ESISTENZIALISMO

EXISTENTIALISM. — It represents the latest and most vigorous form of reaction against idealism, a movement that took its name from the Danish thinker SØREN KIERKEGAARD (1813–55), but which did not take root in European culture until the first decades of the present century with the German Kierkegaard-Renaissance, under the influence of multiple currents of thought such as the philosophy of life, phenomenology, Nietzschean vitalism, psychoanalysis, idealism itself, neo-Kantianism, and dialectical theology.

Kierkegaard’s opposition to idealism was sustained by an intense religious experience and was directed above all against Hegelian panlogism, which he held chiefly responsible for the moral and spiritual degeneration of the 19th century. Against the dominance of abstract “essence,” within which Hegelian dialectic moves quantitatively, Kierkegaard opposed the “existence” of the concrete individual and the “qualitative dialectic” of freedom; against the Hegelian trick of resolving the opposition of contraries through mediation, he posited the “situation” in which the crises of conscience arise for every person and the “leap” of choice is imposed upon each; against the empty totality of impersonal spirit concretized in the State and universal history, he affirmed the inseparable individuality of “singulars,” who, by virtue of their nature as “spirits”—unlike the animal immersed in its species—find themselves each “before God,” isolated in their secret of guilt, faith, hope, and love: like Socrates, Abraham, Job... To claim, as Hegel does, that “essence”—and thus reason—explains everything, and that “the inward is also the outward,” is to abolish the originality of spiritual life itself and to confuse all things. Hence, to the Hegelian method, which dialectically “overcomes” oppositions while remaining within the objectivity of abstract thought, Kierkegaard opposes an indirect method that appeals to the subjectivity of the being of the individual, which expresses itself only in the categories that move and sustain the tension of individual freedom.

Alongside the fundamental category of the “individual,” Kierkegaard develops many others (sin, anxiety, choice, repetition, the moment...), but their meaning varies profoundly depending on whether the “individual” remains within the plane of pure ethics, as Socrates, or enters the stage of authentic religious existence, that of the New Testament Christian. The purely aesthetic stage, into which fall, along with ancient paganism, romanticism, Enlightenment thought, and Hegelian neopaganism, lies outside the sphere of authentic existence: they represent pure aestheticism, devoid of any genuine relationship to the Absolute.

The aims of contemporary existentialism are to organize Kierkegaardian themes into a more rigorous historical, philosophical, and theological structure. The theological existentialism of “dialectical theology” has deepened, while hardening, the relationship between man and God, which Kierkegaard had posited as the essential moment of existence that refuses to dissipate itself in the boundless sea of finitude. Exacerbating, in a Calvinist sense, what the Danish philosopher had called the “infinite qualitative difference” between God and man—against the Hegelian reduction of the infinite to the finite—K. Barth first denied any possible relationship between the two terms in the order of nature. He then comprehends this possibility within the order of grace, insofar as it is granted in Christ, not in the sense of drawing near to God but rather of projecting oneself to the farthest distance from Him, to the extreme limit of sin from which one is irredeemably clothed (*Der Römerbrief*, 1949, p. 114). In his recent elaboration of his dogmatics, however, Barth has tacitly disavowed this adherence to existentialism, denying theology any opportunity or possibility of “existential” reconsideration, since it would reintroduce humanism within the sphere of faith (*Die kirchliche Dogmatik*, 5th ed., I, 1, Zurich 1947, p. 19). While for Kierkegaard “paradise” constitutes one of the moments of existence—that which precedes faith and which faith itself surpasses with its superior positivity, thus entering a new sphere victorious over doubt—for Barth the paradox is the clash, the absurd and permanent scandal, just as “sin” is not remitted by Redemption but is precisely through it that man bears its accusation and must carry its full weight and condemnation. More positive, however, is the existential impetus developed by other dialectical theologians (Gogarten, Tillich, K. Heim, R. Bultmann, M. Buber...) around the relationship of “I” and “Thou,” of evident Romantic derivation, which appears even in Feuerbach but confined to immanence (*Die wahre Dialektik ist kein Monolog des einsamen Denkers* and, in the same work, *ein Dialog zwischen Ich und Du: L. Feuerbach, Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft*, 1943, p. 83), while these authors seek in various ways to find in God the ultimate true “Thou” of dialogue, in which humanism finds its word of truth and salvation. In Kierkegaard, in keeping with his sound theological realism, this divine “Thou” is offered only through the work of Jesus Christ, as grace and as example, and it is therefore in Him that one must encounter the divine “Thou.”

The achievement of the philosophical existentialism of the German Kierkegaard-Renaissance has been to give a rigorously “human” structure and context to Kierkegaard’s theological categories of existence: to the “dialectic of immanence” within the metaphysical-theological sphere, by which Kierkegaard attained faith as the authentic sphere of absolute truth, is opposed a “dialectic of transcendence” in a merely actualist sense. The being of man is posited in function of a “possibility of being,” which, as “freedom,” is called to actualize itself in the world in which he lives (situation), and existence becomes precisely this freedom that continually transcends itself in the world of things and persons with which he lives—a transcendence, therefore, that does not oppose finitude but interprets it as the sphere of finitude that constitutes the consciousness and freedom of the individual.

Two have been the principal directions of German philosophical existentialism: one, represented by K. JASPERS (1883), draws especially on Kant (for the theory of consciousness), while the other, represented by M. HEIDEGGER (1889), has remained, at least in his principal work (*Sein und Zeit*, Halle on the Saale 1927), closer to the dialectic of Hegelian negativity. Jaspers conceives of man as immersed in the being that surrounds us everywhere (hence he is called: *das Umgreifende*). It is a matter of finding orientation in order to move and actualize oneself. Jaspers therefore distinguishes between the being “that we are,” which is the central and operative core of being, and the being “that we are not,” which forms our limit as our “other” (*als das Andere*), whether it be simple empirical reality (the world) or transcendence as such, which Jaspers understands, in a Kantian manner, as “being in itself” (v. *Vernunft und Existenz*, Groningen-Batavia 1933, p. 39). In his more recent work, Jaspers further develops the relationship between consciousness and the double sphere of reality that limits it, concentrating them in what he calls “philosophical faith,” defined as the supreme moment of being, insofar as it consists in the act of existence in which transcendence becomes “consciousness of its actuality” (*Wirklichkeit*): it is thus what sustains us in the tension of the opposing polarities of consciousness as it turns toward the world and toward transcendence (*Der philosophische Glaube*, Munich 1948, pp. 16, 1963), and the faith of man in his possibility in which he breathes his freedom (ibid., p. 59). Thus, the mediation of Christ, as in Kierkegaard, is replaced by individual autonomy and the absolutization of reason, which subordinates religion to itself (ibid., pp. 85, 1963).

Heidegger eliminates any reference to transcendence in the metaphysical sense, even as a mere “limit-situation” (Grenz-Situation) as the Divinity is conceived in Jaspers’s philosophy. According to Heidegger, philosophy must be “ontology,” and its task is to unveil the truth of Being that things conceal (v. 1948a). The truth of man’s Being is as an existent; it lies entirely in his “transcending,” in referring to something else (in intentionality): consciousness is nothing in itself without reference to an object, and it is this nothing that underlies existence, or rather, existence’s Being must be conceived in light of this nothing. Driven by this nothing, Heideggerian transcendence is first realized as “Being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-sein), conceived as a cluster of “tools” to be used; yet this first level would be meaningless if man’s action were not coordinated with that of others, if it were not “with others” (Mitsein); finally, his action would lack its ultimate meaning if it were not referred or “projected” toward an end that he encounters, which is ultimately death itself (Sein und Tod). Thus Heidegger can affirm that the essence of truth is freedom as an act (Ernöglichung) and no longer, in the Aristotelian-Thomist sense, as the adequation between subject and reality (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, ch. 3; French trans., Louvain 1948, p. 72).

The entire perspective of Heidegger’s philosophy has therefore been understood as antimetafisica and fundamentally an expectation in which the categories of Kierkegaardian existentialism (anxiety, decision, sin, guilt…) have been completely inverted to signify worldly and indifferent contents. In his latest essays, published after World War II, Heidegger seems to offer an interpretation of Being akin to that of the pre-Socratics (especially Parmenides); there are even a few hints at the problem of God, but it is declared to remain outside the scope of Being and of philosophy, which cannot pronounce either for or against, and is said to be thinkable only starting from the “essence of the holy” (Brief über den Humanismus, in Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, Bern 1947, p. 101, 1963). These hints are entirely insufficient, for they do not grasp how a “holiness” can “be posited” for a being, such as man, whose power-to-be is rooted in and refers back to nothing.

A positive rectification of Heideggerian existence was attempted in Italy by Abbagnano (b. 1901) and in France by J.-P. Sartre (b. 1906). Whereas in Heidegger the foundation of existing and of its relation to Being is, so to speak, its “insistence” in nothing or the impossibility that existence not be nothing; and in Jaspers this foundation is instead given by its transcending toward Being without ever reaching it, i.e., by the impossibility that existence be Being. Abbagnano identifies existence with the very relation it has to Being and defines it as “the possibility that it be the relation to Being” (Introduzione all’es., Milan 1942, p. 48). This relation is the activity of man in the world and with his fellow men, so that on the one hand it constitutes the “problematic” of his Being, and on the other it is his very “freedom” in act, in which existence unfolds: attitudes extolled in his later writings are traced back without further ado to faith understood as the fundamental mode of Being in which all human manifestations can take root and from which they can derive their specific meaning (Filosofia, religione, scienza, Turin 1947, p. 73). This “faith,” for Abbagnano, still seems to remain within the bounds of immanence, or, as he puts it, “bringing Kierkegaard back to Kant” (cf. Es. positivo, Turin 1948, pp. 36 ff.) so that value may be grounded in the sphere of the purely human.

The negation of every value, on the other hand, seems to be at the root of Sartre’s literary-philosophical work. His “starting point” can be indicated as the “ontologization of the phenomenon,” which he sees as the result of all modern philosophy that would have reduced the existent to the series of appearances that manifest it (L’être et le néant, Paris 1946, p. 17). Thus Being is identified, without residue, with appearing; and appearance does not point to a supposed hidden Being beyond it, but to the “total series” of appearances themselves: the Being of these appearances in turn becomes immediately present in negative situations such as boredom, nausea… to which Sartre reduces Kierkegaard’s theological anxiety and Heidegger’s cosmic anxiety. This appearance has the function of activating consciousness toward the world that the phenomenon precisely has the function (intentionality) of presenting, and thus Sartre could give the extreme formula of existentialism according to which existence precedes essence, and therefore define consciousness as “a being for which it is in its Being a question of its Being insofar as this Being implies a Being other than itself” (ibid., p. 29; emphasis in the original). It is therefore the “negative” that underlies existence, which fails to coalesce into a higher synthesis, as in Hegel, but rather insists on deepening the opposition between the two terms—using Hegelian terminology, Sartre calls them the In-itself (world) and the For-itself (consciousness)—each of which is constituted in function of the negation that it exercises with respect to the other (cf. ibid., p. 235). The ideal would be to reach a type of synthesis like Hegel’s, to “metamorphose,” as Sartre says, one’s own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself, realizing that “causa sui” which religions call God… an absurd enterprise because the idea of God is contradictory and man is a “useless passion” (ibid., p. 708). Sartre has categorically affirmed that his atheism is the only one truly coherent and that it allows man to rediscover himself in his action, which is his very making of himself (cf. L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Paris 1946, pp. 21 ff., 94 ff.). All of Sartre’s writings were condemned by the Holy Office on November 6, 1948. To Sartre’s moral and theological nihilism are aligned A. Camus, A. Malraux, and S. de Beauvoir.

A positive existentialism, inspired by the originality of spiritual life, is affirmed instead in the playwright and art critic G. Marcel (1883), who converted to Catholicism in 1929 and is currently engaged in vigorous criticism of art. Marcel’s antagonist is Sartre. Starting from a conception of man’s Being as an “having,” i.e., as “being in a body,” as the situ

The fundamental function of existence with the opposition between external and internal, MARCEL has concentrated the existential dialectic around spiritual life as a “communion” of love of the self with others. In this sphere the existential categories such as anguish, decision, project... give way—or rather are transfigured—into an attitude which Marcel designates with the theological terms of faith, hope, charity..., specifying that he limits himself to analyzing the spiritual structures as they are given in existential dialectic, without prejudice to what may come to man from a higher source. Each of the structures now emphasized constitutes the “overcoming” of dispersion and the victory over the dispersive pressure exercised against the life of the spirit by the negative internal and external factors present in the situation. Thus for Marcel hope is “essentially” the availability of a soul that is inwardly committed in an experience of communion to perform the act that transcends the opposition between willing and knowing, by which it affirms the living perpetuity of which this experience offers at once “the pledge and the firstfruits” (Homo viator, Paris 1944, p. 7). In every analysis Marcel makes the existential problematic revolve around two moments: the problem with which it begins, and the mystery toward which its movement leads, in which there is therefore a kind of passage to the limit toward the suprapersonal, which is also a suprarelational belonging therefore to the Absolute (cf. ibid., p. 47). It is thus a question of a dialectical and spiritualistic phenomenology, rich in profound intuitions that may be susceptible of notable developments when both their starting point and the method succeed in imposing themselves with greater consistency, freeing themselves from the antimetafisical prejudice.

To the positive side there seem to adhere in France, among others, also R. Le Senne and L. Lavelle; special mention is deserved by N. Berdyaev (d. 1947) for his metaphysics of creative freedom with a Böhmean-Schlingnian background. In Germany defenders of Christian forms of existentialism have been P. Wust (d. 1942) and Th. Haecker (d. 1946): the former, a disciple of Max Scheler, was an acute phenomenologist of “piety,” while the latter was one of the best translators and expositors of Kierkegaard, vigorously combating the Protestant or atheist Kierkegaard-Renaissance.

It is therefore not easy to give an overall judgment of existentialism. As a starting point, “symptom” of the definitive treatment of man, existentialism has a decisive importance inasmuch as it vindicates the freedom and dignity of the individual and shows the inconsistency of the finite and the impossibility of transforming it into the infinite. As a “method” existentialism has not yet sufficiently clarified itself, and often seems to revert to one or another philosophy that it wishes to criticize, especially if it persists in excluding every metaphysical foundation and admitting the absolute priority of existence over essence. If this were the definitive attitude, it must be recognized that existentialism is hardly reconcilable with traditional Christian thought. On the other hand there is no reason why this same thought, while remaining faithful to essences and their ontological hierarchy, should not leave open the possibility of an authentic existential dialectic within the realm of freedom and the life of the spirit, of which not only Kierkegaard but already Pascal in his best mystical vein and St. Augustine himself have offered excellent illustrations.

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Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947; H. Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in *Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso*, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947; H. Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in *Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso*, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in *Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso*, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947; H. Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in *Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso*, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947; H. Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in *Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso*, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947; H. Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947; H. Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in *Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso*, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947; H. Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in *Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso*, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947; H. Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in *Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso*, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947; H. Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947; H. Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947; H. Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947; H. Mounier, *La suite famille existentielle*, in 1947; *Existentialisme*, in 1946; *L'é*, (authors in Atti dell'Accad. di S. Tommaso, Roma-Torino 1947; E. Mounier, *Introduzione aux existentialismes*, Parigi 1947; J. Wahl, *Petite histoire de l'existentialisme* (con discussiones), in 1947; G. Lucaks, *Existentialisme et marxisme*, in 1947

The difficulty of reducing 600,000 to 6,000 (Ex. V. HUMMELA UER, FRANZ); W. M. Flinders Petrie takes ‘eleph ’eleph’ in the sense of a grouping, family, arriving at a total population of 100,000 or 120,000 people.

On the eastern shore of the Red Sea the Israelites found themselves in the desert of Sur or Etham; they reached Marah, then Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees; from there they departed and arrived in the desert of Sin, where they were sated with quails and received the manna (16–35). Then they came to Daphca Aulus, then to Rephidim; there they fought the Amalekites (v.). Having reached Sinai (v.), in the third month after leaving Egypt they camped before the mountain, on which God gave the Law to Moses and made a covenant with Israel, who became the people of Yahweh (19:5–6).

The conviction of the Mosaic origin handed down in Israel (Josh. 1:7 ff.; 8:30–35; 1 Kgs. 2:3) is accepted in the New Testament (Mark 12:16 = Ex. 3:2–6). The historical authority of Exodus is assumed and affirmed throughout the Old Testament: the slavery and the miraculous departure from Egypt are often recalled (e.g., 13:13; 15:51; 10; Ps. 60:6; 78:13; 106:9; 114:3); Moses (v.) emerges in the history of Israel as liberator, founder of national unity, and legislator; the Hebrew cult was formed around festivals (Passover and Pentecost) and customs (tithes, offering of the firstborn) closely connected with the Exodus. Moreover, the book itself provides many internal proofs of authenticity: the archaic character of many passages (the Decalogue, the Song of Moses [Ex. 15], the Covenant Code).

The full consonance of the events narrated in Exodus with the Egyptian environment confirms the very ancient origin of the book.

The ‘critical’ school of J. Wellhausen (v. PENTATEUCH) applied to the book of Exodus the distinction of sources, attributing, for example, to J (together with B and P) 7–10 and 33:12–34:28; to E the Decalogue (v.) and the Book of the Covenant (20:1–24:8); to P 6:2–7:13; 25–31; 34:20–10:36. It attributes to Moses only the account of the slaughter of the Amalekites (17:8–14), elements of the Book of the Covenant (20:23–23:33) and its codification (24:4–7; 34:27). But the analysis of sources does not reach conclusive results, since it is much more difficult than in Genesis to distinguish between Yahwistic and Elohistic documents.

Rationalists maintain that the miracles attributed to Moses must be considered either as idealized history (providential interventions of God in favor of Israel), or as myths (divine appropriations), or as natural events embellished (the ten plagues, the quails, the manna), or as etiological legends to explain a usage or religious symbol (Yahweh inscribing characters on the two tablets explains the two stones preserved in the ark; the efficacy of the paschal lamb is taught by the tenth plague). But the difficulties raised do not hold. The appearance in Ex. 3:1–6, for example, conditions the entire mission and work of Moses, which without it would be inexplicable. As for the plagues and the manna, while admitting their local color, the miracle is at least quasi-miraculous or beyond nature. The miracle of the crossing of the Red Sea is such a historical fact that it cannot be suppressed without shaking the entire structure of the Old Testament (Ex. 14; 15:4, 22; Num. 33:8; Deut. 11:4; Josh. 2:10; 4:24; 24:7; Ps. 105 [106]:8; Isa. 11:16; Neh. 9:11; Wis. 10:8; 1 Macc. 4:9; Acts 7:36).

The center and basis of Israel’s legislation is the Decalogue (v.), inscribed on stone. The first nucleus grew through the addition of other laws, required by various circumstances and the progressive organization of the nation. Interwoven and interpenetrated with social prescriptions, the legislation contains many liturgical prescriptions, including chs. 25–31 (description) and 36–40 (execution) regarding the worship in the portable sanctuary (the tabernacle) — the Ark (v.) of the Covenant, the table, the lampstand (v.), the tabernacle (v.), the sacred vestments and vessels.

The principal truths taught in Exodus are: the unity and spirituality (prohibition of images) of God; the covenant with God. It regulates morality and establishes external worship.