tions; not only the world but any metaphysical ultimates whatever are arbi-
trary. Even Heidegger had not gone this far, noticing only that it is the human
being who is thrown into the world. Sartre notes that the world itself, the
existence or non-existence of God, being itself, are “thrown” down from
nowhere. It is this realization that Sartre dramatizes in his fictional alter ego
staring at the ugly roots of a tree, stripping away words and concepts which
hide the brute existent like the Buddhist stripping bare sunyata beneath “name
and form,” recognizing that there is no ultimate reason for this, or for anything
else. Sartre’s character, like the author himself, has long had a sense of nihilistic
malaise, which he calls nausea; only at length does his phenomenological
diagnosis lead him to identify, with an emotional jolt corresponding to a
Buddhist counter-enlightenment, his nausea with the world itself in its meta-
physical unfoundedness.^22
Once an atheist existentialist movement became formulated, the term was
retrospectively applied to neoconservative theologians. Parallel to the German
lineages which energized and welcomed Heidegger was a movement of French
theologians of the 1920s through the 1940s. In France too the flow was from
the disillusioned religious liberals into the conservative camp. Maritain came
from a liberal Protestant background, but associated with the Catholic social
activists Charles Peguy and Léon Bloy and studied with Bergson and with the
vitalist Driesch at Heidelberg. Maritain converted to Catholicism in 1906 and
joined its most politically reactionary branch, the Action Française, growing
out of the Dreyfus controversy and the final disestablishment of the French
Catholic Church. Gabriel Marcel came from an agnostic family; was active in
secular altruism with the Red Cross during the war; became increasingly
disillusioned with rationalist philosophy; associated with Scheler on his French
visits and with the Berdyaev circle of conservative émigré theologians in the
1920s; and eventually converted to Catholicism in 1929. The works of Mari-
tain and Marcel, which became “existentialist theology,” date from the late
1920s and 1930s, although the terminology did not become explicitly existen-
tialist until the late 1940s, at the height of Sartre’s popularity.^23
The movement grew out of the vitalism represented by Bergson; but
whereas vitalism was a halfway house combining popular science with liber-
alized religion, the next generation of theologians and philosophers took
science as part of the alienating rationalism of the modern world. Instead of
an ally, science became an opponent against which more emotionally exalting
positions could energize themselves. For vitalism, too, reason was not necessary
to give value to life, which surges with its own joyous élan. In the next
generation, the mood was repudiated, and nature became nothing but a march
toward death.^24
Sartre’s philosophy is resolutely atheist, but it retains the concept of God
Writers’ Markets: The French Connection^ •^779