Professor Tatiana P. Lifintseva gave a lecture at the Oxford Symposium on Religious Studies at the Old Library of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin (December 5-7 2016)
The paper deals with an important problem: the problem of a latent Christian foundation of Western philosophy – the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, in this case. The author tries to show that in spite of his declared atheism Sartre’s metaphysics latently comprises the ontological “melancholy for God” and that the “Absenсе оf God” (which IS GOD, according, for example, to the doctrine of modern "negative theology") is the primary principle for “building” of the whole metaphysical system of Sartre and his concept of human consciousness and subjectivity. As the core of existential philosophy in general (be it religious or “atheistic” / non-theistic) are the problems of personality (“being-to-death”, “the border situations”, "freedom", "guiltiness", "responsibility", "the alternate", etc.) – so, its problematics is extremely close to traditional Christian anthropology.