can know of the structures of this other time, the problem of the personal experience of the phenomenological object is eliminated (cf. Heidegger 2004(cf. Heidegger :58 [1921]]).Presumably we are to read both Paul and Augustine, but especially the former, as accomplishing this given they had no empirical experience of the archetypical events in question.This aside, three problems remain which are not problematized radically enough in Dilthey.They are: a) that the language is not original, either as what was spoken as an elemental activity of the factical life experience of the day, or as what has become history, b) we are unable to authentically empathize with the reality of that 'time' period, and c) one cannot recreate the factical life context and must rely on a sense for the 'un-seen' (ibid:59).The message of the new history of beings both within and without the history of what has been lends its support for the very presence of this unseen which is now just seen for the first time.Whether it can remain visible-the term 'remain' too is problematic because we are assuming that it had become visible in a manner more than what can be said by Paul's actions, for instance-as part of history and as part of the history of living-on in its light is of course debatable.Otherwise, we are left with an analysis (in Dilthey at least, for phenomenology and its new hermeneutic) with historical phenomena akin to factical experience which never leaves the realm of objects (ibid:23).Instead, the historical must itself be taken as an historical object.The emic is not yet the 'ontic'-the space of supposed inauthenticity and rationalization in the mundane facticity of social institutions-but it is already within the realm of object-laden history as facticity itself is quite obviously already part of history as it occurs.Thus it cannot be relied on in itself to provide either the space for the new meaningfulness to adhere for the anxious acolyte, nor for the phenomenologist, as the clearing in which the lighted space of a new mode of being becomes extant and with this acts as an historical force.
viii Furthermore, "This knowledge it has of itself answers more adequately to the demands of scientific truth than does its knowledge of external nature.Augustine uses the profound epistemological truth contained in these statements for the following conclusion.We become aware of ourselves because we comprehend thinking, remembering and willing as our acts, and in becoming aware of them we have true knowledge of ourselves.But to have true knowledge of something means to know its substance.Therefore we know the substance of the soul."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :236 [1923]]).The phenomenological problem thus becomes rather rapidly a problem of self-knowledge within a historical milieu where the self-concept is very different from our own in both theory and practice.'Knowledge of the self' is likely to proceed in fits and starts, and whether or not we accept the notion that in seeking we already have what we seek, or are at least prescient of it, and in knowing something we already understand what it means to know and what it has meant to possess knowledge, then whatever the nature of the self let alone its 'soul', we can comprehend Augustine along these lines: human life is not in its essence a material quality, and we have to engage in constructive willing behavior to have self-knowledge.In other words, hexis is not the space of knowledge of this sort any more than is the material the space of what it means to be human.The problematic of phenomenological hermeneutics proceeds along similar lines: the more life comes to itself the more the burdens of life pull these prefigurings of the tentative awarenesses that are also implicit structures of the lifeworld (cf.Heidegger 2004Heidegger :181 [1921]]).If anyone lives within this tension, they are by necessity practicing an interpretation of first forms that are lifegiving while at once having also the ability to deny self-knowledge, as they must conceptualize the self as their own.Rather, the sociality of the this world is repudiated by enactmentally coming to know the self in experiential selfknowledge.The 'self lived by the world' is seen as a special 'how' of facticity and remains inauthentic (cf.ibid:170).ix Dilthey reminds us that no matter how profound the elements of Christian thinking were in relation to the syncretism of metaphysics inherited from Greek philosophical and ethical systems, the weight eventually moved squarely into another kind of place entirely: "It was the tragic destiny of Christianity to extract the holiest experiences of the human heart from the quiet of the individual's life and introduce them among the motive forces of worldhistorical mass movements, and to evoke mechanistic morality and hierarchical hypocrisy in the process."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :233 [1923]]).Whether this transformation of the passion of the interior life into the blood of the external world is a necessary function to all forms of religious routinization is an openended question.What does appear clearly is that once one comes to hold a belief with one's entire being, the error that this being is now the embodiment of the ideals and therefore must be defended unto death, lest the ideals perish, is both realistic from the vantage point of the sub-culture in an empirically available time and space, but at once is completely incorrect when history is viewed over the longer course.In this second view, although it often comes to us too late in the day marred by conflict, ideas in fact survive and adapt themselves to new contexts.We need not immolate ourselves to save our ideas, but rather might preserve ourselves to see them save themselves.
x Another error is thereby coined in this process, which for Dilthey is more fatal at least in the realm of ideas than even the 'moralic' acid' which whitewashes the history of Christendom soon after the shift from Western to eastern Empire.The Neo-Platonic ideal realm, however much it may appeal to Heidegger as the nascent phenomenological analyst of Augustine the phenomenological writer, is for historical hermeneutics mistaken: "For that premise uses the psychical reality of living experience only as a point of departure for arriving at the a priori abstract notions which the metaphysical science of reason had developed.The fateful distortion of the true state of affairs, a distortion which assigns the first place in the mind to this abstract element, continues on; consequently, it is inevitable that it will also hold the first place in the objective structure to be erected."(ibid:235).
xi The 'inner connectedness' of history in general remained aloof from summary until Augustine, as it was nestled inconspicuously somewhere in the folds of case histories such as Herodotus and Thucydides, epic narrative histories which were part fictional, such as Homer or Gilgamesh, and cosmogonies, such as the Pentateuch, which were rationalized folktales given formal narrative structure only with the appearance of writing in marginal areas of the Levant.Rather than all of these, "Augustine would like to establish the living relationship of God to humanity and his plan in history, and yet at the same time preserve the immutability of God-imbued as he is with the ancient idea that all change implies transitoriness."(ibid:237).
xii One of the most common ways these 'trends' occur is at first by the self desiring the praise of others, and shunning their blame and stigmata (Heidegger 2004(Heidegger :174 [1921]]).The love of 'praisers' in Augustine is condemned as it is desired through one's restative to the social standing in the 'communal world'.This restitution leads to self-praise, but the source of the value by which one measures oneself as praiseworthy-that is, deems oneself to be of value at all-is false.The 'horizontal worship'-a phrase sometimes heard in contemporary evangelical circles as in fact countervailing God's edicts about self-adoration, in spite of equal weight in the gospels concerning the communalism of 'neighbor-love'-arises from the unexpected compass of social stigmata as praise, which takes us and becomes ever more attractive to us even than the for'.This vitiates and ruptures authenticity, but we do not become 'the self-directed' at least in every sense of the term because we give over to communality these awarenesses (ibid:176-7).When the adoration of horizontal rebounds to us we are denigrated because our life is now seen as too 'miserly' even for the care and concern for and of others, or yet even the love of others (ibid:171).Two other factors then intervene, aside from anxiety and resentment, and these are curiosity and self-concern.All 'dealing with'coming to grips and 'looking after' things worldly-enjoys itself as at least a rational action directed at a finite goal.This 'looking about oneself' is kindred with the more general curiosity which in Augustine is characterized as the 'superfluous greedy motive of seeing' (cf.ibid:166-7, 170).
xiii Although the problem is announced in Dilthey in round terms.His epistemological psychology of knowledge, as we have already seen, does not ultimately appeal to the phenomenologist.Speaking of the problem of communication, with a specific nod toward what may be more than mundane or at least more rare in its appearance within the run of living on, he says "Let us imagine for a moment this richness of life in a given individual as something totally unlike that in another individual and not communicable to him.In such a case those individuals might be able to overpower and subjugate each other through physical force; but they would really possess nothing in common; each would be sealed up in himself against all others.As a matter of fact there is in every individual a point at which he simply does not fit into such coordination of his activities with others.Whatever part of the fullness of life of the individual is determined by this factor does not enter into any of the systems of social life."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :105 [1923]]).The insight of Heidegger to this regard is that given that we all must share this point of absence of contact -and thus an absence of sociality and the beingness or modes of being which such social locations and actions perform in the day to day, whether relatively intimate or anonymous-is that we can see Paul as kindred in his immanential revealing of this absence of community, indeed, his absence from humanity within his calling to remake the being of what has been considered to be human.Whether or not in the absence of beings we encounter the presence of Being is a claim that can be shown in Durkheim to brilliantly adjust the perspective of absence allowing for the appreciation of the full presence of social being and all its implications, most profoundly, that of life over death.Perhaps this is indeed one of the core meanings of the Pauline works, somewhat obscured in the rhetoric of Greek mysticism, but nevertheless available to us precisely because of the sudden absence of a recognizably functional social location of its bearer.xiv Heidegger echoes Dilthey's sentiments and suggests that law and faith both aim at salvation in different ways (Heidegger 2004(Heidegger :48 [1921]]).The hexis of what has been called faith does not fulfill the radicality of the new being without history, nor does the praxis of the formalized rules of correct behavior in this world fulfill the promise of the good society which can only take place in the next.There is thus a substitution of faith from experience for the tradition of law and socialization (status and ethnicity, for instance) that is remindful much later on of Luther and others.(ibid:51).Simply, the attitudinal expectations of the day to day are too mundane, too pesante for revelation; the 'thief in the night' is the vehicle for this subito (cf.ibid:70-73).Similarly, when we arrive at a rhetorical representation of this disconnect, we find that the worldly metaphors of 'vehicle' and 'vessel' are such that they are inherently incomplete, forms without substance, and need their 'opposite' (ibid:87).The authentic enactment of the new faith in a being beyond the end of history fulfills this relation.

Loewen 29
xv And not so much women, at least in Paul, although the success of the cult which he founds rests in no small way upon its general appeal to both males and females (cf.Weber 1963Weber :104 [1922]]).There is also the sense that the Jews themselves are potentially liberated by this new faith (ibid:260).In spite of just how much Paul in fact does not bracket out from his culture history, the element of a new community-Schliermacher notes this radicality as being borne on the basis of a strictly religious feeling, rather than on gender, ethnicity or even class (cf.Dilthey 1988Dilthey :116 [1923]])-becomes monumental in our understanding of how religious life can spread cross-culturally and yet simultaneously adopt and remain aloof to the local traditions, including those regarded by the natives as religious themselves.
xvi The situation is hardly different today for the vast majority of humans on earth, and even for ourselves, the vastly yet relatively privileged intelligentsia in the developed world, as we must also practice similar arts and protest similar loved ones in the face of the world as it is.Given that we can recognize ourselves in the lifeworld of the ancients, even if this, as it must be, is partly illusory, it should not come as a surprise that Christianity with its supposed originary message of love and communalism lives on in the 'inner recesses' of our conscience, if not so much in our consciousness.We also feel the resentment and sometimes outright envy of those above us in the chain of capital, whose shills and talents seem so much more impoverished and vulgar than our own.One can return rapidly to Weber's analysis of the rise of salvation movements in the disenfranchised intellectual and other classes simply by comparing the rise of certain political movements of modernity as soteriological, not the least of which is, of course, Marxism.
xvii This kind of concern is almost Buddhistic in its effort to 'lose itself' (cf.ibid:180).Given that sum of occurrence and effect locates meaning only when the content and its reality are of interest to persons does in fact a phenomena become historical, the Pauline presence is itself irruptive of the being-fullypresent in spite of its claims to exude just such an immanence in the face of the world (cf.ibid:29).It is suggestive that the redemption from history and from what has been the case, even 'biographically' has a plausible origin in the function of the Delphic Apollo, which was used as a 'savings bank for slaves' to at some point buy their own freedom, either from the chattel holders or from the law itself.No doubt many artisans were also in such a debt, perhaps a kind of 'eternal' cycle of debt-peonage, from which their only escape was indeed their demise: "... this was the pattern in Paul's mind for the redemption of Christians through the blood of their savior, that they might be freed from slavery to sin and to the law."(Weber:1963(Weber: :99 [1922]]).
xviii It is perhaps ironic that Augustine's sometime vengeful celebration of the fall of Rome as a metaphor of the judgement of the new God and the triumph over classical forces and sources of life finally catches up to him, as it were, with the siege of Hippo (now Bone, Algeria) twenty years later, in the midst of which he perishes.One speculates if he realized that the forces that he originally might have seen as a manifestation of the new God's justice in fact were a third party entirely, as they now surrounded a nascent bastion of the new life and the new faith with the same disregard as they had previously shown a generation before, without respect to the mere technicality that in 410 it was the Visigoths and in 430 the Vandals.Yet, as stated before, Augustine can in no way be reduced to ressentiment, as this thread by itself would place him in the same category as the televangelists who proclaimed that the incipient AIDS crisis was a direct act of God's justice upon the gay community.After much less than a generation, we realized empirically, even as we should have recognized ethically in the original moment, that this could not possibly be true, 'loving God' or no.xix Dilthey's criticism of the notion of abstraction as it served interpretation is suggestive to this regard: "It was the fundamental error of the abstract school to ignore the relation of the abstracted partial content to the living whole and ultimately to treat these abstractions as realities.It was the complementary but no less disastrous error of the historical school-in its profound feeling for living, irrationally powerful reality which transcends all knowledge based on the principle of sufficient reason-to flee from the world of abstraction."(Dilthey 1988(Dilthey :105 [1923]]).Combinations of these two extremes have ancient roots, some of which would have been known to at least Augustine, and would likely have been suggestive of the tension which was to animate the dialogue between the historic and the phenomenologic.This recent discursive trajectory, of which the study of religious life finds perhaps its most comfortable and familiar home, may be seen as well as a 'repetition' of sorts, of the ancient problem of the experience of God as existing and the theory of God's existence; e.g.: "... Plotinus combined faith in an ecstatic state in which the soul finds itself to be one with God with the stability of a rigorous metaphysics."(ibid:232).
xx Elsewhere there is a more didactic presentation of this complex of concepts.What self-understanding says for hermeneutics contains both "1) Philosophy is a mode of knowing which is in factical life itself and in which factical Dasein is ruthlessly dragged back to itself and relentlessly thrown back upon itself.2) As this mode of knowing, philosophy has no mission to take care of universal humanity and culture, to release coming generations once and for all from care about questioning, or to interfere with them simply through wrongheaded claims to validity." 1999:14 [1923]).The encounter of being in the world with itself is always already a coming to grips with the thrown-ness of its project and the thinking prosthesis of its projection.As such, selfunderstanding as it can occur within the factical world as it is faces a shortfall of experience, as this self is often unreflective and unconcerned.Heidegger empowers philosophy proper to be the species term of a phenomenological campaign: "Philosophy is what it can be only as a philosophy of 'its time'.[ ] Dasein works in the how of its being-new.(ibid:14 italics the text's).xxi Ricoeur suggests similarly that the absolute of religious feelings might be seen as "... the feeling of being preceded in the order of speech, love and existence.There are so many absolute feelings, ab-solute, in the sense of detached from the relation by which the subject would preserve its mastery over the object called religious, over the meaning of its presumed object."(Ricoeur 2000(Ricoeur :127-8 [1992]]).The problem of the variety of religious feelings, akin to James' project, rests in the opacity of quality and specificity regarding the intentionality as sourced in what must be rather that what at least is partially memorialized through what has been: "These feelings, consisting in ways of being absolutely affected, are test cases that bear witness to phenomenology's inability to open the intentionality of consciousness onto something completely other."(ibid:128).So called 'immediacy' also presents a major question, in that the quality of the absolute other to which we are called by the religious moment as to be a being without history and to become a being absent from eventuality, is challenged by the very perspective of the factical in being able to know that indeed the religious presents to us a difference.This casts aspersion on the truly immanent expression of the other (cf.ibid:129ff).
Loewen 15 meaning.vi True, the native point of view is ascertained with some clarity; especially if the documents in question are those which themselves contain existential questions concerning the facticity of history as it has been lived.Yet beyond this, we are not able to question the 'already' quality of the emic.(cf.ibid:16).'What has been' is interrogated in phenomenology.This process takes its cue, in the case of religious life, from the questioning and almost accusatory stances of the ancient texts of existential revision.One must, in both Paul and Augustine, remake one's life in the face of what the world has been and what it will become because of this 'already'.The already of lived time as history is not the same as the already-always of hermeneutic challenge and happenstance.Rather, this kind of phenomenology sees the question of the having been as irruptive, in much the same way as the transcendental reduction of Heidegger's mentor sought to construct its inverse, that is to say, to bracket the hyletic realm with a view to participating in what is irrupting, what is the content of the eidetic, what is of essence and not empiricity.Hence, a phenomenological study of the religious life, with all of its own irruptive qualities Being well known and ascertainable in precisely this manner, presents an excellent opportunity for furthering the new science given that this venue-the admitted empiricities of the archives themselvesapparently sought to further and foster the new history of Being.