The aftermath of World War II spawned no identifiable Lost Generation, but it did bring a word for intellectuals to play with: existentialism. At first it appeared to be nothing but a new French fad—redolent of sex, sidewalk cafes, tight blue jeans and Communism. But on examination it seems that all kinds of respectable thinkers are existentialists, and that France's Atheist Jean-Paul Sartre represents merely a quasi-Communist splinter group in a movement that grew out of the thoughts of the great 19th century Danish religious thinker, Sören Kierkegaard. What is a modern-day existentialist? One who asks the great questions—"Who am I?" "Why am I here?"—and finds no answer. Can a Christian be an existentialist? He may ask the existentialist questions and suffer the existentialist agonies of doubt and darkness, but for him the answer of faith has come.
Some of these thorny trails of thought are explored in Christianity and the Existentialists, a new book published by Scribner ($3.75) and edited by Carl Michalson, professor of systematic theology at Drew University. Its eight chapters include studies of Kierkegaard by Theologian H. (for Helmut) Richard Niebuhr,* Spain's Miguel de Unamuno by President John A. Mackay of Princeton Theological Seminary, Nicholas Berdyaev by Matthew Spinka, professor of church history at the Hartford Seminary Foundation, Gabriel Marcel by Professor J. V. Langmead Casserley of the General Theological Seminary, Martin Heidegger by Erich Dinkler of Yale Divinity School, and of modern art by Harvard's Professor Paul Tillich. Out of this meeting of minds one conclusion about existentialists emerges clear: they take life hard.
Poison in the Beer. Liveliest chapter is Editor Michalson's own attempt to answer the question: What is existentialism? The layman's suspicion that it is some kind of clandestine wedding between Nordic melancholy and Parisian pornography, he admits, comes close to truth. "For . . . there is in existentialism a shocking sensualism, an erotic realism, a tearful and throbbing meeting of skin against skin, which, so characteristically French, appreciates propinquity of heart and fingertip." At the same time existentialism contains "a sentiment of constantly living over cracking earth, or at the foot of live volcanos, or in a land where people fight two wars in every lifetime."