One of the influential writers in the second half of the twentieth century has been Jean Paul Sartre, a novelist and writer celebrated by several generations. He sowed abundantly the seed of atheism with his brilliant literature and apparent philosophical seriousness. With such instruments it seemed to many European and American intellectuals that his critique of religion was definitive, as has happened before with other authors, such as Nietzsche, who—in this matter—have been rhetorical stylists rather than reasonable thinkers. To affirm falsehoods with assurance, even with excellent literary technique, is no proof that what is affirmed is evident or that it conforms to reality. Since his theatre continues to be performed and is an ideological exponent of a—conscious or unconscious—still important sector of present-day society, and his commonplaces, under different guises, go on “working,” it is not amiss to review a few pages that Charles Moeller devotes to him in volume II of his work Twentieth-Century Literature and Christianity. Moeller analyzes other arguments on which Sartre “grounds” his atheism. Here we transcribe Moeller’s critique of a famous question that continues to trouble many who are unaware of the true Christian teaching about God, the concept of creation, and human freedom.

The Notion of Creation in Jean Paul Sartre

In Twentieth-Century Literature and Christianity,

Ed. Gredos. Madrid

To give the reader a breather, I shall take this argument from the popularizing lecture that Sartre has spread throughout the world. God must be rejected, because his existence rests on the prejudice of “creationism.” Sartre represents God to himself as “a superior craftsman”: whatever the doctrine we consider, whether it be a doctrine like that of Descartes or the doctrine of Leibniz, we always admit that the will more or less follows the understanding, or at least accompanies it, and that God, when he creates, knows exactly what he creates. Thus the concept of man in the mind of God is assimilated to the concept of the paper-knife in the mind of the manufacturer; and God produces man following certain techniques and a conception, exactly as the craftsman fabricates a paper-knife following a definition and a technique. Thus the individual man realizes a certain concept that is in the divine understanding (EH, pp. 19,20).

One would think we are dreaming. The simplism of these traveling-salesman arguments of secularism has something bewildering about it. Unfortunately, we shall see them again in Le Diable et le bon Dieu. If Sartre is remarkable in his descriptions of sensible behavior, he is so in equal measure in the truly incredible proofs of his simplism, when he goes beyond the domain of sensibility and claims to tackle spiritual problems. This conception of creation supposes that man can have not an atom of freedom, of initiative, just as the paper-knife has none, being entirely passive in the hands of the one who fabricates and uses it. If it is supposed, Sartre writes in L’être et le néant, that God has given being to the world, being will always appear tainted with a certain “passivity.” Moreover, no subjectivity, even were it divine, could create anything objective, but only a representation of objectivity. And even were this possible, “by virtue of that kind of fulguration of which Leibniz speaks,” the created being could not affirm itself as being “except over against and in opposition to its creator”: otherwise, what is created would be no more than an “intrasubjective” being, fused, mingled with the divine subjectivity, entirely passive. And since, by hypothesis, one must admit the idea of a “continuous creation,” what is created would then lose all independence, all consistency, all “Selbständigkeit” (EN, pp. 31,32).

Technical Activity and Creative Activity

Must it be recalled that the creation of man cannot be assimilated to the fabrication of a paper-knife? The paper-knife itself, conceived by the engineer, is created in being by God, like the whole of reality. The creative act is not that of a craftsman; creation is not a technique: therein lies the appalling Sartrian simplification; the philosopher here bears witness to a dangerous bias of the contemporary spirit, which consists in reducing everything to utilitarian techniques. If the creation of the material world is not a technique, still less will that of man be: God creates man free, makes him free, creates freedom in him. The activity of creation is not a craftsman’s “making,” but a communication of being, out of love; it is a gift of self; it is the will to make other beings participate in BEING. When it is a question of man, creation means the design of making him participate in the divine nature, among other things, by means of freedom. Any apprentice in philosophy knows that such is the Thomist and Christian idea of creation: if Sartre meant to reject it, he ought to have refuted it, beginning by distinguishing between technical activity and creative activity.

Here too it is enough to think of human fatherhood in order to unveil the Sartrian sophism. Whoever begot a child with the idea of making of him a passive thing, an inert prolongation of himself, would not deserve the name of father. The father knows well, when he brings a child into existence, that he collaborates in the appearance of a new freedom, one that will be able to oppose his own freedom, but of which he hopes that, within the bosom of autonomy, it will freely undertake to love the one who has begotten it. God does not want servile prostrations, said Péguy. Neither do human fathers. Here too, unfortunately, the modern theories about “sexual techniques” skirt the danger of making the birth of a child pass for a “technique of a special kind,” but, when all is said and done, a technique. Sartre does not penetrate the mystery of love, since he writes that “the child is a thing vomited” into the world. By confining himself, once again, to the sensible, he could not but reduce creation to a utilitarian technical activity. It then becomes an easy game for him to make an end of such a caricature.

The “Medusan” Gaze

An example drawn from the second volume of Les chemins de la liberté will show how Sartre represents to himself the relations between

man and God. Daniel is a “follower” of Corydon; and he knows it. Instead of freely assuming what he is, he prefers not to face himself; he finds it more convenient to exonerate himself of his responsibility. He then turns toward God; he imagines “a gaze that looks at him” (let us think of “the Medusan gaze”). God is “an eye that looks at him”; under the fixity of this gaze, Daniel feels himself becoming “a thing,” an “in-itself,” an object; under this gaze he sees himself entirely identified with his vice, for God says that Daniel “IS” a wayward man. At that very moment, Sartre explains, Daniel sees himself liberated and exonerated of the responsibility for his vice: having become a “thing” under the gaze of the “other” (God), he ceases to be responsible for being a lost man, just as the table is not responsible for being a table under the gaze of man. Freed from himself, Daniel writes to Mathieu to inform him of his “conversion.”

It is useless to deny that very frequently such is the manner in which we behave: when we say to a friend, “What do you expect me to do; I am like this, you have to take me as I am,” what we are doing is trying to reduce our weaknesses to a fatality that would not be ourselves, that would be to us like something external. There is an example of bad faith, and, unfortunately, a very frequent one. But if such behavior is possible and even frequent in the human comedy, whom will one make believe that Daniel’s attitude in the presence of God is nothing other than an abominable caricature of Christian repentance?

When man turns toward God from the bosom of his sin, the gaze he meets is not that “Medusan gaze” that petrifies him and shamefully frees him of his responsibility. Sartre blasphemes when he gives to understand that Daniel is going to convert to the Christian faith. No Christian will admit that to repent of a fault, under the gaze of God, is equivalent to trying to unburden oneself of the weight of this fault by saying to God: “You see, I am like this; I am not responsible.” We may try to deceive other men in this way; but even the most lukewarm believer knows well that the “gaze of God” is a gaze of love; far from leaving us nailed fast, petrified, it is a call, a lancet-thrust, that penetrates to the juncture of soul and spirit, in order to restore to us the sense of our responsibility, to awaken in us a freedom dead in sin.

Has he read any text of the Gospel?

Sartre will no doubt say that religious repentance is a biological illusion. But the phenomenological description of this feeling goes in a direction diametrically opposed to what Sartre claims to make of it; Sartre lacks any antenna that would allow him to divine what authentic religious life is; one would say that he has never read a single evangelical text, a single book of mysticism; one would say that he has never heard the cry of the sinner who turns back to God and feels himself responsible before Him, while at the same time mysteriously comforted by Him.

This example casts a brutal clarity upon the wholly imaginative idea that Sartre forms of creation: Daniel’s experience is nothing but the concretization of a philosophical theory. It has no value. If to create is worth as much as to fabricate, man has only to let himself be “used” by his fabricator. We find here the same paralogism already noted with regard to Camus; unfortunately it is in the air and might be expressed well enough in the following manner: either everything comes from God, and then nothing comes from man; or nothing comes from God and, in that case, everything comes from man. On this second hypothesis, if man has some dignity, some sense of freedom—and this is necessary in our times of dictatorship and democratic conformism—it will be said that his human dignity begins with the “death of God.” This is why, since God does not exist and cannot exist, under pain of endangering the dignity of man, the religious behavior of Christians will appear to Sartre as necessarily tainted with passivity, with cowardice, with conformism, with the spirit of seriousness. Christians, just like children, if they are logical with their faith, cannot but be humbugs.

Must it be repeated that, if God creates, he wills “that the substance be, that it be active, and that it attain its end”? Must it be recalled that the reality of God is necessary in order to ground the “ultimate” meaning of reality, but that the created world has in itself a certain consistency, that it is not pure appearance, a play of illusion, a phantasmagoria predetermined by an invisible despot? Is it necessary to recall that it is precisely from this consistency of its own that the creature draws the strength to rebel against God, that God accepts that the creature should use this freedom of its own, which He himself has given it, to turn against Him, to be “god without gods”? Must it, finally, be necessary to return to this elementary evidence, that God asks us to pray and to work, ora et labora?

Sartre Understands Nothing of the Mystery of Love

When one has confined oneself to the sensible, one is also closed to the mystery of love; one understands nothing of the mystery of the “participation” of the contingent in the transcendent. Then it is no longer possible to see in the world anything but the shameful passivity of servile slaves before a despotic God, or the proud self-sufficiency of a being that claims to be without father and without mother. We shall realize this still more perfectly by briefly analyzing the third argument on which Sartre claims to found his atheism.

Contradiction between Freedom and the Existence of God

This third aspect of Sartrian atheism is implied in the two preceding ones. But Sartre draws from it consequences so important that it is necessary to devote to it some considerations in a special paragraph.

Atheism is, in Sartre, the foundation of his conception of freedom: since there exist no values “inscribed in a metaphysical heaven,” nor any “human nature” conceived by a God, man is wholly delivered over, abandoned to himself: he must choose continually and create values. On the contrary, were God to exist, the existence of objective values would dispense man from the responsibility of choice. Man could “lean” on the comfortable pillow of given certainties; he would never again know “care,” which is the characteristic of “free” man (EN, 721,722).

The argument is only a variant of the preceding one; it merely insists on the alleged cowardly conformism that would characterize the believer. It will suffice to recall that the grace of God does not reach us as an invitation to submit with an easy conformism. It penetrates us like a lancet, prevents us from falling asleep, obliges us to an ever-alert vigilance; the Christian is the watchman of the “Easter night,” the night during which one is not permitted to sleep, for one must “watch for the passing of the Lord.”

This ever-wakeful vigilance is not based on some sort of canonization of anxiety for its own sake, but on the reality of God who calls us, and from whom we never feel more distant than when we try to draw near to him. It is enough to recall the life of the saints, their anguishes, their nights of the senses and of the spirit, the luminous cloud that surrounds them when they draw near to the divine

union; Gregory of Nyssa speaks, for example, of “epectasis,” that is, of an indefinite going-out from oneself toward the unfathomable abyss of God.

On the contrary, inversely to what is too easily thought in Christian circles, the unbeliever is not necessarily a man tortured by cares and anguishes; Sartre is a clear example of this. All too frequently conversion makes an atheist pass from an apparently balanced world to a universe in which he finds himself torn from himself. The Veil of Veronica, by Gertrud von le Fort, shows well what I mean, in the contrast between the grandmother, who dies serenely contemplating the Pantheon, and the heroine’s aunt, who, being a Christian, knows the terrors of a painful purification.

All too frequently we lower our beliefs to the level of easy and comfortable recipes, to the meticulous calculation of our merits, to that odious balance sheet of our sins and our virtues, to that obscure “neither good nor evil” of a drowsy religious life. But a writer must judge a religion by its most eminent representatives, the saints and the mystics. It may of course be said that their experiences are “biological illusions”; one will claim to reduce them to phenomena of the subconscious and of the unconscious; but, if one is honest, one must begin by describing them such as they are and not, as Sartre does, by basing them on a caricature.

The author of L’être et le néant gives proof, moreover, of an astonishing ignorance where Christian reality is concerned; he writes, without batting an eyelid, that “mystical experience is not a privileged experience,” as if he were unaware of the sum of asceticism and renunciation that it in fact presupposes: can one think that an experience founded upon such renunciations has nothing original to teach us, that it is exactly of the same order as that of a sensual man, for example? It must be said: Sartre wipes out with a stroke of the pen twenty centuries of Christian history, without any serious investigation, and solely by virtue of a prior option in favor of “materialist rationalism” or, if one prefers, according to Gilbert Varet, of “dialectical empiricism.”

Author: Charles Moeller

Source: Encuentra.com