Abstract

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.