Posts Tagged existentialism

Insurrection: To Believe Is Human, To Doubt Divine.

by Peter Rollins

185 pp.  Howard Books.  $16.00.

In 2009 I started a journey into existentialism, a body of philosophy and literature that I’d heard of in my college days, largely skirted through graduate school, and only returned to because my friend Michial Farmer (you might know him from the podcast) talked me into reading and discussing Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time with him as he prepared for his comprehensive exams.  Once we’d worked our way through that, I turned around and read most of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and (because a student of mine is using it in his senior research project), Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus.  Before 2009, for other reasons, I’d also read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov and several of Nietzsche’s books, which also usually get listed as influences on existentialism.  I did all that reading before 2009, and I taught Brothers Karamazov this spring.  So when I wrapped up Peter Rollins’s book Insurrection, I knew that I was looking at a popularization of existentialism for Christians, and I knew that Rollins has put together a pretty good treatment of the intellectual movement for non-specialists: coming away from this book, someone without the background in literature and philosophy that I happen to have will be able to say that there’s a strain in Christianity that emphasizes the felt absence of God as a valid part of the experience of confessing Christ; that the trappings of popular piety often serve as psychological defense mechanisms that keep people from having to confront unpleasant things in life; and that the crucifixion names not only a historical moment but also a way of relating to the world.

Rollins breaks down the “movements” of existentialism (though he does not call it that) into a movement that holds up God as the one who protects everything for the sake of the believer, a movement that gives up everything for the sake of God, and a movement that gives up everything, including  God (30).  Turning to Christ’s call on the cross, Eloi Eloi lama sabbachthani (Mark 15:34, Matthew 27:46) as his central text, Rollins spends the first half of the book articulating a psychological theology with the felt absence of God as its starting point.  The end result reminds me of Saint John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul (I refer to the longer version, the one I’ve spent the most time with) in its focus on the long periods of dryness in which the presence of God gives way to a sense of absence.  In Rollins’s vision, the experience of being-abandoned-by-God is not something that happens to some but not others but something that lies at the heart of Christianity, something that the cowardly can block by means of ideology (chapter 2) or by holding onto Church liturgy as a sort of security blanket (chapter 3) but which, for those Christians who choose honesty over self-deception, is the shape of most of the Christian life.  Such is the main focus of the book’s first part.

Before I move to the second part, I should note where I depart from Rollins’s sort of Christian existentialism.  Perhaps it’s because I work so regularly with college students and church congregations rather than with book publishers and conference audiences, but I found Rollins a bit tiresome as he reduced other people’s differences from his own ideology as satisfactions of “psychological need” and as he referred to those who differ from him as possessed of “infantile faith” (50) and as he took again and again the role of the Nietzschean psychologist, ignoring the content and substance of other people’s ideas in favor of swipes at other people’s inner states.  I point to these not as limitations of Rollins’s own intellect (he could very well have actual arguments published in other texts) but as shortcomings of this book: in the first part at least, Rollins tends towards grand suspicions of other people’s motivations and consciousness rather than self-examination in the face of difference.  The difference between my own existentialism and Rollins’s is not so much in the content as in the approach to difference, but it’s not unimportant: where his prose tends to treat those who differ as inferior, I’m far more inclined to think that the difference might distinguish different kinds of goodness rather than always between goodness and badness, and furthermore I’m far more suspicious of myself: after all, if there is a distinction to be made between better kinds of being-Christian and worse kinds, I always suspect that mine might be the worse.

Part two, labeled “Resurrection,” takes readers past the existential angst of “Eloi Eloi” and into a way of life that Rollins calls Resurrection life but which bears little resemblance to the traditional Christian doctrine of the same name.  Rather than turning to 1 Corinthians 15, which in my own thinking is the best starting place for thinking about Resurrection as a horizon, or to Romans 12, which is as fine a place as I can immediately imagine for thinking about how Resurrection informs life in the Saeculum, Rollins turns to Camus and Nietzsche as helps to say what Resurrection looks like.  Invoking a very Camus-flavored Sisyphus in the sixth chapter (128), Rollins calls Resurrection life an affirmation not of the hope of a life filled with goodness where this existence so often falls short but of life as already experienced (129).  Resurrection for Rollins is not a rejection of a Nietzchean sense of eternal recurrance but an embrace of the same, a yea-saying to life as it is, with all of life’s horrors rolled into it (130).  In short, nobody gets resurrected for Rollins: some just stop crying out for a life that makes human beings suffer.

Such an embrace of power as the core reality of existence rather than a corruption of the same logically leads, as far as I can tell, nowhere in particular: I’ve known Nietzscheans (and Foucaultians, the English department’s version of the same) who were right-wingers and Nietzscheans who were left-wingers.  After all, when there is no good life to which one might compare and by which one might judge this life, any difference is just more difference.  Or, if you can’t resist (as I can’t), it’s difference, difference, difference all the way down.  Rollins, when his coin got flipped, landed on the left, so the second half of the book early and often names typically New-Left causes as the true outgrowths of mature Christianity.  Rollins makes the typical and the unreflective move of equating racism, sexism and homophobia (140), sneering at people who volunteer at homeless shelters and hold down jobs that those homeless people cannot have (151-52), and even at one point going after Batman as someone who could use his money better for school improvement than for Batmobiles and Bat-Caves (142).  Rollins’s earlier embrace of Eternal Recurrance quickly enough falls away in this section as he holds forth the hope that the same stuff, with the proper social agitation, won’t happen to the next generation as it did to the current one (148), and by the end of the book, Rollins, in his fervor for New-Left protest, seems to make of that group of folks something like a cross between Hegel’s world-historic souls and Plato’s philosopher-kings (174).

None of this is to take away from the first half of the book, which even as it shows seeds of the later elitism, still does a good job of popularizing Christian existentialism.  But when Rollins ventures to step beyond Eloi Eloi, he becomes, for better or for worse, a fairly typical avant-garde New-Left liberal, one happy to fly from continent to continent speaking at conferences while decrying the “bourgeoisie” (the folks Marx would likely have called workers) and their clinging to superstition.  Because Eternal Recurrence has no content, has no telos against which to compare the recurring, Rollins easily enough turns his affirmation of “life” (a word which is always contested, even when a book pretends that it ain’t) into a programmatic progressivism and folks of his ilk, as they wander from conference to conference as the harbingers of “life.”

Those who have read more than one of my reviews know that I tend to be suspicious of the traveling consultant, much preferring the Benedictine stability of the parish preacher or the small-college professor to the grand ideas and finger-pointing from the guy-from-out-of-town.  So it goes.  But I still assert, and may those with ears to hear listen, that one tells trees apart by the fruit they bear.

Thus far in this series, I haven’t really discussed any theologian who might be rightly considered an existentialist, as opposed to an influence or proto-existentialist. (The exception is Karl Barth, whom I’ve brought up several times and who is existentialist to the core.) Having, I think, demonstrated the importance of religious sources for early formulations of existentialism, I will in this post examine what it is in existentialism–even in the atheistic forms represented by Sartre, Heidegger, and Camus–that made it so attractive to religious thinkers throughout the twentieth century; in so doing, of course, I will also describe what attracts me to this philosophy.

The easiest and most obvious answer is that religious thinkers have been drawn to existentialist thought because religious philosophers exerted such a strong influence on its formulation. (Kierkegaard is indispensible, of course, but Pascal is a clear influence on both Sartre and Camus, and Heidegger takes one of his major concepts–curiosity–right from Augustine’s Confessions.) I don’t want to downplay the accuracy of this explanation, but unless we’re to assume religious thinkers are outrageously small-minded and parochial, we need to find another explanation.

I’ve already suggested that the brand of atheism championed by secular existentialists is more self-reflexive and thus more acceptable to religious thinkers than the more rationalistic variety represented by the Logical Positivists and the nü atheists. This, obviously, makes a Paul Tillich or an Abraham Heschel more likely to associate themselves with Sartre than with Bertrand Russell (or, in our day, Richard Dawkins). This is certainly part of the equation; it’s easier for a believer to see the legitimate arguments in Nietzsche and Camus than in the nü atheists because one senses that, despite their occasional militancy, the existentialist atheists understand faith much better than Daniel Dennett does. The existential call is to take religious faith more seriously–not to blithely exchange it for a scientific certainty, a type of faith in and of itself.

But there must be more than this, for the existentialists are hardly the only atheists to take religion seriously. I think historical context will prove valuable here. Existentialism, broadly speaking, comes in three major waves: First, in the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky revolted against the ascendant rationalism of the Enlightenment. Then, in the period between the two world wars, Heidegger, Jaspers, and others revolted against Logical Positivism and the increasingly mechanized world in which they found themselves. The third movement comes after World War II, and especially in the 1950s and early ’60s, when existentialism hit pop culture. Here, Sartre, Tillich, Heschel, and many, many other philosophers, theologians, and novelists revolted against a world that produced chilling examples of “man’s inhumanity to man” on the one hand and a stultifying suburban culture on the other. (Mechanization was, obviously, still in the mix and played a big part in both the cruelty of war and the boredom of the suburbs.)

The concerns of the existentialists of all three of these eras–both in terms of what they reject and in terms of what they promote–just so happen to line up, in large part, with the traditional concerns of Jewish and Christian thought. The existentialists seek to rescue Western philosophy from those who would make the intellect the defining characteristic of man, to the exclusion of the rest of his being. They want to repudiate the psychologist who would claim that man is an unwitting slave to deep, unconscious drives. They want to elevate the concrete and individual self above all universal abstractions, be they “logic,” “ethics,” or “human nature.” Certainly they want to refuse the conformity of Stalin’s Russia and Eisenhower’s America. They want to demonstrate man’s position in the world without allowing him to be lost in that world. They want to point to the shattering nothingness at the very heart of being–knowing all the while that they can never explain it, only point to it.

Compared to the Enlightenment philosophers and the logical positivists, the existentialists, even the atheists in their ranks, have deeply metaphysical concerns. Heidegger’s last few years, in fact, are sometimes referred to as his “religious period,” even though he never gave up his atheism, to the best of my knowledge. In the same vein, Walker Percy classes Sartre as a religious novelist on the grounds that he “betrays a passionate conviction about man’s nature, the world, and man’s obligation in the world.”

The religious intellectuals of the twentieth century thus find in the existentialist corpus new skin for the old ceremony–a vibrant and up-to-date language in which to couch or tweak the ancient verities. For example, when an existentialist theologian speaks of “man’s alienation from God,” he draws from an enormous sea of connotations: he brings up not only Genesis 3 and its Jewish and Christian commentators but also Heidegger on “thrownness,” Sartre on anxiety, and Camus on absurdity. The latter shed light on man’s state before redemption, and the former provide an explanation for the origins of the mess in which we find ourselves. To put this in another way: the existentialists–more so, in my opinion, than any other group of modern philosophers–ask the important questions, the ones that both challenge theology in significant ways and request theological answers.

An example of how the results can vary for different theologians: In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes two kinds of being: être-en-soi (in itself) and être-pour-soi (for itself). The former is objective being, inanimate and without inner contradiction; the latter includes beings with consciousness. (Sartre does not reveal whether this category applies to nonhuman animals or not.) Être-pour-soi is rich with self-contradiction, for we are not, in Sartre’s terminology, what we are.  The great sin (absolutely not Sartre’s word) of humanity is their attempt to become être-en-soi, to become perfect by becoming an object.

So far, so good. But theists have a problem here because Sartre allows only for perfect being without consciousness, or self-alienated consciousness. God, as traditionally conceived, is a perfect consciousness, a personal being utterly without self-contradiction. Thus, God is, for Sartre, utterly impossible. Nevertheless, Sartre is an important influence on the two most important Christian existentialists, Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, and if they are to respond honestly to his work, they must find a place for God in his two types of being. Their solutions differ in ways that get at the heart of their overall philosophical and theological divergence.

Barth, for his part, has little patience for the theological liberalism ascendant in the nineteenth century; it’s possible to read his entire project as a repudiation of the worst excesses of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Thus, his existentialism involves little change to traditional Christianity’s core principles. (There are a few breaks with the tradition, particularly in his early work, but on the whole Neo-Orthodoxy is as conservative as mainline theology gets–which doesn’t stop some Evangelicals from seeing Barth as a great enemy.) Barth does not, as far as I know, use specifically Sartrean terms, and yet I think his emphasis on what he calls the “Wholly Other” God can serve as a response to Sartre’s atheism. Hundreds of theologians before Barth, of course, had emphasized God’s transcendence–and the Calvinist tradition out of which Barth writes is sometimes accused of an overemphasis on this attribute–but Barth is, I think, new in the lengths he goes.

I talked in my previous post about Barth’s steadfast refusal to allow a path from man to God. The reason for this is that God is made of something absolutely different than the world. The end result is that He is utterly transcendent, utterly removed–absent, as some people prefer to say. We can find God neither by searching our hearts nor by searching creation, neither with logic nor with emotional response. His ways are not our ways, and no twist of logic will allow us to understand Him. This raises God above all simple dichotomies, be they Cartesian or Sartrean.

Many people’s understanding of Barth ends with God’s otherness, and it’s true that Barth is probably guilty of overemphasis, especially early in his career. But Barth certainly acknowledges the other side of God, His immanence. He denies natural theology because God is wholly other, but he points to revelation, God’s reaching down to man, which can happen only if God is also immanent. So God is above the duplicity of the en-soi and the pour-soi, but He reaches down into it. Barth gets around Sartre’s prohibition on God by breaking the circuit, then quietly putting it back together: God is en-soi, pour-soi, and simply soi, a sort of being beyond being–and He is all three simultaneously.

Tillich is famously less concerned with maintaining traditionalist formulations of Christianity. He begins his Systematic Theology with an attack on fundamentalism, which, he says, “fails to make contact with the present situation, not because it speaks from beyond every situation, but because it speaks from a situation of the past.” For Tillich, theology must be created anew for each generation; his own theology is quite clearly and explicitly an attempt to recreate Christianity under existentialist principles. The language changes. For Barth, alienation is a product of sin; for Tillich, sin is alienation. In the merger of these two systems of thought, Barth privileges Christianity. Tillich, his critics say, privileges existentialism.

So he absolutely has to deal with Sartre’s objection–and he can’t do so by elevating God beyond the dichotomous world, because he is far less comfortable with fideism than Barth is. His solution is to argue that God is simply not a combination of en-soi and pour-soi at all.He speaks of God less as a Person than as an idea, as when he says, in Systematic Theology 1, that

Philosophy necessarily asks the question of reality as a whole, the question of the structure of being. Theology necessarily asks the same question, for that which concerns us ultimately must belong to reality as a whole. . . . It must be the ground of our being, that which determines our being or not-being, the ultimate and unconditional power of being.

Commentators have disagreed on the extent to which this formulation dispenses with God’s Personhood (the part of Him subsumed under the heading of pour-soi) and places Him entirely in the consciousness-free world of the en-soi. It is certainly possible to posit God as both a Person and as the ground of all being; Abraham Joshua Heschel does so in Man Is Not Alone. But in my reading of Tillich’s books I’ve never seen him present God as anything more than ultimate concern. He never moves from metaphysical object to supernatural subject. This is a major break from historical Christianity, and it’s clearly born out of a deep engagement with existentialist ideas.

And this is only one example, meant to demonstrate the deep rejuvenation Christian and Jewish theology received from existentialism. For some, like Tillich, existentialism provided the impetus to make stale theology radically new; for others, like Barth, it asked questions that left nineteenth-century liberalism speechless. Either way, theology became important to public life in a new way. At the height of existentialism’s popular appeal, Christianity was represented by great minds like Barth and Tillich, and Judaism by equally great minds like Heschel. Today, we get Rick Warren and Shmuley Boteach. Res ipsa loquitur.

I grew up at the tail-end of the Evangelical Apologetics Explosion. Somewhat arbitrarily, I’m selecting as the apex of that movement the year 1999. (I use that date because of the publication of Josh McDowell’s New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, but that was also the year of Norman Geisler’s Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics and the year after Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ.) I was seventeen in 1999 and was just starting to be disillusioned with the church I grew up in. We weren’t terribly devoted to apologetics at my church–and I don’t mean to suggest that McDowell and Geisler are in any sense responsible for my alienation from the Southern Baptist Convention–but my youth group did attend a summer camp with a Creationist theme and a very obvious apologetics influence.

(A tangent: We sang a song there that suggested that the monster in Job 40:15-24 was in fact proof that human beings and dinosaurs co-existed: “Behemoth is a dinosaur / I know creation’s true!” Subtlety, let us say, is not a hallmark of the apologist’s creed, at least not as it is presented to teenagers. It was also at this camp that I first heard the Standard Evangelical Sermon on Premarital Sex^TM, in which amorous teenagers are instructed for half an hour that OH MY GOSH SEX IS AWESOME before receiving a brief disclaimer that “it’s much better if you wait until you’re married”–as if anyone could possibly experience both waiting and not waiting and thus be in a position to judge.)

I also took a mandatory apologetics course at my Christian college, in which I angered the Bible and theology majors around me by consistently failing to see the big deal–or, indeed, the point. We read Strobel and Geisler and a book by Paul Copan that promised to “deflat[e] the slogans that leave Christians helpless”–and I found them helpful on some level. But when it came to the actual purpose of the class–training us to prove the truth of the Gospel to unbelievers–I was left in the dark. I don’t remember for sure, but I suspect my classmates responded to my disinterest by citing 1 Peter 3:15: “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you” (NAS). For reasons I will go into in a bit, I think it’s entirely possible to obey this verse without subscribing to a Geislerian view of apologetics: that is, that Christianity is imminently reasonable and that unbelievers are faulty in their rational thinking.

We must have discussed Pascal’s Wager in that class; it is, after all, a standard in apologetics and an argument which nearly everyone encounters at some point. Its premises are familiar: Either there is a God, or there isn’t. The consequences for believing in a God that doesn’t exist are not much to speak of–but the consequences for not believing in a God Who exists and Who commands faith are infinite. Therefore, we should believe in God. This argument is full of holes, as any atheist (and not a few believers) can tell you. The biggest problem is that Pascal’s Wager can make no distinction among the hundreds of religious conceptions of God, most of them mutually exclusive. What if I choose to believe in the Christian God, and it’s the Muslim Allah Who is real? Suddenly the consequences of belief are much more serious!

The Wager also results, presumably, in a rather intellectualized and cold-fish faith, a fact that Walker Percy’s character Will Barrett points out in The Second Coming:

To the best of my knowledge, only one man in history ever made a practical proposal, that is, a proposal of which the rare sane unbeliever could at least make a modicum of sense. That was the famous wager of Pascal, who was the last French intellectual who was not insane. . . . But it is after all ludicrous to reduce the question to a crapshoot at Vegas. . . . The trouble with Pascal’s wager is its frivolity.

These very legitimate objections notwithstanding, Pascal’s Wager is important to existential apologetics for at least two reasons: (a) It assumes the mutual absurdity of faith and atheism; and (b) it posits faith as primarily an act of the will, rather than of the intellect or of the emotions.

That first point is, I suspect, forgotten or ignored by apologists of the Geislerian variety. But the Wager, though it’s a logical appeal of sorts, is built on several dozen pages of absurdist theology. Most notably–and this is, in my opinion, the single most profound sentence in the Pensées–he tells us that “It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist” (¶230). The effect of this mutual absurdity is not merely to make religious belief into a leap of faith; it makes atheism into the same sort of leap. Agnosticism seems to be left as an option, but on a practical level there is no agnosticism, as you either live as if there is a God or as if there isn’t. Not only is (a)theism a leap of faith; it’s a leap of faith that everyone must take in order to exist.

The other contribution Pascalian absurdism makes to existential theology is that it makes faith into an act of the will. This, no doubt, displeases those who wish to posit Christianity as wholly reasonable and who see faith in Christ as primarily a matter of intellectual assent. But it’s not; it can’t be, not if the essence of Christian faith is a trust in Jesus Christ. St. James suggests as much when he says that “You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder” (2:19, NAS). What makes the difference is an active faith (built, James says to Luther’s chagrin, on works)–an act of the will. Intellectual assent without what William James famously calls “the will to believe”–forcing oneself to behave as though one believes, even if it doesn’t make sense at times–is fairly worthless.

As for the notion that faith is built on “feeling”–that idea stems from a faulty reading of Matthew 22:37: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” That heart implies emotion to the modern reader, but Christ is quoting Deuteronomy 6:5–and the seat of the emotions in the Hebrew Bible is not the heart but the bowels. If the author of Deuteronomy had wished to suggest that we ought to love God with our emotions, he would have instructed us to “Love the Lord your God with all your bowels”; as written, heart more likely refers to what we’d call the soul, and soul refers to something akin to life-breath.

Faith in Christ, then (and other religious faiths, as well), is an act of the will, that is, something we choose to trust in, even though it doesn’t always feel great or make perfect intellectual sense. For how this works, we must skip ahead several centuries from Pascal to Søren Kierkegaard. The Danish philosopher is famously resistant to attempts to force God into human understanding (which is, after all, the end results of much of modern apologetics). He remarks in his journals–and in the new beverage holder at the Christian Humanist Store, cheap at twice the price!–that “to stand on one leg and prove God’s existence is a very different thing from going on one’s knees and thanking Him.” He takes it even further in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and suggests that attempts to prove the existence of God end up accomplishing the exact opposite purpose:

To demonstrate the existence of someone who exists is the most shameless assault, since it is an attempt to make him ludicrous, but the trouble is that one does not even suspect this, that in dead seriousness one regards it as a godly undertaking. How could it occur to anyone to demonstrate that he exists unless one has allowed oneself to ignore him; and now one does it in an even more lunatic way by demonstrating his existence right under his nose?

The existence of God, strangely enough, is completely beside the point for Kierkegaard; he takes it as a given and expects from his “knight of faith” not a belief in the existence of God (after all, even the demons have that) but a painful, crushing–some might say “horrible,” and they wouldn’t be misreading Kierkegaard–trust in the invisible, perhaps unknowable, God.

His model for this is Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, which he discusses in his most famous book, Fear and Trembling. Abraham is a Man of God specifically because, when the Divine approaches him, he asks neither for verification nor for a justification for the horrifying action demanded of him. Indeed, he commits himself wholly to God’s commandment–even though it contradicts both an earlier promise God made to him and every human law, including the law of logic, which is violated by the contradiction. What makes Abraham a knight of faith, in fact, is his ability simultaneously to believe God’s promise about making him into the Father of a Great Nation and to obey God’s later command for human sacrifice without active or passive rebellion of the Camusian variety. This process is the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” a Kierkegaardian phrase from which later scholars derived the concept of the “leap of faith.” The ethical sphere involves not only morality but all universal systems, most notably logic.

This is, obviously, a full-fledged attack on apologetics based on logical argument; God simply cannot be reached in this way. Karl Barth takes this bold assertion and runs with it, remarking in The Word of God and the Word of Man that “There is no way from us to God–not even a via negativa–not even a via dialectica nor paradoxa. The god who stood at the end of some human way–even of this way–would not be God.” (John Updike memorably quotes this passage in Roger’s Version, a novel about the seamy underbelly of fideism.) Hence, the need for revelation–God’s reaching down to man, reliably described, for Barth, in the New Testament. Logic isn’t revelation; it is trumped by it.

But there’s more to the story. Some people could do what God commanded of Abraham, Kierkegaard says, but they couldn’t do it in the spirit of faith:

If–in the guise of tragic hero, for higher than that I cannot come–I were summoned to such an extraordinary royal progress as that to the mountain in Moriah I know very well what I would have done. . . . I am fairly certain I would have been there on the dot, with everything arranged–I might even have come too early instead, so as to have it done quickly. But I also know what else I would have done. The moment I mounted the horse I would have said to myself: “Now everything is lost, God demands Isaac, I sacrifice him, and with him all my joy–yet God is love and continues to be so.” . . . And yet this is the greatest falsehood, for my immense resignation would be a substitute for faith.

The distinction Kierkegaard draws here between faith and resignation is helpful in uncovering the role of reason in the religious life. It’s important that he does not recommend a “teleological negation of the ethical,” but rather a suspension.

It may be helpful to go back to another familiar image here. Dante has Virgil, a virtuous pagan, lead him through Hell and Purgatory, but they must part ways. In like fashion, Dante seems to suggest (and Kierkegaard would surely agree), the believer must leave her reason behind the instant she believes. But there’s a third act: in Heaven, in the realm of belief, Dante receives a new and more perfect guide, Beatrice. In like manner, Abraham begins to sacrifice Isaac but “believe[s] that God would not demand Isaac of him”–and receives Isaac back. The believer suspends the ethical and the logical in order to receive a higher ethic, a higher reason, on the other side of faith. One believes in order to understand, in other words, and despite the apologists of the ’80s and ’90s, one does not understand in order to believe.

That’s not to say there’s no place for Strobel and Geisler and other apologists. Their arguments and books can help to bolster faith once a person has already made the leap–but they can’t lead people to God, at least not to any God worth believing in (that is, a God far beyond the limits of the human mind and its commitment to the Kierkegaardian ethical). Strobel’s book The Case for Faith thus has a nonsensical title: no case can be made for faith except the case made in and to faith.

Blaise Pascal initially seems a rather odd figure to label as a Christian existentialist–or even as a forerunner to the movement. Other than his famous “wager” (about which I will say quite a bit more later), he is perhaps best known for a major contribution to mathematics: Pascal’s Triangle. (It’s apparently quite significant, but don’t ask me to explain it to you.) He was the sort of polymath the Enlightenment excelled at producing, and, like the other renaissance men of the era–Franklin, Jefferson, Priestley, Bacon, Diderot, et al–he can be quite committed both to strictly logical thought and to the scientific method, neither of which mesh terribly well with the thought of what William Barrett calls “irrational man.” But the surface facts of his life mask an important truth about Blaise Pascal: Created though he was by the Enlightenment, any time he thought seriously about subjects outside of mathematics, he was forced to betray the Enlightenment–a betrayal that seems to have been quite difficult, perhaps even painful, for him. This is clear in his most famous work, the so-called Pensées, a book that strives for Enlightenment-style scientific certainty but ends up in the unexplainable darkness of Job or Ecclesiastes.

Pensées is not, properly speaking, a book–or at least it’s not the sort of cohesive work people often mean when they use that word. The academic term text is far more applicable in this case; Pensées is in fact a loose collection of notes, a stabbing toward a major work of apologetics. Some of Pascal’s “thoughts” are more or less fully formed, going on for ten or fifteen pages and making what amounts to a complete argument. Others are so brief and removed from context that they work as Modernist poetry. (The most famous of this category is number 507–”The motions of grace; the hardness of heart. External circumstances”–which John Updike used as the epigraph to Rabbit, Run.) Some are in Latin, making them inaccessible to the illiterate among us. The important thing, though, is that these are mere fragments of a never-completed book that would have presented a cohesive apologetic argument. It is in the nature of fragments, however, to lack cohesion, and the reader will likely be driven mad if she attempts to construct from these tessons de pensée the book that never was to be.

The real irony, of course, is that it is its fragmentary nature, its frustrating failure of coherence that constitutes a large part of the text’s appeal to the post-Waste Land reader. (One imagines Pascal’s Jansenist God, only a step below Calvin’s, planning it this way, killing our author off at the tender age of 39, merely to ensure that readers would continue to find God’s hand in the forever-unwritten book three and a half centuries later.) The modern mind–especially the modern mind of a literary rather than a scientific bent–is far less receptive to “metanarratives,” to use Jean-Francois Lyotard’s term, and far more open to the “stab in the dark” approach that fragments suggest.

The Pensées breaks down, essentially, into two sections. In the first (and more interesting, in my opinion), Pascal attempts to demonstrate that man’s life apart from God is a wretched thing that is not worth living. In the second, he posits that Christ, as Redeemer, is the solution to that alienation. This organization was, of course, neither new nor unique; St. Paul uses it in his epistle to the Romans (and many a teenage Christian in the 1980s and ’90s learned it as the so-called “Romans Road” of evangelism). Nor is it particularly existentialist as a bare organizational schematic–except that it begins not with revelation but with the conditions in which man finds himself. Existence precedes essence. It’s worth noting, however, that Pascal belongs to a line of scientists (stretching at least back to Aristotle) who also move from bottom to top, and so beginning with the human condition rather than with the eternal verities is not enough reason for us to class Pascal with the existentialists; it is more likely to be evidence of his commitment to the scientific.

And indeed, Pascal often seems to want to proceed scientifically, as when he talks about how to correct those who are in error:

When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. . . . [N]aturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true. (¶9)

Pascal here betrays a profound faith in empiricism, the foundation of the scientific method. Elsewhere, though he takes shots at Descartes throughout the text, he seems to buy into the Cartesian split–between the mind and the world–wholesale, and promotes the man-as-disembodied-head anthropology that existentialists would so vociferously criticize about the Cartesian Enlightenment. “Man is obviously made to think,” he says. “It is his whole dignity and his whole merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought” (¶146). While later existentialist theologians, particularly those of a Neo-Orthodox bent–and I’m thinking especially of late-period Karl Barth here–would deny that the natural world (and with it, human reason) provides a route to real knowledge of God, Pascal is initially rather blithe about Calvin’s general revelation: “Those honour Nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything, even on theology” (¶29).

And yet, and yet. Throughout the text, Pascal seems to want to break out of the narrow strictures of Enlightenment empiricism, even as he occasionally bows to its philosophical language and assumptions. We see this as early as the first section, where he makes the distinction “between the mathematical and the intuitive mind” (¶1): namely, that the former uses logical but highly specialized principles, to the extent that the mathematician and the scientist are likely to miss out on obvious common-sense truths:

But the reason that mathematicians are not intuitive is that they do not see what is before them, and that, accustomed to the exact and plain principles of mathematics, and not reasoning till they have well inspected and arranged their principles, they are lost in matters of intuition where the principles do not allow of such arrangement. (¶1)

That Pascal not only posits the existence of a sphere of “intuitive truth” inaccessible to the “mathematical” mind but also suggests that it may be a higher form of truth indicates a major break with his Enlightenment peers–and an even larger one with the scientific-materialist philosophers who followed in their wake. And as the book continues, Pascal drills more and more holes in the predominant ideology of his day–until, by the end, he sounds far less like Kant than like Kierkegaard. Midway through, in fact, he’s ready to jettison the whole project:

The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote from the reasoning of men, and so complicated, that they make little impression; and if they should be of service to some, it would be only during the moment that they see such demonstration; but an hour afterwards they fear they have been mistaken. (¶542)

Eventually, he even comes around to what we can recognize as a Barthian position on natural theology. “Those in whom this light [of faith] is extinguished,” he says, “find only obscurity and darkness” in God’s work in the world (¶242). Presumably this includes the empiricists who examine the world so closely.

My explanation for the tectonic shift in the Pensées is that the project he had undertaken–to present a clear and coherent description and defense of Christianity–convinced Pascal of the existential truth that Christianity must be lived before it can truly make sense. Thus, he came up with his Wager–which I will deal with in detail next week in a post on existential apologetics.

As I mentioned last week, the academic dean of the secondary literature on existentialism, Walter Kaufmann, points to the Christian theologians St. Augustine and Blaise Pascal as early examples of existentialist thought. He does so in a rather unhelpful and patronizing way:

If we look for anything remotely similar [to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground] in the long past of European literature, we do not find it in philosophy but, most nearly, in such Christian writers as Augustine and Pascal. Surely, the differences are far more striking even here than any similarity; but it is in Christianity, against the background of belief in original sin, that we first find this wallowing in man’s depravity and this uncompromising concentration on the dark side of man’s inner life.

Kaufmann thus manages not only to slight Augustine and Pascal as thinkers—in what sense are their writings not philosophy?—but gives only the vaguest reasons for their influence on Notes from Underground. My task in this post is to expand on Kaufmann’s assertion, to demonstrate exactly why Augustine belongs in the canon of proto-existentialist writers. I will make the case for Pascal next week, when I discuss existentialist apologetics.

St. Augustine is (quite rightly) claimed as a forebear of such disparate traditions as Thomism and Calvinism, so there shouldn’t be too much harm in adding existentialism to this list, so long as we acknowledge that he, like all great thinkers, contains multitudes, and that Charles Taylor and John Piper have as much of a claim on him as Karl Barth and Paul Tillich do. (I’ve even heard him called the father of postmodern semiotics, so maybe Roland Barthes also gets a slice of the pie.)

Augustine’s most important book for existentialist thinkers is indisputably his Confessions, often called the world’s first autobiography and certainly an innovation in theological technique. The book is a work of serious philosophy—no doubt many readers decline to finish the book once they reach the abstract speculation on memory in Book X—but it is also intensely personal. The saint decides here that he cannot tell the story of God without simultaneously telling his own story. He treats theology, in other words, as something other than an academic discipline—he treats it as something that is inextricably bound to his own day-to-day life.

St. Paul did this, too, of course—his letters collected in the New Testament depend on the story of his life and his conversion in order to make their theological point—and yet there is no doubt that for Paul, his story was to come second to the story of Christ. The difference for St. Augustine is that to tell the one story, he has to tell the other—there can be no abstraction, no depersonalization. Frederick Buechner says that “All good theology is autobiography”—this assertion is never more true than it is in Augustine.

And yet it’s not just a method that Augustine offers to later existentialist thinkers. There are two main ideas that existentialists take more or less directly from Augustine: (a) the so-called “God-shaped hole,” utilized mostly by Christian existentialists; and (b) the nothingness of evil, utilized by nearly everyone, but Sartre in particular. (These are not Augustine’s only contributions to existentialist thought—Heidegger takes his notion of “curiosity” directly from the Confessions, for example—but they are the two most notable.)

Christian existentialism begins, for all intents and purposes, with the first paragraph of the Confessions:

“You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised” (Ps. 47:2): “great is your power and your wisdom is immeasurable” (Ps. 146:5). Man, a little piece of your creation, desires to praise you, a human being “bearing his mortality with him” (2 Cor. 4:10), carrying with him the witness of his sin and the witness that you “resist the proud” (1 Pet. 5:5). Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your own creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

Augustine sees in human beings an innate religious longing, an undeniable pull toward the source of their being, that is, the God of the Bible. As I will demonstrate in my post on apologetics, this puts the arguments for God’s existence on entirely existential grounds. Christian theologians of all traditions will latch onto the last sentence of this paragraph, but existentialists in particular love it. Pascal does so most famously—“there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present” (Pensée 425)—but nearly every existentialist theologian describes this longing, even if, like Karl Barth, they say the religious impulse is equally matched by a complete inability to find God on one’s own.

The result of this religious instinct is clear, in that Augustine’s philosophical methodology follows directly from it. Philosophy becomes a chance to encounter the God for whom his heart longs, and early on in the book Augustine asks a series of philosophical questions with serious relational ramifications:

Tell me, God, tell your suppliant, in mercy to your poor wretch, tell me whether there was some period of my life, now dead and gone, which preceded my infancy? Or is this period that which I spent in my mother’s womb? On that matter also I have learnt something, and I myself have seen pregnant women. What was going on before that, my sweetness, my God? Was I anywhere, or any sort of person? I have no one able to tell me that—neither my father nor my mother nor the experience of others nor my own memory. But you may smile at me for putting these questions. Your command that I praise you and confess you may be limited to that which I know.

Philosophy thus becomes a special sort of prayer, a desperate attempt to contact the God behind all things. We see the same attitude even in non-Christian theologians, such as Martin Buber, whose I and Thou operates on much the same principle. It’s also related to Augustine’s use of Scripture, which is intensely personal and which begins what Robert McQuilken derisively calls the “existential hermeneutic”: “the existential approach claims that the life-situation of the interpreter plays a formative role in the meaning of any communication.” This hermeneutic very clearly begins with the Confessions, though McQuilken does not acknowledge it.

Augustine’s other contribution to existentialism is a bit more abstract, though he still builds it out of the autobiographical materials of his own life. While talking about the sins of his youth, he marvels, nearly offhand, that “evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being.” This is a heavy statement, one that Sartre will expand on sixteen centuries later in Being and Nothingness. If evil is nothing but a privation of the good, it is roughly congruent to what Sartre calls “nothingness,” the non-Being that infuses all being on this earth. If evil has no substance of its own, then it must exist at the heart of every substance other than God.

Sartre, obviously, does not agree with most of Augustine’s assumptions—including, of course, the existence of God and probably “good” and “evil” as categories—but it’s hard to argue that his discussion of nothingness does not proceed more-or-less directly from Augustine’s discussion of the same topic. The difference between the two thinkers is ultimately the difference between religious existentialism and atheistic existentialism, which is to say that the former believes in a Being wholly without nothingness that will, presumably, one day banish nothingness from our universe and make us all what we are rather than what we are not.

There’s a degree to which it’s legitimate to claim Judeo-Christian roots for almost all Western philosophies (including the scientism that seeks, in its more recent and ugly manifestations, to destroy religious faith altogether), but Existentialism has a special claim, I think. Most wide-scale histories of the movement include an early space for religious belief. Walter Kaufmann, himself no great friend to Christianity, is typical. In his Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre—one of the earliest anthologies of existentialist writing and thought—he tries to find a precursor to Dostoevsky: “If we look for anything remotely similar in the long past of European literature, we do not find it in philosophy but, most nearly, in such Christian writers as Augustine and Pascal.” It seems odd to me that Augustine and Pascal do not qualify as philosophy in Kaufmann’s mind—they are, let us agree, artistic works, possibly in addition to philosophical works—but he reads the line of influence correctly: “it is in Christianity, against the background of belief in original sin, that we first find this wallowing in man’s depravity and this uncompromising concentration on the dark side of man’s inner life.”

William Barrett—whose 1958 text Irrational Man is, by my lights anyway, the single best introduction to the movement—rightly goes even further back to find the source of Existentialism. He takes Matthew Arnold’s distinction between Hellenism and Hebraism (a distinction fleshed out even further in Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man) and classes nineteenth- and twentieth-century Existentialist thinkers in the latter group:

The Law, however, is not really at the center of Hebraism. At the center lies that which is the foundation and the basis of the Law, and without which the Law, even in the most Pharisaical tradition, would be but an empty shell. Here we have to think beyond Arnold. To be sure, the Law—the absolutely binding quality of its ritual and commandments—has been what has held the Jewish community together over its centuries of suffering and prevented this people from extermination. But if we go back to the Hebraic sources, to man as he is revealed to us in the Bible, we see that something more primitive and more fundamental lies at the basis of the moral law.

Barrett, like Kaufmann, finds the roots of Existentialism not in works of straight philosophy but in artistic works, in this case the Book of Job, sometimes referred to as literature’s first “novel”; in order to understand early Existentialism, says Barrett, “We have to learn to reread the Book of Job . . . in a way that takes us beyond Arnold and into our own time, reread it with an historical sense of the primitive or primary mode of existence of the people who gave expression to this work.”

Job has lost its power in the modern world, Barrett claims, because we feel relatively protected, both from the world around us and from a kind and forgiving “god without thunder,” to use John Crowe Ransom’s phrase. This was not true for the book’s initial audience:

For earlier man, the outcome of the Book of Job was not such a foregone conclusion as it is for us later readers, for whom centuries of familiarity and forgetfulness have dulled the violence of the confrontation between man and God that is central to the narrative. For earlier man, seeing for the first time beyond the routine commandments of his religion, there was a Promethean excitement in Job’s coming face to face with his Creator and demanding justification.

What Barrett leaves out in this description, of course, are the facts that lead up to this demand. Job is about belief systems that had seemed stable being turned on their head. Job and God seem to have an implicit arrangement at the beginning of the book: Job will live uprightly, and God will bless him (or at least keep him from the really terrible things of life). But this arrangement is shattered by the cosmic bet between God and Satan, and the entire foundation of Job’s life is shattered. The operative question of the bet is whether or not Job will remain Job even after his world turns to mud—that is, whether or not he will remain righteous even when he can’t find an immediately good reason for doing so.

The arguments set forth by his friends—almost all of which involve Job harboring some “secret sin” that makes him deserve the suffering he’s experiencing—are apt to seem rather ridiculous to readers who are familiar with Christ’s declaration that God “causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45, NAS). But of course such arguments are still used today. I remember my mother coming home crying from church one day because some amateur theologian (who apparently was familiar with neither Matthew nor Job) had told her that my sister’s recently diagnosed diabetes was the product of some sin. No, the Book of Job says, things happen, the reasons for which we will never know.

The crowning glory of the Book of Job is its final third, in which Job does indeed demand an explanation for his suffering from the God who is, after all, in control of all things. Barrett’s observation that, as opposed to similar moments in Greek drama, “The Hebrew . . . proceeds not by the way of reason but by the confrontation of the whole man, Job, in the fullness and violence of his passion with the unknowable and overwhelming God” is instructive here. Job’s complaint to God is not that he has suffered and doesn’t know the reason for it; it’s that God is absent during that suffering. Thus he can cling for awhile to his famous statement that

I know that my Redeemer lives,
And at the last He will take His stand on the earth.
Even after my skin is destroyed,
Yet from my flesh I shall see God.
(19:25-26)

It is, in fact, not until Job claims that he will approach God rationally and tell him what’s what that God appears in the whirlwind to rebuke him. “I would declare to Him the number of my steps,” he tells his friends. “Like a prince I would approach him” (31:37). These are nearly Job’s final words before God appears; Elihu will spend several chapters rebuking him before the main event shows up in chapter 38.

God, let us say, is not pleased by Job’s desire to attack or defend him on logical grounds:

Who is this that darkens counsel
By words without knowledge?
Now gird up your loins like a man,
And I will ask you, and you instruct Me!
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell Me, if you have understanding,
Who set its measurements? Since you know.
Or who stretched the line on it?
On what were its bases sunk?
Or who laid its cornerstone,
When the morning stars sang together
And all the sons of God shouted for joy? (38:2-7)

God thunders on like this for several chapters, and finally Job gives the correct answer: “I retract, / And I repent in dust and ashes” (42:6). Notice that Job is not intellectually convinced by God’s argument—no more than the reader is intellectually convinced by the strange epilogue of the story, which tells us that God gave Job a new wife and new children, as though that made up for all he’d been through. Job’s response to God is a method, a way of living: he bows before Him.

The other major source for existentialism in the Hebrew Bible is Ecclesiastes, a book that has always posed a problem for thinkers who want to make the Bible into a grandly coherent statement. What do we make of this book, which seems to preach nihilism and meaninglessness? It’s often classed as wisdom literature—but how does it fit in with the Psalms and the Proverbs, most of which appeal much more directly to traditional notions of God. But Ecclesiastes opens with an insidious declaration of intent:

“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher,
“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”
What advantage does man have in all his work
Which he does under the sun? (1:2-3)

Notice that holy living is not excluded from this condemnation of human life: “The wise man’s eyes are in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet I know that one fate befalls them both” (2:14). The Preacher is clearly operating under what Martin Heidegger would later term being-towards-death—a state which, however grim, opens up potentiality to the person who exists in it. The problem in this case is that it has reduced all potential outcomes to the same sad singularity: nothingness.

There is no epilogue to Ecclesiastes that makes things right—the Preacher doesn’t come back in the final few verses and say that he’s discovered a meaning for his life. All things remain vanity at the end of the book. There is no meaning to suffering that can be discovered: “man cannot discover the work which has been done under the sun. Even though man should seek laboriously, he will not discover; and though the wise man should say, ‘I know,’ he cannot discover” (8:17).

One gets the image of Albert Camus’s Sisyphus, pushing that rock up that hill for all eternity, with no hope that he’ll ever be allowed to stop or be given a more achievable goal. And the Preacher’s advice is strikingly similar to Camus’s: You just have to keep working anyway and hope that maybe eventually something will turn up: “Cast your bread on the surface of the waters, for you will find it after many days” (11:1). As in the Book of Job, a method is prescribed rather than an answer being given—and as in the earlier book, the answer revolves around having faith in a God Whom we can’t see and can’t hope to understand: “Just as you do not know the path of the wind and how bones are formed in the womb of the pregnant woman, so you do not know the activity of God who makes all things” (11:5). Meaning is apparently not for human beings to grasp, but for God alone.

The themes of the Book of Job and of Ecclesiastes would be echoed by existentialist theologians throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. God is absent in an immediate physical sense, these theologians tell us (though they disagree about what that absence signifies), and there is no immediate answer coming to the question of why we suffer. The solution is not an intellectual program, as you might expect, but a method of living: Paul Tillich will tell us to have the “courage to be,” the drive to live in the face of the nothingness all around us; Martin Buber will tell us to find God in the encounter between the I and the Thou; Karl Barth will point to the Book of Job itself, along with the other books of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, and tell us that the only route to God is the only which He has devised, His testimony and revelation. These three thinkers (and most other existentialists, religious or atheist) owe a great deal to Hebraic angst and doubt, and a return to these early books shows the modern reader, again and again, that what he goes through is nothing new.

It is not reasonable to expect everyone to share the same religious views, and since it can be difficult to see God’s hand in our violent and hate-filled universe, I don’t fault anyone for not believing in God. (My own reasons for believing in God are complicated, probably unsatisfying to people who live outside of my body, and a subject for another post.) But there is, best I can tell, a consistent and an inconsistent way to go about being an atheist, and most modern-day atheists fall rather neatly into the latter category. But I’ll let Walker Percy explain. From his novel The Second Coming:

The present-day unbeliever is a greater asshole than the present-day Christian because of the fatuity, blandness, incoherence, fakery, and fat-headedness of his unbelief. He is in fact an insane person. If God does in fact exist, the present-day unbeliever will no doubt be forgiven because of his manifest madness.

The present-day Christian is either half-assed, nominal, lukewarm, hypocritical, sinful, or, if fervent, generally offensive and fanatical. But he is not crazy.

The present-day unbeliever is crazy as well as being an asshole—which is why I say he is a bigger asshole than the Christian because a crazy asshole is worse than a sane asshole.

The present-day unbeliever is crazy because he finds himself born into a world of endless wonders, having no notion how he got here, a world in which he eats, sleeps, shits, fucks, works, grows old, gets sick, and dies, and is quite content to have it so. Not once in his entire life does it cross his mind to say to himself that his situation is preposterous, that an explanation is due him and to demand such an explanation and to refuse to play out another act of the farce until an explanation is forthcoming. . . .

The more intelligent he is, the crazier he is and the bigger an asshole he is. He becomes a professor and forms an interdisciplinary group. He reads Dante for its mythic structure. He joins the A.C.L.U. and concerns himself with the freedom of the individual and does not once exercise his own freedom to inquire into how in God’s name he should find himself in such a ludicrous situation as being born in Brooklyn, living in Manhattan, and being buried in Queens.

Percy, no doubt, won few friends among the atheist community with such statements—though it’s worth pointing out that in the section just before the one I’ve reproduced here, he recites a litany of reasons Christians are nearly as unsatisfactory as atheists, and thus he probably didn’t endear himself to the Religious Right, either. But, vulgarity aside, I think he’s right: Modern atheism, particularly the scientific variety proffered by the Logical Positivists and then by the nü atheists, is unsatisfactory.

The insanity of modern atheism is built on two posts. First, as Percy points out, modern atheism is inherently incurious. The atheist will object here that he has a great respect for the universe, a deep awe at the world around him. This is not what Percy is objecting to; no one claims that the nü atheists explicitly believe themselves to be the all-knowing center of the world, and no one claims that they have absolutely no sense of mystery. The problem is that they seem unwilling to interrogate that which really matters. If God exists, nothing could be more important, but by and large, the modern atheist dismisses God with a wave of his hand. Their sense of wonder is misplaced. They don’t ask the really important questions. Richard Dawkins even suggests that these questions—the “why” questions that are unanswerable by materialist science—are not worth answering. Percy would no doubt cough “asshole” and quickly turn away.

The second post of atheist insanity is the desire to discredit Christianity but to have everyone behave as though Christianity were true. Sartre, of all people, objects to this philosophy:

The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain kind of secular ethics which would like to abolish God with the least possible expense. About 1880, some French teachers tried to set up a secular ethics which went something like this: God is a useless and costly hypothesis; we are discarding it; but, meanwhile, in order for there to be an ethics, a society, a civilization, it is essential that certain values be taken seriously and that they be considered as having an a priori existence. It must be obligatory, a priori, to be honest, not to lie, not to beat your wife, to have children, etc., etc. So we’re going to try a little device which will make it possible to show that values exist all the same, inscribed in a heaven of ideas, though otherwise God does not exist. In other words . . . nothing will be changed if God does not exist. We shall find ourselves with the same norms of honesty, progress, and humanism, and we shall have made of God an outdated hypothesis which will peacefully die off by itself. (from Existentialism)

The nü atheists have certainly taken up the task begun by these unnamed “French teachers”; I heard a radio interview with Dawkins in which he claimed that Christianity was unnecessary because we could get to its ethical principles without the barbarity of Christ crucified. If this is true, it is only because he lives in a Western world that has for millennia based its ethics on Christ crucified. Confucius may offer us the Golden Rule, but he cannot pray, “Father, forgive them”—and this is, after all, what Dawkins and other purveyors of an atheist ethics desire for all of mankind to say. (What’s all this talk about “compassion” about if not forgiveness?) One cannot discard Christian metaphysics and maintain Christian ethics, at least not in an a priori way; those ethics proceed from the metaphysics, and if you’re going to adopt them, you’d better find a materialist reason for doing so. (Such a reason does not exist, as far as I can tell—you can tell a person that if he beats his wife, society will punish him, but you cannot tell him that spousal abuse is wrong without pointing to a metaphysical standard.)

Sartre will say elsewhere that all of existentialism comes from a saying of Dostoevsky’s (which appears in both The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov): “If there is no God, then all things are permitted.” Dostoevsky’s religious readers sometimes claim that Sartre has gotten Dostoevsky wrong, but if he has, it’s only in assuming (if indeed he does) that Dostoevsky believed there was no God. He certainly did not, and our nü atheists should pay attention to the real consequences of atheism. Ivan Karamazov gleefully proclaims this idea and yet is horrified when his half-brother Smerdyakov kills their father with no remorse. This is the state of man without God—you can intuit ethics, as we all do, but you can’t found them on anything, and you’re left speechless and half-mad if you examine evil seriously. I’ll be dealing with Dostoevsky’s relationship to religious and atheistic existentialism in my next post.

My point here is that the existence or non-existence of God matters, and if Dawkins, et al, take that seriously on the level of social policy, they don’t seem to take it seriously on a personal existential level, which is, of course, the level of real import.

Percy hints at the other inconsistency in nü atheist ethics, but things have progressed a bit since The Second Coming was published in the early ‘80s, and I’ll need to tease this out a little. He speaks disdainfully of the atheist professor who “joins the A.C.L.U. and concerns himself with the freedom of the individual,” but doesn’t get at the real irony in this move. Some—though by no means all—of the nü atheists are committed to a completely materialist vision of what it means to be a human. In other words, any personality, “self,” or “soul” (these last two words are particularly embarrassing to our contemporary atheists, I’ve noticed) is a mere side effect of chemical, physical, and electrical processes in the brain. This viewpoint would suggest that there is, in fact, no mind, only a brain. Professional skeptic Michael Shermer, among others, holds this opinion.

There is no individual, then, at least not in the way Western civilization has held out the notion. And yet the nü atheists are strikingly committed to the notion of human rights, to the point where Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have called for the arrest of Pope Benedict XVI “for crimes against humanity” in his complicity in the recently revealed child-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. Shermer is a bit more slippery; on one level he proclaims the relativity of moral values, at least on a social level; on another, he suggests that we should find a natural basis for the ethics of human rights. And why should we, if all our actions are motivated not by a human self but by a collection of human impulse—why should we even seek to find that natural basis for human rights? The answer, of course, is “to make society run smoothly.” But this answer doesn’t suggest human rights; it suggests a fiction to make life more comfortable for certain human beings.

Fictions are fine, but only if one admits them to be fictions instead of claiming them as empirical truths, as Shermer does—or instead of ignoring the issue altogether, as Dawkins seems to. The nü atheists would be well-served by a reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, history’s most honest and brilliant atheist thinker, who recognized that without a metaphysical foundation for human society and ethics, the very notion of value would be devalued. The passage that everyone knows from The Gay Science has a madman boldly proclaiming that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” (¶ 125). Less well-known is an earlier passage along the same lines:

New struggles.—After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. –And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. (¶ 108)

Nietzsche would lump religious believers in with those still worshipping the shadow of a dead God, of course; but atheists who treat Christian morality as something separable from Christian metaphysics belong there, too. From Nietzsche’s perspective, after all, they’re hanging on to the pathetic legacy of Christianity.

Indeed, the death of God means the death of morality, meaning, and value itself, and Nietzsche makes the point better than anyone else I’ve ever read:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a person as firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins.
(from “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”)

Such are the consequences of a world without God—an atheist who is willing to accept these consequences must either mourn the death of God, as does Sartre, or else glory in the absence of value, as does Nietzsche. The nü atheists, with their satisfied, godless humanism, wish to glory in the death of God and pretend that the values contingent upon the existence of that same God are independent. To quote Nietzsche once more, “They desire the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth; they are indifferent to pure knowledge if it has no consequences.”

Atheistic existentialism, then, is not as hostile to the religious mind as one might suspect, if only because it dares to take religion seriously on its own terms, something that the atheists who subscribe to Logical Positivism (and its contemporary heir, the nü atheism) steadfastly refuse to do.

When people find out that I self-identify as a Christian existentialist, they are sometimes surprised. And why shouldn’t they be? Existentialism as a philosophical movement is bound up in the public mind with four of history’s most famous atheists: Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, and Friedrich Nietzsche. (We could add to this list numerous other atheists who are identified with the movement, including Simone de Beauvoir, Franz Fanon, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Walter Kaufmann, and others.)

And yet it has always seemed to me that of the major philosophical movements of the past century and a half, existentialism is the most open to theological expression—not just because the movement finds its roots in religious thought (particularly in branches of Christianity and Judaism), but because the concerns of the existentialists are inherently religious concerns. It is no surprise that we find an outbreak of existentialist influence wherever the traditional Western notion of humanity is threatened, often by scientism and mechanization. It was the existentialists who revolted against the necessarily atheistic logical positivism of the early twentieth century; it was the existentialists who objected to the assembly-line dehumanization of the 1940s and ‘50s; and it will be the existentialists, I suspect, who wrest control of the public dialogue around religion away from the nü atheists of our own day.

I will thus spend the next several weeks writing a series of posts explaining what, exactly, religious existentialism looks like, how it differs from atheistic existentialism, and why I think it is the most viable option for the religious mind, even now, sixty years after its cultural prime. By necessity, I will confine my discussion to Christian and Jewish thinkers—and even then, I will be writing primarily about Christian existentialism—mainly because I am not aware of a Muslim or Hindu existentialist thinker, and other than perhaps Hermann Hesse, I don’t know of a writer who simultaneously identifies him or herself as both Buddhist and existentialist.

This study will be necessarily personal and incomplete. I have spent the last fifteen months or so in a concentrated study of major existentialist texts, but there is much I have not read (including, to my shame, any major work by Merleau-Ponty, Nikolai Berdyaev, Jose Ortega y Gasset, or André Gide). Nor would I ever claim to have more than a tenuous grasp on the two central systematic works of the movement: Heidegger’s Being and Time and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, two of the most notoriously dense and difficult works of twentieth-century philosophy, an area of study not particularly known for its breezy texts anyway.

As a student of literature who never made it past Introduction to Philosophy, I will also be focusing more than some people might like on fiction inspired by the philosophy. David E. Cooper, in his book Existentialism, claims that many a faulty reading of existentialist philosophy is built upon an “over-reliance on existentialist fiction” in general and on Camus’s L’Etranger in particular. So be it. My understanding of existentialism is substantially broader than Cooper’s anyway—as I will demonstrate as these posts continue—and I could not possibly leave out the work of John Updike, Walker Percy, and Frederick Buechner, who brought me to existentialism as a philosophy through the version (perhaps watered-down) found in their fiction.

I invite objections, in the form of comments or emails—both to whatever faults the informed reader may discover in my reading of the existentialists, atheistic and religious, and to any attempt on my part to merge the Judeo-Christian tradition with the sometimes inhospitable philosophies of the secular existentialists. At the end of the series, I will present a bibliography of texts referenced and cited for this project. Bear with me, and I hope you enjoy what is to come.

Alienation is such a major fixation for existentialists that it can be easy to forget that they didn’t invent it. (Students, like me, of Christian existentialism are more likely to say that the Hebrew Bible invented the concept, which was then preserved like a faithful remnant in the writings of St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal, etc., etc., until Kierkegaard could pick it up and gift-wrap it for the twentieth century.) But there is an argument to be made–and, in fact, David E. Cooper makes it in his book Existentialism: A Reconstruction–that the history of philosophy is a history of human attempts to cope with deep-seated alienation; in Cooper’s opinion, that alienation is the product of “a whole distorted stance towards the relation between man and world,” and philosophy is less scientific thought than psychospiritual panacea:

[T]he deepest urge to philosophy may be the need to overcome, dissolve, or come to terms with the dualistic thinking which informs that stance. Neither puzzlement nor awe, neither a thirst for knowledge nor a craving for clarity, has been the abiding inspiration for philosophy. Rather, this has been the perpetual threat posed by the sense that men are hopelessly alienated from their world.

The advantage of the existentialist, then, is not that he recognizes the alienation at the heart of an individual’s relationship to the world–indeed, if Cooper is to believed, nearly every major philosopher has recognized this fact, implicitly or explicitly–but that he sees the degree to which the Cartesian split of the mind from the body exacerbates the alienation.

Alienation is certainly a good place to start from if one is interested in doing philosophy the way Plato and Socrates did it: as a quasi-religious ritualized quest for Truth. (After all, what is the Theory of Forms if not an attempt to impose a grand celestial order upon an earthly reality that appears chaotic and absurd?) And philosophers who admit that their philosophy proceeds forth from a nothingness coiled, to use Sartre’s image, at the heart of their being strike me as fundamentally more honest than those who, like the Logical Positivists, pretend to detachment and objectivity. The former relate to the world as we all do, from a position of what Heidegger calls “concern”; the latter attempt to create a clinical environment and, in so doing, manage to leave themselves out of their precisely defined worlds entirely. The problem is that a definition of the world that excludes the definer (a) is untrue in the sense that it fails to account for one of the most important pieces of the puzzle, the Self; and (b) propagates Descartes’s dualistic view of humanity, thus making alienation even worse. The moral of the story: Admit alienation before you begin to think, or else make your situation that much worse.

The Bible does not, technically speaking, begin with alienation but rather with an astounding unity in which is hidden a secret dualism: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Indeed, all matter and all substance flows forth, effortlessly, from this one divine source. And yet we have a split here, in that in the act of creating the world, God is not the world. But separation does not necessitate alienation, any more than finitude necessitates sinfulness. God and the cosmos, though split from the first moment of creation, nevertheless exist in perfect harmony for the first two chapters of Genesis. And when “the Lord God form[s] man of dust from the ground, and breathe[s] into his nostrils the breath of life” (2:7), Adam and Eve, too, exist in perfect harmony–with each other, with the world, with God, and with themselves. (Notice, too, that at least in this account of the origin of man, the body and the spirit [or "mind"?] appear to be mutually dependent; the body may come first, but Adam is not called “a living being” until God imparts to him “the breath of life.”)

So alienation enters Judeo-Christian theology in Genesis 3, with Adam and Eve shattering the dualistic harmony that has heretofore reigned supreme. Alienation, I’ll argue, manifests itself in four ways today and always–and it should come as no surprise that we find all four in the third chapter of Genesis:

1. Alienation from God. Adam and Eve disobey God’s commandment and are torn away from their relationship with the divine. Genesis 2 is the last chapter in the Bible in which a call from God is unequivocal, not matched by a pull away from God. By the time the Modern Age rolls around, we get Martin Luther’s deus absconditus and Karl Barth’s Wholly Other God–both legitimate theologies in this postlapsarian world in which we are alienated from the source of life.
2. Alienation from the world of nature. God’s last action before ejecting humanity from Eden once and for all is to introduce violence into the nonhuman world for the first time: “And the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them” (3:21). The modern era is famously marked by humanity’s preference to interpret God’s command to “fill the earth, and subdue it” (1:28) as “take advantage of the earth.” Environmentalism would be unnecessary if not for our alienation from the natural world.
3. Alienation from one another. It’s telling that Adam’s first impulse after being confronted by God about his sin is to blame “The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me” (3:12). In reality, this move is meant to blame both Eve and God for Adam’s actions, and it demonstrates the degree to which our alienation from one another is intertwined with our alienation from God.
4. Alienation from ourselves. I’d argue that the Cartesian split actually doesn’t begin with Descartes’s cogito but with the eating of the fruit in the Garden: “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (3:7). Here we have, for the first time, man and woman ashamed of their physical bodies–the mind has turned against the body, and this enmity has been there ever since.

The history of philosophy–at least according to the Hebraic origin story–is thus the history of alienation. Importantly, the forbidden fruit is from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (2:17), making intellectual and philosophical activity a double motion: It brings on alienation, and then it attempts to heal it. This double motion is important, as we shall see in a moment.

I give the theological background of alienation–and obviously, I’ve given only a small corner of a vast tapestry of alienation in the Bible–in order to point out that Cooper’s book, like the vast majority of general books on existentialism, fails to engage adequately with existential theology, as opposed to existential philosophy. Everyone discusses Kierkegaard, of course, and Cooper spends a bit of time with Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel, but he dismisses readers who view Buber theologically and says nothing about the most explicitly theological aspects of Marcel’s thought (specifically, his rebuttal to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, “Existence and Human Freedom”). He brings up Rudolf Bultmann in order to dismiss him, and he completely ignores the two greatest Protestant theologians of the last century, Barth and Paul Tillich, both of whom make very important modifications to existentialist thought. Not a word is said about Helmut Kuhn, the Niebuhr brothers, etc., etc., although John MacQuarrie gets brought up in a nontheological context.

As I said, Cooper is by no means alone in these exclusions; theological existentialism is so ignored in general histories of the movement that it may indeed fall to me to write a more inclusive one. But Cooper strikes me as a particularly egregious example, focusing on Heidegger and Sartre–existentialism’s most radical atheists–nearly to the exclusion of everyone else. He even tries to throw Kierkegaard out of the club, for reasons that are very telling. Kierkegaard, he tells us,

seems to enjoy the thought that men are aliens in their world. It is only if people do view themselves as “homeless” that they will then seek that personal relationship with God, which is the pivot of Kierkegaard’s concerns.

He gets the facts basically right but the tone wrong. Kierkegaard appreciates alienation (and its attendant psychospiritual affect, angst/dread/anxiety/whatever) for its ability to lead people to the precipice of faith, but he’s as interested in healing alienation as is everyone who follows him–he just believes that healing will come only when the individual leaps over that precipice. Thinking that a relationship with God is the only cure for spiritual homelessness is not, in fact, the same thing as enjoying the thought of spiritual homelessness.

Here, then, is where the bibically minded thinker (Jewish or Christian) must break with the defiantly secular existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre (and Cooper, to the degree he subscribes to the philosophy he summarizes). We’re told that “The Existentialist . . . follows Hegel and Marx in assigning to philosophy the task of curing people of the misunderstandings which promote a sense of alienation.”

The problems should be obvious: Alienation, for one thing, is not the result of anything so trivial as a misunderstanding; it is a deep-seated gulf at the very heart of humanity’s relationship to itself and everything else. And philosophy’s ability to heal alienation is exactly counterbalanced by its creation of further alienation, as the story of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil demonstrates. When philosophers attempt to “cure” alienation, it’s like trying to get a sliver out from under your fingernail: You may know what the problem is, but you lack the means for solving it. And the tomes on alienation–even the existentialist tomes, which see the problem much more clearly than most others–only push that sliver deeper in.

The existentialist theologians know this. Barth tells us that our attempts at reaching God–or our attempts to do what only God can do–are little more than Towers of Babel, created to be toppled. The solution is the one Cooper rejects out of hand: We must allow despair to lead us to the precipice, then close our eyes and jump beyond knowledge into the theological hole.