Paradox and mystery

catholic existentialism

pp. 194-222

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

Abstract

The distinctively Russian visions of Berdyaev and Shestov show that religious existentialism was never a narrowly Protestant (and still less a narrowly German) phenomenon. Roman Catholicism also produced several outstanding thinkers who could be described as existentialist, despite the hostility of the official hierarchy to the spirit of existentialism. This hostility was due partly to the anti-authoritarian and individualistic style of existentialist thought and partly to its supposed denial of reason, since the kind of Thomist theology dominant in the Catholic Church in the first half of the twentieth century laid great emphasis on the continuity between reason and faith and insisted that a rational empiricism modelled on Aristotelian principles could provide an adequate basis for justifying fundamental theological truths.