This philosophy has the dignity of being an honest expression of an impossible existence. And its author [Sartre] merits the respect that must be paid to one who has vicariously taken upon himself for many the fate of nihilistic involvement and been courageous enough to slough off the bourgeois veneer.

Here – as well as in the case of many expressions of modern art, abstract, non-objective, and surrealist art – we must conclude that there is a “loss of the center.” But we may do this only if we say at the same time that its author represents a higher ethical dignity than do the painful conservatives who will not dare to make such an honest confession, but rather, by trying to restore the classical, go on telling lies with the help of an illegitimate, stolen beauty. Even the confession that one is confronted with Nothingness has about it the luster of honesty which will not remain without blessing; for it has to do with that willingness to be stripped of illusions and be defeated that must be suffered wherever one takes life and death really seriously. And perhaps Jesus Christ would include this philosophy of the empty hands and this art of the lost center in that mysteriously honored domain which he described as spiritual poverty and emptiness before God, but which nevertheless was full of promise: Blessed are these – far more blessed in any case than the rich fools and other “possessors,” than the real or seeming “beati possidenti.”

We may venture to express it this way: No man will ever come to the truth and thus to a trustworthy bridge over the abyss of Nothingness who has not faced doubt, despair, and shipwreck. This is the virtue of the great Descartes, to whose spirit everyone who is intellectually alive and responsible should devote a lock of hair. He knew that one comes to the truth only through doubt. And we would be doing him an injustice if we were to assume that he used doubt merely as a dodge, as a heuristic principle, as it were, knowing all the time that in the next moment a brilliant, self-evident proof of God would emerge.

He who really doubts never employs a trick of method; rather he exposes himself to despair and shipwreck. He who wants to die “in order” to become has not really died at all. In such cases theology speaks of temptation (Anfechtung). Not until a man is in the fiery furnace of utter bewilderment and despair does he see what is really genuine. This is what Luther meant when he said that “tentatio facit theologum” (temptation makes the theologian). He who simply cultivates and preserves the sheltered garden of his childhood faith and the ideals of Western Civilization, always fending off the destructive onslaughts of doubt, can never really experience the miracle of grace. For at best he puts his faith in his own faith, perhaps only in the faith of former generations. He never believes, however, in the God who seeks him with his grace.

He who knows what faith is must also have stood beneath the baleful eye of that demonic power against which we fling our faith. Faith is a struggle or it is nothing.

He who, for fear of falling victim to nihilistic self-destruction, hysterically seeks to hold on to what was once holy to him, to the higher goods of humanity that mean something to him, falls victim to hysteria and loses his intellectual inegrity. He who wants to believe must go through death.

But let him beware of a teleology of dying, of dying as a trick. Let him not dare to play with nihilism, as some youngsters perhaps do. The poor in spirit is not a snob.

Anybody who has ever been snatched away from nihilism knows that this does not happen by way of a harmless process of growth and becoming; he knows that he has been laid hold of by a higher hand and drawn across the saving border (Helmut Thielicke, Nihilism, 175-177).