enjoy gazing a while at this sublime object before it: this object of which, for all its beauty and its casting, we can say everything — except that it repre-sents life!

A Historical Sketch

Existential philosophy began not as a philo-sophical type standing by itself, but as an unconscious tendency, peering out shyly within the general current of philosophy. Perhaps we glimpse some of its first beginnings, at the very outset, in the Sophists, who — despite their slidings into relativism and the pursuit of success and appear-ances — inclined toward the right direction in their turning away from the cosmological and quasi-metaphysical speculations of the older Greek philosophers.

Then this tendency showed itself more clearly in Socrates: who restored to man his central place among the problems of philosophy, and refused, in his thinking, to stray far from man and his prob-lems. But the Socrates we know is the Platonic Socrates, the Socrates cloaked in Plato's meta-physics. And no sooner had Aristotle come, and after him the various Greek philosophical cur-rents, than living man had been lost among the various problems of phi-losophy, and the anx-ious, concerned thinking had been lost within the folds of abstract scientific-metaphysical thinking. Finally came Neoplatonism, and it flooded the existential tendency and smoth-ered it.

Nor let us forget

to mention Stoicism, which, for all the error of its conclusions, fol-lowed a not unworthy existential path in the problems it raises.

Then came Christianity, and we may say that Christ gives true expression to the con-cerns of pure existential thought. But Paul and John shifted the center of gravity in Christianity from exis-tential concerns to the domain of theology, and set doctrine in the place of life in Christianity. In this they were followed by the Church Fathers, who repre-sent the ascendancy of the Greek, metaphys-ical, theological spirit over the personal, exis-tential Christian spirit. Exceptional among them was Augustine, who inclined some-what toward existen-tial thinking; and his "Confessions" are an inexhaustible spring for existential thought, for they are in truth the story of a life, not the defense of a doctrine — and the doctrine in them is manifested only in the life. Christian thought thereafter, especially owing to the dominance of Aristotle, contin-ued to incline toward non-existential thought, until the "Scholastic" tradition came to fix the dominance of that thought. But let us not forget that in Christian life there were always those who drew their inspiration not from the Church's theological heritage, nor from the Greeks, but from the person of Christ; and therefore in the saints — in their lives and in their writings — we find what we may call a true existential thought.

Then came the modern ages, and both tenden-cies were represented in them. In the age

in which Descartes and Spinoza, Hobbes and Locke arose, and which prepared the way for Kant and Hegel, we did not lack the likes of Pascal in France and Bunyan in England, and some of the English poets such as John Donne and the school of the metaphysical poets. But the most important of them all is Pascal, in whom the existential tendency was embodied to a far degree.

Then the age of meta-physics and academic philosophy prevailed — save for Pascal and the groups resembling him — until Hegel came, representing the abstract academic system of thought. Then Kierkegaard burst forth in revolt against him; and it was Kierkegaard who coined the phrase "existen-tial philosophy," and he who carried it over from a tendency toward a philosophical method into a distinct type of thought. In Kierkegaard, then, exis-tential philosophy opens upon a new epoch in its history: the con-scious epoch.

Since Kierkegaard's time, these two types of philosophy have been in contention for mastery. And let us not forget that the nineteenth century, the age of Kierkegaard, witnessed the completion of a ten-dency in human civiliza-tion which began with the beginning of the modern ages: the ten-dency of revolt against the values of the ancient and medieval ages, the values of Greece and of Christianity, and the undertaking of life in reliance upon man's reason and his bare natural powers. This tendency bore its fruit in the chaos that began in the nineteenth

century and continues still — and this war is among its fruits. In a chaos such as this, man's return to himself becomes easy. And in man's return to himself, existential philosophy finds fertile soil.

Hence we find today, in philosophy, the likes of Heidegger and Jaspers — both of them leaders of Western thought — existential in their ten-dency. And we find in theology Emil Brunner, one of the leaders of Protestant theology, who has begun to incline toward existen-tialism in his philosophy and his theology; and likewise Karl Barth and Karl Heim, to a lesser degree. In theological philosophy we find Berdyaev, the Orthodox, inclin-ing with a strong personal existential ten-dency; and likewise we find the Jewish the-ologian Martin Buber, professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a man of worldwide intellectual standing, inclining with a religious-philosophical tendency toward exis-tentialism. Nor let us forget, among the philosophers, Nietzsche in the nineteenth cen-tury, and among the novelists, Dostoevsky.

And alongside this cur-rent — I call it a current, because it does not yet form a tradition — let us not forget the con-trary currents: such as the intellectual currents tending toward science, or toward metaphysics. Nor let us forget the special current tending toward theology and Scholastic philosophy, laboring to redirect attention toward the Thomist heritage, rep-resented in particular by the Frenchman Jacques Maritain.