A less critical remark about the Reformation section of The Master and His Emissary. One intriguing feature of this section is a passing comparison of those two great Martins, Luther and Heidegger, as both being “somewhat tragic figure[s]” whose work was “hijacked” and ultimately unleashed “an anarchic destruction of everything [they] valued and struggled to defend” (314). This is an interesting parallel, and I think reveals more than McGilchrist recognizes in the moment.

Luther’s great flaw — a flaw that he inherited from 1300 years of Christian tradition, radicalized by his apocalyptic self-understanding, knit uncomfortably close through his theology, and bequeathed to later generations with horrendous and anti-Christian consequences — was his personal and theological anti-Judaism. On the Jews and their Lies is of course the most (in)famous and horrifying expression of this flaw, and is admittedly a document that requires some historical contextualization — Luther, like practically everyone else in the sixteenth century, thought the Second Coming was close at hand, which meant a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity was imminent; when it became clear that this was failing to happen, his bitter reaction was expressed with the most splenetic language he could muster. But really (as we can see more clearly now in the wake of the Shoah) even the most robust Protestant must admit that Luther’s formulation of justification — not to mention some of his more polemic statements in defense of it — depends on such a sharp antithesis, even opposition, between Law and Gospel that it has historically proved difficult for Lutherans (other than Luther himself, an Old Testament scholar extraordinaire) not to see progressively greater and greater justification for casting aside Torah, Moses, and Israel entirely. Lutheranism’s theological failure mode is Marcionism (as seen in Adolf von Harnack), and Marcionism bears more than a passing family resemblance to Christian anti-Judaism; which, with the modern invention of racial essentialism, was radicalized into Christian anti-Semitism.

Meanwhile, The Master and His Emissary was published in 2009, and is absolutely dependent on Heidegger’s philosophy; somewhere McGilchrist calls him the most comprehensive expositor of the right hemisphere worldview in intellectual history. (In my view, the book’s real muse — the Beatrice to McGilchrist’s Dante — is Hegel, but Heidegger plays the part of Virgil throughout.) As scholars have been discovering since Heidegger’s Black Notebooks began to be published in 2014, Heidegger embraced and creatively rearticulated the Nazi ideology during its period of ascendancy and regnancy, and remained — at least in private, once it was no longer permissible to be public about it — a defender of Nazism until his death, long after the exposure of Nazi Germany’s numerous crimes against humanity and above all the Jews. (Apparently Richard Wolin’s recent Heidegger in Ruins (Yale, 2023), is the important book on this topic, though I haven’t read it… yet.) McGilchrist’s book evinces none of this — and it is hard to blame him for it, given the genuine importance of Heidegger to all subsequent twentieth-century thought and the timing of the Black Notebooks' publication; but I am, to say the least, intrigued to see how, if differently, Heidegger may be treated in The Matter with Things (2021).

So, if Heidegger is the prophet of the right hemisphere — does that make Nazism the right hemisphere’s most seductive, and most horrifying, failure mode?