This book, which appears in the series ‘Ashgate new critical thinking in Theology and Biblical Studies’, is a detailed study of the work of Martin Heidegger. Drawing mainly on English language discussion of the German philosopher’s work, Paul Matthews seeks to stress Heidegger’s credentials as a thinker for an ecological age.

Certainly, Heidegger is a critic of the way in which present-day society ‘Enframes’ and thereby orders the world as standing-reserve. In this ordering by the operations of technique, a certain truth of Being is revealed. That is, the essence of technique is to order the world as ‘standing reserve’—as available for human use. ‘Enframing’ is the word used by Heidegger to characterise a world whose revealing is not that of poiesis but rather an ordering such that it can be used as a standing reserve by and for humanity. Thus the human subject dominates the natural object. And the cost is high, Heidegger argues: in the urge to construct the other as object, humanity may also be regarded as part of the ‘standing reserve’. In consequence, humanity doubly reasserts its dominion over the earth. Thus it becomes clear that humanity is also lost. Whereas attention is often focussed on the technologies in and through which humanity creates its own environment, in fact, so Heidegger argues, humanity in the midst of technical objects never thereby encounters its own essence.

It is not difficult to see why such a position might be attractive to theologians. In a posthumously published interview, Heidegger opined that so deep did the sensibility of Enframing run in the West that ‘Only a god can still save us.’ In the same interview Heidegger continues: ‘I think that the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god’. At first glance, such a view might seem to have already thematised the issue of ‘the revelation of nature’ for theology. Thus Heidegger’s own response to the matter of the omnipresence of technique – ‘only a god can still save us’ – seems amenable to theological appropriation. For Heidegger suggests a way in which our praxes can be reoriented away from technique: in theological terms, our praxes could be reoriented based on an understanding of nature as gift. Instead of regarding the world as a standing-reserve to be challenged forth, poiesis could be understood as a mode of revealing which would privilege revealing in terms of ‘granting’. (Famously, the later Heidegger suggested that art provides the locus where the insight into a reality which ‘grants’ might be best seen and protected.)

In sophisticated, scholarly and careful fashion, Matthews seeks to build on these commitments: The core movement of the book is a passage from Technodasein to Umweltdasein, at every point under the tutelage of Heidegger and his interpreters. Matthews argues that we should move from an account of existence as technical to an account of ‘potential everyday environmental existence grounded upon a pragmatic, aesthetic and metaphysical response to the Revelation of Nature’ (p. 9). In other words, the passage to Umweltdasein is a movement in search of authority. Is it possible to think in other or different ways about Nature so that we might mark the movement of self-emergent nature towards us? In such fashion this book joins a wider movement, which includes ecofeminists and social ecologists, that is seeking a range of ways of ascribing subjectivity to nature. ‘Being-in-the-world is contingent upon the earth. As mortals we express this fact through our earth facticity. Mortals are open to the gift of Being and the gifts of beings; they understand that primordial nature is a self-emergent event that grants the possibilities for setting up a world’ (p. 176). Matthews offers thereby a natural theology for an ecological age.

An important difficulty with Heidegger’s thinking revolves around the concept of poiesis. Heidegger seems to invite only two stances before the revealing forth of Enframing: poetic meditation or the acceptance of technological cause and effect. Heidegger’s thinking seems to occlude the political and the social (except in terms of the technologically dominated realm of being). We switch between Technodasein and poetic meditation. Matthews notes this problem, though not directly. He develops a very helpful distinction between ‘earth’ and ‘world’ as a way of orienting Heidegger’s thought on ‘the Fourfold’ – earth, mortals, sky and divinities – more adequately towards the political and the social. Moreover, Matthews concludes this ambitious project by seeking to extend Heidegger’s work in a pragmatic-aesthetic-metaphysical direction, which he summarises thus: ‘A pragmatic measure expressed as the Environmental Imperative; a poetic measure expressed as a guiding principle for a mortal dwelling; and third, a critical metaphysical measure thought of in terms of humanity’s ek-sistential predisposition towards metaphysical speculation in both an ontological and historico-factical sense’ (p. 235).

This section is, unfortunately, the least developed part of the book, and the argument inches forward mainly by detailed discussion of the work of others in such fashion that the novel pragmatic, aesthetic and metaphysical aspects do not emerge clearly. This is a pity because the central thesis is attractive, and Paul Matthews makes an otherwise excellent contribution to the theological assimilation of Heidegger’s thinking.