Sartre: A Christian Appraisal
Man, Sartre once wrote, is ‘nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.’ If he is to bejudged, therefore, it will have to be on the basis of his actions. As long as he is alive, however, his actions remain incomplete; he may continue in the same general direction, doi...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
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| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
1982
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| In: |
Scottish journal of theology
Year: 1982, Volume: 35, Issue: 3, Pages: 243-262 |
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| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
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| Summary: | Man, Sartre once wrote, is ‘nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.’ If he is to bejudged, therefore, it will have to be on the basis of his actions. As long as he is alive, however, his actions remain incomplete; he may continue in the same general direction, doing more or less the same kind of things he has always done, or he may change his course, thereby giving his life a totally different meaning. It was just such a change that Kierkegaard was hoping to find in Bishop Mynster. Mynster, he believed, was betraying Christianity by the kind of preaching he did and the kind of life heled; but he could redeem himself by declaring that it was not really the faith he was proclaiming, but rather some watered-down version of it. Kierkegaard therefore waited till the Bishop died and only then, after all his acts were complete, did he begin his famous ‘attack on Christendom’. Up till April the fifteenth 1980, the day Sartre died, it was likewise possible that a dramatic change would take place — perhaps a confession, like Aquinas’, that all he had written had merely been ‘straw’. But that was not to be; apparently Sartre died, not regretting anything he had said or done. This does not mean necessarily that the way is now open for an ‘attack on existentialism’; but it does mean that Sartre has become himself totally, as he would have put it, and we are in a position to apply to him those words that Inez, a character in Huis Clos, applied to Garcin: ‘One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are — your life and nothing else.’ |
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| ISSN: | 1475-3065 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Scottish journal of theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0036930600016604 |