Who's an Existentialist?

The aftermath of World War II spawned no identifiable Lost Generation, but it did bring a word for intellectuals to play with: existentialism. At first it appeared to be nothing but a new French fad--redolent of sex, sidewalk cafes, tight blue jeans and Communism. But on examination it seems that all kinds of respectable thinkers are existentialists, and that France's Atheist Jean-Paul Sartre represents merely a quasi-Communist splinter group in a movement that grew out of the thoughts of the great 19th century Danish religious thinker, Soeren Kierkegaard. What is a modern-day existentialist? One who asks the great questions--"Who am I?" "Why am I here?"--and finds no answer. Can a Christian be an existentialist? He may ask the existentialist questions and suffer the existentialist agonies of doubt and darkness, but for him the answer of faith has come.

Some of these thorny trails of thought are explored in Christianity and the Existentialists, a new book published by Scribner ($3.75) and edited by Carl Michalson, professor of systematic theology at Drew University. Its eight chapters include studies of Kierkegaard by Theologian H. (for Helmut) Richard Niebuhr,* Spain's Miguel de Unamuno by President John A. Mackay of Princeton Theological Seminary, Nicholas Berdyaev by Matthew Spinka, professor of church history at the Hartford Seminary Foundation, Gabriel Marcel by Professor J. V. Langmead Casserley of the General Theological Seminary, Martin Heidegger by Erich Dinkler of Yale Divinity School, and of modern art by Harvard's Professor Paul Tillich. Out of this meeting of minds one conclusion about existentialists emerges clear: they take life hard.

Poison in the Beer. Liveliest chapter is Editor Michalson's own attempt to answer the question: What is existentialism? The layman's suspicion that it is some kind of clandestine wedding between Nordic melancholy and Parisian pornography, he admits, comes close to truth. "For . . . there is in existentialism a shocking sensualism, an erotic realism, a tearful and throbbing meeting of skin against skin, which, so characteristically French, appreciates propinquity of heart and fingertip." At the same time existentialism contains "a sentiment of constantly living over cracking earth, or at the foot of live volcanos, or in a land where people fight two wars in every lifetime."

Existentialism, unlike traditional philosophies, does not try to think its way above or beyond man's subjective moods--it glorifies them. Fear and trembling, guilt and death, are valued by existentialists as concomitants of man's encounter with the void around him and his necessary decision to walk forward in the darkness. For existentialism, in spite of all its talk, is a philosophy of action; words by themselves do not count. "One who murmurs in his beer, 'I wish I were dead,' " writes Michalson, "would only be really existing if he were at that moment quaffing poison." Kierkegaard, says Yale's Niebuhr, was much like his hero Socrates, "whose wisdom consisted in the knowledge of his ignorance, whose imperative was 'know thyself,' whose philosophy of life was 'reduplicated in his living and his dying, who was a comic and tragic figure, who was the father of philosophers but the father of no philosophy." Kierkegaard attacked the Christianity of his time devastatingly for standing between the individual and Christ. True Christianity he saw as "a becoming, not being ... To believe is not to be a believer, but to become a believer in every moment, without confidence in the soul's power to believe, but only with confidence now that tomorrow God will give it faith as a wholly new and wonderful act of grace."

"Dangerously irreligious." For Spanish Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, who died in 1936 at the age of 72, life's true meaning lay in what he called "agonic struggle." His religion, he once said, "is to struggle with God." And he carried on the struggle in a setting of "transcendental pessimism." Man's heart craves God and immortality, he held, but his intellect can never prove their existence. Therefore, "let life be lived in such a way," Princeton's Mackay paraphrases him, "with such dedication to goodness and the highest values that if, after all, it is annihilation which finally awaits us, that will be an injustice."

Harvard's Tillich sees existentialism in three aspects. In part it is "an element in all important human thinking ... the attempt of man to describe his existence and its conflicts, the origin of these conflicts, and the anticipations of overcoming them; it is also a revolt against 19th century industrial society, against the world view in which man is nothing but a piece of an all-embracing mechanical reality"--physical, economic, sociological or psychological. The third aspect of existentialism, says Tillich, is the universal plaint of sensitive human beings in the 20th century. "It became the subject matter of some great philosophers ... of poets . . . like Eliot and Auden ... It was expressed especially powerfully in the novel." And, Tillich adds, at least as much in painting.

The sweet and pretty religious pictures that are all too common in church papers, church meeting rooms and ministers' offices, says Tillich, are "dangerously irreligious, and they are something against which everybody who understands the situation of our time has to fight." Against them he puts paintings that attempt to thrust the viewer face to face with reality, 16th century Matthias Gruenewald's famed Crucifixion on the Isenheim altar ("I believe it is the greatest German picture ever painted"). Modern existentialism in art, he says, begins with Cezanne and penetrates to "the depths of reality" in pictures like Van Gogh's Starry Night.

To capture reality is what modern artists, good and bad, are trying to do, says Tillich, and that is why Hitler, representing the fear of reality of the petty bourgeoisie, suppressed modern art. "The churches followed in most cases the petty bourgeoisie resistance against modern art and against existentialism generally. The churches believed they had all the answers. But in believing they had all the answers, they deprived the answers of their meaning. These answers were no longer understood because the questions were no longer understood, and this was the churches' fault ... I believe that existentialist art has a tremendous religious function . . . namely to rediscover the basic questions to which the Christian symbols are the answers, in a way which is understandable to our time. These symbols can then become again understandable to our time."

But, Tillich concludes, there is really no such thing as Christian existentialism. Christians who question life in existentialist terms answer as Christians. "For this reason, I do not believe that the ordinary distinction between atheistic and theistic existentialism makes any sense. As long as an existentialist is theistic, he is either not existentialist or he is not really theistic."

Even so, the existential attitude is normative for modern Protestantism. "Existentialism describes the human situation," says Tillich, "and as such it is a decisive element in present-day religious thinking and Christian theology."

*Not to be confused with Union Theological Seminary's Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, his elder brother.

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