Existentialism: Two quotes

I’ve been reading and thoroughly enjoying “a casebook on Existentialism” by William V. Spanos. Existentialism is a philosophy or attitude that describes the atheist or Christian—born into a world of suffering and absurdity—who must search for meaning and purpose, and in doing so, take personal responsibility for the “free will” that life has blessed them with (or cursed them with, depending on how you look at it). You can read more about existentialism [here]. Anyway, here are two excerpts from the book that I found thought provoking, the first by Spanos, and the second by the poet W. H. Auden:

“As we have seen, the atheistic existentialist takes the death of God literally. Thus man is absolutely free to create his own essence. He becomes—from a Christian point of view at any rate—something like his own deity, and, along with the burden of responsibility and risks, he also assumes the awesome creative potentialities generated by this situation. For the Christian, on the other hand, God is not dead; He is rationally incomprehensible; that is, He is absent. Thus man’s freedom becomes the dreadful awareness of the necessity to choose between a life of despair in the realm of Nothingness and a life of precarious joy in the realm which to the empirical eye appears meaningless, but to the eye of faith constitutes on the microcosmic level a reconciliation between existence and essence…” -Spanos

“...for the course of History is predictable in the degree to which all men love themselves, and spontaneous in the degree to which each man loves God and through Him his neighbour.” -Auden

I have some thoughts on these two passages that I’ll hold back for the meantime… any comments/criticisms?