[I have been unable to find in Epictetus’s text the passage to which Camus here refers. In lieu of a standard English translation of the primary text, I have therefore provided an English translation of Camus’ French text. All such subsequent translations will be indicated by asterisk.—Trans.]
[Cf. Aristotle Problems 17.3: “If, then, there is a circle, and a circle has neither beginning nor end, men would not be ‘before’ [the contemporaries of the war of Troy] because they are nearer the beginning, nor should we be ‘before’ them, nor they ‘before’ us.” Aristotle: Problems, vol. 1, ed. T. E. Page, trans. W. S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 367. In The Rebel, Camus cites the same passage from Aristotle in order to distinguish between Christian and Greek accounts of history: “The Greek idea of becoming has nothing in common with our idea of historical evolution.
The difference between the two is the difference between a circle and a straight line. The Greeks imagined the history of the world as cyclical. Aristotle, to give a definite example, did not believe that the time in which he was living was subsequent to the Trojan War.” Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 189–90. I have rendered devenir as “becoming” rather than “evolution,” as in Bower’s translation. The translation is more literal and closer, I believe, to Camus’ meaning.—Trans.]
b) The Common Aspirations. Few periods were as distressed as that one. In an extraordinary incoherence of races and peoples, the ancient Greco-Roman themes were mixed with this new wisdom that came from the Orient. Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and Persia were sending thoughts and thinkers to the Western world.5The lawyers of the time were Ulpian of Tyre and Papinian of Herese. Ptolemy and Plotinus were Egyptians; Porphyry and Iamblicus, Syrians; Diasconides and Galen, Asians. Lucian himself, that consecrated “attic” spirit, is from Commagene at the frontier of the Euphrates. And it is in this manner that in the same epoch the heavens could be populated by the gnostic Æons, the Jewish Yahweh, the Christian Father, the Plotinian One, and the old Roman gods themselves, still worshiped in the Italian countryside.
And certainly one can find political and social causes for this state of affairs: cosmopolitanism6 or real economic crises of the epoch. But it is also that a certain number of passionate demands begin to be born that will attempt to satisfy themselves at all cost. And the Orient is not alone responsible for this awakening. If it is true, then, that Greece euhemerised7 the gods, if it is true that the problem of the destiny of the soul had disappeared beneath Epicurean and Stoic ideas, it nonetheless remains true that the Greco-Roman world was returning to a real tradition. But something new is nevertheless making itself felt.
In this world, in which the desire for God is getting stronger, the problem of the Good loses ground. For the pride of life that animated the ancient world, this new world substituted the humility of spirits in pursuit of inspiration. The æsthetic plane of contemplation is concealed by the tragic plane where hopes are limited to the imitation8 of a God.
- Cf. Cumont, Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain.
- Alexander, in his campaigns in the Orient, had created more than forty Greek cities.
- Euhemerised: a neologism derived from Euhemer, a Greek mythographer for whomthe gods were human beings, deified through the belief of their fellow men. (R. Q.)
[A note by Roger Quilliot, editor of the Pléiade edition of Camus’ collected works.—Trans.] - Cf. “L’homme nouveau” dans les rites de purification à Éleusis: “La déesse Brimo a enfanté Brimos” Philosoph.: V.8. Cf. Plutarque, de Iside, 27, according to Loisy, Les mystères païens et le mystère chrétien, ch. IV, p. 139 [sic]: “Après avoir comprimé et étouffé la rage de Typhon [Iside] ne voulut pas que les combats qu’elle avait soutenus … tombassent dans l’oubli et le silence. Elle institua donc initiations très simples où seraient représentées par des images, des allégories et par des scènes figurées les souffrances de sa lutte.”
[Cf. The New Man in the rites of purification at Eleusis: “The goddess Brimo gave birth to Brimos.” Philosoph.5.8.* Cf. Plutarch De Iside et Osiride27: “The sister and wife of Osiris, however, as his helper quenched and stopped Typho’s mad frenzy, nor did she allow the contests and struggles which she had undertaken . . . to be engulfed in oblivion and silence, but into the most sacred rites she infused images, suggestions and representations of her experiences at that time, and so she consecrated at once a pattern of piety and an encouragement to men and women overtaken by similar misfortunes.” Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, ed. and trans. J. Gwyn Griffiths (Wales: University of Wales Press, 1970), 159. In Loisy, the first sentence of this passage actually reads: “après avoir comprimé et étouffé la folie et la rage de Typhon.”—Trans.]
They act out the sorrowful drama of Isis in search of Osiris;9they die with Dionysius,10and they are reborn with him. Attis is subjected to the worst mutilations.11 In Eleusis,12 Zeus is united with Demeter in the person of the great priest and hierophant.
And in the same period, there infiltrates Lucretius’s idea that the world is not oriented toward the “all things are the same forever,”13 but that it serves as the scene for the tragedy of man without God. The problems themselves are incarnated, and the philosophy of history is born. One will be less reluctant consequently to accept this change of the world that constitutes Redemption. It is not a matter of knowing or of understanding, but of loving. And Christianity can do nothing but embody this idea, so little Greek in nature, that the problem for man is not to perfect his nature, but to escape it. The desire for God, humility, imitation, and aspirations toward a rebirth, all these themes are intertwined in the Oriental mysteries and religions of Mediterranean paganism. Above all, since the second century before Christ (the cult of Cybele was introduced in Rome in 205 BCE), the principle religions have not ceased, in their influence and in their expansion, to prepare the way for Christianity. In the period that concerns us, new problems are posed in all their acuteness.
c) The Position of the Problem and the Plan of This Work. To consider Christianity as a new form of thought that suddenly overtook Greek civilization would therefore be to evade the difficulties. Greece is continued in Christianity. And Christianity is prefigured in Hellenic thought.
- Cf. Loisy, [Les mystères païens et le mystère chrétien,] ch. I.
- Cf. Cumont, [Les Religions orientales,] appendix: “Les Mystères de Bacchus.” 11. Ibid., ch. III.
- Loisy, [Les mystères païens et le mystère chrétien,] ch. II.
- [“Sunt eadem (sic) omnia semper.” Camus offers no reference for this passage. The text is from Lucretius De Rerum Natura 1.945. It should read “eadem sunt omnia semper.” Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. William Ellery Leonard (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916).—Trans.]
It is far too easy to see in dogmatic Christianity a Greek addition that nothing in the evangelical doctrines could legitimate. But on the other hand, one cannot deny the Christian contribution to the thought of the period, and it seems difficult to exclude all notion of a Christian philosophy.14 One thing is common, and it is an anxiety that gave birth to problems: it is an identical evolution that leads from the practical concerns of Epictetus to the speculations of Plotinus and from the inward Christianity of Paul to the dogmatism of the Greek Fathers. But can we distinguish, nevertheless, even in this confusion, what constitutes Christianity’s originality? There is the whole problem.
From a historical point of view, Christian doctrine is a religious movement, born in Palestine, and inscribed in Jewish thought. In a period that is difficult to determine, but certainly contemporary with the moment when Paul authorized in principle the admission of gentiles and exempted them from circumcision,15 Christianity was separated from Judaism. At the end of the first century, John proclaimed the identity of the Lord and the Spirit. The Epistle of Barnabas, written between 117 and 130 CE, is already resolutely anti-Jewish. This is the fundamental point. Christian thought is then separated from its origins and is dispersed throughout the entire Greco-Roman world. The GrecoRoman world, prepared by its anxieties and by mystery religions, ended by accepting Christianity.
We are not interested, consequently, in separating absolutely the two doctrines, but rather in discovering how they have united their efforts and in seeing what, in each of them, has remained intact in this collaboration. But what Ariadne’s thread must we follow to find our way through this confusion of ideas and systems? Let us say at once that what constitutes the irreducible originality of Christianity is the theme of Incarnation. The problems are made flesh and immediately assume the tragic and necessary character that is so often absent from certain games of the Greek spirit. Even after the Jews had rejected and the Mediterraneans accepted Christianity, its profoundly innovative character survived. And Christian thought, which inevitably borrows formulas ready-made from the philosophy of the time, transfigures these
- Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, March 1931. Revue de
