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Better Living through Dread: Medieval Ascetics, Modern Philosophers, and the Long History of Existential Anxiety

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Paul Megna
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Abstract

Intellectual historians often credit S⊘ren Kierkegaard as existential anxiety's prime mover. Arguing against this popular sentiment, this essay reads Kierkegaard not as the ex nihilo inventor of existential anxiety but as a modern practitioner of a deep-historical, dread-based asceticism. Examining a wide range of Middle English devotional literature alongside some canonical works of modern existentialism, it argues that Kierkegaard and the existentialists who followed him participated in a Judeo-Christian tradition of dread-based asceticism, the popularity of which had dwindled since the Middle Ages but never vanished. Following medieval ascetics, modern philosophers like Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre cultivated and analyzed anxiety in an effort to embody authenticity. By considering premodern ascetics early existentialists and modern existentialists latter-day ascetics, the essay sees the long history of existential anxiety as an ascetic tradition built around the ethical goal of living better through dread.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 5: Special Topic: Emotions , October 2015 , pp. 1285 - 1301
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

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