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Atheism compels attention and impresses everyone by its massive diffusion. It is no longer the privilege of an enlightened minority, but expresses a norm common to all classes of society. A civilization has been consciously built on a refusal of God, or more precisely, on a negation of all dependence on any power beyond this world. In fact, science no longer has need of God as a hypothesis. Moreover, from the moral point of view, God seems not to be all-powerful since he does not suppress evil, or if he does not wish to do so, then he is not love.
Built thus on a negation, atheism has no metaphysical content proper to itself and no constructive philosophy. Explicitly expressed, it still remains rare. Its dominant and widespread form is an atheism of fact, invertebrate but practical. Philosophic considerations intervene only afterward to justify attitudes or to provide an excuse. Its reasons are never truly rational, and they cannot be, for they fall short. Being of an empirical order, they are utilitarian and pragmatic. This explains why the problem at this level simply ceases to interest man. Since he is more concerned with economic and political questions, religious beliefs no longer mean anything to him. His attitude is strengthened by his often justified distrust of philosophers, who have abdicated and betrayed their social function by their own scepticism.
St. Paul knew well what he was doing when he centered his teaching on what immediately aroused a reaction from the men who relied on discursive reason. Indeed the incarnation is always a folly and a scandal for human thought. The latter in its historic criticism demythologizes and distinguishes between the historic Jesus and the Christ rigged out in the dogmas of faith.
The archaic state of knowledge in past ages makes every scholar mistrustful and little inclined to take into account a so-called “revelation”. They find no certitude at the outset of the alleged event and, in every way, a truth buried in the centuries is unacceptable to the contemporary spirit that is interested only in the here and now. One must choose between verifiable facts and texts visibly originating in a myth. To the atheist, it is inconceivable, even offensive, that God should enter into time and confide his truth to a handful of obscure disciples and to the precarious transmission of texts, written twenty centuries ago. The life of Jesus shows only anecdotes and miscellaneous facts without any guarantee of objectivity. Can a contingent fact, scarcely remarked by historians, touch the heart of the man in the street in this 20th century? How can an event dated and fixed in time and space lay claim to an eternal value--the authority of God and the universal importance of the salvation of every man? There is here something monstrously out of proportion,1.1 even unbearable for critical reason. The man Jesus could very well have lived in Palestine. It is not so much his divinization by his disciples as the humanization of God that is declared impossible. A moral ideal, a philosophic concept could, if need be, receive the title of divine, but the philosopher refuses a God-man, refuses a God speaking as a human being and taking on the face of a man. Thus the authority of the apostolic witnesses crumbles away, and with it, that of the Word. Through lack of hearers, it is more than ever a voice crying in the historic wilderness. Like the wise men of Athens in former times, the man in the street now repulses all discourse with “We will hear thee again on this matter.”1.2
We must pay attention to this very real difficulty and we must be clear on what faith requires of us and the why of this requirement. Unfortunately, believers and unbelievers are profoundly ignorant of one another, they do not understand one another, they belong to different anthropological types. Even for St. Gregory of Nyssa, the man who is not moved by the Holy Spirit constitutes a species, a humanity apart.
Believers naively advance arguments drawn from a fear of judgment or from a metaphysical disquietude in the face of death. On the present level of evolution, the resurrection of the dead and all the traditional problems of the religious man do not even graze the conscience of a certain type of atheist, for in this case of advanced degeneracy, even his subconscious does not bear any trace of them. We are witnessing a profound change in the human substratum.
It is important to understand this for, above the always formless crowd, the existence of a real spiritual life, the fact of a saint, would constitute a kind of thorn in the side for an atheism that wishes to be systematic, moral and totalitarian. Sooner or later the reciprocal ignorance of dynamic faith and militant atheism, as well as their peaceful coexistence, will be shown to be impossible. Messianic apostolates reach a point where they not only exclude one another but violently oppose one another. In fact, there exists already a lucid and serenely authoritarian manner of posing the problem of faith by putting atheism in question in a direct confrontation that permits no cheating, no loophole, no “asylum of ignorance”.
Atheism can be explained by the simple fact that God does not impose himself on anyone and that his existence is not immediately evident to all. In the mind of the masses, religious faith is reduced to an exploitation, an alienation, or a compensation. But if we pass beyond this demagogy, a task that is not too hard, we find that criticism comes up against a real difficulty. It is not a question of the indifferent; they do not interest us here. The most surprising thing is the existence, even the possibility, of a conscious atheism. How can one be an atheist?
The word atheism, by its negative a, denies theism, denies God. Now the real problem is to show how it can really do this but, first of all, we must specify what it denies. How does atheism define the “Complex God” before denying him? This is the whole question. At most it is the negation of a certain type of theology, of an anthropomorphic and human conception of God. This in no way goes beyond the human and in no way does it touch God in himself. On the other hand, to speak philosophically, one can deny a thing only in affirming another. In denying God, what does one affirm in his place? If it is a protoplasm bearing within itself its future prophets, we must confess that this is a hypothesis more problematic than the very simplistic and reasonable idea of a creator God.
To deny, and to be ignorant of, are two very different things. An agnostic affirms nothing and is ignorant of everything. On the other hand, he can deny only proved errors and evident impossibilities.
Atheism claims that God is evidently impossible. Now science teaches us to be extremely prudent when we make hypothetical judgments, especially in considering what is impossible. The boundary between the possible and the impossible is changing so constantly that one does not know anymore where to place it. What if the science of tomorrow should demonstrate that atheism is an impossible deception, an untenable ignorance, a survival of scientistic obscurantism worse than the so-called darkness of the Middle Ages?
Such a complete change of ideas will certainly not take place today. But the glaring absence of an atheistic philosophy that is sufficiently consistent and constructive obliges academic atheism in its recent forms to place itself beyond the problem of God. This is no longer at the end but at its point of departure. That the existence of God is not a philosophic problem is a gratuitous, simplistic and uncritical postulate.1.3
Atheism thus simplified penetrates the masses. It no longer comes from the brains of philosophers and is thus freed from any exercise of the intelligence. Imperceptibly it identifies itself with the historic situation, setting itself up as a consequence of political and economic conditions. It claims and appropriates to itself all efforts against famine, war and injustice. It does this the more easily as official religion, having been associated with an order that has passed, now shares its fate, and sees itself thrust aside.
After all, there is no dispute about God in himself. “Let us leave the heavens to priests and sparrows,” Heine said. It is his presence in the world, it is his root in humanity that are passionately denied. This negation is made easier by God himself who shows himself but does not prove himself. To speak empirically, it is evident that man can find a fellowman, can even experience an emotion in his regard, without the intervention of the gods. Consequently, at least in appearance, the more a man is a man, the less religious he is and the more he can feel himself the sole demiurge of his destiny and the master of history.
Atheism does not appear anymore as a chance by-product of our human condition; it has become essential, for example, to the Marxist doctrine. Communism exists only in function of integral humanism. According to its assumptions, man is the only reality of history. He bears within himself the principle of his own genesis, the creation of man by man. The dialectic relation constitutes history, the relation of the production of man and of the transformation of nature into human nature. Man exists, therefore, only because he has produced himself. From having (the non-plenitude of possessions) he passes to being (ontological plenitude); he appropriates to himself the whole of his being; he creates himself. The “meaning of human” applies only to man, and it arouses the passion of man in regard to man. At the culminating point of his consciousness, liberty is revealed and imposes itself in the “understood necessity” of the creation of its own substance, the production of the total and universal social man.
What is important to understand is that militant atheism is pre-Communistic; it is clearly marked out by its own limits. The denial of God, the proofs for his non-existence, the philosophic exposé of the contradictions inherent in religion, constitute the preliminary dialectic, the praxis or action. Facing this, there is inevitably a sphere of abstraction. Man in the period of militant atheism, even the one who expresses it the best, is still an abstract man, for criticism, though Marxist, is a purely intellectual operation.
At the moment when all forms of alienation will be radically suppressed, religious alienation will automatically be suppressed, without the need of any supplementary act. Absolute humanism is effectively atheist; here is the situation in fact.
At the end of historic evolution there will be no place for a militant atheism, for once its objective--the telos--is attained, the religious question of the existence of God will not even arise and, at the same time, the period of abstract and theoretic atheism will have been definitely completed. Religion, theism and atheism will share the same lot; they will become museum pieces. Indeed, in the golden age the act of individual conception would be a total generic act. It would be self-sufficient and in it the whole law of the species would be concentrated and totally present to such a degree that the question of the first ancestor would be meaningless. Every question on the subject of origins turns aside from experience, takes a step backward toward a former reflective stage. It puts man and matter again in question and, in so doing, renders them fully non-existing; it is the avowal of their non-essential character. Communism is not a philosophic postulate but an act that completes history. The coming of socialistic man is its unique proof; being irrefutable, it will be more than a proof, it will be a revelation. This is why Communism begins after atheism; it is the praxis, the transformation of the world. The practical denial of God completed in actu is situated once for all at the beginning of the new era.
The denial of God has permitted the affirmation of man. Once this affirmation is made actual, there is no longer anything to be denied or subordinated. The psychological state of Communistic man suppresses the speculative atheism of negation, and the circle is closed on man, on his substance that has been made absolute and divine. On this level total man will not be able to ask a question on his own reality, just as God does not put a question to himself.
As one perceives immediately, the method is simplistic and prephilosophic. The invisible transcendent is decreed to be non-existing, not directly, but in function of matter, because it would diminish the reality and integrity of material fact; it would escape the essential objectivity of consciousness. Furthermore, and this is very serious, once established, integral Communism in sup- pressing critical atheism would suppress the very conditions that permitted its access. Therefore, it would suppress all possible verification of its own foundation. Critical atheism is only a postulate of a truth which suppresses it without any possible return. The final act annihilates the conditions of its own actualization.
Before the arrival of the total man, denial of God is not sufficient; it is only pragmatic. After his arrival, it is non-existent. Therefore, at no moment is it valid in itself. Right and fact are on two different planes, and the division between them makes it impossible to appeal from one to the other. This flagrant lack of a dialectical bond renders the atheistic demonstration of the Marxists extremely weak, incoherent and untenable in the face of a serious philosophical investigation.
Effective atheism is thus more than atheism; it is an entirely different thing, for it rests on something beyond atheism and its problems. It is accessible only to future man. Therefore, it does not yet exist, and it will not until there is a fully developed Communism. A fortiori it is not accessible to a non-Communist. It is clearly the fetishism of matter that makes the god-man come forth from its depths.
This vision explains the present situation in Russia where a certain place is left to the Church as well as to the virulent criticism of religion. These are facts inherent in the pre-Communist stage.
We witness a desperate struggle from which critical atheism can extricate itself only by projecting the incredible fabrication of a future myth.
The stronger Marxism is politically and economically, the weaker it is philosophically. The matter of Marxism has nothing in common with the matter of modern physics. When Marx said, with a certain lyricism, that the spirit is “the torment of matter”, he dates and manifests an outmoded romanticism. A sharply defined intellectual regression forces Marxism to be only a very archaic form of pancosmic monism. Indeed it presents an emanative philosophy of the totality of matter. The social collective is the only concrete thing of organized existence. Whatever deviates from this “general line” that marks the contours of the socialist pleroma--an individual, for example, or a person wishing to detach himself from it, or worse still, to oppose it--immediately becomes a heretical abstraction. God, not being able to become one of its elements, binders totalization, and thus reveals himself as the abstraction par excellence.
The Marxist totality expels the being of God, but lays claim to the possession of all divine attributes. We recognize here very paradoxically the ontological argument of the Marxists: at the extreme, perfection and existence coincide in the state of divinized protoplasm.
This totalitarian character of Marxism makes it a substitute religion. Marx created the myth of the collective proletariat-messiah, the only class free from the original sin of exploitation; by its sufferings this chosen people expiates, saves humanity and leads it toward the promised land of the kingdom.
Matter attains its peak in the infallible consciousness of Karl Marx. His doctrine is immutable and universal truth. It applies to this earth but also to the innumerable worlds in the universe, matter being everywhere identical. Marxist metamorphosis asks a question that has no possible answer: How did matter evolve toward consciousness, how did it become capable of feeling itself and knowing itself as super-matter? What kind of head had that astonishing first ape who discovered himself to be man, and what was the state of his Soul?1.4 Here “the more comes forth from the less”, and the effect contains that something, that “indefinable something” of which there is no trace in the premises. This is characteristic of a miracle. Matter endowed with self-movement, the cause of which no one can determine, directs itself relentlessly not toward the absurd but toward the logos of super-matter.
In its impulse toward self-criticism, Communism today confesses that it has neglected man alone and his solitude. This is the favorite subject of present-day Soviet novels. Whitehead, a great mathematician, said precisely that “God is what man makes from his solitude...” Slowly but surely, the surprising idea strikes this man: to be opposed to someone is to render homage to his existence.
In the light of a serious analysis, dialectic materialism appears anti-dialectic, retrograde and anti-modern, for it solves the problem of God without having propounded it correctly. It solves it against man, against a fundamental fact of his being. It is a frustration and an alienation in reverse. God is deprived of the human, he is disincarnated. One wonders what man has gained in exchange and what is going to happen when, reversing the view of Feuerbach, God will become conscious of his impoverishment and will definitely appropriate to himself the human--the totus Christus and that will be the judgment.
“Give man this world and the need of another will disappear,” is the expression of the demagogic pretension of the atheist to dispose of this world. The praxis, substituted for truth, emphasizes efficiency and production in technical areas; it explains its momentary successes, which are always possible but always provisory, being suspended in the “pauses” of history and in the balance sheet of its failures.
In Soviet Russia, the Church declares that it accepts science and its techniques in their totality, the existence of God and the atheist mystique not being scientific questions. It admits in principle the full agreement of religion and science and accepts without any objection the community of goods, preoccupation with one's neighbor, and peace on earth--all these being evangelical truths.
Such an attitude disarms and disorganizes critical atheism, which no longer has valid arguments. The bishops refer calmly to history and say: “In spite of the faults and errors of Christians, Christianity still exists; it will always exist, for eternity works for us, for every man, and for time.”
Scientism represents a rather widespread form of methodological atheism. However, its simplistic vision risks making the soul sterile, incapable of any religious fruitfulness. This danger comes from the cultural and technical context of present-day life. In the long run it exercises a pressure and a hold on persons who are unaware of it; they breathe it in, as it were, in all public places.
The sectarian and semi-scientific mentality of scientism is displayed on all the pages of the popular press. Closed to all ideas that go beyond it and to all transcendence, scientism, by its methods, makes an effort to account for the world without the intervention of the gods. The universe is formed by the groping extension of life. Man is in a state “of becoming”; starting from the initial facts, everything can be explained, and every existent being is only a partial accomplishment of the possibilities inherent in things. In penetrating the secrets of nature, man does not in any way prove that God does not exist; he simply ceases to feel the need of doing so.
In spite of its apparent optimism, scientism today has burnt its wings in reaching its own limits too quickly. It is no longer dogmatic nor does it promise happiness to man. It has shown that it is powerless to resolve conflicts, to console suffering, or to say: “Rise up and walk.” It has lost its power of attraction. In the place of truth, it offers only solutions that are momentarily practical, or it hypnotizes the crowd for a few seconds by the distracting range of its techniques. Like a sorcerer's apprentice, it is outstripped by the famous “possibility inherent in things”. It is by no means master of the future, and it knows anguish in the face of the unknown. A person of this type, being warped and narrow in his views, has difficulty in understanding why a surgeon in operating discovers no trace of the soul, or why an astronaut does not see angels passing by him in the sky. That souls and angels are spiritual realities, invisible by their very nature, does not even cross his mind. Can a being living in three dimensions deny the existence of a sphere which goes beyond these three, and which would be precisely one that shows the “possibility inherent in things”? The adventurous minds of mathematicians are fortunately not hampered by such limitations.
The causalist vision considers the interior of a being as a copy of its exterior and thus misunderstands the irreducible novelty of the spiritual activity. Even Marxist dialectics goes beyond simplistic causalism for it shows the interdependence of human consciousness and history. One acts on the other, and their reactions are never passive. Depth psychoanalysis adds to this vision by show- ing that the biopsychological. is not solely a product of the factors at work but a reaction and a creative expression of man. Besides an external causality, there exists an internal dynamism, a finality sought for by the intelligence, a conscious and reasonable intentionality. To all that is “by”, there is added a “for”; to every affirmation “This is not that”, is added “This is that, and more than that”. A statue, for example, is only marble, but it is also beauty and harmony. A human being is only a biochemical process, but he is also a mind and a child of God. On a cause there is always grafted a motivation. The causal vision explains man as the product of bio-psycho-sociological structures, but the same elements are ambivalent. They explain but also express man, speak of his aspirations and of his projects which go beyond him and transcend the scientistic vision.
Science today no longer assimilates the higher to the lower. It recognizes the thresholds of different levels and planes. When phenomenology inclines toward the affirmation of the continuity of planes, implied one in the other and reducible one to the other, when it affirms “that is that and nothing but that”, it goes beyond the descriptive method and passes on to an ontology of pure contingency and of closed world. Now the radical distinction of orders, in Pascal's meaning of the word, remains unmistakably evident. It is not in the concept of matter that materialism can find sufficient reason for a denial of God and of the transcendent. The converse is also true; it is not on matter that a believer bases his faith in God. No scientific method, not even that of materialism, is opposed to the superior that is different in nature and radically irreducible. It thus leaves the metaphysical plane entirely open.
True science affirms soberly and honestly that it offers only an hypothesis giving a satisfactory interpretation of the known facts, an interpretation that is provisory and in constant revision. The scientific rationalism of immanence alone is never sufficient or decisive. In an atheistic scientist, the current objections against religious faith are mingled with affective motivations. The so-called objectivity of a scientist is a myth. He always has his human reactions and, at most, his attitude can be reduced to agnosticism.
Science does not at all stress the reason of the heart or a metaphysical choice. For a scientist like Einstein, the study of life suggests the irresistible idea of order. “I have met nothing in my science that I could oppose to religion,” he said. True science is humble; it knows that each of its explanations only places the difficulty elsewhere. “The greatest mystery is in the very possibility of a little science.”1.5 All of science is a great mystery. “The greatest emotion that we can experience is mystic emotion. This is the seed of all true science.”1.6 Lavelle1.7 speaks of “the total presence” that awakens the attitude of prayer, and with Rene Le Senne,1.8 philosophic meditation is transmuted into prayer.
The so-called ex officio atheism of scientists is definitely outmoded. The more scientific a man is, the more repugnant he finds the absurd and the more he postulates a meaning to the world, even if he cannot formulate it scientifically. He leaves this task to other competencies while keeping a profound respect in face of the mystery. To quote Einstein once again: “The most incomprehensible thing in the world is that the world is comprehensible.” What the intelligence grasps can never be God; at most it is only the imprint of his glory, the luminous traces of his wisdom. The intelligence can embrace the concomitant intelligibles of the mystery; it can never elucidate the mystery itself. When the resources of the intelligence are exhausted, when its last arrow--myth--is sent to the very heart of being, the mystery, without allowing its nature to be penetrated, can become enlightening.1.9 It can arouse the presentiment of something of immense importance. The mystery is not what we understand, but what understands us.
Existentialist philosophy appears more nostalgic than aggressive. Its pessimism seems to be deliberate. An aphorism of Heidegger expresses a certain virility in despair: “Man is a powerless god.” Unquestionably all goes back to Kierkegaard and to his violent reaction against Hegelian rationalism. Hegel's panlogic speculation introduces no harmony into the real, and it offers no salvation. Kierkegaard centered his very personal and very concrete reflection on the religious question: What must I make of myself; in other words, what must I do to be saved?
He built up a most penetrating vision of self-knowledge and anticipated depth psychology. In the depths of the soul he discovered anguish and a feeling of a priori guilt which divide a human being and instill an infernal element into him. It is at this level that a thirst for salvation springs up. The ultimate alternative sets the choice between nothingness and the absolute. It offers the greatness of faith contemplating Christ, who has made himself the contemporary of every soul. On the other hand, to flee idealistic metaphysics is to flee the judgment of God.
Reason can function only between the beginning and the end, therefore it is placed between the two. This is why the intermediary sphere of the immanent has no ontological foundation. Only anguish in the face of nothingness can shatter the immanent and lead toward the religious “wholly other”. It is because he is “other” that he requires the crucifixion of reason and appeals to “the crucified judgment”. The case of Abraham illustrates how morality is transcended by the folly of the cross. Since then the only true witness to the truth is the martyr. Man in himself is only a passover. Now the paschal resurrection-passage of the transitus brings about the transcendence whereby death is made Christian; it is no longer an intruder, but the great initiator into the great mystery of eternity.
However, dialectic theology, the theology of the cross, is not yet a theology of the Parousia. The God of Kierkegaard, like the God of Jaspers, remains an absolutely transcendent God. Man is not in God and God is not in man; man stands before God. His tragic thirst is not assuaged; he does not yet know all the mystery of the immanent God and the mystic espousal of every soul with God. Kierkegaard did not know that in marrying Regina Olsen his soul could have espoused Christ.
Heidegger took up the formula: man is the existent ego. Existence precedes essence, which means that man creates himself, that no essence determines his destiny; consquently he has no nature but he has a history.
Thrown into co-being with others, finding himself always “in situation”, the average man does not oppose the world. Now his cares, an immediate element of life, disperse his attention, direct it toward “non-being”, and veil the real. Alienated from himself, he loses his true ego and veers toward the impersonal and anonymous--expressed by “one”, das Man. Constructed by man's cares, the world is illusory, deceitful, ghost-like, for cares make us forget the real, namely, the ego and its liberty. That is why the ego does not emerge except on the background of nothingness, on that crude screen where the inevitable experience of death is projected. This is the tragedy of man.
It is because by themselves nothingness and freedom are without reason and without foundation; they are limitless and therefore correlative and related. In fact, liberty is limited only by nothingness; it experiences its bounds only in the feeling of death which is essentially concrete, personal and inevitable. Only by transcending his cares toward death is man offered the experience of absolute freedom.1.10 Even more, and this is essential, awareness of death arouses and imposes the decision to realize all the possibilities of liberty and thus to assume the full responsibility of the ego faced with its own destiny.
Man in the metaphysical emotion caused by anguish in the face of death experiences the finiteness of his temporal being, but he grasps above all his “non-being”, evident as soon as it was founded on his cares and preoccupations. We understand then the fundamental thesis of Heidegger, which can be reduced to the celebrated formula, Freiheit zum Tode, freedom toward death; man's tragic grandeur reveals to him his Sein zum Tode, his being toward death.
Man's ethical task consists in transcending the world of his cares toward the heroism of that freedom which is responsible for his destiny. This moral teaching is closely related to the ethics of the Stoics. Powerless mortal man is declared to be a god. Not responsible for the being imposed upon him, he assumes his liberty of evaluation and thereby assumes his destiny, whatever may be the final results. He imposes on himself the duty of judging. His freedom is not then purely arbitrary, but he remains a powerless judge through want of an objective criterion of judgment, that is, an axiology of values in function of the Absolute. Is this not the penitent judge of Camus' The Fall?
Only an extreme and profound subjectivism, one that is serious and truly tragic, can condition such a vision. The philosophy of nothingness is a theology without God, the place of God being granted to nothingness, and the characteristic of nothingness is to annihilate, or to nothingize. Such an impasse, however, could become salutary. Heidegger will never write the second volume of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), for he has remarked that his philosophy is not an explanation but a description, and that it is not a denial of God but a certain expectation.1.11
Sartre continues Heidegger's theses. His psychoanalysis constructs a mythology of the en-soi and the pour-soi, of being and nothingness. The vision is complicated because being is divided and nothingness is multiple. On the plane of being, the en-soi is irreconcilable with the pour-soi; they establish and destroy each other reciprocally. The union of these two realities, or the convergence of essence and existence, is declared impossible; this is a radical denial of the idea of God, who is this very union.
The pour-soi (conscience, idealism), dynamic and changing through its choices, appears as a fissure in the static en-soi (being, realism). To establish oneself means to deny the static order, to deny above all, one's own immutability. In affirming its freedom as independence of the world and of the en-soi, the pour-soi effects negation, annihilates ceaselessly and thus enlarges the gap of non-being in the static being of the en-soi and places it at the limit of nothingness.
The denial of a beginning and of an end, both transcendent, renders freedom tragic, places it outside pardon, which is possible at the beginning, and outside justification, which is possible at the end. Between the massive existence of a world deprived of meaning, where every value is artificial and irremediable, and the human mind inhabited by the exigency of its reason, the rift is inevitable. There remains to man only the freedom to deny a world that denies him.
Man is terribly alone in his fearful and absolute freedom for which, as in Heidegger's philosophy, he experiences full responsibility. In thus making freedom the formal element of truth (when it is a condition of it) he arrives logically at the affirmation: “Man is condemned to liberty.” Condemned because he is not the creator of his being, and free because he is wholly responsible. Sartre clearly belongs to the great French school of moralists.
The analysis of bad faith shows the failure of communication. This is because each pour-soi tends to transform another pour-soi into an en-soi, to make of a subject an object. In the end, he risks transforming himself into an en-soi, to petrify himself in a static state by his memories and projects. We either take possession of another or we are possessed by him. Our relationship to another is always deceitful, and that is why other people are hell for us.
If Marxism is a philosophy of totality, Sartrian existentialism is just the opposite; it is the philosophy of what cannot be made total. According to it, totality expresses the ultimate abstraction; on the contrary, the concrete is the individual. Its reality is in function of the gap, the discontinuous, the absurd and the free will. We can understand how the whole idea of God, of the one who fills in the gaps, makes unity out of plurality, and gives meaning to things, would diminish the tragedy of existence, suppress solitude, limit the arbitrary and lessen the sense of autonomous responsibility.
We must give heed to this existential speculation, which, from a philosophic point of view, is very powerful. It overthrows the smug optimism of religious philosophies according to which evil serves the good and in so doing is non-existing as evil; this would render the death of God on the cross incomprehensible. For Sartre, God would diminish the radicalism of evil, of misfortune, of guilt. We can recognize here Kantianism become a religion, but having lost the postulate of the practical reason; it is a Kantianism without God. Kantian rigorism would here attain its climax. The idea of God would contradict the absolute of moral exigency, and it is this absolute character that requires a morality without the Absolute. The greatest paradox is that despair at its height necessarily refers to the Absolute that has been declared impossible. Tacitly, in order to retain its grandeur, existence is a cooperator of value, and thus the ontological argument is denied and described simultaneously. In the last analysis, it is the absence of God that makes the world absurd and hopeless. Therefore, this absence alone justifies the extreme positions of existentialism. Certainly there is no answer to the question posed by this relationship; there is not even a question, for there is no “judge” in this world without finality. Nevertheless, God serves here as a point of reference, although negatively; all is thought of in relation to the absence of the divine meaning. Dostoievski has shown that suffering in its extremes can pass into a complacency in suffering, and that from this state no return is possible; the pleasure of suffering suppresses every solution capable of transcending it.
The more free a man is the more alone he is and the more a stranger to the world. In the rarefied air of the heights, the permanent act of establishing himself, of inventing himself, dominates man's fear and despair. Does it give him the right to be the supreme arbiter? If God does not exist, is everything permitted? For Sartre, who understands this formidable question of Dostoievski, the sufficient reason for ruling out crime resides in the absolute of liberty, which is related to values, even if the latter are contingent and contrived. Because being is to be-with, it has a side that touches the existence of others. When a man posits himself, he at the same time posits others. To be free and to remain upright and sincere, is to posit oneself morally; it is to be in good faith. A criminal, on the contrary, destroys the integrity of his being and of his choice; he is in bad faith.
The being in situation is inserted into history, and since Marxism offers a meaning of history in its theory of social evolution, Sartre seeks in it possible human communication. The abyss of liberty, very strangely, arouses dizziness, disgust, nausea. One would say that the deception pays off. This is what Dostoievski has indeed foreseen, saying that man will never be able to bear the yoke of freedom and that Marxism offers the maximum possibility of getting rid of this royal gift. Sartre confesses: “I lead to nothing, my thought does not allow me to construct anything; then there is no other solution but Marxism” (La critique de la raison dialectique). The difficulty, however, remains without a solution. Marxism exaggerates the importance of matter in order to make it creative. Existentialism, on the other hand, makes it blind in order better to fight against it and to hold man in check.
Nietzsche, and Sartre in his wake, have proclaimed the death of the adversary without ever succeeding in definitely eliminating him. His shadow pursues them; the reverse of God is indeed present in man's every thought. Man's drive toward the superman is thwarted by his impotence and is defeated. Freud had discovered the mysterious original fault, the “death of the Father”. The man who brought it about could never overcome his remorse, and this is the origin of the collective neurosis. The profound pessimism of the last works of Freud comes from his tardy clairvoyance. His utopia of human happiness had crumbled away, and his resignation was bitter. Moreover, the superman came to nothing, and the closed humanism of the atheists is doomed to failure.
Malraux in his Mitamorphose des dieux declares that in order to invent and to start his own divinization, man has to conquer his obsessive complex of the Absolute. Can he do this? Freud as a psychotherapist answers negatively. According to Sartre, man kills God in order to say: “I am, therefore God does not exist.” But even for Sartre, this power of liberty manifests its emptiness and the vanity of nothingness. Gide wished his moral teaching to be more consistent. His only principle was that a man should go to the limit of himself, to conform sincerely to the standards which each one would give to himself according to his free choice.
However, the impunity that every atheist enjoys during his earthly existence is not the last word; death jealously hides its mystery. The devil told Ivan Karamazov the story of an atheist who after death perceived that reality was different from his ad- vanced ideas. “I do not accept it, it contradicts my convictions,” he cried, and lay down across the road. He was condemned to walk until his chronometer would decompose into its elements.
In answering Sartre, Merleau-Ponty1.12 said that man is not condemned to freedom; he is condemned to meaning, in other words, he is called upon to decipher the meaning of existence and, above all, the meaning of freedom itself.
We must recognize the grandeur of existentialism that has centered all its reflection on freedom. Fundamental evidence of the human mind, freedom constitutes the creative activity of man. Now in this function, unless it contradicts itself, it cannot come from the world with its system of dependencies and constraints. It is evident that freedom is transcendent to the world, has its origin elsewhere, and is offered as a royal gift. That is why in his profound philosophy Jaspers designates clearly the Giver and bears powerful witness to the existence of God. Jaspers' great merit is his discovery of a proof of divine existence in freedom. We find there the fatherland of freedom, where it has its roots, and in this way it effects an opening toward God. God inspires it to be truly free; this renders it different in every respect from the type of dependence found in Kantian theonomy. God has created a “second freedom”. To this gift of God man answers by the gift of himself; he dies and rises in the convergence of these two freedoms, and by this experience he has access to the meaning of his existence. His freedom is never an object for man. It is not even action, but rather a creative reaction to the Giver, to his invitation to become a freedom of service and to testify to its heavenly origins.
There still remains a rather widespread form of atheism: psychologism. This attitude of mind tends to see in every religious sentiment a function of the soul, a subjective psychological datum. It thus reduces religion to a causality productive of aims or to the sublimation of an instinct. Every expression of man brings us back to our present reality, but it also expands it and leads to what will make us more fully ourselves. It breaks the vicious circle of immanence and refers to the transcendent. Here the role of depth psychology and the genius of Jung are decisive. Jung has demonstrated that the religious symbol testifies to a reality that is at the same time intra-human and trans-human.
Even in clinical cases, the symbol always bears traces of trans-subjective archetypes. The judgment of truth refers not only to the causal order but to the order of meaning. Disorders come from the meanings that have been imposed on a man but that he has not assumed for himself. Normally, a man ought to discover freely what he is and to give himself his own proper meaning. This is why, according to Jung, the fundamental problem for all the sick is the religious attitude. “All have become sick from the fact that they had lost what living religions have always given to their faithful.”1.13 Jung declares as a certainty that every life has a meaning, and the task of the doctor is to lead his patient to this discovery. This entails a clear religious awareness. “The one who has passed through this can calmly say: `It was a grace of God'.”1.14 “The man who has experienced it possesses an inestimable treasure and a source that provides a meaning to life.”
It may be that modern atheism is providential in showing us the urgent need there is to purify our idea of God, and to raise the dialogue to a biblical and patristic plane, above all systems of the theology taught in the schools. Here Jung's message takes on breadth and importance. The future depends on the trans-subjective spiritual content of the human psyche: With what and by what will man live his destiny? The quaternity of which Jung speaks is an application of the dogma of Chalcedon (“without confusion and without separation”) to the mystery of the eighth day, to the apocatastasis or final restoration of all beings to God. The consubstantiality of all creatures is opposed to fragmentation. The saints and martyrs before the throne of the Lamb await the final change from dissimilarity to resemblance. Origen1.15 insists on this, saying that Christ is waiting for his glory to shine forth in the totality of his body. If this still remains a mystery, it is clear, however, that only love can break the heart of matter from within; but to do this, it must, following the example of Christ, descend to it.
Jung tells us this as a psychologist.1.16It is his last word, his final testament. Here he goes beyond science, suppresses psychologism, and attains the grandeur of a prophet of the last days. By his words, Job gives us the answer that he finally received. It is for Job's friends, believers and atheists, to give heed.
By the absence of a positive content, all forms of atheism lead to a systematic deception. The existence of evil hinders atheism from becoming a solution. The irrational character of suffering and of death keeps reason in check and shows its failure. Indifferent to good and to evil, nature is so also to man and to his destiny; she crushes him by her absurdity. The sole efficacious solution would be to postulate ignorance of freedom. Only on this condition would evil and suffering be suppressed since one would suppress consciousness of them. A puppet has no right to tragic tears, but every form of resignation is felt to be nothing but an unendurable abdication of man.
Father Valensin1.17carries his reflection to its limit. If, by an impossibility, evidence would be given that there is no God, “I would think I would be honoring myself in believing it, for if the universe is something idiotic and despicable, it is so much the worse for him; the wrong was not in me for having believed that God is, but in him for not existing.” At this high level, the absence of God for man is infinitely more important than the presence of the world; that is, that this absence is unthinkable. This is not because of a simple longing, nor a solution of anguish, nor Pascal's wager, it is evidence for every adequate reflection. The problem of evil was a stumbling block to Jewish theology: Christ did not suppress evil, therefore he is not the true Messiah. This is also the argument of atheism: Christ has not brought to pass the kingdom of God on earth. The Gospel has never promised any material happiness on earth. It is profoundly pessimistic in regard to history, for if freedom is real, it is so also for evil. The deliverance of which the Gospel speaks is never the mechanical destruction of evil, but a cure, and Christ “has conquered death by death”. As long as the last human being has not freely participated in this victory, evil will continue to condition history. God could take our place in order to suffer and to die, but he cannot do so for our acts of freedom, of choice and of love. Liberty frees only the one who desires it. That is why the one who desires nothingness will have it in his own way, at least for a fleeting moment. No human exigency equals the divine exigency for freedom for man. This is what forms God's hell before forming man's hell, and that is why God descends there.
The Christian position is decisive here. Apologetic pragmatism does not treat the problem of evil in itself, but as a necessary component of the world. Evil has an astonishing power; it has drawn God forth from his silence and has made him pass through death and resurrection. It is still the existence of evil that is the most striking proof of God's existence. A world that puts to death the just and innocent Socrates1.18 calls for another world, and bears testimony to a beyond where Socrates reappears and the risen Christ will inaugurate eternity. “Atheism shows force of mind, but only up to a certain degree,” Pascal noted.1.19 No denial of God reaches God, for it is situated outside him; it is a negation of a false god or of an abstract conception of God. No one can invent God, for no one can go toward God unless he starts from him. Ontological truth precedes noetic truth and is presented under the form of experimental evidence.
The error of every criticism of the ontological argument for the existence of God is to see in it a deduction of being from the content of thought. St. Anselm never meant this. It is a question of intuition seizing the impossibility of thinking certain contents as pure contents of consciousness.
The idea of the absolute is inalienable. Every philosophical thought has the absolute in view and reflects in relation to the absolute. God thinks God. If a man thinks God, he is already within the divine thought on God, he is in the evidence that God has of himself.1.20 The content of the thought on God is not a content that is only thought. In every thought of God, it is God who thinks himself in the human mind and who constitutes immediately the experience of his presence. Man cannot yet say anything of God, but he can invoke him and cast himself into his presence.
Between the impossibility of denying and the impossibility of proving is situated this irrefutable experience with its unshakable evidence. If every thought is always in relation to God and has him in view, every thought on existence that becomes an argument affirms the existence of God. As Peguy said: “One must do violence to oneself not to believe.”1.21 An interiorized conception of the ontological argument1.22 could indeed trace the way to God of every modern man.
It may be that the world is now more than ever near religious faith. Science no longer presents any difficulty, and atheism can advance no serious argument. However, there is a considerable obstacle that comes from Christianity itself. It is the latent atheism of believers.
On the threshold of faith, the enduring freshness of words such as: “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse”,1.23 invites us to most serious reflection. It is a question of choosing our destiny. At the opposite pole of no, which engenders numberless heterogeneous groups and separations, there is the unconditional yes which turns all into an infinity of unions. St. Paul says: “Only `yes' was in him.”1.24 In this yes the fiat of man answers the fiat of the creator, and since Pentecost, it is directed toward the last day. On the dial of history, the hour of messianic restoration may sound at the most unexpected moment as the Gospel tells us. To hear it, and more especially to be able to listen to the interior march of history, we must attain that depth of silence below which, according to Kierkegaard, “man has neither eyes nor ears”. For this reason the Gospel ceaselessly returns to the warning: “He who has ears let him bear.”
Simone Weil noted that there are two kinds of atheism, one of which is a purification of the idea of God. In a certain sense this is a grace. The Church is invited to present to men a “showing” of the true God. It can begin an “ecumenical” dialogue with the atheist, because atheism is clearly a Christian heresy. It has never approached faith in its essence, and has never contested it in its mysterious reality as gift of God; believers and historic expressions of faith are in question.
If empirical conditions favor unbelief, it is because in our day man will no longer tolerate any abdication of his rights nor any mandate over him. There is here a very positive element that we must take seriously, namely, the refusal of any recognition of God that would not be at the same time recognition of man. Atheism obliges Christians to correct the flagrant faults of the past and to recognize man and God at the same time, to show in God a human epiphany. Abraham's faith made him confess that with God all things are possible. The Christian's faith implies that with man also all things are possible.
For the apostles and saints, relation with God was always concomitant with that of man. In the modern dialogue between atheists and Christians, Marxist atheism of solidarity must be answered by the man of the ecclesial community, and atheistic existentialism of solitude must be answered by the monk.
It is necessary to disengage the Gospel message from all historic and social context that is out-of-date. Our age, as Simone Weil has said, is in need of “a sanctity that has genius”.
It would be a grave error to assign only negative characteristics to our age.
Man grows in the measure of his exigencies. Religious ideas are deepened in the
same proportion. History moves toward a final interrogation on God and man, and
these two form only one mystery of divine love. The tensions can end in an
apocalyptic outburst. At the worst, it will be the maranatha, and the
stones will cry out the terrible prayer of the agonizing like an accompaniment
to the last martyrs.