From The Drama of Atheist Humanism to the Apocalypse of the German Soul: Henri de Lubac, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Mounier, Hans Urs von Balthasar

Studies of Nietzsche and Christianity by Karl Jaspers and Hans Eggert Schröder reveal the span in possible Nietzsche interpretation in the late 1930s. Against this background, in 1944 Henri de Lubac published his studies of Nietzsche, Auguste de Comte, Karl Marx, and Ludwig Feuerbach under the title The Drama of Atheist Humanism. Claiming that people in Western society had been undergoing “a sort of immense drift [….],” de Lubac returned time and again to Nietzsche’s atheist assumptions, questioning the intellectual probity of atheist humanism. An anti-idealist stance marks an initial methodological difference between Nietzsche and Gabriel Marcel, who saw in Nietzsche’s thought a turning point in contemporary philosophy. Whereas de Lubac saw the “death of God” as a theological problem with tragic anthropological consequences, Marcel focused on humankind’s response to this rupture in transcendence. As Emmanuel Mounier (echoing Charles Péguy) put it, the Christian has to “pay the price of the temporal” (faire les frais du temporel). For Mounier, Nietzsche’s work was significant in revealing the nature and the extent of the crisis of modernity. In his doctoral dissertation, Balthasar considered how both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had, albeit in different ways, grasped the fact that Western culture was in a state of crisis and beginning to unravel. His subsequent three-volume study, Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, marked a new stage in his engagement with German Idealism—and with Nietzsche.