Havel teetered on the brink between Theism and Deism. Uncomfortable with the term "God," he used Heidegger's "Being" to describe the divine instead. It's also important to note that his "Pre-I" was as much an invocation of the Freudian idea of the baby's consciousness in the womb as it was an intuition of the pre-existence. His prison letters were so heavily censored that he had to resort to an almost tortured abstract philosophical tone to get out anything to his wife and friends. Given all of these limitation, however, his time alone in prison was such an intense time of soul searching and introspection that I find it fascinating to read as an example of a man with little or no theological belief or underpinning wresting openly with his experiences with the divine.
For example the following paragraph strikes me a useful mini-essay on why we had to leave the Father's presence for a mortal life:
"...by virtue of our 'pre-I,' we still have one foot, as it were, in the original fullness of Being and our mind has not yet emerged with sufficient clarity to make us aware of our state of separation and present to us the necessity of existence-in-the-world, and, of course, the temptation locked within it - if, then, we are not yet capable of reflecting the 'voice of Being' on that level, then only later - in the forge of living trials and through them, as we mature into ourselves - do we find ourselves in a genuinely 'alert' confrontation with that voice, in that never-ending 'dialogue' with it at the crossroads where Being and existence-in-the-world part ways, and only then do we have the real freedom to decide, over and over again, what we will pursue and what we will turn away from. In other words: we really only discover and begin to understand, accept and fulfill our genuine responsibility 'toward' - through alert 'existential praxis,' through the trials and tribulations we undergo, and the tasks that arise - and of course through our own failures as well."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
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