On the Manifold Meaning of Letting-Be in Reiner Schürmann

Reiner Schürmann has been called “one of the most important philosophers of the XXth century” and “perhaps the most important thinker to advance the lineage of Eckhartian–Heideggerian mysticism.” While many scholars who knew Schürmann and who still know his work today—which, after all, uniquely develops the philosophical and political implications of what Meister Eckhart and Heidegger had called releasement or letting-be (Gelassenheit)—would agree, almost nothing is known publicly about the ends of Schürmann’s own path of releasement: about how, for example, he discovered this term or, better, this way of life while a student at the Dominican school of theology, Le Saulchoir, or about how it shaped the way he died three decades later. And yet, as I show in this paper, this very early and very late work on and of releasement is crucial for understanding Schürmann’s trajectory and hence what he has to offer to thinking and being today. If, in his published works, Schürmann downplays or denigrates Christian releasement as derivative or even delusional, it is nevertheless this variety of releasement that set him on his path of thought. Christian releasement, in more than one sense, is also what awaited him at the end, as though his path had been a circle all along.