Justified True Belief

(●) The most famous atheist of the twentieth century, and the one who insisted that unbelief has a price and then named it out loud. + Most people who give up on God go on living much as before. The furniture of the moral world stays where it was: kindness is still good, cruelty is still bad, a life still means something. Jean-Paul Sartre thought that was cheating. If there is no God, he said, then there is no one who designed us, no blueprint we are supposed to match, and no court of appeal for our judgments about good and evil. We are alone with a freedom nobody asked us to carry. That is why a Christian site has room for him. Sartre is not the comfortable atheist who keeps the ethics and drops the doctrine. He is the one who did the arithmetic in public and published the answer, and Christian writers from Paul Tillich to Francis Schaeffer have kept him on the shelf for exactly that reason. When he wrote that man is a useless passion, he was not being gloomy for effect. He was stating a conclusion he believed followed, and he spent a long working life refusing to soften it. One fact about him is worth holding on to. In October 1964 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he turned it down. He had refused the Légion d’honneur back in 1945, and when he explained himself in 1964 he put the two refusals together: a writer, he said, must not let himself be turned into an institution.

(●) 1905 AD: Born in Paris to a naval officer who was dead before the boy turned two. + Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on 21 June 1905. His father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, was an officer of the French navy who had picked up a fever in Indochina; he died on 17 September 1906, when his son was fifteen months old. Sartre would later say, with the flat cheerfulness he reserved for painful things, that his father’s early death had been the great piece of luck of his life, because it left him without a master. His mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer, took the baby home to her parents. Her father Charles Schweitzer was a teacher of German with a beard like a patriarch and a library to match, and a nephew of his, Albert Schweitzer, would become one of the most admired Christians in Europe. In that house the small, cross-eyed boy was petted, performed for visitors, and left alone with books, and he grew up believing that words were the most real things there were. Fifty years later he wrote the story of those first eleven years in Les Mots (The Words), and the book is merciless about the child it describes: a little impostor putting on a show of being a prodigy for an audience of adoring adults. One other thing happened in those first years, and it stayed with him for the rest of his life. A clouding of the cornea took most of the sight in his right eye, and the eye drifted outward as a blind eye will. That is the wandering, off-centre gaze that every photograph of him shows.

(●) 1917 AD: His mother remarried, the family left Paris, and the adored child became the bullied one. + When Sartre was eleven his mother married again, to an engineer named Joseph Mancy, and the household moved to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast. The boy who had been the centre of a doting circle found himself an outsider in a provincial school, small for his age, Parisian in his accent, and easy to pick on. He was beaten in the schoolyard and, by the accounts he gave long afterwards, learned to lie and to steal small sums from his mother’s purse to buy a place in the gang. Something else went quietly during those years. He never had a conversion away from belief, because there was never much belief to leave. His grandfather was a Protestant and his grandmother a Catholic, and each treated the other’s religion as a mildly amusing local custom, so that the boy concluded early that neither of them took the matter seriously. God, he wrote in The Words, did not lose an argument with him so much as quietly stop being there. He noted the absence with polite surprise and supposed the matter settled. He came back to Paris in 1920 to finish school at the Lycée Henri IV, and there he found Paul Nizan again, a friend from his first years at the school, who became his closest companion and, later, his first serious political argument.

(●) 1929 AD: He came first in France in the philosophy examination, and met Simone de Beauvoir, who came second. + Sartre entered the École Normale Supérieure, the school that trained the teachers of France and a good many of its writers, in 1924. He was known there as a clown and a prodigious talker, the organiser of revues that mocked the staff, and in 1928 he sat the agrégation, the national competitive examination that licensed a man to teach philosophy, and failed it outright. He had written the paper he wanted to write rather than the paper the examiners wanted to read. He sat it again in 1929 and came first. Second place went to a twenty-one-year-old from a devout Catholic family, Simone de Beauvoir, who had lost her own faith as a girl and who would become the most important philosopher of women’s lives in the century. They agreed on a partnership that would have no marriage, no children, and no secrets, each free to love others provided nothing was hidden from the other. It held, in its fashion, for fifty-one years, until his death. Both of them told the world it was a success; the letters and diaries published after they died show how much it cost the people who came third. Then came the ordinary years that biographies hurry past. He taught philosophy to schoolboys at Le Havre from 1931 to 1936, and at Laon after that, and in the evenings he wrote things nobody would print.

(●) 1933 AD: A year in Berlin gave him a method, and a novel about nausea gave him a subject. + The story Beauvoir tells is that a friend came back from Germany talking about a new way of doing philosophy, and that Sartre, hearing over a drink that you could make philosophy out of an apricot cocktail on the table in front of you, went pale with excitement. The new way was phenomenology, the method of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl: instead of arguing about whether the world outside your head is real, describe exactly how things show up in experience, and describe them so carefully that the description itself does the philosophical work. Sartre spent the academic year 1933 to 1934 at the French Institute in Berlin reading Husserl, in a city where the swastika had just gone up over the public buildings. He came home with a technique, and he used it first on ordinary states most philosophers had ignored: imagining, feeling afraid, being disgusted. In 1938 the technique produced a novel. La Nausée (Nausea) is the diary of a lonely historian in a provincial town who is overtaken by the sheer, unjustifiable thereness of things: a tram seat, a pebble, the root of a chestnut tree in a public park. Nothing has to exist, and nothing explains why any of it does. The book made his name, and the experience it describes is the seed of everything he wrote afterwards.

(●) 1940 AD: Captured on his thirty-fifth birthday, he read Heidegger in a prison camp and came home to write his masterwork and his first great plays. + Mobilised in 1939, Sartre served as a meteorologist, sending up weather balloons behind the lines and filling notebook after notebook while he waited. On 21 June 1940, his thirty-fifth birthday, he was taken prisoner at Padoux as the French front collapsed, and he spent nine months in German hands, most of them in Stalag XII-D at Trier. He was, by the accounts of men who were there, happier in the camp than he had been for years. He was one of thousands rather than a lonely intellectual; he lectured to the prisoners, argued with the priests, and at Christmas 1940 wrote and staged a nativity play, Bariona, performed on Christmas Eve for fellow prisoners who understood perfectly well that the occupied country in the play was also France. He also read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time properly for the first time, and the reading reorganised his thinking. Released in April 1941, he went back to teaching in Paris and to writing under German occupation. The result, published in 1943 while the Germans still held the city, was L’Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness), a philosophical treatise of some seven hundred pages on freedom, self-deception and other people. In the same stretch of years he wrote his first two great plays, Les Mouches (The Flies) in 1943 and Huis clos (No Exit) in 1944, whose most famous line, hell is other people, escaped into every language in Europe.

(●) 1945 AD: One lecture made existentialism a household word, and he spent the fame that followed on politics, and on refusing the prizes he was offered. + In October 1945 Sartre gave a public lecture in Paris with the title L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism Is a Humanism). The word in that title had been floating about for a few years, and this was the evening it arrived. Existentialism, as he used it, is the view that a human being turns up in the world with no fixed nature handed to him in advance and has to make himself by what he does, so that philosophy has to start not from a system about the world but from a particular man working out what to do before Friday. It was never a school with a membership list. It was a set of questions, a mood, and a handful of writers who mostly disliked being grouped together, and after that October the label was stuck to all of them anyway. By the reports that came out afterwards the hall was so overcrowded that chairs were broken and fifteen people fainted in the heat, and the newspapers carried the evening as a happening rather than a lecture. Published the following year, it is the shortest and clearest thing he ever wrote, and he later half regretted it, because the simplifications that made it famous were the ones he spent the rest of his life correcting. In the same month he founded the review Les Temps modernes with Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others, and for thirty years it was the noisiest address in French intellectual life. Then came the politics, and they are the hardest part of his record to read charitably. Sartre spent the early 1950s as a public defender of the Soviet Union, telling the readers of Libération in a series of articles after his 1954 visit that freedom of criticism there was complete, and he was slow and grudging about the evidence of the labour camps. Long afterwards he said plainly that he had lied. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 broke that allegiance, and he condemned it in print. Yet he moved on to newer revolutions rather than to second thoughts: in 1961 he wrote a preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) that welcomed revolutionary violence in terms that appalled many of his own readers, and in his last decade he lent his name to Maoist groups whose politics he only partly understood. He was also, all this while, courageous in ways that cost him something. He signed the Manifesto of the 121 in September 1960, which called the fighting in Algeria criminal and absurd and stood by the Frenchmen who refused to take part in it, and his flat was bombed twice by supporters of French Algeria. Prosecuting the signatories was discussed. A remark repeated ever since has de Gaulle waving the idea away with the words that one does not imprison Voltaire, which is a very good story, and nobody has ever pinned the sentence to a document. When the students rose in May 1968 he went and spoke to them, and in the 1970s he stood on street corners selling a banned Maoist paper, daring the police to arrest a national monument. The refusals belong with the courage. He had turned down the Légion d’honneur in 1945, and in October 1964, when the Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature, he turned that down too, explaining that the honours a writer accepts put a pressure on his readers that he did not think desirable, since Jean-Paul Sartre signing as a Nobel winner is not the same signature as Jean-Paul Sartre. The Academy recorded the award anyway. He remains the only person to have declined the literature prize of his own accord.

(●) 1980 AD: Blind and failing, he gave a last set of interviews nobody could agree about, and fifty thousand people walked behind his coffin. + The last years were a slow closing down. Years of amphetamines, whisky and unfiltered cigarettes caught up with him, and in 1973 a stroke and failing circulation left him almost completely blind. For a writer this was the one loss he could not absorb. He could no longer read what he had written or see what he was writing, and the vast study of Flaubert he had been working on for a decade, L’Idiot de la famille, stopped where it was, three volumes in and unfinished. So he talked instead. His young secretary Benny Lévy, a former Maoist who had turned to the study of Jewish scripture, sat with him for months of recorded conversation, and extracts appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur in March 1980 under the title L’Espoir maintenant (Hope Now). The Sartre of those pages talks about hope, about brotherhood, and about a messianic Judaism, by which he means the old Jewish expectation that history is going somewhere and that a redeemed humanity is still to come. He sounds, in short, unlike the man who wrote Being and Nothingness. Beauvoir was furious and said publicly that a sick old man had been manipulated. Sartre, asked, confirmed that the texts were his. What to make of them is argued about still, and the honest answer is that we do not know. He died in Paris on 15 April 1980 of a pulmonary oedema. Four days later, with no state ceremony and no religious rite, roughly fifty thousand people followed his coffin through the streets to Montparnasse Cemetery, most of them strangers who had simply come. Beauvoir was buried beside him six years later, and their shared grave is still one of the most visited in Paris.

What He Taught

(T1) There is no such thing as human nature, because there is no God who could have designed one. + Sartre liked to start with a paper knife, the thin blade people once used to slit open the uncut pages of a new book. Before any paper knife existed, somebody had a use in mind and a design to match it, and the finished object was made to fit that idea. So for a paper knife, essence comes first and existence second: what it is for was settled before it was. Now, he said, apply that to a human being. For centuries Europeans assumed that God is to us what the craftsman is to the paper knife, so that there is a human nature, a design, a purpose written in before we arrive. Take God away and the design goes with him. We turn up first and find out what we are afterwards, and there is nothing underneath our choices that we are failing or succeeding to live up to. That is what he meant by his famous slogan, existence precedes essence. A coward, on this view, is not a man with a cowardly nature; he is a man who has made himself a coward by cowardly acts, and who could start making himself something else this afternoon. A Christian can go a surprising distance with him before the turn comes. The New Testament is full of men who become something by what they do, and Sartre is a useful corrective to any comfortable notion that character is fixed at birth. But Scripture grounds the possibility of change in the opposite fact from Sartre’s: we can be remade because we were made, in the image of a God who knew us before we were formed (Genesis 1:27; Psalm 139:16). Sartre wants the freedom without the maker, and the question that follows him all his life is whether the freedom survives the loss.

(Q) "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself." + Source: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (Philip Mairet translation, 1948). The sentence comes early in the 1945 lecture, in the passage where Sartre first explains what he means by saying that existence precedes essence (T1). He calls it the first principle of existentialism.

(T2) Freedom is not a gift but a sentence, and it leaves a person no excuses anywhere. + During the lecture Sartre told a story about a student who had come to him for advice during the war. The young man’s brother had been killed by the Germans, and he wanted to slip away to England and join the Free French. His mother lived for him alone, and leaving would destroy her. Christian teaching, he found, could be read either way: love your neighbour, and the nearest neighbour is the one in the kitchen; or love a whole people, and go. Sartre’s reply to him was that no rule and no counsellor could carry the decision for him, and that in coming for advice he had already half chosen, because you know roughly what advice a man will give before you choose which man to ask. The only thing Sartre could tell him was: you are free, therefore choose. Behind the story stands what he called abandonment: not that God has walked out on us, but that there is no God and therefore no values written into the universe waiting to be read off. And behind that stands the phrase everyone remembers. We are condemned to be free. Condemned, because we did not ask for this and cannot resign from it; free, because from the moment we are here, every act is ours and is chargeable to us. There is no hereditary weakness to blame, no upbringing, no temperament, no orders from above. Even a man facing a firing squad chooses how he faces it. You might want to stop him there and say that this is nonsense, that a man tied to a post has no freedom worth the name. Sartre would answer that you have changed the subject. He is not claiming that we can have whatever we want, or get out of whatever has us; he is claiming that whatever is handed to us, the meaning we give it and the way we take it are ours, and that nobody else can be made to sign for them. It is a bracing doctrine and a pitiless one, and it is worth saying plainly what it does not contain. In Sartre’s world you carry the whole weight of what you have made of yourself, and nobody can lift any of it off you, because there is nobody there. The gospel agrees with him about the weight and disagrees about the nobody: "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).

(Q) "That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does." + Source: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, in the discussion of abandonment (Philip Mairet translation, 1948). The sentence immediately before it is the one that makes the point sting: we are left alone, without excuse (T2).

(T3) Pretending not to be free is the commonest form of human dishonesty. + Watch a waiter in a busy café, Sartre says, and you will see a performance. His step is a little too quick, he bends a little too eagerly, he balances the tray with the flourish of a tightrope walker, and the whole display is a man playing at being a waiter the way a child plays at being a soldier. Nobody is fooled and nobody minds. The trouble starts when the waiter begins to believe it: when he tells himself that he is a waiter in the way this inkwell is an inkwell, a fixed thing with fixed duties and no say in the matter. That is what Sartre called mauvaise foi, bad faith: lying to yourself about your own freedom. It is a strange sort of lie, because the liar and the person lied to are the same, which means some part of you has to know the truth in order to hide it. His examples are ordinary and uncomfortably recognisable. The woman on a first date who leaves her hand in her companion’s and tells herself she has not noticed. The man who says he cannot help his temper, as though a temper were weather. The official who says he was only following orders. In each case a person turns himself into an object to escape the burden of being a subject, and the escape is a fraud, because the very act of choosing it is free. Sartre has here put his finger on something the Bible has a harder word for. Scripture also says that human beings are self-deceivers by trade, that we suppress what we know and dress the suppression up as ignorance (Romans 1:18-20), and Christians have no reason to flinch at his diagnosis. What his system cannot supply is the next move. Bad faith, once detected, can only be swapped for a more lucid version of the same predicament. There is no confession in it, and no absolution.

(Q) "There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition." + Source: Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, part one, chapter two, section II, "Patterns of Bad Faith" (Hazel E. Barnes translation, 1956). It closes the description of the waiter, the grocer and the soldier at attention, each of them pressed by everyone around him to be nothing but his function (T3).

(T4) Another person turns me into an object simply by looking at me. + Here is the scene Sartre uses, and it is the most vivid thing in his long book. Out of jealousy or plain curiosity, a man is crouched in a corridor with his eye to a keyhole. While he is alone there is no self in the picture at all: there is only the scene beyond the door and his absorption in it. He is not thinking about himself; he simply is the looking. Then a floorboard creaks behind him. Somebody is there, and has seen him. In that instant he acquires a self he did not have a moment before, and it arrives from outside, already judged: he is a man caught spying at a keyhole. Sartre calls this the Look, and he takes shame to be the proof of it. You cannot be ashamed all by yourself, because shame is the recognition that you are as somebody else sees you. So other people are not an optional extra in my life; they are the ones who hand me back a version of myself that I cannot compose and cannot refuse. From this comes the most quoted sentence he ever wrote, spoken near the end of his play Huis clos (No Exit), in which three dead strangers are locked in a drawing room with no mirrors, no sleep and no exit, and slowly realise that no torturer is coming because they will do for one another: hell is other people. He did not mean that other people are unpleasant. He meant that each of us lives permanently under a gaze that fixes us, and that his ontology, his account of what there ultimately is and how it fits together, leaves that gaze no way of ever becoming love. Christian teaching begins at the same painful place, with a man and a woman who have just eaten and who suddenly cannot bear to be seen (Genesis 3:7-10), and then goes somewhere Sartre’s account has no room for: the gaze that knows the worst and does not turn away.

(Q) "But the Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other." + Source: Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, part three, chapter one, section I, "The Problem" (Hazel E. Barnes translation, 1956). He has just described making a vulgar gesture while alone, and then raising his head to find that somebody has been watching (T4).

(T5) Every human being is trying to become God, and the attempt cannot succeed. + This is where Sartre ends, and for Christian readers it is the most interesting thing he ever said. Start with a stone on a wall. It is simply what it is, all the way through, with nothing left over and nothing to settle. A person is never like that. Ask a man of forty what he is and watch him try to answer: a father, a foreman, someone who used to play the cornet. Whatever he lands on, he is at that moment weighing it, holding it at arm’s length, deciding what to make of it, which is to say that he is always a little short of himself. Sartre gave the two conditions names. The settled, solid way of being, the stone’s way, he called the in-itself; the restless, self-questioning way, the man’s way, he called the for-itself. And his claim is that every human project is an attempt to have both at once, to be as solid as the stone and as free as a mind in the same act. To be your own foundation, in other words, needing nothing outside you to explain why you are here. Older philosophy had a name for a being like that: ens causa sui, the being that is the cause of itself, which the theologians call God. So the deepest human desire, on Sartre’s reading, is the desire to be God. You may want to stop him there and ask whether the century’s most famous atheist has quite noticed what he has just said. He had noticed, and he is not saying it against religion or for it; he is saying it as a piece of plain description, and he thinks it fits the man chasing a fortune, the woman chasing a reputation, and the philosopher chasing a system equally well. What he adds is that the goal is a contradiction, since nothing could be at once wholly fixed and wholly free, and therefore the whole enterprise is doomed. Man is a useless passion. Set beside that sentence, the Christian claim is not that Sartre has misread the desire. Augustine said much the same about the restlessness, and Genesis 3 puts the wish to be like God at the very beginning of the trouble. The claim is that the desire has an answer Sartre never considered: not that man climbs up into God, which is indeed a contradiction, but that God came down into man, which is the Incarnation. Sartre saw clearly that the passion of man runs the reverse way from the passion of Christ. He drew the conclusion that it was therefore wasted.

(Q) "Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion." + Source: Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, part four, chapter two, section III, "Quality as a Revelation of Being" (Hazel E. Barnes translation, 1956). These are the closing lines of the last chapter, immediately before the book’s conclusion. Earlier in the same chapter he states the thesis flatly: to be man means to reach toward being God (T5).

(Q) "Atheism is a cruel, long-term business: I believe I have gone through it to the end." + Source: Jean-Paul Sartre, Words (Les Mots), the closing pages of part two, "Writing" (Irene Clephane translation, 1964). Near the close of his autobiography, looking back at the child who had let God slip away without noticing. Bernard Frechtman’s American translation, titled The Words, renders the same sentence as a cruel and long-range affair that he thinks he has carried through. It is the nearest thing in his writing to an account of what unbelief had cost him, and Christian readers have been quoting it ever since.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Catholic France answered him within two years, and Rome put everything he had written on the Index. + The reply came fastest from the man with most to lose by it. Gabriel Marcel, a Catholic convert and a philosopher who had been describing his own work as existentialist before Sartre made the word famous, quietly stopped using the label and wrote a long study of Sartre instead, the essay "Existence and Human Freedom" in The Philosophy of Existence (1948). His objection went to the heart of the thing. A freedom that is nothing but the power to choose, with no good that it is for and nobody who gave it, cannot tell the resistance fighter from the collaborator, since both were exercising it. Marcel’s own word for what Sartre had left out was availability: the readiness to be at the disposal of another person, which he thought was the actual shape of a free life and which Sartre’s system could only describe as a defeat. Jacques Maritain took a different line in Court traité de l’existence et de l’existant (1947, in English Existence and the Existent). He was one of the leading Thomists of the century, which is to say a philosopher working in the line of Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century friar whose account of God and the world became the standard one in Catholic thought. Thomas Aquinas, he argued, was the real philosopher of existence, because for Aquinas the act of existing is the deepest thing about any creature and is received from God at every instant. Think of a singer holding a note. The note is not something that was made once and then left standing on its own; it is being held in being for exactly as long as the breath lasts. That, on the older account, is the position of every created thing. Sartre had kept the emphasis on existence and thrown away the giver, and what remained was existence with the floor taken out from under it. Rome was blunter. In 1948 the Holy Office placed Sartre’s complete works on the Index of Forbidden Books, the list of titles Catholics were not to read without permission. The ban stood until the Index itself was abolished in 1966.

(†) Protestants kept him close, because he was the atheist who refused to be comforted. + Paul Tillich, preaching and lecturing to American audiences in the 1950s, told them that Sartre’s proposition that the essence of man is his existence was the most despairing and the most courageous sentence in all existentialist literature (The Courage to Be, 1952). He meant it as a compliment and as a warning in one breath: courageous because the man had looked at the consequences without blinking, despairing because he had nothing to put in the place of what he had removed. Francis Schaeffer, working with students at L’Abri in Switzerland two decades later, made Sartre a fixed point in his account of modern thought. In The God Who Is There (1968) he read the existentialist as a man who, having given up any rational basis for meaning, could only tell people to authenticate themselves by an act of the will, with no way of saying which act. Schaeffer’s favourite illustration was Sartre’s own signature on the Manifesto of the 121 in 1960, which called the fighting in Algeria criminal. Calling a war criminal is a moral judgment about the world, and in making it Sartre stepped, for a moment, back onto ground his philosophy had denied him. The habit stuck. Christian apologists have gone on using Sartre as their witness for the prosecution ever since, precisely because he cannot be accused of stacking the deck: William Lane Craig’s treatment of the absurdity of life without God quotes him for the consequences a friendlier atheist would have softened, and then charges him with inconsistency for telling people to invent a meaning once those consequences have been admitted.

(†) His last interviews left a question his oldest friends could not close. + In March 1980, a month before he died, the conversations between Sartre and Benny Lévy appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur. They are not the record of a conversion, and nobody should sell them as one. Sartre does not say he believes in God, and the religion he speaks of with warmth is a messianic Judaism that he approaches as a possibility for humanity rather than a creed for himself. What unsettled his friends is that the voice in those pages will not fit the rest of the work. He speaks of hope as something a person is owed rather than something a person invents, and of a fraternity between people that his own account of the Look had ruled out. Beauvoir protested in print that a sick and nearly blind old man had been pushed into saying things he did not think. Sartre was asked in his last weeks whether the texts were his, and he said that they were. The honest verdict is the uncomfortable one: we do not know what was happening in him, and the sources conflict. It is worth resisting the temptation on both sides. Christians who claim a deathbed turn are claiming more than the evidence bears, and secular readers who insist that a blind old man simply parroted his secretary are claiming more than they can show either. A life that argued for forty years that a person is never finished until he is dead ended by giving its own interpreters nothing to be certain about.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a nature he denied, a freedom with no giver, and a God he called a contradiction. + Sartre is worth reading because he is clear, and clarity makes disagreement easy to state. The two accounts come apart at four points, and each is worth having at full strength. - The design. For Sartre there is no human nature, since there is nobody who could have authored one, and so no act can be called against nature and no life can be called a waste of what it was for. Scripture starts from the opposite fact: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27). The image is not a limit on freedom but the reason a human choice matters at all. - The freedom. He was right that we are answerable and cannot get out of it, and right that people spend their lives dodging the fact. What he could not say is where such answerability comes from, or to whom it is owed. Christian teaching does not make freedom smaller, it makes it addressed: "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery" (Galatians 5:1). A freedom given by someone can also be healed by someone; a freedom that is simply a brute condition can only be endured. - Other people. If being seen is essentially a defeat, then love can only ever be a struggle for possession, which is exactly the conclusion Sartre draws in his chapter on concrete relations with others. The gospel puts the opposite case in its plainest form: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). Being known by God is not the ultimate objectification but the ground of being loved at all. - The useless passion. His argument is that the desire to be self-founding is universal and impossible, so the desire is wasted. The Christian answer accepts the first half and denies the inference. The attempt to climb into God’s place is indeed both universal and hopeless, and it is the oldest sin there is. What Sartre never weighed is the other direction of travel, in which what we could not seize is given: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). He remains one of the best tutors an unbeliever ever had, and Christians have kept him for a plain reason. He drew the map of a world without God more carefully than most believers have ever drawn it, and then he lived on it, and he told us what it was like.