Arthur Darby Nock was born in Portsmouth, England on February 21, 1902, the son of Cornelius and Alice Mary Ann Page Nock. In his family's quiet and somewhat austere home, he and his elder sister were always urged to excel in their school work and had little opportunity for easy contact with friends. In later years Nock felt that early loss. Meanwhile, however, he flourished in the atmosphere of forced learning, and distinguished himself both at the Portsmouth Grammar School and at Trinity College, Cambridge, to which he had won a Scholarship.

In view of the fatefulness of Ludwig Feuerbach for religion in the modern world, it is curious that recent theologians have written so little about him. For the most widely effective critiques of religion in our time, those by Marx and Freud, are both variations on a theme that received its classic expression not from them but from him. Yet Karl Barth is the one major theological figure of today who has explicitly concerned himself with Feuerbach over the years. Even if Barth had no other bearing on our situation than this, his reflections on Feuerbach would merit the attention I propose to give them by considering three questions: (1) Who is the Feuerbach with whom Barth has been concerned? (2) How has Barth responded to him? (3) Has he answered him?

Although Matthew Arnold, in his disquisitions on faith and belief, never used the word “myth” as literary criticism defines it today, yet his whole approach to the spiritual crisis of modern times derives from an implicit assumption that man cannot live without myths. In “On the Modern Element in Literature,” he voiced man's need of an adequate intelligence of his situation. To comprehend the collective life of humanity, past and present, in all its complex interrelatedness—such is, to Arnold, the essence of moral and intellectual deliverance, the necessity for an age of “multitudinous” facts.

Three eminent scholars, Professors Robert M. Grant, T. A. Burkill, and Cyril C. Richardson, in their reviews of my Religious Philosophy, have raised certain problems touching on topics in Patristic philosophy. The problems are of such importance as to call for further consideration.