© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd “SUPERABUNDANT BEING”: DISAMBIGUATING RILKE AND HEIDEGGER THOMAS PFAU Abstract Rilke’s impact on the generation of writers reshaping philosophy and theology during the interwar years is arguably without parallel. Within this constellation, the case of Heidegger as a reader of Rilke presents unique challenges. For Rilke’s poetry neither quite allows for a wholly appropriative reading such as, for better or worse, Heidegger accords Hölderlin’s oeuvre; nor can Heidegger quite bring himself to subject Rilke’s poetry to critical appraisal. Instead, Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein as worked out in Part I of Being and Time (1927) and in his lectures on The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics (1929) seems haunted by an intellectual and expressive debt to Rilke that he can neither acknowledge nor fully resolve. For to do so would be to confront a possibility of human finitude, so luminously traced in Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1922), still defined by moments of transcendence – moments that can be captured in the fleeting plenitude of poetic intuition (Anschauung) and lyric image (Bild). Whereas von Balthasar, in volume 3 of his Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (1939), reads Rilke as fundamentally embracing Heidegger’s notion of strictly immanent and finite Dasein, I argue that the oeuvre of the later Rilke, without being reclaimed for a metaphysical, let alone religious position, nevertheless is shaped, both intellectually and expressively, by insistent, if enigmatic, moments of transcendence. I With the possible exception of Hölderlin, no German poet has had greater resonance in twentieth-century intellectual culture than Rilke. The list of philosophers and theolo- gians responding to his poetry includes Erich Przywara, Romano Guardini, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Blanchot and, of course, Martin Heidegger. Of those expressly and for the most part affirmatively responding to Rilke, some (e.g., Przywara) simply quote his poetry at length and almost without commen- tary, seemingly taking Rilke’s late poetry, and the Duino Elegies in particular, as a ca- nonical expression of post-World War I Europe’s spiritual and intellectual destitution. 1 Others, Heidegger, Guardini, and von Balthasar above all, offer more searching, if no- tably divergent, interpretations of Rilke. In von Balthasar’s wide-ranging exploration of eschatological motifs in European modernity (Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, 1937-1939), 1 In a 1936 collection of essays, Przywara situates Rilke in a matrix of voices that include St. Ignatius, John of the Cross, Heraclitus, and Nietzsche. See Erich Przywara, Heroisch (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1936), 165-95. DOI: 10.1111/moth.12458 Modern Theology 00:00 Month 2018 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online) Thomas Pfau English Department, Duke University, Box 90015, Durham, NC 27708-0015, USA Email: pfau@duke.edu