The evident fact that ‘Existentialism’ is no longer de rigeur makes Noreen Khawaja's book both a timely remembrance and, perhaps strangely, an important counter-cultural contribution to contemporary philosophy of religion. The wane of Existentialism (if it ever even existed) also marks a lamentable forgetting of key concerns about personal authenticity that seem curiously low on the agenda for our age of apparent self-obsession and self-commercialization. It is especially poignant, in light of this, that Khawaja's outstanding rehabilitation of existentialist thinking appeals, not to the future, but to the past: namely, the venerable philosophical and religious tradition of askesis, or ‘exercise’. Khawaja's book deftly elucidates how, in the hands of existentialists (especially Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre), askesis is translated into the modern idiom of ‘existential authenticity’, or ‘a way of working on the self’ (p. 25).
The Religion of Existence is certainly not a manifesto on the contemporary importance of existentialism. It is in many respects a narrative that retells the story of existentialist philosophy and theology with beauty and refinement. Along the way, the story encompasses the demands of humanism and misanthropy, religion and atheism, exposing many such dichotomies as false and misconstrued. Through its broad yet penetrating lens, existentialism is aptly designated as ‘a tradition, not a movement’ (p. 4). This lack of a ubiquitous ‘essence’ is ultimately the empty eye of the storm around which existentialist thought rages. This raging of thought is stimulated, in part, by the modest renaissance of Kierkegaard's thought following the First World War. Feeding on Kierkegaard's ideals, existentialist tradition is confronted immediately by the Christian piety and passion of its forefather. The question of how to integrate or disentangle itself from the ‘shared semantic horizon’ of Christianity (p. 7) becomes a central concern of existentialists and the immediate focus of Khawaja's critical narrative. Implicit roots of the ‘existential’ are uncovered in Pietistic notions of ‘conversion’: an inflamed concern with the possibility of dynamically changing identity from which existential tradition cannot uproot itself. As such, Khawaja convincingly posits, there is a ‘feel of religion’ even at the most atheistic limits of existentialist thinking (p. 16).
This feel of religion is an irreducible aspect of existentialist tradition's inheritance of Kierkegaard, who represents ‘the first to reformulate Christian theology in fully “existential” terms’ (p. 18). In doing so, Kierkegaard is concerned with a missionary vocation to revive ‘true Christianity’ (in terms reminiscent of Johannes Arndt) within spiritless Christendom. This sort of ‘authenticity’ assumes the form of ‘a pietistic intensification of one's commitment, or faith’ (p. 19). By also intensifying the Pietistic element within Kierkegaard's thought, Khawaja avows that she is ‘trying to understand what was at stake in the existential tradition more clearly than its proponents understood it themselves’ – an understanding that offers nothing less than ‘a new portrait of the shifting relationship between philosophy and religion in late modern Europe’ (p. 21). This ambition raises the book's narrative into the grander narrative of the impact of Enlightenment, secularization, and Christian identity. To realize this, Khawaja explicates the extent to which ‘secular discourse of authentic selfhood is shaped by a specifically Protestant-Pietistic tradition of thinking about religious conversion’ (p. 22). From this shaping there emerges what is identified as ‘a new form of asceticism’ (p. 22), an affirmation of ‘the value-bestowing capacity of spiritual labour’ (p. 24).
Khawaja delineates this narrative argument through five compelling chapters, complemented by an Introduction and Conclusion. Initially, the book shows the convergence of existential ideals of authenticity (Eigenlichkeit, in Heidegger's idiom) and Protestant-Pietistic ideals of conversion. This convergence is located, in part, through shared notions of ‘working on the self through exercise (askesis)’ (p. 25). While certain forms of asceticism require a renunciation of the claims of the world, Khawaja identifies a form of what she appositely calls ‘energetic asceticism’ (p. 26) in existentialist and Pietistic traditions. This entails a sense of the self as something worked and transformed via spiritual exercise, rather than as a thing in itself. This convergence emerges in Kierkegaard's ‘thinly veiled psychological reformulation of Pietistic notions of conscious, ongoing conversion’ (p. 26). Here Kierkegaard translates conversion models into the modern idiom of becoming a self, realized by ‘choosing oneself’, which involves a negation of oneself in repentance.
The existential development of this idea is subsequently traced through Heidegger's emphasis upon ‘authenticity’ (Eigenlichkeit). Khawaja critically rejects common suspicions that Heidegger represents a mere secularization of Kierkegaard's religious self, suggesting instead that Heidegger adapts the ascetic element for philosophy's method. A more explicit affirmation of ‘authenticity’ is subsequently derived by Sartre's normative ethics in which atheism becomes the only authentic response to the ‘death of God’. Here Khawaja contends that Sartre repeats patterns of ‘conversion’ in his models of escape from ‘bad faith’. Even within the horizon of atheism, Sartre's ‘ethics of authenticity’ is taken as reinscribing the ideal of the self as ‘the product of its own penitential labor’ (p. 27). But once the idiom of Pietistic asceticism has undergone such extensive translation, can it be truly said to still be the same thing? In other words, a genealogy of any ideal does not guarantee that the descendants are reducible to the characteristics of their ancestors. Surely the insistence upon sin that so preoccupied Pietistic and Kierkegaardian thought has been abolished with the spectre of the dead God?
Khawaja responds admirably to this objection in her final chapter. It might be suspected that ‘sin’ has ultimately been recast in the mould of ‘inauthenticity’: that is, a falling away which requires the ‘conversion’ to ‘authenticity’. In this model, sin effectively comes to operate as the ‘other’ to authenticity. Such a dichotomous model, tempting though it may be, is collapsed by Khawaja. Insofar as ‘sin’ announces a ‘differential, discontinuous structure’ to selfhood, Khawaja contends that sin is actually a vital influence for existentialist tradition. Sin gives existentialist thought the insight that ‘the true form of human life is not continuity but rupture and break’ (p. 27). The rupture of sinfulness is not that which authentic life must overcome. It is the very mode of authentic life itself. Perhaps this insight represents existentialism's final greatest vision: life is a broken narrative, and that brokenness is not to be denied or escaped from, but affirmed as the form of life itself. What is more, a different ‘ontology of time’ (p. 202) emerges, focused on rupture over continuity, and problematizing assumptions about the presence of ‘the present’.
The problem for theology, as Khawaja identifies, is that the sinfulness or fallenness of life is given the sort of recognition that Christianity traditionally denies to it. Sin is not overcome, but acknowledged at the deepest possible level of authenticity. That which Christianity calls ‘death’ is affirmed by existentialism as ‘life’. The reality is, of course, far more complex and nuanced than this. Inklings of such thinking are present in Kierkegaard's notion of ‘anxiety’, particularly the idea that sin discloses something independent of the self over which the self is nonetheless responsible. Following Heidegger's debt to Kierkegaard, Khawaja states that ‘sin creates the possibility of the “own” that Eigenlichkeit actualizes’ (p. 203). Sin, therefore, is that which locates me within a larger life that I discover I am already complicit in, rather than allowing me to start at my own beginning. But sin is not a ‘nature’ or an ‘essence’ (pre-empting Existentialism's refrain); it is the condition which makes possible the ‘spiritual labor’ (p. 207) of askesis.
The Conclusion to The Religion of Existence raises profound questions for the understanding of late modernity and its anxious relation to its own Christian shadow. If Pietistic Protestantism remains inherent within even the most vociferously atheistic voices of protest, ‘Does existentialism become a religion?’ Or even, does religion become existentialism? ‘Perhaps’, Khawaja intriguingly ponders, ‘religion itself might at last become less “religious”?’ (p. 234). Furthermore, on what grounds does ‘secular’ critique of Christianity truly stand if, inverting Feuerbach, Christianity is actually the secret of secularism itself (p. 234)? Such questions threaten to unsettle the grounds on which the study as well as critique of ‘religion’ stands. As Khawaja observes, established dichotomous visions of secularization and religion are now beginning to be un-thought. As a result, the recent past is no longer as accomplished as we may have led ourselves to believe.
Similarly, Khawaja leaves us with convincing cause to rethink what we may have been led to believe about Heidegger and Sartre. Their philosophies do not merely rest on secular ‘selective appropriation of religious ideas – authenticity without grace, anxiety without faith, theological anthropology without the theology to back it up’ (p. 241). Not only is the theology inside Heidegger and Sartre; Heidegger and Sartre are inside the theology, for ‘in the orbit of the protestant-secular, nothing is universal, and we are all “insiders” ’ (p. 242). For the study of religion at least, this renders improbable an already wearied ‘insider/outsider’ model of thinking. Going back to the forefather of this genealogy, I think Kierkegaard anticipates something along these lines already. Through the refracted prisms of pseudonymous authorship (and editorship), Kierkegaard locates himself ‘inside’ the emerging ‘secular’ as well as ‘the religious’. He is, as he avows himself to be, a secret agent; but also perhaps a double agent – or even a double agent who is not really sure which side he is working for. In the end, it is not entirely clear what the sides are, such that, in Kierkegaard's observation, Feuerbach comes to understand ‘Christendom’ better than most who claim to inhabit it.
Kierkegaard, however, ultimately regarded himself in the service of ‘true Christianity’, and certain lines were drawn, if only in his mind. Over two hundred years after his birth, both ‘Christendom’ and ‘the secular’ are in quite different states. Anachronistic reversion to past ideals can be a dangerous and esoteric path – though Pietism itself was not entirely averse to it. What Khawaja has provided is not a nostalgic ode to the fading stars of existentialism. The Religion of Existence is an elegant and deeply considered rehabilitation of important ideals rarely discerned in existentialist tradition. More than this, it is also a rehabilitation of existentialist ideals themselves insofar as it raises them from the mires of thoughtless forgetting. It constitutes a rehabilitation insofar as it revives existentialist thought from the trivializing grasp of tired old clichés, caricatures, and misreadings. In doing so, it breathes fresh air and new life into its subject through the, perhaps similarly forsaken, ideals of asceticism. This rehabilitation is a distinctive and welcome contribution to thinking, and a reminder that thoughts themselves rarely die the deaths we imagine for them.
The claim that Pietist thinking informs existentialist forms of asceticism is profound and ground-breaking. This claim could, however, be developed further by identifying the sources themselves in greater depth. But this sort of extensive source-work would have engendered a quite different and less inventive book. Khawaja is evidently aware that she will not, nor cannot, satisfy everyone. For my biases, for example, I might have liked to read a little more on Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's sources in Augustine, Luther, and German mystical theology. I suspect there is more to be elicited about askesis in Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's treatment of Anfechtung (spiritual struggle). And might, in the end, Nietzsche have a greater role to play in the story? In general, references to secondary sources can be rather light, occasionally leaving the impression that certain roads are less travelled than perhaps they are. But these lacunae serve consciously also to inspire further work reviving a vital tradition of thinking – a discourse on authentic living that has left a void, scarcely filled by what follows. While important and critical fault-lines have been exposed within existentialist thought, the key concerns that motivate existentialist passion remain unresolved, perhaps irresolvable. But if this so-called ‘movement’ is exposed for harbouring certain fatal flaws, this exposure is not in itself justification for abandoning existentialism's vital questions along with its seemingly worn-out solutions. Khawaja's brilliantly subtle book reminds us of this and more. One hopes others will follow that pathway it has opened for thinking.
