From Hebraism to Modern Thought: The Diverse Sources of Existentialism

Existentialism is often thought of as a 20th-century French invention – Sartre in a Paris café, Camus brooding over the absurd. But the philosophical roots of existentialism stretch back much further, winding through ancient Hebrew scripture, early Christian theology, and the tortured reflections of a 17th-century French mathematician. Scholars widely recognize that while existentialism as a formal movement belongs to the modern era, its intellectual sources are ancient, diverse, and deeply religious. Understanding those sources – particularly Hebraism, Christianity, and Pascal – is essential to understanding why existentialism asks the questions it does.

Two pillars of Western thought: Hebraism and Hellenism 🔗

To trace existentialism’s origins, philosopher William Barrett, in his landmark 1958 work Irrational Man, turned to a distinction first articulated by the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold: the difference between Hebraism and Hellenism. These two traditions, Barrett argued, represent two fundamentally competing impulses in Western civilization – and existentialism, he concluded, belongs firmly on the Hebraic side.

According to Barrett, Hellenism – inherited from ancient Greece – is a philosophy of knowledge, theoretical science, and rational certitude. It looks upward toward universal ideas and abstract truths, producing philosophers, scientists, and logicians. Hebraism, by contrast, is a philosophy of action, moral law, and human finitude. It looks downward toward the concrete and the particular – toward individual people and what they stake their lives on. Its ideal figure is not the detached thinker but the person of committed faith.

The core distinction, then, is between doing and knowing – between the Hebrew concern for practice and right conduct, and the Greek concern for knowledge and right thinking. For ancient Greek philosophy, moral virtues were ultimately subordinate to intellectual virtues; the highest human achievement was theoretical wisdom. For Hebraism, the moral life – lived faithfully before God – was the substance of existence itself.

The moral human being at the center 🔗

This Hebraic vision produced a distinctly different conception of what it means to be human. Within Hebraism, the human being is understood as predominantly a moral creature – finite, imperfect, and aware of that imperfection. The concept of sin, which has no real parallel in Greek philosophy, introduces a persistent unease into the Hebraic conception of the self. Human beings are not idealized rational agents capable of grasping the cosmos; they are struggling, flawed individuals responsible before God.

Barrett found this sensibility most vividly expressed not in formal philosophy but in scripture – specifically, in the Book of Job. Job’s relationship with God is not one of calm theological reasoning. It is raw, personal, and emotionally intense. Job questions, protests, and even revolts – yet maintains trust. Barrett describes this faith as more fundamental than any set of doctrinal beliefs: it is trust before it becomes theology. And it is precisely this kind of embodied, anguished, first-person encounter with existence – not detached philosophical reasoning – that existentialism would later make its central concern.

Kierkegaard, widely regarded as the father of existentialism, reflected this Hebraic influence directly. In one of his early journals, he wrote that what he really needed was clarity about what he must do, not merely what he must know. This priority of moral action over intellectual knowledge is the hallmark of Hebraic thinking – and a thread that runs through existentialism from its earliest roots to its modern expressions.

Christian sources of existentialism 🔗

If Hebraism planted the seeds, Christianity cultivated them. Christian existentialism is often traced back to Søren Kierkegaard, but its deeper roots lie in the early Church – in figures like Paul, Augustine, and Tertullian, who confronted the collision between faith and reason with an urgency that Greek philosophy never felt.

Augustine and the turn inward 🔗

One of the most significant shifts in the history of philosophy happened quietly, in the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo. As Barrett observed, while Plato and Aristotle asked “What is man?” – a general, species-level question – Augustine asked something altogether different in his Confessions: “Who am I?” That shift from the universal to the singular, from the abstract to the deeply personal, is existentialism’s founding gesture. Augustine’s Confessions has been called the earliest example of existential theology, primarily because it is a sustained self-reflection on personal choices and the meaning of one’s individual journey toward faith.

Faith against reason: The existential tension in Christianity 🔗

Christianity from its inception grappled with a tension that would define existentialism: the conflict between faith and reason. Barrett argued that Christianity, despite its Greek and Neo-Platonic influences, belongs fundamentally to the Hebraic rather than the Hellenic side of human nature – because Christianity places the person of faith above the person of reason. It is not rationality that saves; it is trust, commitment, and the personal leap into belief.

This is why figures like Tertullian – who famously embraced paradox over philosophical proof – are seen as early precursors to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard addressed themes such as authenticity, anxiety, love, and the irrationality of faith, rejecting every effort to contain God within a logical system. For Kierkegaard, theology was not about objective claims – it was about the individual grappling with subjective truth. Each person must make independent choices, and it is those choices that constitute existence.

In the 20th century, this Christian existential tradition continued in thinkers like Paul Tillich, who argued that every person has an “ultimate concern” – a deep, foundational focus that shapes their life and provides meaning – and Karl Barth, who pointed to the Book of Job as evidence that the only authentic route to God passes through doubt, anguish, and radical dependence. Martin Buber, Tillich, and Barth – each in their own way – owed a profound debt to the Hebraic tradition of angst and the Christian insistence that existence is always a personal, not merely intellectual, affair.

Pascal: The bridge between faith and modern existential thought 🔗

No figure stands closer to the threshold of modern existentialism than Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). A brilliant mathematician and physicist who helped lay the foundations of probability theory, Pascal turned his formidable intellect not toward systematic philosophy but toward the anguished question of what it means to be a finite human being in a universe that offers no clear answers. In philosophy, he is recognized as an early pioneer of existentialism, even though he lived two centuries before the term was coined.

The Pensées and the human condition 🔗

Pascal’s major philosophical work, the Pensées (“Thoughts”), was published posthumously from unfinished notes intended as a defense of the Christian faith. But its themes – the limits of reason, the fragility of human life, the search for meaning – are precisely those that existentialists would later inhabit. In the Pensées, Pascal defined the human condition using three words: boredom, inconstancy, and anxiety. These are not trivial observations. They are the starting point of a philosophical reckoning with what it means to exist.

Pascal argued that without God, the human spiritual condition is essentially one of misery – characterized by anxiety, alienation, loneliness, and ennui. He believed that if people could honestly look within themselves, they would recognize this desperation clearly. Rather than appealing to abstract proofs of God’s existence, Pascal appealed directly to the subjective human spirit and to each reader’s personal experience, emphasizing the existential human need for meaning and the feelings of incompleteness that arise in its absence. This method – beginning not from universal principles but from the raw texture of individual experience – is the existentialist method avant la lettre.

The tension between reason and the heart 🔗

Pascal was a scientist, but he was deeply suspicious of science’s ability to answer the most urgent human questions. In his work, Pascal divided reality into the order of reason and the order of the heart. Reason allows us to understand the material world, but it falls short when confronted with concepts like infinity, eternity, or the divine. His famous declaration – “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know” – captures a fundamental existentialist conviction: that the deepest truths of human existence are not grasped through logic but through lived experience, passion, and personal commitment.

Pascal recognized the inherent tension between reason and passion as central to the human condition. Existentialists from Kierkegaard to Sartre would later make exactly this conflict – between the demand for rational certainty and the irreducibly subjective character of existence – a cornerstone of their philosophy.

Pascal’s wager as existential choice 🔗

Perhaps no element of Pascal’s thought is more recognizably existentialist than his famous Wager. Pascal’s Wager historically charted new territory in philosophy, anticipating future movements such as existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism. The Wager is not, as it is often misunderstood, a cold mathematical calculation. It is a confrontation with radical uncertainty – an insistence that human beings cannot remain neutral in the face of the most fundamental questions of existence. We are always already choosing, always wagering with our lives.

Pascal’s central philosophical paradox was the dual nature of the human being: simultaneously great (as a creature of reason and self-awareness) and wretched (as a finite, sinful, mortal being). He argued that any serious philosophy of human existence must account for both sides of this paradox. His legacy in existentialist thought lies precisely in his recognition of this finitude – the human being caught between the nothingness from which existence erupts and the infinite which exceeds all comprehension. This insight would echo directly in Heidegger’s analysis of “being-toward-death” and Sartre’s confrontation with the absurd.

From Hebraism to modernity: A continuous thread 🔗

What links Hebraism, Christian thought, and Pascal is not a single doctrine but a shared orientation toward human existence. All three take the concrete, finite, morally burdened individual seriously – more seriously, in fact, than any abstract philosophical system. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, building on these foundations, emphasized the subjective element in thinking and the primacy of the will over purely logical or conceptual objectivity. The 20th-century existentialists – Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus – extended and secularized this tradition, but the questions they were asking had ancient religious roots.

Barrett argued that the features of Hebraic man are precisely those which existential philosophy attempted to retrieve and bring to reflective consciousness – alienation, anxiety, freedom, suffering, finitude, and death. These were not invented by French intellectuals in the 1940s. They were the inheritance of thousands of years of Western religious thought, finding new philosophical form in a modern world that had largely lost the faith that once gave them context.

Existentialism, in this light, is not a break from the Western tradition. It is the tradition’s innermost questions resurfacing – stripped of systematic consolation, but carrying the same urgent insistence that existence is not a problem to be solved by reason alone, but a condition to be lived, chosen, and owned by each person in full.

What do you think? If existentialism’s roots lie not in abstract philosophy but in lived religious experience – in Job’s anguish, Augustine’s confessions, and Pascal’s dread – does that change how you understand what existentialism is really about? And can a philosophy that began in faith remain meaningful for those who no longer hold religious beliefs?

References

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