In the previous issue Mrs. Najla Aqrawi spoke to us of "classicism" and "Christianity," two of the three pillars of the modern French theater. Today she treats the last of these pillars, "atheist existen-tialism," the fascinating study to be completed in the coming issue.

Atheist existentialism replies to Christianity with a philosophical system which Sartre summarized and popularized in a book called Existentialism Is a Humanism, and whose substance is this:

1 — Man's existence precedes his essence.

2 — Man is absolutely free (and perhaps this is the only absolute Sartre acknowledges); he makes himself and his destiny as he wills.

3 — Man is wholly responsible for his being, because he is its sole maker. The lazy man is responsible for his laziness, the tyrant for his tyranny, the coward for his cowardice. Do not say circumstances did not serve me and luck did not help me: you form your essence with your own hand, as you will.

4 — Man has no relation to any

absolute whatsoever — not God and not the Devil, not heaven and not hell. Man lives on earth with his fellow man, and his relation to the rest of mankind determines his conduct, his principles, and the discipline of his soul.

5 — Man is his deeds: "Man works and inscribes his face upon the surface of the earth." No sanctity and no evil — only a free humanity.

Sartre puts his pen at the service of spreading his message, and so we find the elements of his philosophy in his various plays; at bottom they are a reply to Christianity and a clamorous cry of denial against it. Perhaps his play The Devil and the Good Lord, performed for the first time at the Théâtre Antoine in 1951, is among the most powerful things Sartre has said in setting out his ideas plainly. He made the hero of his play, "Goetz," an abnormal man who took up evil as his weapon because he was born illegitimate and grew up resentful against God, defying His authority. He was the commander of an army, conquering cities to destroy them and shedding blood to slake his thirst, avenging himself on this idealistic world that had cast him out; and so he remained, boasting of the power of his evil, until a priest challenged him one day and told him that all men do evil, and that the difficult thing is to do good. So he wagered with him that he could do good whenever he chose, and cut himself a new path, and clothed himself in the garment of sanctity for a whole year; but at its end he found that the results of his deeds were no better than before, and he came at last to see that God does not exist — and, in consequence, that the Devil does not exist, and that the perfect, ideal world does not exist, so it is no matter that he is an illegitimate son; and that man is alone upon the face of the earth, living with his fellow man... So he cast off the robe of sanctity

as he had cast off the robe of evil, and became again a natural man, sharing with the rest of mankind their ordinary life and doing work useful to his fellow man. This idea — the humanity of man — appears with clarity in his play Dirty Hands, whose hero, Hoederer, is a humane man in every sense of the word: he loves men and deals with them on the basis of mutual benefit; the criterion of his work is men's need upon the surface of the earth — no absolute principles inspired by the heavens above or whispered by the devils of hell. He is a leader in a dictatorial party, but he is flexible, changing his plans according to real circumstances, lying if the situation requires it and bending his actions in urgent need. Facing him is a young man, "Hugo," pained and tormented by his sense of an absolute that shackles him and curbs the free rein of the liberty he seeks. Bourgeois by origin, he revolted against his wealthy milieu and joined Hoederer's party, but the principles of an upbringing rooted in his soul he will never shake free of. His problem comes to a crisis when the party changes its policy, making it imperative for Hugo to change his thinking; he rebels and refuses to be flexible and move with the new political currents; he prefers death to that human flexibility he has never known, and he meets his end, doomed by his clinging to that absolute in which he was reared.

Among the religious subjects Sartre treats in his plays is the subject of hell, which in his view is nothing but man's judgment upon his fellow man. He presents it with violence in his play Huis Clos, where he shut three persons up "face to face" in a closed room in the other world, awaiting the varieties of torment and the gnashing of teeth, because they sinned on earth, and they know they sinned, and that they are on their way to eternal punishment. Their waiting in that solitary