Abstrakt
Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard are often jointly called the 'founders of existentialism', but we are rarely given compelling reasons for why this should be the case. Disparities in their religious and philosophical outlooks, coupled with their contrasting cultural backgrounds and the fact that they are writing in different genres, would indicate that we are dealing with authors who could not be any further apart.
In this paper, I try to bridge this gap by presenting Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard as writers offering an elaborate model of an existential-religious transformation, based in a profound and formative encounter with God. However, I will claim that they differ when it comes to the form of the existential transformation itself; one structuring it around what I will term an introspective God-encounter, the other around an encounter which could be described as extrospective.
That is by apprehending God either within one's inwardness, or conversely, by establishing a relation with God understood as an externality, an all-unity of being existing outside the perceiving subject. I will argue that the existential transformation they envision is a process through which a deficient or inauthentic self transforms into an authentically Christian self.