PHENOMENOLOGY OF ATHEISM

This article by Paul Evdokimov offers a theological phenomenology of contemporary atheism, considered in its plurality of forms — agnosticism, Marxist materialism, Sartrean existentialism, neo-positivism — and in its philosophical and psychological foundations. The study draws on the Eastern patristic and hesychast tradition to show that atheism, far from constituting a philosophically coherent negation, presupposes a misunderstanding of the very nature of God and of the conditions for knowing him. Evdokimov argues that any purely conceptual negation of God never reaches the living God, but only his human representations. The principal theological contribution lies in the mobilization of the Palamite distinction between divine essence and energies, the mystical tradition of the heart, and pneumatology, in order to propose an Orthodox response to atheism that implicates the responsibility of Christians themselves in the face of contemporary unbelief.