Forerunners

pp. 8-23

in: George Pattison, Anxious angels, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

Although existentialist themes can arguably be found in religious writers of many ages, it is only in the nineteenth century that these themes begin to be worked together into a coherent discourse to produce a family of diverse but related thinkers who can be identified as religious existentialists in an eminent sense. We shall return to the question as to how this specific form of religious existentialism relates to figures such as Augustine, Luther and Pascal (who are often cited as examples of existentialism avant la lettre), but we begin with the development of religious existentialism in the modern sense, a development that is inseparable from the crisis of German Idealism.