We do not live in existentialist times. The earnest gloom that popular opinion associated with existentialism and which once permeated movies, music, and fashion has receded from our vernacular. To be sure, despair runs deep in our culture: we are haunted by the prospect of ecological disaster, senseless mass murder, seething political resentment, and the persistence of racial and sexual violence. Yet terms like “anxiety,” “dread,” the “absurd,” and “nothingness” no longer belong to our dominant idioms of despair. “Anxiety” has become a medical, not a human condition. Even the existentialist warning that we must never renounce our boundless freedom for a fixed and fated identity now strikes us as embarrassingly quaint. We like our identities: to “find ourselves” does not mean to grasp our irreducible freedom or transcendence, but to discover the community, beliefs, and nature that truly define us. We prefer essence over existence.

Though it rarely indulges in cultural criticism, the contemporary forgetting of existentialism makes Noreen Khawaja’s excellent new book particularly welcome. Its main virtue is to remind us of the truly radical nature of existentialist ideas about subjectivity. Rejecting the romantic tradition of “expressive selfhood,” existentialists challenge the notion that there lurks in each of us a “true” self that would appear in all its uniqueness if only the social pressures and psychic insecurities restraining it could be overcome. Existentialists teach us the far more unsettling lesson that we have no stable self to speak of.

The reason lies in the dilemma that Khawaja places at the heart of existentialist thought: to exist is to have had no say in the fact of one’s existence; it is to live in an intrinsically derivative state. Kierkegaard captured this idea with characteristic irony: “How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrown into the ranks as if I had been bought from a seller of souls? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality?” (80). We are always trying—and failing—to make our own this being that we had no choice but to be. And the only occasion for this endeavor is an ever receding present, which relentlessly destabilizes our commitments and sense of self. One of Heidegger’s “tiniest but hardest-working words,” Khawaja notes, is “je” (“in each case”) (186): “always” or “forever” are never the modes in which we live; our identity is never settled; at every instant, it is once again up for grabs.

Khawaja develops this reading of existentialism by considering three themes: personal identity (chapter 2), the place of “self-explication” in existentialism’s method (chapter 3), and the question of authenticity’s ethical status (chapter 4). Each of these themes provides an occasion for delving into a different philosopher: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre, respectively. The most striking conclusion of her analysis, however, is the recurring framework she identifies across the work of these thinkers.

Kierkegaard’s reinterpretation of what it means to be a Christian leads him to contend that human despair arises from the fact that the “self is derived from something other than itself.” The Christian concept of sin refers to the residue of our being that we never truly recognize as our “own.” We experience sin because we “can never fully catch up with givenness” (88). Yet sin also points the way to repentance: assuming responsibility for “one’s existence as derived” (98) becomes, for Kierkegaard, Christianity’s essence: it requires a conversion, in which we joyfully embrace the derived existence that previously so burdened us and welcome it as an opportunity for spiritual labor.

The basic pattern of Heidegger’s thought is, in Khawaja’s reading, remarkably similar to Kierkegaard’s. Like the Danish philosopher, Heidegger also grapples with givenness or, as he calls it, “facticity,” which he sees as an a priori condition of human existence. Heidegger’s crucial concept of “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit) refers to the fact that I am always in a position to grasp these a priori conditions in explicit terms. Authenticity is a formal possibility of existence. Yet while it may be a more “fundamental” attitude than other ways of being, it can in no sense be called “better.” Indeed, as Khawaja notes, Heidegger maintained that one of the most decisive traits of being, with which human existence is always entangled, is self-concealment. If being’s meaning is fated to elude us, authenticity, far from entailing triumphant insight into being’s hidden truths, means little more than a mindful repetition of being’s inevitable occlusion. As Khawaja puts it, authenticity is “the ever-to-be-renewed struggle to remember the self-concealing origin of appearance” (155).

Though Sartre is often seen as having vulgarized Heidegger’s thought, Khawaja sees the French thinker as retracing his predecessors’ steps. Through an original reading of his war diaries, Khawaja explains how Sartre formulated his ideal of authenticity (authenticité) as an alternative to stoic resignation and André Gide’s quest for a “true self.” For Sartre, authenticity means accepting the hand that fate has dealt us, but treating it as if it were a hand we had chosen. Since you can’t be the self you want, you should love the self you’re with. As with Kierkegaard and Heidegger, it is not the claim that existence is contingent, but the attitude one adopts towards contingency that defines, for Sartre, the existentialist mindset.

For Khawaja, our derivative nature—the fact that we can never be the cause of our being—thus becomes existentialism’s core problem. It is no coincidence that Heidegger, whose notions of facticity and thrownness she sees prefigured in Kierkegaard and reconfigured in Sartre, is her book’s center of gravity. Particularly important to her account is Heidegger’s rejection of the concept of subjectivity, which, he believed, failed to capture the way existence is always already involved with being. In this way, Khawaja reads back the postmodernist critique of the “philosophy of the subject”—which is frequently synonymous with phenomenology and existentialism—onto the very target of its critique. This claim is hardly surprising as it relates to Heidegger himself, given his widely acknowledged influence on so-called postmodernists like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. But Khawaja argues that this skepticism towards traditional conceptions of subjectivity can even be found in Sartre, who, in the eyes of the postmodern generation, had ignored Heidegger’s radical insights by reviving the Cartesian subject. For Khawaja, Sartre in not making the quest for true selfhood philosophy’s primary task so much as he is trying to “ri[d] himself of the illusion that there is a self to find” (191).

The idea that authenticity is no more than a deliberate and self-conscious position vis-à-vis our own thrownness leads Khawaja to describe it as an ascetic concept. For all three thinkers, authenticity, in varying degrees, depends on a conversion experience: though we carry on with our daily lives as before, we do so with a dramatically altered outlook, in which we embrace our thrownness as an occasion to live in a new way. This is why Khawaja maintains that existentialism is so often bound up with religious concerns. She analyzes how Kierkegaard’s thinking is rooted in Pietism, and tracks down the Pauline and Protestant themes that recur throughout Heidegger’s and Sartre’s work. She sees a fluid relationship between secular and religious concepts: ideas like conversion, guilt, sin, and redemption influence and are recast by existentialist thought, which, in turn, allows the Christian experience of faith (the main religion Khawaja considers) to be understood in a new light.

Khawaja wants her study to be about religion, and the religious underpinnings of existentialist thought she identifies are always illuminating. Yet one wonders if the argument from religion is not ancillary to her magisterial exegesis. An intriguing subtheme of the book is the role that economic concepts, particularly relating to property (“appropriating,” “owning,” and so on), play in existentialist discourse. Yet is it so obvious, based on her analysis, that Protestant theology is more central to existentialism than this language of property rights? The book is not entirely convincing on this front, and both these themes seem subordinate to her compelling and persuasive analysis of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre.

An issue that particularly concerns Khawaja is whether existentialism is tied to secularization. Pushing back against the view, she argues that “modernist stories underestimate the implications of existentialism’s engagement with religion and leave us ill equipped to explain the more explicit appeals to religion” in twentieth-century thought (233). But Khawaja’s concern that attempts to think of existentialism as a distinctly modern phenomenon will downplay its religious significance may be exaggerated. In The Order of Things—a book that is in many respects a polemic against existentialism and phenomenology—Foucault describes the modern episteme as founded on a dilemma: it wants to study human beings as empirical phenomena, while at the same time finding a transcendental foundation of knowledge in the human subject. This outlook emerges on the ruins of the early modern episteme, which is premised on the conviction that there exists a rational supranatural order that can be adequately captured only by perfected systems of representation—exhaustive tableaux of knowledge or a mathesis universalis. Both epistemes have implications for religious as well as secular thought. Could one not argue that existentialism (precisely because it seeks to found a transcendental outlook on the basis of immanent existence) as well as various schools of modern religious thought are grounded on the intellectual assumptions Foucault finds in the modern episteme, just as they foreclose the theological notions that would have seemed self-evident under the early modern episteme? Even if one does not endorse Foucault’s specific claims, this way of thinking—seeking the intellectual paradigm shared by modern forms of thought, in ways that straddle the religious-secular divide—seems to offer fruitful solutions to Khawaja’s concerns.

It is in the nature of book reviews to raise such scholarly issues. But what could ultimately be more inauthentic than a book review? It is a task worthy of Hilarius Bookbinder, or another of Kierkegaard’s alter egos. But when he was pondering more weighty matters, Kierkegaard asked: “What does it mean to say: the world? . . . Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here?” (80). It is in reminding us of the powerful ways in which existentialists grappled with these questions that the great merit of Khawaja’s powerful book lies.

 Atheist, n. “a man with a phobia about God who saw his absence everywhere and who could not open his mouth without saying his name: in short, a Gentleman with religious convictions”

—Jean-Paul Sartre1

The Religion of Existence aims “to present existentialism as a fertile context in which to think through the problematic status of religion in modern thought” (240). It is a thought-provoking book, with an enticing premise and expansive prose.

Through its exploration of the self as a task (and its argument that existentialist “authenticity” is a secularized Protestant ascesis) Khawaja’s book raises many questions: What do we mean by religion? Who (if anyone) has privileged access to it? It is fascinating both as intellectual history and a contribution to debates about what Khawaja calls “the meaning” and “complex burden of Christianity as a cultural legacy for the West” (236, 240).

For those who share her suspicion that the boundaries between the so-called secular and sacred—or between philosophy and theology—are more porous than commonly acknowledged, the book raises larger issues of both the backward-looking and forward-looking variety. In this piece I shall focus primarily on the former, and primarily on Sartre, for in his case there are reasons to believe that Protestantism, Pietism, and Kierkegaard don’t deserve quite as much credit as Khawaja gives them.

Khawaja begins with Kierkegaard because he is “first to formulate Christian theology in fully ‘existential’ terms” (18). She argues that “the idea of authentic selfhood at the center of existential philosophy is first developed by Kierkegaard” and that in this tradition authenticity “is not something one obtains or at which one ‘arrives’; it emerges from the interminable labor of an individual’s choice of herself and obtains only as long as that choice continues to be affirmed, or worked out” (19). She then argues that this value is in some sense secularized in the work of Heidegger and Sartre.

I agree with Khawaja that Christianity is “a shared semantic horizon” of existentialism (7), that sin in particular plays a significant role, and that readers have approached Sartre with misleading assumptions about the religious themes in his work. But there are reasons to doubt that Protestant Pietism plays the most significant role in this story. I have written elsewhere that the English-speaking world’s interpretation of Sartre is skewed by its reception of his works in light of the German phenomenological (and, indeed, the Kierkegaardian existentialist) tradition. And it bears repeating that Sartre was steeped in an intellectual context where the lines between philosophy and theology were drawn differently than they are today.2

Khawaja attributes to Sartre a Protestant religiosity, writing that “surely it was the lingering traces of his Protestant upbringing, the Schweitzer side of the family tree rearing its kulturreligiöse head” (17); she also claims that his thinking about authenticity “participates in a specifically Protestant tradition of working on the self” (24). But despite his famous Protestant family, Sartre says in his memoir, Words, that he was “brought up in the Catholic faith”3 of his mother, that he was “both Catholic and Protestant.”4 Sartre’s autobiographical writings are evocative, which in many cases makes it difficult to assess their reliability as history. But there are less disputable reasons to take the importance of Catholic theology in Sartre’s intellectual formation more seriously—and indeed to resist the idea that Protestants have a monopoly on working on the self in this way.

I will give examples of other—catholic or Catholic—thinkers who influenced Sartre and exhibit this virtue. In doing so my question to Khawaja is: what is it that makes Protestant—or Pietist—asceticism distinct from these other Christian traditions of what she calls “spiritual labor” (111)? Her definition of Protestantism (given on p. 23) acknowledges that Paul and Augustine anticipate some of the themes expounded by Kierkegaard. But why should we see such figures as “proto-Protestant” or “quasi-Protestant” when similar themes are evident in Catholic thought, before and after Luther? One suspects that Weberian lenses, in this case, may be distorting what they promise to clarify.

Take, for example, the concept of conversion. Khawaja claims that, for Kierkegaard, “to become a Christian is to convert” (72) and that “it is with Pietism that conversion is transformed from one moment in the process of justification into an encompassing devotional ideal” (73). She takes this aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought to be original to him and influential in later existentialists, arguing that “by approaching the problem of religious conversion as the problem of continually ‘becoming a Christian’—Kierkegaard created the conditions for a convergence between continual conversion and personal identity” (111). Existentialist accounts of the temporality of the self play a particularly significant role in her account. But I would argue that the conditions Khawaja identifies are evident much earlier in the Christian tradition.

In book VII of the Confessions Augustine does not present “conversion” as a single and irreversible event. In fact, he uses precisely the same Latin terms Khawaja notes in Heidegger—conversio and aversio—to describe the temporal turning of the self toward or away from God.5 In Classical Latin, the words conversio and convertere designate the act of “returning or becoming.” These terms convey ongoing movement rather than a change from one state to another. But conversio and aversio in Augustine do not just bring us closer or farther from God. They also bring us closer to or farther from our true selves.

Augustine discusses conversion’s continuity in terms of habituation, which (although he does not use Khawaja’s term) requires “spiritual labor.” And Augustine’s influence on twentieth-century French philosophy was more significant than is widely acknowledged: he was on the agrégation programme eleven times,6 the same number as Bertrand Russell, behind Nietzsche and Husserl (with fifteen appearances each), and ahead of Hobbes and Diderot (with ten).

But in addition to direct readings of Augustine, Sartre was also steeped in what Philippe Sellier has called “diffuse Augustinianism.”7 In France in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Augustine’s thought saw a resurgence of interest, with the emergence of l’école française de spiritualité. The French School, and its founder Pierre de Bérulle, were heavily indebted to Augustinian ontology and anagogy—to the idea that human beings can ascend from lower to higher orders of being, and that they do so by spiritual labor.

Bérulle’s name is little known outside France. But he was spiritual director to a better-known philosopher: René Descartes. Rather than focusing on the Meditations primarily as the locus classicus of rationalist scepticism, French interpreters have read Descartes in other lights, acknowledging his indebtedness to Bérulle and Augustinian tradition. According to Pierre Bachmann, for example, what Descartes discovered in the moment of thinking was something about the temporal structure of selfhood: “The cogito detaches a unique moment of existence, a moment which does not rely in any way on that precedes it neither on anything that follows in the course of its existence. . . . The Cartesian man also must be conserved; to be recreated at each instant. In the nakedness of the Cartesian moment one unerringly arrives at the notion of continual creation.”8

In the seventeenth century—called by some French historians “the century of Augustine”—the implications of continual creation for personal identity were debated with rigour. They were debated between Jesuits and Jansenists—most famously, perhaps, by Pascal. And François Fénelon wrote that he did not know how to assure himself “that the self [le moi] of yesterday is the same as the self of yesterday and of today. They are not necessarily linked together. One could be without the other.”9

Looking backward, therefore, I contend that the roots of Sartre’s “ekstatic temporalization of the for-itself” extend deep into this tradition—which was fertile soil for his later encounters with Kierkegaard and Heidegger.

This competing genealogy, however, does nothing to subtract from the forward-looking questions The Religion of Existence raises. Khawaja’s methodological framing of the book—situating it in different readings of existentialism and secularity—raises fascinating questions about the relationship of religion, faith, and philosophy. She contends that these three existentialists share “one crucial but rarely acknowledged sentiment: Christianity is too important to the project of philosophy to be left to theologians” (21).

This provoked some lingering questions: What about Christianity is too important? Insights into authenticity as a way of “saying yes to life” through continuous conversion? Or the relationship of the self to its actions and to others? Leaving aside the question of whether existentialism’s secularized ascesis has its origins in Protestantism, Catholicism, or some blend of both, when does something begin or cease to be “Christian”?

One of the more influential books in contemporary philosophy and theology is Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007). It bears all the hallmarks of a magnum opus: ranging across more than eight hundred pages of text, and ostensibly crowning an already outstanding scholarly career, A Secular Age is famed not only for its insights into the rise of secular modernity but, in the manner of a Heidegger or a Derrida, for creating a new way of speaking about its subject matter (“buffered self,” “immanent frame,” and so on). A Secular Age, then, would seem to confirm and, in turn, to explore what many take to be a basic fact of contemporary Western culture—that it is an age [saeculum] of humanism, whereby the concepts and practices of Christianity have been overwhelmed by a plethora of alternatives, whether religious, nonreligious, or even antireligious.

But it is on just this point that other commentators demur. Noted sociologist Peter Berger has argued that it is pluralism, rather than secularism, that most accurately characterizes the modern West. Thus he remains unpersuaded by the guiding assumption of A Secular Age: “Already the title of [Taylor’s] book is wrong. We don’t live in a secular age.”1 As Berger sees it, Taylor overstates the degree to which an “international intelligentsia” represents the Weltanschauungen of “most of the world,” which in truth “is more religious than it ever was.”2 As a sociologist, Berger’s analysis is dependent on scientific data—demographic surveys, ethnographical case studies, and so on. And yet, might it find corroboration in humanistic disciplines such as philosophy and theology? In other words, is there an aporia in the humanities that corresponds to the one in sociology—namely, that putatively “secular” discourses and movements are not as secular as they appear, either failing to drive out religion altogether or, at least, reinscribing the spiritual and theological insights of Judeo-Christianity?

These questions are by no means new. John Milbank, to cite a well-known example, has claimed that theology’s “positioning” by the ostensibly neutral social sciences is actually a relic from medieval disputes within Christianity. Hence, for Milbank, secular discourses are better thought of as heterodox theologies dislodged from the Christian mainstream. Though different in purpose and in tone, Noreen Khawaja’s excellent new book, The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre (2016), seems to do for existentialism what Milbank sought to do for social theory. That is to say, for Khawaja, existentialist philosophy does not arrive ex nihilo but, inasmuch as it stems from the work of Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, it has “Protestant Christianity as a semantic horizon” (6). What this means is that atheist iterations of existentialism remain embedded in a Christian framework, just as Christian thinkers have learned from existentialist philosophy—whether they acknowledge it or not—that “the existential” is a key category in understanding the import of Christian faith. As Khawaja boldly puts it, “Christian faith is a matter of existential decision, and Christian language is a matter of existential meaning, but not because the Christian message is a kind or instance of the larger genre of existential communication. Christianity is existential because the existential itself is about Christianity” (11).

But this is only part of the puzzle. That existentialism translates Christian concepts into a secular idiom, Khawaja concedes, is not terribly hard to see. Still, one might wonder: “What does the translation translate? If it is not simply rhetoric and vocabulary that link existential thought to Christianity, what does this rhetoric do?” (19). Khawaja locates a number of “subthematic values” (22) that answer these questions. First, she maintains that “the secular ideal of personal authenticity will prove to be wrapped up with [the] Pietistic tradition” (22). Second, and more surprisingly, she argues that when “the architects of authentic existence engage with Protestant formations of piety, what emerges is a new form of asceticism” (22). This is as true for a “quietly lapsed Catholic such as Heidegger” as for “a zealous atheist such as Sartre,” since both figures, no less than the Pietist-bred Kierkegaard, emphasize “one of the most powerful spiritual ideals of our times—the idea that my ‘true’ self is not given to me but something I am responsible for producing” (24). Understood in these terms, Pietist spirituality, as mediated by existentialism, continues to influence Western society, and thus Christianity writ large remains present even amidst post-Christianity: “The more we learn from historians of religion about where our ‘secular’ and ‘modern’ world came from, the more we come to accept that ‘we seculars’ are always in some sense Christian, as well as or in spite of whatever else we may be” (241).

It is clear, then, that Khawaja recognizes the socio-political valence of her thesis, though that is not her chief concern in The Religion of Existence. On the contrary, the book is best thought of as a close reading of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre, with particular attention to how each of these thinkers evinces a sustained interest in self-cultivation and self-transformation—a kind of askesis by and through which the self becomes its own project. Given the extensity of Khawaja’s argument, it would be impossible in this context to detail her approach to these titans of existentialism. For that reason, I will restrict myself to a few observations about her treatment of Kierkegaard. After all, she views Kierkegaard as the primary branch by which Pietism and the Christian tradition are linked to existentialism. Thus much of her case hinges on the Dane.

First, Khawaja notes that it is surprising “how negligibly Pietism has factored into philosophical and critical assessments of existentialism” (47). Doubtless this is true, not only with regard to Kierkegaard, who was brought up in Copenhagen’s Moravian community and who retained a marked sympathy for Pietist Erbauungsliteratur throughout his life, but also with regard to a figure such as Heidegger, whose well-known interest in the Catholic mystic Meister Eckhart bears historical and thematic associations with Pietism. Moreover, as Khawaja notes, where Pietism and existentialism have been linked (as in a 1963 talk by Karl Barth) the emphasis has been on their common inward and subjectivist tendencies. In response, Khawaja argues that “there is a far more concrete connection between the two traditions,” namely, an emphasis on “conversion,” understood particularly as an ascetic call to “life-formation” (48, 51). In Kierkegaard’s case, these are not the preferred terms, but his overarching project of encouraging the reader to assume responsibility for her existence as a created being entails a self-conscious decision to become a Christian. Thus he aligns “the ideal of personal identity and the Pietistic ideal of conscious, resolute conversion” (98).

This is, as far as it goes, a straightforward way of connecting Kierkegaard’s philosophical interests to Christian spirituality, and I am generally persuaded that, in establishing an “existential account of the self . . . knotted together with Christian values and norms,” Kierkegaard represents both “an attempt to reverse the course of an already operative secularization of Christianity” as well as an influence on “existential thought even in its most exuberantly atheistic form” (112). My basic agreement, however, should not imply that I lack questions. The first concerns the particular way that Khawaja reads Kierkegaard. It is important for Khawaja’s project that “lifelong conversion” be understood as “lifelong struggle,” and she locates just this interpretation in Kierkegaard’s thought: “the underlying theological view” of Kierkegaard’s response to Christendom is that “conversion is ongoing struggle without rest” (76). But it would appear that Kierkegaard is more nuanced than Khawaja suggests. Of course, Kierkegaard does emphasize that Christian discipleship is ineludibly militant and shot through with Frygt og Bæven (“fear and trembling”). On the other hand, he also insists that it is marked by a profound and almost ineffable sense of Hvile og Ro (“rest and calm”).

Take, for instance, his treatment of the so-called woman who was a sinner—a figure depicted in Luke 7:36–50 and the focus of no fewer than three of Kierkegaard’s writings. In “Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins” (1843), Kierkegaard lauds the woman’s willingness to approach Jesus even though her sins seemingly made her unworthy. Since her love of Jesus was so great, she overcame this obstacle and the dread that accompanied it: “In beating the enemy she beat herself to calmness [Ro], and when she had found rest [Hvile] at Jesus’ feet, she forgot herself in her work of love.”3 In “The Woman Who Was a Sinner” (1849), Kierkegaard expands on this interpretation, adding that the woman is a “picture”4 of what it means to be a Christian. Notably, this icon is not so much about struggle as about prevailing over struggle: “She has forgotten . . . the restlessness [Uro], has forgotten herself—she, the lost woman, who is now lost in her Savior, who, lost in him, rests [hviler] at this feet—like a picture.”5 A subsequent discourse sums up this insight by calling the woman a “teacher” and a “prototype of piety.”6 In light of this emphasis on rest and calm, Khawaja’s reading of Kierkegaard is problematized. After all, if the woman who was a sinner is archetypal for Christian discipleship (as Kierkegaard himself avers), then would it not be difficult to maintain that Kierkegaard’s understanding of religious conversion precludes rest?

The second question involves the ostensive “Protestantism” of Kierkegaard’s enterprise. Doubtless Khawaja is right that there are strong links between the Protestant movement of Pietism, Kierkegaard, and later existentialists such as Heidegger and Sartre. To emphasize this point, moreover, dovetails nicely with traditional readings of the figures in question—Kierkegaard, the inheritor of Lutheran Angst; Heidegger and Sartre, lapsed Catholics and advocates for a religion of immanence. But is this picture not just a little too neat? As Emmanuel Mounier’s l’arbre existentialiste suggests,7 the roots of existentialism actually dig deep into the Catholic tradition, from the Stoic leanings of Ambrose of Milan to his pupil Augustine of Hippo and on to thinkers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Blaise Pascal. Khawaja does not dispute this point, though, at times, it appears that her desire to see “Protestant Christianity” as existentialism’s “semantic horizon” elides the degree to which Pietism in general and Kierkegaard’s thought in particular were indebted to Catholic doctrine and spirituality. To cite but one example, Khawaja insists that Kierkegaard’s stress on continual conversion is a reworking of “Pietistic self-examination” (78). But the contention that one must “work out [one’s] own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12)—a Pauline expression famously embraced by Kierkegaard—also harks back to a pre-Reformation soteriology, whereby the assurance of salvation is denied. As a result, the believer can never “rest easy” but instead must continually strive to direct her will toward God. These efforts are often ascetical and require a daily willingness to assume the burden of Christ’s cross. As the fourth-century mystic Gregory of Nyssa puts it, “He who climbs never stops going from beginning to beginning, through beginnings that have no end. He never stops desiring what he already knows.”8

In short, if Kierkegaard’s thought does not just point to “lifelong struggle” but also to the blessed rest of unio mystica, and if it does not just mediate Pietist tropes to twentieth-century existentialism but also draws deeply from Catholicism, what would that mean for Khawaja’s thesis in The Religion of Existence? These are, it seems to me, questions worth pondering. Still, whatever answers emerge, Khawaja has done a great service in casting new light on our supposedly “post-religious” age.

Every philosophy conceals a philosophy too: every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is also a mask.

—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

 

Noreen Khawaja’s The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre is a splendidly written close reading of the core of existentialism. It is particularly incisive in its analysis of the complex valences of “authenticity” (28–69) and its portrayal of existentialism as a “tradition” or “pattern of intergenerational influence” (4). Her meticulous and thoughtful readings of key philosophical issues in the writings Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre have already garnered well-earned praise and I suspect the work’s reputation will continue to grow.

All that said, it seems to have been packaged and presented as a somewhat less adventurous project in the philosophy of religion, and as such it seems likely to mislead superficial readers. Let me explain.

Unmasking is a conventional mode in the philosophy of religion. Countless studies have taken it as their ambition to expose the religious influences or background of a particular philosopher and to show that a nominally secular philosopher was aligned with theological discourses all along. For instance, Jacques Derrida has been unmasked in different contradictory studies as variously a theologically Jewish, Christian, and even a specifically Catholic thinker.1 I’m not against unmasking as such but unmasking often functions either to claim the philosopher for the study of religion or to suggest that the philosopher failed to fully appreciate the theological resources of a particular faith. In the latter case, this mode of scholarship often deploys a narrative trajectory drawn from the old-fashioned account of secularization to present particular philosophical schools as a falling off of supposedly richer theological traditions.

At first glance, The Religion of Existence looks like an unmasking project of this sort. From its title alone, a reader might expect that the book will be an exploration of existentialism as an -ism or one might say religion insofar as that suffix is often taken. Moreover, the book does gain some of its initial mileage by tracing the Pietist influences on what would become existentialism, which would seem to allow one to claim existentialism as a Protestantism. The three thinkers examined in detail—Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre—therefore get to be unmasked as in some sense Christian. Thus, there is a strong temptation to see the book as a classical exposé in the conventional mode.

But this is where the reading of Khawaja’s account goes astray because we already know that Kierkegaard was a deeply Protestant thinker. He is also conventionally portrayed as the founder of existentialism. Thus, we already know that existentialism has Protestant roots. This if anything is far and away the established story. We also already know that Heidegger was deeply entangled in theology. Even those who haven’t identified the theological register of Being and Time know that Heidegger spent a little time in a seminary, wrote a habilitation thesis on the theologian Duns Scotus, and so on. Hence, the only thinker with a connection to Christianity to be unmasked might be that famous atheist Sartre. But even there, it is common knowledge that as soon as a particular philosopher goes out of their way to stridently declare their atheism, they are reacting to a deeply theological set of concerns. Plus, scholars have been looking at putative theological influences on Sartre since the 1960s. Moreover, Khawaja notes from the outset that the idea of existentialism as engaged with Christianity is not a new discovery (19). Thus, The Religion of Existence cannot be a mere unmasking or appropriation of existentialism for Christian theology.

To elucidate why this would be a mistaken reading of the work, I want to describe what I see as the book’s more fascinating intervention—namely, an engagement with narratives of secularism and the relationship between religion and philosophy. In a way, I think Khawaja might be doing her own unmasking of the kind of unmasking that goes into much of philosophy of religion.

Already in the introduction Khawaja outlines what she sees as the three main historiographical accounts of the relationship between existentialism and religion—first, existentialist philosophy appears in a different domain of generality from Christian theology in a way that perhaps complements it (11–12); second, existentialism is a secularized form of religious thought, produced through a process of subtraction or competition with Christian meaning (13–14); third, there is a kind of religious tone or affect which colors existentialist thought (15–16). Although her aim is to disrupt all three of these narratives, it is this last mode that Khawaja interrogates by seeing it as a symptom of an issue that is important to her work as a whole, namely “a deep and widespread uncertainty in the twentieth century about what makes thought ‘religious’” (16). In that respect, she summarizes all three narratives by observing that they share a sense that “existential philosophy feels religious to its readers” (16). The work is in some respects an attempt to address exactly those issues—what does it mean for thought to be religious? And why does existentialism have a religious “feel”?

Khawaja explores these issues throughout the work. But she returns to thinking through them in relationship to broader narratives of secularization in the book’s riveting conclusion. There she distinguishes between two particular approaches to the place of religion in modernity. First, there is a movement that Khawaja sees as epitomized in Gil Anidjar’s Blood. She accuses Anidjar of denying “that there is anything with agency in the West that is not Christian” as part of an effort to “resurrect Christianity in mythical” form as a rhetorical enemy or scapegoat (237). Second, she contrasts this mode with Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life. One of Sloterdijk’s ambitions is to preempt a notion of a “return of religion” or “postsecular” (239). Instead he argues that what is conventionally thought of as religion is just one “regime” or manifestation of a broader human capacity to practice life or self-invent. Accordingly, he takes asceticism or practical askesis to be the essence of humanity.

Khawaja is critical of both views and it is in the last pages that Khawaja owns her own usage of “religion” to “demarcate the shift that occurs when, out of a softened distinction between fact and value, a praxis emerges” (232). I want to take this notion of religion together with her final statement: “A principal aim of this book has been to present existentialism as a fertile context in which to think through the problematic status of religion in modern thought” (240).

To paraphrase, what “feels” religious about existentialism turns out to be in good part its engagement with practice, which she identifies, like Sloterdijk, with the older meaning of askesis (61–62)—hence the “Asceticism in Philosophy” of the book’s subtitle. Existentialism would seem to be a “religion” of existence insofar as it represents a “way of life.”

I broadly agree with the characterization that one of the distinctive features of existentialism is its presentation as a way of life and that this aspect of praxis is one reason why scholars have been quick to suggest it feels religious. I think this is an important takeaway from the project. But this leads me to two intertwined observations:

(1) Why think of ascetic practice as particularly Christian? Or particularly religious? Restated, what are the stakes of treating existentialism as religious as opposed to classically philosophical?

I may be misreading the work in this respect but it seems at times there is a shift between talking about why people might see existentialism as religious and why existentialism might be religious (at least for the purposes of analytical study). The second part of the question seems like it could be explored further, in part because it doesn’t seem to be a given.

For instance, the main thrust of Nietzsche’s discussion of the “ascetic ideal” in the Genealogy of Morality is that asceticism has moved beyond Christianity to be a life-denying ideal throughout European culture. Asceticism in this account would be “culture,” but it might as easily be construed as “politics” or a form of political action.2

More importantly, the language of askesis takes us back to the roots of Greek philosophical thought. In Pierre Hadot’s famous formulation, which is quoted within, “Philosophy [was] a way of life.” Hadot explores this way of life centrally in Stoicism or Cynicism and perhaps one could make the case that existentialism is a reaction to either.

But if the core of classical philosophy is a collapsed distinction “between fact and value,” such that “a praxis emerges,” then one might as well say that Existentialism is a philosophy. On the surface this seems to be such a truism as to be actively banal. But one of Hadot’s main points is that the loss of philosophy as praxis is late.

(2) Not to turn Khawaja’s work into a classic account of secularization, but it is worth observing that the loss of a notion of philosophy as a way of life is even later than is conventionally supposed.

We find an emphasis on a way of life in Early Modern Philosophy, although admittedly with a sense that philosophy would justify Christian morality. We find it in “enlightenment” thinkers. Part of Nietzsche’s famous critique of philosophers not living up to their values presupposes philosophy as a lifestyle. We can find it in Kant, in the Romantics, in the Pragmatists, the Young Hegelians, Marxist philosophers and Critical Theorists, etc.

The notion of a “naturalistic fallacy” and the distinction between fact and value the quasi-positivists’ reading of Hume, given impetus by a misreading of Weber (and interesting the proto-existentialist Tolstoy). It became a central norm in the American academy only in the twentieth century. In some respects, a de-politicized and de-actualized philosophy functioned as a way to force Marxists out. Even the early “Red Positivists” had ethical programs and political projects. So my sense is that what “feels religious” about existentialism is how much specifically Anglo-American analytical philosophy came to model itself on a “value-free science.”

In the view that Khawaja criticizes Christianity is sometimes characterized as a religious exit from religion. It would be easy to turn the tables on philosophy itself. One might say what passes as philosophy in American philosophy departments is a de-classic-izing of philosophy and a rejection of both its Greek and Christian antecedents. To exaggerate somewhat, one might say that philosophy is a secularization of philosophy.

In sum, the definition of philosophy in terms of rational contemplation and metaethics and a rejection of praxis, value, politics, and a way of life is younger than Existentialism. In this respect, Existentialism is peculiar because it retained its identification with practice not because it did so initially. Moreover, it is not alone in representing various forms of philosophical praxis (some of my favorite philosophical schools are praxis and value oriented, e.g., critical theory, virtue ethics, feminist philosophy, and Sino-Japanese philosophical traditions). Finally, the roles of various existentialists themselves in the flight from values and the rejection of praxis is perhaps a subject worthy of more detailed analysis.

By way of final summation, I want to emphasize the value of the project. I think it provides a fascinating reading of existentialism and the next time I teach Kierkegaard I’ll do it in a different way because of this excellent work.

To end in a prompt—I’d love to see you expand your tantalizing remarks about secularization theory in the book’s conclusion to discuss in greater detail your broader alternatives to Anidjar and Sloterdijk and the like.