The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre

The Religion of Existence

THE RELIGION OF EXISTENCE

Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre

Noreen Khawaja

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40451-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40465-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226404653.001.0001

Published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University.

Page 42: The Existentialist Tree, from Emmanuel Mounier’s Introduction aux existentialismes, © Éditions Denoël, 1947. Reprinted by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Khawaja, Noreen, author.

Title: The religion of existence : asceticism in philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre / Noreen Khawaja.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016014740 | ISBN 9780226404516 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226404653 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Existentialism. | Asceticism.

Classification: LCC B819 .K484 2016 | DDC 142/.78—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014740

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Your true penitence is worth more than a true, constant faith.

—Metastasio, La Clemenza di Tito

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Feel of Religion

1  ·  Authenticity and Conversion

2  ·  Conversion as a Way of Life

3  ·  Philosophical Methodism

4  ·  The Infinite Mission

5  ·  Ascetics of Presence

Conclusion

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

It is for several reasons misleading to begin with a page of acknowledgments. First, the fact that there are so many conversations, so many fundamental acts of sharing, so many generous people and unforeseen spurs, without any of which this work would simply not have come about. In their broad shade, the project of writing out my acknowledgments seems impossible from the start. Second, the fact that the best and truest acknowledgment of all these acts and influences is the work itself. There is no metadiscourse capable of representing these relations more fully or more precisely than the work already expresses. Perhaps one should begin always as Marcus Aurelius did, with a full chapter of philosophical thanksgiving in which family and fortune, friends and enemies are all assimilated: those from whom I have learned, from whose lessons this work attempts to teach me again, anew, something worth writing down. Having neither his courtesy nor his serenity of temper, I will thank just a few of those whose spirit and time have helped this book come to fruition.

My colleagues at Yale have given substance to the idea of an intellectual community. Katie Lofton, above all, the righteous conjurer of worlds. Her quickening gaze and fundamental belief in the practice of thinking made it possible for me to work beyond the limits of my own experience in all those fragile moments of conception and construction, when the biggest bets of the project were all still in play. Elli Stern has been a relentless comrade, and his appetite for ideas has constantly provoked and inspired me to reach for the biggest and clearest version of what I was trying to say. I am thankful for his keen criticism, unflagging support, and true friendship. Martin Hägglund’s incomparable attention, reaching for big stakes and leaning on local phrases with equal gusto, made this book much stronger than it was before he read it. Our reading group on Kierkegaard was an impetus in my early work on this project. I am deeply grateful to Jennifer Herdt, who read the first draft of this work in a generous and thoughtful spirit and offered many useful suggestions for improvement. Paul Franks generously offered his time and readership and helped me see the stakes of a Christian genealogy in a critical new light. Kathy Tanner helped me on several occasions to see both the strengths and the weaknesses of this work in a way I had not previously imagined. Her exceptionally helpful comments on the relation between Pietism and philosophy came at a key juncture. Hindy Najman’s attentive reading of an early draft of my introduction allowed me to see a context for this work that I would not previously have imagined. Nancy Levene, in the example of her work and the powerful presence of her thinking, kept challenging me to go all the way to the bottom of things. In the refracted light of our conversations, many ideas at the basis of this work began at last to become clearer to me.

I would also like to thank the colleagues and friends at Brown University who invited me to their colloquium on religion and helped me think through a draft of the first chapter of this work. Alexis Glenn gave a wonderfully sharp response, and I appreciate enormously the feedback and suggestions given by so many there, especially Mark Cladis, Tal Lewis, and Steven Bush. Similarly, a colloquium held at Yale through the Yale Seminar in Religious Studies on the manuscript during the spring of 2015 offered a tremendous breadth of insights into the readership of this work. Peter Gordon’s munificent and epically thoughtful comments—at the colloquium and beyond—were of crucial help in formulating the scope of my argument and the stakes of some of its key terms. He raised difficult questions that made the book much better (though I am sure not to have answered them all). Taylor Carman helped me anticipate important criticisms of this work and, in the spirit of existentialism itself, encouraged me to finish the book in the way it wanted to be finished. George Pattison offered typically sharp and helpful comments on many key points in core chapters of the book and has been a supportive presence throughout its development.

Jen McWeeny asked me superb and difficult questions about the Sartre chapter that I am still not sure I have resolved. Christian Sommer offered several insightful suggestions about the Heidegger material in particular. During the final stage of the writing process, Jessica Helfand put an actual roof over my head, and I feel profoundly lucky to call her my friend. Marissa Gemma and Lauren Boehm read several chapters of this book in their roughest, most deranged form—it is only because of their sharp eyes, searching imaginations, and true, true love that this work made it into a state where it might be read by anyone else, ever.

There are several people whose readership has been essential to me over the longue durée—not only of this book itself but of the thinking and the writing that led me to it. Joanna Radin showed me the meaning of intellectual kinship before I knew that without that lesson all would have been lost. She is my partner in imperfect crime. Walking and talking with Emanuele Coccia is an art in itself. Our conversations made it possible for me to experiment with this book as an act of writing, for which my gratitude is as inexhaustible as the supply of exclamation marks in his computer. David Kangas opened up so many intellectual possibilities for me—with respect to Kierkegaard in particular, but through Kierkegaard, with respect to the whole. His example casts its shadow throughout this work. David Marno—expert on thanksgiving, and whom I cannot thank enough. We started out together, and while I was worrying about the religious dimensions of phenomenology, he was rethinking devotion in phenomenological terms. In the course of our dialogues, many ideas within this work came into being.

My advisors at Stanford helped me get going in my research on existentialism and believed in me long before there was evidence to back up that credence. Tom Sheehan and Brent Sockness, Brent Sockness and Tom Sheehan—their support in difference made my work stronger at every turn. Sepp Gumbrecht has always had the best possible eye for what was interesting and what was not and taught me the absolute importance of that skill. I am also grateful for the stalwart support and interest of those who had no reason to offer it—Van Harvey and Allen Wood, most especially.

Family is by necessity the first to give or not to give one opportunities in life. Mine by fortune gave me the means to pursue the life I now have. The support of my parents in particular has given me the confidence to commit to this work across all manner of moments. Their bookshelves bore the first works of philosophy I ever read, a literal truth from which many metaphorical ones could be spun.

I am thankful for the Morse Fund, the Griswold Fund, and the Hilles Grant at Yale University for giving me the financial backing to complete this project. And the fact that it is not just a project but a book, a thing in the world, is large part thanks to Alan Thomas, to his staunch support and many wise ways.

At the close of this long and too-short list: Espéraza, the idea of which allowed me to write this book, the reality of which nearly stopped me from finishing it, and the living spirit of which makes me want to begin everything all over again.

Introduction

The Feel of Religion

It takes an atheist of world-historical proportions to have one’s entire oeuvre banned by the Vatican. Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1959 distinction, uncommon for a philosopher in the twentieth century, placed him in the company of Spinoza, Diderot, and John Stuart Mill. Even Voltaire’s works had received only a selective prohibition. Three years before the verdict, Walter Kaufmann, the most important translator and defender of existential philosophy in America at the time, had observed that Sartre’s uniquely insistent atheism was at the root of the controversy that had grown around his stateside reception. Pointing to the long association between departments of philosophy and theology in American universities, Kaufmann cited "a wide-spread assumption in the United States that an avowed atheist is eo ipso no philosopher and differentiated Sartre’s vociferous atheism from that of the British philosophers more familiar in the American context, who do not usually make a point of their disbelief."¹

Sartre’s atheism has often been understood as something more than an expression of his own philosophical attitude. After his 1946 essay Existentialism Is a Humanism, which contains his most pointed declaration of atheism, became the most widely read and circulated work on existentialism in the postwar context, it became difficult to distinguish discussions of Sartre’s position from those of his fellow existentialists. Existentialism Is a Humanism was originally given as a lecture in 1945 to a room packed with Parisian intellectuals, all looking to each other for help navigating the political and moral quagmire of liberated France. As the copula in the title would suggest, the text is closer to a manifesto than an essay, and Sartre’s chief aim was a political one: he wanted to convince his audience that existentialism, despite its concern with subjectivity and its insistence on the finite character of human freedom, was not a theoretical argument for quietism. Many of his listeners had been, like Sartre himself, active in the French Resistance and in 1945 found themselves leaning toward versions of Marxism in the search for a discourse that could balance a radical critique of tradition with a deep investment in the political and social future of Europe. Sartre sought to establish that existentialism—through its original concept of personal authenticity—was not only compatible with but even essential to any progressive agenda devoted to the advancement of material and political freedom. He also spared no time in pointing out that existentialism, properly understood, had nothing to do with religion. There was, to be sure, a lot of philosophical and quasi-philosophical talk about existence among those sympathetic to the monotheistic traditions of Christianity and Judaism. But here Sartre came armed with a new distinction: such talk was not existentialism but rather Christian existentialism.² Utterly distinct from this Christian discourse was atheistic existentialism, of which Sartre offered himself as the primary representative. The first principle of atheistic existentialism emphasized the total isolation of the human being and the total responsibility of each person for his own existence: Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.³ Among the Christian existentialists, he named Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. Martin Heidegger was the only philosopher he placed in his own company.

The published version of Sartre’s lecture quickly became one of the most widely read texts of existential thought. Within a few years, it was translated into English, Dutch, German, Danish, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. Quite soon, in other words, Sartre’s context-specific defense of his philosophy, along with his fundamental division between Christian and atheist as two available types, was made to stand as the authoritative characterization of existentialism at an international level.⁴ At the same time, as Sartre’s definition gained more and more influence, the other so-called existentialists wanted less and less to do with it. Heidegger addressed the subject in his 1947 Letter on Humanism, loudly rejecting any philosophical affinity with Sartre. By the time Kaufmann’s influential anthology appeared in 1956, Kaufmann felt the need to open with the concession that existentialism had been haunted almost from its inception by the possibility that it may not even exist.

The uncertainty about whether or not existentialism existed, or could be used coherently as a term, also served to mask a different sort of problem: Sartre’s dichotomy between Christian and atheistic existentialism had little basis in fact. There were, to be sure, those like Marcel and Blondel in the French context who identified both as Christians and as existentialists.⁵ But in attempting to prevent his audience from confusing his own philosophy with that of Marcel, Sartre created a good deal of confusion elsewhere. Heidegger, for one, explicitly rejected the label Sartre created for him, insisting on a formalism so absolute that it seemed to make the very question of theism irrelevant to the procedure of philosophy. And Jaspers, whom Sartre describes as a professed Catholic, consistently argued that his notion of transcendence could not be understood under any specific confessional orientation. What’s more, Jaspers’s background was Protestant, not Catholic, and it is first of all to Protestantism one ought to look in order to understand the Christian elements in his thought.

The issue is not that Sartre was wrong about Heidegger or Jaspers, nor even that those influenced by his essay inadvertently repeated his errors. The issue I want to stake out here is that Sartre’s premise itself is false: the role that religion plays in the broad field of existential philosophy cannot be explained by relying on a dichotomy between Christian and atheist. Existentialism is a tradition comprised of Protestant theologians (Tillich, Bultmann, Gogarten), Catholic theologians (Rahner, Blondel, Jacques Maritain), Jewish theologians and religious thinkers (Buber, Soloveitchik, Benjamine Fondane), postconfessional religious writers of an impressively global cast (Jaspers, Unamuno, Chestov, Henri Corbin, Keiji Nishitani), vocal atheists who stood against religion (like Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir), as well as methodological atheists whose relation to religion is more ambiguous, like Heidegger, but also like many of the existential psychologists who appropriated and disseminated key ideas of this philosophy under the rubric of spiritual health and self-actualization in the second half of the twentieth century (R. D. Laing, Irvin D. Yalom, Rollo May).⁶ When Sartre’s explanation for the apparent Christianness of existentialism was adopted by a larger audience, the flawed distinction became the basis for a flawed theory of religion.

Most attempts to account for what unites such a diverse array of figures have focused on the themes that appear in their writings. According to such accounts, existentialism is best characterized by a series of philosophical motifs, primarily connected with negative emotions—fear, anxiety, isolation, boredom, guilt, nothingness, finitude.⁷ Thematic analyses were propagated by all sorts of figures. First of all, we find them advanced by those invested in and sympathetic to existential thought, such as Helmut Kuhn, who describes Heidegger’s Being and Time as being perfumed with the exhalations of death. Like the uniform of the black guard, it is marked all over with the mortuary emblem of skull and bones.⁸ Kuhn is an admirer and early interpreter of existential thought, but his reading would appear with no great shift of tone as the core argument in dismissals of Heidegger’s work. Walter Kaufmann, for another example, treats the diversity of attitudes toward religion among the figures he collected for his existentialist canon as evidence of their lack of agreement about essentials and posits that unity should rather be sought in the one essential feature shared by all these men: perfervid individualism.⁹ This same impression would appear in the words of critics, but as a negative caricature: the antisocial existentialist, faithful to himself and to himself alone. It would also leave existential thought vulnerable to a misunderstanding that haunts it to this day—namely, that it is a doctrine of the individual developed from the long tradition of European romanticism.

The persistent appeal of such thematic approaches stems from the sense that existentialism lacks the deeper unity of a movement with shared objectives. But I would add that this lack itself only appears as a problem to the extent that one tries to understand existentialism as a movement in the first place. This certainly was the impression many readers got from Sartre’s manifesto, and he did little to work against it. Nonetheless, the impression was a false one, and it obscured the simpler nature of the connection between the main figures associated with the label.

Existentialism is a tradition, not a movement. It is a tradition in the most literal sense of the word: a pattern of intergenerational influence, in which later figures read and appropriated the work of earlier figures. These figures do not always agree about essentials, but their intellectual kinship has little to do with the presence of common themes in their writings. The kinship is felt, even when the disagreement is undeniable, because their works are in constant conversation with one another. It is virtually impossible, for example, to discuss Kierkegaard’s notion of choosing oneself without having Heidegger’s concept of authenticity in the background. Likewise, I challenge any reader to produce an example of Heideggerian Angst without drawing from the iconic encounter in Nausea in which Roquentin fails dramatically in his attempt to pick up a crumpled scrap of paper from the street. This almost automatic entanglement of ideas and images should not be seen as an indication that Heidegger is more precise than Kierkegaard or Sartre more influential than Heidegger. Nor should we be too quick to chastise our own tendencies to interpret the past anachronistically. We find ourselves in this situation because existentialism is a tradition, and it is the nature of a tradition to create situations of anachronicity.

In Kierkegaard’s case, this intrinsic anachronism was aggravated by the relatively late reception of his writings in western Europe. Though he was a contemporary of Schelling, Marx, and Burckhardt, it would take until the years following the First World War for Kierkegaard’s collected works to be translated into German. And what emerged from this translation, in addition to a German academic field of Kierkegaard research, was a wide-ranging intellectual tradition in which Kierkegaard’s ideas were appropriated and progressively explained in a number of disciplines, serving as the stimulus to new conversations in philosophy (Heidegger and Jaspers), theology (Karl Barth and Theodor Haecker), and political thought (from Carl Schmitt to Adorno). This German Kierkegaard then made his way into France in the 1930s, during the same period that French philosophers were beginning to get excited about the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. Sartre’s formative trip to the Insititut Français de Berlin in 1933–34 has been credited as one major impetus for the explosion of existential thought in postwar France.¹⁰ Likewise, Jean Wahl’s 1938 opus, Études Kierkegaardiennes, which depends entirely on German translations and scholarship, provided the emerging existentialistes with the first comprehensive study of Kierkegaard in France. More than seven hundred pages long, this work also included a reissue of Wahl’s important 1932 essay Heidegger and Kierkegaard: Search for the Original Elements of Heidegger’s Philosophy, which positioned Heidegger as the direct philosophical descendant of Kierkegaard just as Heidegger was becoming known in France.¹¹

Kierkegaard died in Copenhagen nearly a century before the word existentialism began ringing in people’s ears. Kierkegaard himself was raised strictly in his father’s Pietism, a Danish hybrid marked by both Moravian and Halle traditions. Although he was a writer of many voices, Kierkegaard consistently described the aim of his work as that of explaining what it means to become a Christian. Thus at the heart of his authorship is the idea of the Christian mission, but his audience was composed not of the distant tribes of Asia or America but of what Schleiermacher once called religion’s cultured despisers—the bourgeois citizens of Christendom who treat their religion as custom rather than an object of ongoing, passionate commitment. But for our purposes, it is important to note that it is not only that Kierkegaard understands his audience as the lapsed Christians of nineteenth-century Denmark; his work addresses its reader as if she were that lapsed Christian. Judging by the demographics of his own day, this would have been a fair bet. But decades later, and in the context of a far more diverse and international audience, this strategy had an interesting consequence: whether or not she acknowledges this address, Kierkegaard’s reader finds herself deciding about how to draw lines between the discourse of theoretical psychology and the discourse of the Christian mission, both of which traverse his work.

As the existential tradition claimed Kierkegaard as its father, in other words, those within that tradition found themselves in an inevitable confrontation with Christianity. It is quite true, as Kaufmann and others have observed, that Heidegger’s formal sublimation of Kierkegaard’s Christianity differs from the overt and atheological criticism of Sartre. Moreover, in their respective attitudes toward Kierkegaard’s religion, Heidegger and Sartre are just about equally far from the approaches taken by a Jewish philosopher such as Martin Buber or a postsecular Jew such as Lev Chestov. And yet these differences should not eclipse the fact—perhaps more salient today than in 1956—that to have Kierkegaard as one’s father also means to share Protestant Christianity as a semantic horizon of one’s work. This is so regardless of the degree to which existential thinkers explicitly engaged Christian ideas outside of their engagement with Kierkegaard. More often than not, however, their confrontation with Christianity was not merely the side-effect of their attraction to Kierkegaard. The young Heidegger, for example, seemed to be as interested in the character of Kierkegaard’s Christianity as he was in Kierkegaard himself (an influence which is now quite well documented).¹² At a time when Heidegger was working out how to make the transition from medieval theology to contemporary philosophy and from conservative Catholicism to a more mediated position, inflected by liberal Protestantism and devotional literature alike, Kierkegaard presented a promising way of working through Christian ideas in a fully modern psychological language.

Even more important for the development of existentialism is the fact that Kierkegaard’s Christianity wore its theoretical sophistication rather lightly. His insistence on exploring ideas through the embodiments of voice and character, his complex and only partially systematic layering of distinct perspectives, his inability to repeat an argument of speculative philosophy without it sounding like a parody—all of this made his writings seem very far removed from the abstract and impersonal discourse of traditional systematic theology. Here there was no rigid differentiation between action and reflection. In fact, most of the philosophical and psychological architecture of Kierkegaard’s writings seemed designed to portray Christianity as the form of life that emerges when a reflective individual begins to take up the problem of his own existence as a matter of passionate, personal concern. Faith is not dogma but autopsy.¹³ The so-called existential turn within phenomenology that began with Heidegger would aim at just this kind of methodological revolution. Heidegger, inspired by the personal nature of Kierkegaard’s work and of Protestant theology more generally, wanted to find a way for philosophy to speak more immediately than as a second-order theorization of experience. He sought to position philosophical discourse against abstraction, as a development and intensification of the latent questions and assumptions that guide human beings in their everyday conduct. And when Sartre, to take a final example, exuberantly describes his discovery that an idea is never just a proposition one adopts but the sort of thing one slips into—an immense complex of thoughts, actions, and feelings, a projection onto my future and a clearing up of my past¹⁴—what he is describing is the idea as an aspect of one’s first-person experience of the world, as something lived. Philosophy had been looking for a new way to relate to life, one in which theory is simply one way of doing something and action itself is seen as an implicit thought. Kierkegaard’s exceptionally articulate form of Christian piety had opened up a way for thought itself to gain access to the passionate, desperate, intensely personal experience of the individual—and to express that experience through the charged psychology of a religion in which every moment stages the risk of gaining or losing one’s eternal happiness.

To call Christianity a shared semantic horizon of existentialism thus points to something beyond the fact that the existentialists had to come up with a way of analyzing the role that Christianity played for Kierkegaard, qua progenitor of their ideas. Insofar as existentialism took on the bold task of making philosophy homogenous with life, in the words of an early reviewer,¹⁵ it had ventured into a space in which some of the most influential models were those developed by Protestant theologians intent on carrying forward the spirit of Reform. Luther’s special notion of vocation had charged even the most mundane and physical of labors with spiritual value, making room outside the monastic context for intellectual possibilities once attached primarily to the vita contemplativa. Living as a Christian, rather than reading or learning, is what makes one a theologian, Luther famously declared.¹⁶ Schleiermacher would later develop this idea even further with his idea of theology as a positive science—not a speculative or abstract system of doctrines organized by logical necessity, in other words, but simply a formal working out of the religious individual’s concrete, living posture of faith.¹⁷ Heidegger takes up Schleiermacher’s definition of theology in his 1927 essay on theology in so close a paraphrase that it could be construed as plagiarism.¹⁸

What Heidegger did was to call attention to this connection between thinking and life by giving it a name: the existential. Quietly but dramatically, this word would come to shift the terms on which the distinction between theology and philosophy was negotiated in the twentieth century. The word is so familiar now that it is easy to ignore how specific its contemporary meaning really is. When we describe something as existential—a question or topic, for example—we are describing something that is personal but not exclusively emotional or psychological. We are describing something that concerns big life choices and deeply held values but that tends not to be reducible to the abstract language of ethics. Just as emphatically as an existential crisis insists on its being someone’s, on its being personal, the qualification existential also implies that the crisis bears a relation to the whole of things, to the stakes and limits of existence. Perhaps most commonly, we use this term to carve out a space within the rhythm of daily life for why questions that are without any clear answer. Philosophers had been using the word existential in a technical sense for centuries, indicating that which relates to the existence of a thing, in contrast with its being or essence. But beginning with Kierkegaard and Jaspers and Heidegger, the existential comes to denote the character of something that is both subjective and systematic, something with intense personal stakes and yet concerning the whole of things.¹⁹

The term was digested almost immediately by contemporary theology. Of particular note is the fact that it was adopted not as one applies a general theory to an unrelated subject matter (as in, e.g., a post-Structuralist theory of the Trinity) but rather as if the existential was itself an endogenous description of Christian theology. Rudolf Bultmann is perhaps the best known promoter of such a view. The New Testament, he writes in 1950, is addressed directly to existential self-understanding.²⁰ This is not the theoretical account of existence offered by the abstract philosophies of Jaspers or Heidegger, he would insist, but the understanding of myself in my concrete here and now, in my concrete encounters, which at the same time is not marginal but guides all my caring and willing, all my joy and anxiety.²¹ Just as Hegel’s philosophy of spirit happened to reveal Christianity as the most spiritual of religions, Heidegger’s philosophy of existence happened to reveal Christianity as the most existential. Bultmann made a claim for the existential as the communicative dimension proper to the Christian proclamation, a move that would later be widely criticized within theological circles as a form of intellectual capitulation. As the then Professor Ratzinger put it, The task of hermeneutics is to ‘actualize’ Scripture. . . . It asks the question: what significance have these past events for today? Bultmann himself had answered this question with the help of Heidegger’s philosophy and had interpreted the Bible in a correspondingly existentialist manner. This answer attracted no interest then, nor does it now; to that extent Bultmann has been superseded in the exegesis currently acceptable.²² This sort of disregard, typical of the theological criticism of Bultmann, is less focused on the classic problem of to what degree theology ought to avail itself of philosophy in elaborating its own texts and doctrines than it is on the fact that Heidegger’s account of existence never quite sheds the impression of being Heidegger’s. When an existential interpretation is applied to the New Testament, the scripture suddenly appears subordinate, as if it were an example of Heidegger’s theory rather than the context in which Heidegger’s theory makes the most sense, as Bultmann no doubt had hoped.

Yet the truly remarkable aspect of the theological reception of existentialism lies in the fact that even those who were opposed to the idea of an existentialist theology, or a theological existentialism à la Bultmann, found themselves drawn to the idea of the existential in their attempts to explain what Christianity was all about. The first wave of this reception can be seen in dialectical theology, and particularly in Karl Barth’s 1922 Epistle to the Romans. At the time of this second edition, Barth had so thoroughly absorbed Kierkegaardian ideas about Christianity being an exclusive affair of the existing individual that he endeavored a kind of existential pneumatology: "The Spirit is existential meaning and sense."²³ Or, a few pages before, "The Spirit has made thee from the law of sin and death—yes, thee, that is, thine existential self.²⁴ Paul Tillich, in telling his version of the story of existential theology, makes an emphatic distinction between existentialism and existential, saying that while the former represents a school of philosophy, the latter refers to a human attitude—that is, a kind of perennial idea, without any origin or discernible history. It is crucial for Tillich to make this point, since he wants to argue that the existential has more to do with religion than it does with the atheistic ontologies of any Heidegger or Sartre: By its very nature, theology is existential; by its very nature, science is non-existential. Philosophy unites elements of both.²⁵ Here, for more or less the same reasons as Sartre divides the atheists from the Christians, Tillich wants to make it possible for the existential" to appear as the proper medium of theology, not—as Ratzinger and others alleged—as a philosophical theory borrowed in order to make theology appear more relevant. David Tracy would make a similar argument, insisting that religious language, ideas, and symbols are effective only insofar as they have existential meaningfulness. Tracy borrows from Schubert Ogden—a renowned scholar of Bultmann—a notion of existential faith as the transcendental condition for all human activity, which all religions explicate and represent.²⁶ Even Ratzinger, who consistently argued against the influence of existentialism on theology, seems to have been unable to avoid this use of the term: "What, in light of the Bible, is ‘faith’? And let us again affirm clearly: it is not a system of semi-knowledge, but an existential decision—it is life in terms of the future that God grants us, even beyond the frontier of death. This is the attitude and orientation that gives life its weights and measures, its ordinances, and its very freedom.²⁷ This is not just an appeal to the existential" as a category that can help in expounding a particular religious doctrine. This is not Kant drawing on an idea of moral philosophy to help explain providence or perfectibility. This is a definition of faith itself as existential.

The inconspicuousness with which the word existential seeps into the language of Christian theology is not limited to systematics. Even historians of theology find themselves drawn to the term, however anachronistic it may appear in connection with pre-nineteenth-century Christianity. John Dillenberger and Claude Welch, whose familiarity with existentialism made him more than usually sensitive to its provenance, used the term to explain a quote from Calvin’s Institutes that relates knowledge of God to knowledge of ourselves: Genuine knowledge of God, in Luther and Calvin, is related to the meaning of life. To use a modern word, such knowledge is existential, i.e., related to one’s very existence.²⁸ But we will find this term used plentifully in historical scholarship on Christianity even without Welch’s attentive caveat. Ernest Stoeffler, the great scholar of Pietism, wrote the following of Francke’s notion of conversion: The new being is really a new creation in the sense of a complete existential re-orientation.²⁹ From such passages one gains the impression that the existential—along with other aspectual designations such as psychological and sociological—appears as a relatively neutral way to describe the personal element of religion, that which touches the individual in her reflection on what this life is ultimately all about. On the one hand, this is obvious, and few would require us to marshal so many examples to be convinced of it. At the same time, existential is unlike psychological and sociological, in that it is a word whose almost boundless diffusion in theological literature issues from the rise of a rather narrowly defined philosophical tradition, rather than from the long percolation of an entire branch of knowledge into the cultural consciousness of the West. At no university, to my knowledge, is there a department whose mandate is the science of existence. People started using the word existential to mean something other than the technical sense of relating to the existence of a thing to the extent that they had been reading Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre.

My interest here is not in the theological implications of this appropriation but in the curiousness of the fact that the word existential seems tailor-made for such an application. Looking again at the passages from Tracy or Ratzinger or Stoeffler, there is in fact no single word that could take the place of existential in simultaneously describing the personal, the passionate, and the reflective character of Christian faith. It is so appropriate a term that it appeals not only to those theologians who have learned from existentialism in formulating their positions but also from those who find existential thought to be a detrimental force within theology. I do not think that this is an accidental coalescence between a particular philosophy and a particular religious zeitgeist. Rather, I would side with the theologians to some extent: Christian faith is a matter of existential decision, and Christian language is a matter of existential meaning, but not because the Christian message is a kind or instance of the larger genre of existential communication. Christianity is existential because the existential itself is about Christianity.

It is important to emphasize that being about Christianity is not the same thing as being Christian. The present work investigates the ways in which the existentialists’ relation to Christianity takes shape at both the historical and the philosophical levels. But it is at no point my intention to claim that these philosophers are, despite their best intentions—still just—Christians at heart. In fact, I believe that if we take seriously the question of what it means for existentialism to be about Christianity, to have Christianity as its object, we will find that it changes how we will want to think and speak about the relation between religion and philosophy in the twentieth century, and particularly, about how, when, and why we draw a distinction between what is Christian and what is not. To get a clearer idea of what is at stake in this issue it will be helpful to review some of the more important interpretations of the relation between religion and philosophy within the tradition of existentialism.

Until now, there have been roughly three kinds of narratives about the role of religion in existential thought. The first has several variant forms, but it centers on a differentiation between discourses of greater and lesser generality. Philosophy aims for an account of what is, and of the conditions of its being, at the maximum level of generality. Even if it is not possible to think entirely without presuppositions, it is the ongoing business of philosophy to examine, criticize, and abandon its presuppositions wherever it can. Christianity, on the other hand, makes truth contingent on having the right presupposition, which is not there to be discovered or explicated but must be revealed by the power of a transcendent god. Only for those who have heard this message is righteousness a possibility. From a philosophical point of view such as I have drawn, insofar as Christianity regards the natural as of deficient or incomplete value and seeks to ground its story about what is in the opaque register of transcendent authority, it renounces the claim to full universality. A philosophical description of existence aims at maximal universality and formality. A Christian theological account of existence categorically depends on historical revelation and prescribes explicit, concrete norms.

Though this simplification risks caricature, it is not without foundation, and more pertinently, it is shared by a number of influential interpreters of existentialism. It has long been a standard characterization of Heidegger’s appropriation of Kierkegaard. Champions of Heidegger’s approach, such as Hubert Dreyfus and Jane Rubin, as well as critics, such as Patricia Huntington and Daniel Berthold-Bond, identify Heidegger’s formalization of Kierkegaard’s psychology and secularization of Kierkegaard’s religion as one and the same gesture.³⁰ Paul Tillich, in calling into question Sartre’s account of existentialism as a field divided between Christians and atheists, presents the distinction between the general and formal and the particular and concrete in terms of the distinction between question and answer: In reality there is no atheistic or theistic existentialism. Existentialism gives an analysis of what it means to exist. . . . It develops the question implied in existence, but it does not try to give the answer, either in atheistic or in theistic terms. Whenever existentialists give answers, they do so in terms of religious or quasi-religious traditions which are not derived from their existentialist analysis. For Pascal, this extra-existential resource is the Augustinian tradition, Tillich continues, for Kierkegaard the Lutheran, and for Heidegger and Sartre it is humanism.³¹ On Tillich’s view, existentialism itself is neutral with respect to religion. Personal commitments and traditional biases are what steer the formal, philosophical description of existence toward the answer of Christianity, or toward something else.

And yet, just a page later, Tillich will say that because this apparently formal, religiously neutral discourse happens to interpret human existence in such a way that it corresponds to what is theologically understood as the old eon—that is, the predicament of man and his world in the state of estrangement—existentialism is actually a "natural ally of Christianity, and the good luck of Christian theology, one that helped to rediscover the classical Christian interpretation of human existence."³² For Tillich, existentialism is not only a handy theoretical discourse in which to explore religious ideas and tropes, it is the ideal modern prolegomenon to the Christian faith. Thus even if we accept his claim that the question of existence posed by the existentialists as philosophers is entirely distinguishable from the answer offered by them in their capacity as Lutheran or Thomistic theologians, we must at least admit, by the same account, that it is quite the leading question. Here, as so often with discourses framed as universal, an unacknowledged tie to the particular can be traced and brought into question.

The second major approach