Abstract

This article explores Schürmann’s relation to religion and theology. Since the publication of his early essays in Ways of Releasement (2023), Schürmann scholarship will find new ways to think about Schürmann’s troubled relation to religion. This article will name some significant traits that surface in these early papers: First, Schürmann’s sense for the mystery, which will, however, quickly vanish from his thinking. Second, the growing influence of Heidegger from 1966 onwards. Third, an increasing departure from determinate religion through a reading of Eckhart, and a growing taste for a universal experience, first, of the mystery, and then of “borrowed being.” Our aim is to show Schürmann’s farewell to religion and theology through succumbing to Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology, which, for Schürmann, seems to have spelled the end of theology.