Spengler, in this Monday's Asia Times, reviews a book on 20th Century Catholic Theology, and proposes an alternative history of metaphysics.

From acidic asides in Kerr's volume, we learn some disturbing things about the "metaphysics of modernity", that is, the philosophical project of Martin Heidegger and his ilk to substitute the neutral concept of Being for faith in a personal God. Heidegger never produced a consistent theory; God put Heidegger in a circular room, and told him that Being was in the corner. Yet he mesmerized the likes of Leo Strauss, the patron saint of American neo-conservatism, who thought Heidegger the greatest mind of the century, despite Heidegger's public support for Hitler through the whole of 1933-1945, and his refusal to apologize for this or to repudiate Nazism through the rest of his life.

Strauss's may have recognized his significance, but that didn't stop Strauss from criticizing Heidegger.

Heidegger, though, imbibed from his teachers the "sawdust Thomism" (Urs von Balthasar) of the 16th-century Jesuit Suarez. As Urs von Balthasar wrote, Suarez thought of Being as the "univocal and neutral principle that is beyond God and the World". God, in other words, is subject to Being, along with things animal, vegetable, and mineral. It is a short hop from this viewpoint to the clockwork universe of 18th-century rationalism. And if Being is superior to God, should we not investigate the metaphysics of Being rather than divine revelation?

That is precisely what Heidegger set out to elaborate, albeit without the appendage of a God who already had become ossified inside Suarez' system. As Kerr reports, Chenu, De Lubac and Urs von Balthasar argued that the irreligious deism of the 18th century followed from the efforts of the Catholic Counterreformation to propagate rationalism against the Protestant emphasis on faith. That opens an investigation in intellectual history not for the squeamish. If the "new theologians" are correct, the secular philosophers beloved of the American neo-conservatives merely added footnotes to the work of 16th and 17th-century Jesuits. Heidegger, supposedly the founder of modernist metaphysics, becomes a minor commentator on the work of Francisco Suarez.

Heidegger brings up Suarez, once, in Being and Time. And in that instance, Suarez is merely a step in the history of metaphysics that neglected the question of the truth of being. The question which Heidegger's way of thinking set out to overcome.

With the peculiar character which the Scholastics gave it, Greek ontology has, in its essentials, travelled the path that leads through the Disputationes metaphysicae of Suarez to the 'metaphysics' and transcendental philosophy of modern times, determining even the foundations and the aims of Hegel's 'logic'. In the course of this history certain distinctive domains of Being have come into view and have served as the primary guides for subsequent problematics: the ego cogito of Descartes, the subject, the "I", reason, spirit, person. But these all remain uninterrogated as to their Being and its structure, in accordance with the thoroughgoing way in which the question of Being have been neglected.

P. 43-44

Heidegger discusses Suarez's distinctio rationis in some detail in part G of the section on Thesis of Medieval Ontology from The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. There, Suarez is interpreted as a minor commentator on Aristotle, who anticipated Kant views on existence.

Spengler continues with this question:

Where is the Father Merrin who at last will exorcise the dybbuk of Heidegger from America's National Security Council?

Perhaps amongst the Kantians at the Pentagon? Father Merrin was the priest that coaxed the dybbuk out of Linda Blair in the The Exorcist.  ¶ 8:41 AM