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eason. 74 To the degree in which humanity conforms itself to this rational ideal, thephenomenological God cannot fail to become real; God’s appearance depends exclusivelyon the future development of reason, while the question of concrete forms of humanlanguage is confined to the contingent domain of the “home-world” (Heimwelt). 75During their later years of thinking, both Husserl and Heidegger show a markedtendency toward an originary “ethics,” developed from within a singular re-reading of thehistory of occidental philosophy. But, whereas the idea of a perfect community of rationalsubjects is the keynote of Husserl’s project, Heidegger’s “ultimate God” is a God for the“world to come,” not primarily a God who delights in being the Monarch of the idealrealm of rational beings. In Husserl’s eyes, the teleological realization of a transcendentalcommunity of human beings is in itself a warrant for the constitution of a world in perfectharmony with the requirements of reason. For Heidegger, the “world as ‘event’” is entirelydependent on the poetic foundation of language, which, given the exceptional characterof poetic existence, can at any moment fail and withdraw.For Husserl, the historical time of transcendental rationality -- especially that whichconcerns the future -- is permeated with a non-empirical dynamic, which, despite alldifficulties and contingent obstacles, cannot fail to carry humanity toward its teleologicalfulfillment. The facticity of this historical process is nothing other than the garb of finitudethat will gradually be undone by philosophical reason, in direct proportion to its growingapproximation to the ideal of a divinized, i.e., fully rational, humanity. The phenomenologicalGod knows no time than the time of philosophical reason, and, if it is true thattranscendental reason can at most approach its divine ideal asymptotically, it can also besure that the God will not tear or break into the tissue of the rational progress that hasalready been achieved. Being finite only in its need for factual, historical progress, transcendentalphenomenology never runs the risk of losing its past results. Inside the Januslike,finite-infinite structure of thought, the weight shifts continually from the balancescaleof finitude to that of infinity -- an infinity that already gilds the past, that is, thehistorical stages reached within the European philosophical tradition.For the later Heidegger, by contrast, the coincidence between “philosophical” and“theological” temporality has to be dissolved in order to be able to conceive philosophicalthought and the divine in the key of a discontinuous, non-progressive and non-cumulativetemporality. The discontinuous, incalculable structure of time, which Heidegger assignsto both the philosophical and the theological dimension of thought, is a hallmark of radicalfinitude -- and hence a reminder, to “thinkers” and “theologians” alike, that all possible“results” or “achievements” of rational thought remain a fragile thing which has to be gained,defended and regained at every moment in the unfolding of human history.If classical Gnosticism is characterized by a profound indifference to the world and acomplete arbitrariness of human behavior, then one is bound to conclude that both Husserland Heidegger, having both come perilously near the region of structural philosophicaldualism, struggle to overcome this danger by trying to establish a relation between theessence of philosophy and the manifestation of the divine in the historical context ofhuman life in the world. This relation, however, will always remain frail, since neither theconstitutive, genetic approach of transcendental rationality, nor the concept of world andGod as so many forms of the “event,” will ever convey the same existential certainty asthe static ontological categories of the ancient Gnostic worldview.74Ibid., 332.75Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß, Dritter Teil (1929-1935), 224-225.235