The Ascesis of Thought: Heidegger and St. Bonaventure in the Light of Teodorico Moretti-Costanzi's "Christianity-as-Philosophy"

The aim of this contribution is to present the relationship between Heidegger and St. Bonaventure as it has been developed in the path of thinking produced by the Italian philosopher Teodorico Moretti-Costanzi. In the second half of the twentieth century Moretti-Costanzi was in the Italian philosophical context one of the first scholars of the Heideggerian though with his very early writing of 1949, dedicated to the theme of the “ascesis of thought” in Martin Heidegger (L’ascetica di Heidegger). With his rediscovering the importance of the relationship between faith and reason in the context of the strong Neo-Hegelian Italian tradition, Moretti-Costanzi approaches Heidegger’s thought in the perspective of the Italian ontologism – guided by his master Pantaleo Carabellese – and after his personal confrontation with the Schopenhauerian philosophy, reinterpreted in the light of a renewed Christian asceticism. This is why, as Moretti-Constanzi met the Heideggerian philosophical position on existence as “being-in-the-world” and “being-towards-death”, he could recognize, beyond the phenomenological elements of his language, the trace of a deepest tradition, signed by the need of an ascetical rediscover of the original relationship between man and world, over the limits of the transcendental distinction between subject and object. The interpretation presented by Moretti-Costanzi of the Heideggerian thought, thus, must be inserted in the frame of one wider tradition which the Umbrian thinker refers to: this is, in particular, the Augustinian and Franciscan root which Moretti-Costanzi rediscovers as the ground of the ascetical movement reintroduced by Heidegger’s philosophy. In this sense, the ascesis of thought proposed by Heidegger in his writings, must be reinterpreted, along with Moretti-Costanzi, in its original context, beyond the phenomenological element and in connection with the mystical tradition which founds in St. Bonaventure one of its highest lights.