Sidney Hook
TWO TYPES OF EXISTENTIALIST
RELIGION AND ETHICS*
It is commonly assumed that religion and morality rein–
force each other's claims and that despite differences in emphasis they
express a common outlook which assigns man an intelligible place in
an ordered world. Historically the connection between religion and
ethics has always been intimate. It is possible, of course, to define
religion in such a way that every strong ethical or unethical position
is religious and the distinction between the religious and ethical cate–
gories disappears. Little is to be gained by such procedure.
It
does
violence to the actual historical materials. Further, the differences
between ethics and religion reappear in the recognized differences
among religions.
In this paper I wish to call attention to two types of existentialist
religious thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which
point up the difference between the attitude of faith- which I re–
gard as strictly religious, and the attitude of morality which I regard
as primarily secular.
By the two types of existentialist religion I mean the types of
religious thinking represented by Soren Kierkegaard and Ludwig
Feuerbach. The first is oriented towards some transcendental element
which conditions the whole of human experience; the second regards
human experience as the matrix of all religion. Although in polar op–
position to each other, both were critical reactions to the idealistic
pan-Iogism of Hegel, for whom religion was nothing but an aesthetic
or symbolic rendition of the truths discovered by philosophy. Kier–
kegaard has become the most influential philosopher of religion of
*
Presented at the Ninth International Congress for the History of Religions
at Tokyo, Japan, August 27, 1958.
