I would like you to show me why would the Orthodox embrace someone as alien as Heidegger? I think your whole concept of Orthodoxy, after all this time on FR, is incredibly impoverished and dead wrong.
I will let Mad Dawg reply to this from a Catholic perspective.
Sure. In the study I am currently doing, Heidegger is portrayed as someone who believes that ultimately man himself is the starting point for understanding. God is unknowable, and therefore the best we can do is the best that man can do. Here is a passage from one of my study books: The God Who is There, by Francis Schaeffer:
Because he could not live with his existentialism, Heidegger as an older man moved his position. His new position rests on these points: (1) Something, Being, is there; (2) This something makes itself known; (3) Language is one with Being and makes Being known. We can never know rationally about what is there (brute fact), but language does reveal that something is there. Thus language is already itself an interpretation (a hermeneutic).
He postulates that there was long ago an era, before Aristotle (and before the entrance of rationality), when men spoke in Greek in such a way that the universe was speaking ideally. He then tries to transfer this to all of man's language - not the content of what is spoken, but simply the existence of language. In this way, the existence of language becomes for Heidegger the mysticism by which he tries to find relief from his previous existential dichotomy. It is semantic mysticism because it does not deal with content in language but simply language as such. Man speaking becomes the mouthpiece of the impersonal "What is" (Being). The impersonal and unknown Being speaks through the being who speaks (verbalizes) - that is, man.
This could be a quite correct view if there were any personality behind man to speak meaningfully to and through man. But because Heidegger is a rationalist and begins absolutely from himself, he cannot accept that a person behind man has spoken. So he is shut up to his particular form of semantic mysticism. The word language is a connotation word which seems to involve personality. The whole solution hangs on the connotation inherent in the one word language
At the end of his book What is Philosophy? he says that in our modern day this use of language is found particularly in the poet. So the conclusion of this view is that we are to listen to the poet. This does not mean we are to listen to the content of what the poet says, but to listen to the fact that there is a speaking which exists. That is all.
This is a good example of the (later) Heidegger that I am aware of. When I read this (and then throw in the Church here and there) I think "Kosta, Kosta, Kosta". :) In Heidegger, we have a gentleman who believes God is irrational and impersonal, who demands that everything be proved rationally by man's standards, who is not terribly concerned with the content of language (insert Bible), and who believes that mysticism is a good answer in many, many cases, even on important issues. I also see a few places in this passage where we could insert what I perceive as your view of the Church (the unknowable speaks through the hierarchy, etc.). I am simply saying that I have perceived a lot of this in your posting, but only somewhat so from Latin posters (and not really at all from MD). That's where my comment came from.