A Sickness unto Death: The Influence of Existentialism

The Angelus - June 1982


I have sometimes imagined that a history of modern thought could be written by simply filling in the background and drawing out the inferences of various papal encyclicals. For example, one can learn more about the true nature of philosophy from Pope Pius XII's Humani Generis of 1950 than from a dozen more detailed volumes I could name. It is a remarkable distillation of sanity in the midst of madness, a clear light which cuts right through the intimidating fog of false philosophies (a fog declared by its makers to be not only impenetrable, but even worse, inevitable). Has not the Church, so often accused of being obscurantist, in recent times looked about to find herself standing all alone in defense of rationality? Alone in refusing to capitulate to scepticism? Alone in not ceding the province of human life to the black armies of unreason? Hers is the voice not only of reason but of experience; having been there at the genesis of all modern philosophies she is also a living witness to their serial decline and fall.

In fact, it often seems that the Church takes philosophy even more seriously than philosophers themselves (many of whom reduce it to a kind of arcane mental discipline, arduous but harmless). This is because a work like Humani Generis presupposes a faith which professional thinkers seem by and large to have lost: faith that philosophy is indeed capable of achieving its own end. Classically, this end has been defined as the possession of truth through the disinterested love of wisdom. At least the Church understands it so. What, then, can be said of those who deny the very concept of truth? Only what Aeterni Patris (Leo XIII, 1879), Studiorum Ducem (Pius XI, 1923), and Humani Generis say: that such people are left only with the open road upon which to take faltering and random steps. Certainly they should not be considered brave or venturesome, for there is no Holy Grail to seek, no wrong to right, no sweet hand to woo and win.

Existentialism is the kind of "truthless" philosophy the popes have warned against—depressed, uninspiring, and thoroughly modern in its ambivalence. After World War II it briefly achieved the status of an intellectual fad and was espoused in a corrupt form by the so-called "Beat" generation. While the young now have other enthusiasms and this is no longer the case, the categories of thought and general orientation of Existentialism have entered into the consciousness of modern society. What continues to attract is its quasi-mystical longing and sense of urgency, a resonance with the vague metaphysical aspirations of a thoroughly secularized culture. I remember vividly how as a stripling my ardent friends and I would tear through the writings of Nietzsche, Kiekegaard, and Camus, in sympathy with the poetic rebelliousness and the self-indulgent drama we found there. The very principles of Existentialism make it inevitable that the longings and aspirations of which I have spoken shall remain unfulfilled; there then remains the typically adolescent luxury of analyzing and exacerbating the resulting anguish.

Existentialism as a cultural phenomenon has a twofold origin: Romanticism gone sour and the cruel vicissitudes of modern history. As for the first of these, it is enough to say that in the nineteenth century everything began with a capital letter: Art, Beauty, Nature, Man—everything, that is except God. Each of these was seized upon at one time or another as humanity's great new hope, and each became but another passageway to outer darkness. Having cast off Church many turned to State, but this became blood and slavery. Having banished God, men turned to Art, but Art could not turn back to them. Nature was cruel and Science indifferent. None could save, and none could care.

Later World War I, the Great War, broke upon a prosperous Europe, shattering once and for all her fatally naive optimism. The horror and destruction which followed was unlike anything that had come before. In the lurid flash of exploding shells where was God? In the savagery, frenzy and panic where was Reason? European society was crushed economically and psychologically, and upon the ruins of her fair cities her spirit lay broken.

Existentialism was born of disillusionment and dust, despair and defeat. It takes as a norm a condition of chaos. Thus it is in revolt against all ordered systems of thought, whether Kantian, Hegelian or Thomistic. It exhibits a palpable impatience for the speculative powers of the mind and a true disgust with the notion of objective, unchanging truth. Existentialism insists, with some justice, that philosophy is not to be merely thought, but lived in the unique situation of each individual. As Gabriel Marcel, a leading figure in the movement (and a convert to Catholicism) phrases it: "We do not study problems of philosophy, we are those problems!"

It would be to contradict the very self-definition of Existentialism if we were to abstract propositions from it and hold them up for judgment. You see, this philosophy is a slippery thing and it speaks with many voices. "To think, to formulate, to judge is always in the last resort to betray" writes Marcel again. We find ourselves dealing not so much with a system of thought as with a mood, an orientation, an outlook. The mood—if I may speak as far as my own reading takes me—is primarily one of brooding gloom, the orientation is militantly individualistic, and the outlook on life is depressed and hopeless. This is why Existentialism never succeeds in its grand objective to articulate not the jaded sentiments of coffee house intellectuals, but the hidden thoughts of the common man. Its introspection is so compelling, its rebelliousness so studied, and its extremism so cultivated that it is totally incapable of dealing with the high adventure of ordinary domesticity. Even the most ordinary of lives are sometimes tipped with the glow of beauty's fire; this is the treasure of earthly life, but existentialism knows nothing of it.

With what does Existentialism concern itself? It is no exaggeration to say that its favorite subject is "nothing." "Nothing is more real than nothing," writes Samuel Beckett (whose senseless but evocative dramas are thoroughly imbued with this philosophy). All philosophers have asked the question, "What is man?" And the answer has usually been given in terms of something common to all human beings. For example, "Man is a rational animal" isolates reason as the distinguishing feature, or essence of humanity. Now Existentialism discounts any such descriptions as fundamentally anti-human. Man, they say, is the only creature not subject to the law of identity. He is an emptiness, or rather a consciousness with the absolute freedom to choose his own essence. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, who is the most consistent and well known existentialist, man actually betrays his humanity whenever he seeks the self-contained identity possessed by things. Those who attempt to be what someone else (including God) desires them to be are "stinkers," or "rotters." They are congealed in convention, and are likened to viscuous drops of honey, oozing and falling into a pot.

The locus of Existentialism is not the speculative ordered subjectivity of a Kant but the burning introspection of Kiekegaard. It was this brilliant but eccentric Dane who wrote, "Truth is not introduced into the individual from without, but was within him all the time"—an ancient and pernicious manifesto indeed. One gets the impression that the very notion of some truth independent of man's will is rejected not upon theoretical grounds, but is just decidedly unwanted. The existentialist believes that he has thoroughly analyzed the situation and found that man is an absurd existence, having no guide for his actions either in heaven or on earth. He is the most lonely animal, a consciousness forced to choose between neutral alternatives. "All actions are the same," the novelist Albert Camus once wrote.

If the notion of objective truth can find no room in the Existentialist system, neither of course can God. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who is often considered the greatest forerunner of Existentialism, gives proud voice to the monstrous egoism which his followers have absorbed. In his book Thus Spake Zarathustra, the hero comes down from the mountains with the declaration "God is dead." Earlier, in a book entitled The Joyful Wisdom, a madman rushes into the marketplace with the same message. It is not an urbane atheism which Nietzsche has left as a legacy but a militant anti-theism wholly volitional in character. Again he writes, "But friends, let me open my whole heart to you; if there be gods in existence, how would I endure not to be a God?"

When pressed to go beyond mere wishing and resentment, existentialist thinkers usually point to the radical contingency of life as the basis for their loss of faith. However, the absurdity and emptiness which they perceive arises out of their rejection of God in the first place. Besides, there are many who look at life just as squarely and whose faith is thereby strengthened. But no matter, for what has happened is that the very concept of God has long since ceased to have any relevance for existentialist man. Sartre writes, "Even if God could be shown to exist, it would not matter." At least the Frenchman is quite honest there. One can think of some "Christian" thinkers for whom the God they continue to profess is just as irrelevant.

One of the characters in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is made to exclaim, "But you see, if there is no God, everything would be possible"—a simple but far from obvious verity. And this is the inevitable conclusion of any consistent atheistic position, the stark implications of which permeate existentialist anthropology. Since man is supposed to be pure negativity he can make of himself anything he wants. Man, who in Sartre's phrase is "condemned to be free," invents his own values. Sartre has written a play entitled 'The Devil and God " to propagandize this point. In it a cavalry officer declares, "What is good has already been done . . . by God the Father. As for me, I invent!"

Nietzsche's Zarathustra is the model of the existentialist man, a "superman" who has risen above "good and evil" in the usual sense. The emphasis which Romanticism had placed upon the individual here reaches its terminus in an idolization of the lust for power. Conventional morality is the "mob instinct" promulgated by the weak to shackle superior individuals. The laws of religion are the petty strictures of the spineless crowd, a "slave morality" propagated by Christians to subjugate passion and strength. Not surprisingly, these ideas thrived along with Naziism; they continue to thrive today among intellectuals; they form the ideological background of the most influential people in the field of communications.

Just as there are those who would like a Christianity without God, so are there those who want an existentialism with God. These "theistic" existentialists adopt Soren Kiekegaard (1813-1855) as their patron. In fact, there has been no single figure who has had a greater influence upon the philosophy of religion in this century.

Kiekegaard's writings are extremely individualistic and Protestant in tone. He fully endorses Luther's vehement curse upon reason, and would gladly second (that is, if he ever did anything gladly) Luther's pronouncement: "By living, by dying, by being damned one becomes a theologian—not by understanding, reading, and speculating." For example, any attempt to demonstrate the existence of God is considered not only useless but blasphemous. According to Kiekegaard, philosophy is actually "the task of becoming subjective." Likewise, Christianity is not a matter of doctrine at all, for doctrine is something that is inherited, and is communicable and intelligible. Rather, Christianity is "not knowing the truth, but being the truth." Each generation must do this for itself, and within each individual is a great chasm between grace and nature, faith and reason, the mind and truth. Man can only close his eyes and take a terrifying tremendous leap of faith; and even then there is no guidance or certainty to be had.

Scarcely known in his own lifetime, Kiekegaard was translated into German shortly before World War I and then discovered by the young Martin Heidegger (a major existentialist philosopher who actually believed that all Western philosophers had misunderstood the problem of being). Brilliant but unbalanced, insightful but erratic, Kiekegaard attracts modern man by his perfervid prose and deep feelings, his individualism and rebelliousness. One hears the echo of his voice not only in Protestant theology, but Catholic as well. Karl Rahner, hailed by many as the "greatest" theologian of our time, is a former student of Heidegger and, of course, an admirer of Kiekegaard. What he calls his "transcendental Thomism" is really an attempt to replace scholasticism with the fundamental assumptions of Kiekegaard and his followers.

This all blends easily with the influential anti-Western irrationalism of the Russian philosophers Berdyaev, Soloviev, and Chestov. All hold in common a disdain for reason and a totally un-Catholic conviction that there is an irreparable break between Athens (reason) and Jerusalem (faith). Chestov, for example, holds that reason is the negation of human existence, an abominable thing which is an attempt against the omnipotence of God. In these writers, messianism is mixed with nihilism, despair with tearful affirmation.

Last, brief mention should be made again of Gabriel Marcel. He is a prolific author and a man of deep and sincere religious conviction. However, he accepts the existentialist view of life. But, he says, God exists; therefore, despair is conquered, darkness dispelled, and the fragments of life are gathered together.

The theistic existentialists are by and large gifted writers; they probe deeply and describe in detail the anguish of those who believe, but find themselves in a world from which all sense has fled. Citizens of a ruined city, their faith is not the consent of the intellect to truth, but an affirmation wild and absurd. And, in fact, they agree to too much. The late Italian philosopher F. Sciacca has summed up the essential philosophic failure of theistic existentialism in a single sentence: "In order to arrive at God one must, against existentialism, reconstruct the positivity of man (by giving him an essence) and the value of existence, and also of thought, reason, objectivity."

Life in the existentialist universe is a sustained effort not to grow weary, a "sickness unto death," a struggle without enthusiasm or breadth of vision. The affirmations that are made (such as in the novels of Camus) do not convince and the endurance proposed as authenticity does not ennoble. "To exist it is necessary to suffer despair and anguish," writes Kiekegaard, and there is much talk in existentialist literature regarding affliction and misery. Nowhere else in the history of philosophy, in fact, does one encounter so much adolescent posturing, so vast a hypochondria, so little regard for human dignity. The frightful contingency of life, the forces of nature, the impersonality of mass society: these are particular experiences which Existentialism dwells upon with near neurotic inwardness, universalizes and makes normative.

At bottom, Existentialism is a philosophy of nihilism and despair, a prison of radical subjectivity which allows "no exit" to the joyful free spirit of man. We do not fault it for its attempt to describe the human condition without prejudice or sentimentality. We may even endorse its success in recalling philosophy to "the things of themselves" and for prodding theism into being more daring and committed, open and genuine. However, we do fault it for binding man and delivering him over to a situation which, in fact, is neither inevitable nor irremedial.

Philosophy is a study both of the universe and of man. First it aims to comprehend the causes and reasons of things, presupposing an ordered universe and a structured reality which, though it may be difficult to reconstruct intellectually, is nevertheless knowable. Second, it responds to the great Socratic command, "Know thyself."

Existentialism's impatience with the slow and deliberate processes of the intellect and its disgust with metaphysics makes it unfit for the first, or cosmological, task. Action takes precedence over understanding, while reality is made coextensive with contemporaneity.

To fulfill the second task is also an impossiblity for Existentialism. If man is ceaselessly in the process of becoming, if he is at present only a passionate existence, how can he know himself? We are told that the moment a man is invested with a definite essence he is no longer fully human: a paradox meaning only that philosophy is impossible.

To sum up, we fault Existentialism for taking a microscope to scan the horizon, for being a false philosophy. It yields to the force of its own analysis, leaving the field occupied by nothing better than a woeful fading "no" uttered in encroaching and sinister darkness.

Though not always professed by name, Existentialism is everywhere in the teaching of religion today, both among Catholics and Protestants. By now it is all familiar: relativity in morals, the absolutizing of the concept of freedom, the quality of life rather than its absolute value, becoming rather than stability, authenticity rather than holiness, rebellion against authority as a duty of conscience, self-fulfillment as the ideal rather than the fulfillment of duty, commitment itself as a good apart from rightness of judgment, the present radicalized to the disdain of the past. Another existentialist philosopher, Karl Jaspers, puts it this way: "Man is everything."

If man is indeed everything, then Sarte is quite right in informing us that, "Existentialism is nothing but an attempt to draw all the consequences from a consistent atheistic position." If we turn to Thomism, we find that this is nothing less than the opposite: a daring and even more arduous task. A Thomist will never make the mistake of asserting the primacy of existence to the denigration of essence or the sacrifice of intelligibility. He knows two fundamental things: first, that in no created essence is existence necessarily implied (for example, there is nothing in the nature of a dog which says it must exist), and second, that God is the uncreated source of all existence without exception: "God, who made the world and all that is in it ..." (Acts 17:24). The prefix "ex" indicates that being emerges from nothingness, "comes out of" God. In Him alone is the fullness of being and the identity of existence and essence without any imperfection: "God said to Moses: I AM WHO AM" (Ex. 3.14).

Without God's sustaining love, nothing could perdure. "God is the Supreme Being who made all things and keeps them in existence." On account of this never ceasing love, no existence is absurd or gratuitous. And it is this same love, all embracing and limitless, which suffuses all life; it is not anxiety, nausea, or the will to power which is the central fact of life, but the person of Jesus Christ who is Love Incarnate.

I remember many years ago—it must have been in the fifth or sixth grade—that good Sister Anne asked her class, "For twenty extra points, where did the greatest event in history take place?" I was fortunate enough to be called upon and to know the answer: "In Bethlehem, in Palestine, over 1900 years ago."

The point of this is that the advent of Christ has radically transfigured existence. Certainly we are contingent beings and there is no necessity that we exist; certainly there is sin and evil in the world. But, as St. Thomas teaches, we are redeemed, and such things do not take away the humanity of man nor reduce him to negativity. While Heidegger says man is a "being toward death," St. Thomas says he is a being toward life; while another philosopher will say that as soon as a person is born he is old enough to die, St. Thomas says that life is given forever. This was the intuition had by the apostles, and passed on to the Punic Fathers Cyprian, Lactantius, and St. Augustine who expressed it so beautifully. To be fully alive, men do need to be committed: to the person and teachings of Jesus Christ. Only in union with Him does existence reach its own perfection. Only in doing His can one's life be meaningful and authentic.

The philosopher and historian Etienne Gilson has written, "Thomism is not another existential philosophy, it is the only one." By this he meant that only Thomistic metaphysics could provide a solid basis for the understanding of reality. As the mind slowly unfolds the wondrous order of creation and mounts to the knowledge of God, there is no need to twist and turn in the confused breezes of the present moment in order to make life bearable. Distinctions are carefully made in accordance with the diversity of things as perceived by the senses; these are synthesized according to a unity perceived by the intellect. The dialectical tensions which tear Existentialism apart are kept in careful balance: grace and sin, essence and existence, the problem of death and the hope for eternal life.

Any analysis of the problem of existence, if it is to endure, must be balanced and versatile, logical and supple, self-confident yet humble before the face of reality. These qualities, so characteristic of authentic Thomism, are absolutely necessary to a world which has lost its patience and is trembling before the incredibly vast and complex evil its own godlessness has engendered.

To return to our starting point, there are many who object to the fact that the Church busies herself with philosophy at all. This concern, if we look closely, is a function of her solicitude for the cultural welfare of men and her zeal for souls. A pure soul does not dwell with a benighted mind; holy things do not proceed from delusion. Definite suggestions regarding philosophical methodology are made, but generally the Church will allow those concerned with such things to argue among themselves. What interests her most are first principles and ultimate conclusions, and in both of these the soundness of Existentialism has been tried and found wanting. Its melodrama and exhibitionism do not stand the test of experience; this is why Pope Pius XII has spoken of it as "the new erroneous philosophy."