An introduction to religious existentialism
September 1, 2020
by Steven Ostrow
Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche│Photo Credit: WikiImages via Pixabay
“God is dead.” From that cheery premise (Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration of 1882) the BOLLI summer lecture series on “Religious Existentialism” took its cue, and we grappled with the implications on seven consecutive Monday mornings. We were expertly led by veteran (and future) SGL Will Grogan (Brandeis MA in Philosophy and currently grad student at Harvard Divinity School) and BOLLI Director Avi Bernstein.
Our principal texts were those of the recognized existentialist masters of the mid-20th century (Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Tillich) and a handful of their more important precursors (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Buber),”existentialists” before Sartre established the label. But we dipped also into very brief bits of ancient text, from Plato’s description of the death of Socrates (in the Phaedo) to bits of Genesis and the prophecy of Amos and the Gospel of John.
We proceeded roughly in chronological sequence — except that Camus’ The Stranger (1942) came first, welcoming us all into the disorienting gloom and purposelessness of the mid-20th century. Camus’ dark Monsieur Meursault became a vivid “first-person” case of existential angst, to whom we returned — always with dark apprehension — time and again. It was Sartre’s response to Camus (in The Stranger, and also in The Myth of Sisyphus) — in Sartre’s own 1945 lecture and subsequent book, Existentialism is a Humanism — that publicly asserted that Existentialism was indeed now “a thing”– a philosophical as well as psychological mode for confronting the multiple natural and artificial horrors of the previous half-dozen decades. Sartre neatly assessed how those two works of Camus worked their existentialist charm: “…the aim of The Myth of Sisyphus is to convey the idea of the absurd, and that of The Stranger to convey the feeling.”
Questions of Definition were pervasive throughout — and not one was easily answered. We dealt with the “big one” — The Meaning of Life — from our first day to our last. Each of our authors framed his own response. Kierkegaard insisted on “faith” even in the face of utter despair. We sought to distinguish between “finding” meaning, and “making” one’s own. Sartre memorably posed the “either-or” dilemma: stay in France with your ailing mom or head to Britain to carry on Resistance from there? Which of the two is better? Whichever one that you choose. We questioned whether there can be real “meaning” that is not “transcendental” (that term itself elusive). We considered what mattered more to Camus’ Sisyphus — getting his boulder back to the top of the slope (again, and again, and….) or being conscious that this was to be his task, ad infinitum, and with (another) deep sigh and firm decision, doing it all over again: Was that to be deemed “courage” or merely resignation? In assessing the work of Camus, Sartre had put it in an existentialist nutshell: “Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.”
Notions of “Protestantism” kept resurfacing, including notions of the historical rejection of old-time ways of the Christian Churches, but also a “generic protestantism” incorporating the “protests” of nearly all our authors against inherited ways of seeing and believing and acting. Here Tillich’s “courage to be” and positing of a “God-above-God” could be considered along with Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship.
The centrality of Images — literal, visual pictures — was a persistent feature for the existentialists, and so it was all the more appropriate that Will and Avi shared with us an abundant series of their own. The photo of a bespectacled Sartre, pipe in hand, his face half dissolved in its smoke, was a beauty. Likewise, the frequent samples of pictorial art, both paintings (from a Titian to a Munch) and sculptures (like that elongated, thin-as-a-rail portrait of Nietzsche).
Here below, four examples of verbal images with special staying power:
First, the two “murderers,” Camus’ Meursault and Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. The former, equally unmoved by his mother’s death, his unprovoked killing of an anonymous Algerian Arab (probably happened, he blurts out in court, “because the sun was in my eyes”), and his imminent execution by guillotine. But a cheerier outlook for Raskolnikov — despite the remaining seven years of an eight-year prison sentence still stretching out ahead of him. Impelled by a kind of intellectual gaming into killing the old pawn-broker and her sister, in a similarly casual way as Meursault had done, Raskolnikov is redeemed by his love for Sonia (reciprocated). He himself becomes a resurrected Lazarus (after Sonia has read him that tale), cherishing the copy of The New Testament she has brought into his cell — even as he notably does not even open it.
Nietzsche in particular relied on vivid verbal picture-making. There’s not just his memorable concept of the death of God, but also his “Overman” (Übermensch), who crosses that bridge of conventional religion and morality into a kind of transcendence, some version of eternity, and will thus be one of a select few, as opposed to the many unable to cross.
Finally, there was Martin Buber, whom I for one found rather more of a pick-me-up than some of the others. In the wake of the widely traumatic Kishinev pogrom (1903), among others, Buber too attempted to make sense of human life in an era of widespread disenchantment. His rereading of Hasidic tales (in his Way of Man) paints vivid portraits of wonderful rebbes finding “meaning” right under our feet!
And so, a bird’s eye view of our exploration of Religious Existentialism. Not exactly beach reading during this time of Covid-19 shutdown, major social and economic troubles on a global scale, and political inanities galore. But as the pandemic has offered many of us extra time for navel gazing and new ways of maintaining contact among the wider BOLLI community, all this material — “dense,” provocative, intermittently grim and encouraging — will have gone some ways toward keeping us sane and in touch with ourselves and with many others. We owe BOLLI at large, and instructors Will and Avi, deep gratitude for so rich an experience.