Visiting Freiburg in 1958, Gilson heard Martin Heidegger lecture. The experience induced tears. He told Pegis, who had brushed off any similarity between Gilson’s existentialism and that of the Germans, that Heidegger “is taking us to the only real metaphysical problems. I believe he could . . . help us not only to deeper insights into his own thought, but even into that of your own dear Thomas Aquinas. His thought is different. . . . But it is where it is [and it is] a good exercise for the mind to be taken there in a new and unfamiliar way.” Gilson suggested that Heidegger’s “Anguish in the face of pure being is perhaps just another name for fear of God.”

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