formulas nevertheless. The role of Greece was to universalize Christianity by orienting it toward metaphysics. The mysteries and an entire tradition that finds its source in Æschylus and the Doric Apollos had prepared it for this role. In this manner, a movement is explained in which the Christian miracle had known to assimilate into itself the Greek miracle and to discard the bases of a civilization sufficiently durable that we are still permeated by it today.
Our task and our plan are thus outlined: to observe in Neoplatonism the effort of Greek philosophy to give the problem of the period a specifically Hellenic solution, to trace the Christian attempt to adapt its dogma to its primitive religious life, just at the moment when, encountering in Neoplatonism metaphysical structures already formed out of a religious thought, Christianity blossoms in the second revelation that was Augustinian thought. But there are three stages or moments in the evolution of Christianity: Evangelical Christianity, in which it finds its source; dogmatic Augustinianism, in which it achieved the reconciliation of the Word and the flesh; and the intervals in which it allowed itself to be led to attempt to identify knowledge and salvation, that is to say, the heresies of which Gnosticism offers a complete example. Gospel, Gnosis, Neoplatonism, and Augustinianism: we will study these four stages of one common Greco-Christian evolution, in historical order and in the relation they maintain with the movement of thought in which they are joined. Evangelical Christianity spurned all speculation but asserted, since the beginning, the themes of Incarnation; Gnosis sought a special solution in which Redemption and knowledge are joined; and Neoplatonism endeavored to achieve its purposes by attempting to reconcile rationalism and mysticism and, with the assistance of its formulas, permitted dogmatic Christianity to form itself, through Saint Augustine, into a metaphysics of Incarnation. At the same time, Neoplatonism served here as a control-doctrine. The movement that animates it is the same one that drives Christian thought, but the notion of Incarnation remained foreign to it.
Already by the sixth century, this movement is consummated: “Neoplatonism dies with all Greek philosophy and culture: the sixth and seventh centuries are periods of great silence.”16
- Émile Bréhier, Histoire de la philosophie I, II, ch. VII, p. 484.
Chapter One Evangelical Christianity
It is difficult to speak as a whole of an “Evangelical Chris –
tianity.” Nevertheless, it is possible to discern in it a certain state of mind in which the later evolution has its source. The favored theme, that one which is at the center of Christian thought at the time and around which everything converges, the natural solution to the aspirations of the period, is the Incarnation. The Incarnation, that is to say, the meeting of the divine and the flesh in the person of Jesus Christ; the extraordinary adventure of a God taking responsibility for the sin and the misery of man, the humility and the humiliations, are presented as so many symbols of Redemption. But this notion crowns a group of aspirations that it is incumbent upon us to define.
There are two states of mind in the Evangelical Christian: pessimism and hope. Evolving toward a certain tragic plane, humanity at that time relied only on God and, entrusting into his hands all hope of a better destiny, longed only for him, saw only him in the Universe, abandoned all interests apart from faith, and incarnated in God the very symbol of this restlessness so divided from spiritual aspirations. One must choose between the world and God. These are the two aspects of Christianity that we will have to examine successively in the first part of this chapter. The study of the milieu and the literature of the period will then display for us these different themes among the men of Evangelical Christianity.
The most reliable method is to go back to the New Testament texts themselves. But a supplementary method consists in appealing, whenever it is possible, to a pagan polemicist.1 Their reproaches, in effect, give us a sufficiently exact idea of what, in Christianity, would offend a Greek, and thus leave us well informed about the novelty of the former’s contribution.
I. The Themes of Evangelical Christianity
A. The Tragic Plane
Ignorance and disdain of all systematic speculation, these are what characterize the state of mind of the first Christians. The facts blind them and press them, especially the fact of death.
a) At the end of the fourth century, Julius Quintus-Hilarianus, bishop of the African proconsulate, calculates, in his De Mundi Duratione, that the world will survive only another 101 years.2
This idea of an imminent death, closely bound moreover to the second coming of Christ, obsessed the entire first Christian generation.3 Herein lies the unique example of a collective experience of death.4 In the world of our experience, to realize this idea of death amounts to endowing our life with a new meaning. Actually, what is revealed here is the triumph of the flesh, of the physical terror before this appalling outcome. And it is no surprise that Christians have had such a bitter sense of the humiliation and anguish of the flesh and that these notions have been able to play a fundamental role in the development of Christian metaphysics. “My flesh is clothed with worms and dirt; my skin hardens, then breaks out afresh. My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to their end without hope.”5 As we see it, the Old
- P. de Labriolle, La Réaction païenne.
- P. de Labriolle, Histoire de la littérature latine chrétienne.
[According to Labriolle, the title of Hilarianus’s work is De Mundi duratione and not, as Camus says, De Mundi induratione. The page reference for this note, which is missing in Camus’ text, is p. 402.—Trans.] - On the imminence of this parousia, cf. Mark 8:39–13:30; Matthew 10:23, 12:27–28,24:34; Luke 9:26–27, 21:32. Cf also the Vulgate: Matthew 24:42–44, 25:13; Luke 12:37–40.
- P. de Labriolle, Histoire de la littérature, p. 49: “Permeated with the sentiment that the world would soon die [one knows that this belief was common among the first Christian generations, but they appear to have felt it with a very particular intensity of anguish] they wanted . . .”
- Job 7:5–6. [I have substituted the English translation of the Revised Standard Versionin place of Camus’ French translation of this text. All subsequent biblical passages cited by Camus will be taken from this translation.—Trans.]
Testament, with Job6 and Ecclesiastes,7 had already set the tone for this development.
But the Gospels have placed this sense of death at the center of their worship.
Actually, we are not sufficiently aware that Christianity is centered around the person of Christ and around his death. We turn Jesus into an abstraction or a symbol. But the true Christians are those who have realized the triumph of the martyred flesh. Jesus being fully human, the emphasis had been concentrated on his death, and one scarcely knows of a more physically horrible death.8 It is on certain Catalonian sculptures, on the broken hands and the cracked joints, that one must reflect in order to imagine the terrifying image of torture that Christianity has erected as a symbol, but it suffices just as well to consult the well-known texts of the Gospel.
Another proof, if one is necessary, of the importance of this theme in Evangelical Christianity, is the indignation of the pagans. “Let her have her way with her empty illusions, and sing her sad, fond songs over her dead god who was condemned by the upright judges and, in his lonely years, met the ugliest death, linked with iron.”9 And again: “Why did he allow Himself to be mocked and crucified not saying anything worthy for the benefit of His judges or His hearers, but tolerating insults like the meanest of men.”10 But this is sufficient to prove the importance of
- Job 2:9, 3:3, 10:8, 10:21–22, 12:23, 17:10–16, 21:23–26, 30:23.
- Passim, but above all Ecclesiastes 2:17, 3:19–21, 12:1–8.
- Cf. Renan, Vie de Jésus, ch. XXV, p. 438: “The particular atrocity of the punishment of the cross was that one could live three or four days in this horrible state. The haemorrhaging of the hands stopped and was not fatal. The true cause of death was the unnatural position of the body, which involved a frightful circulatory problem, terrible pains in the head and heart, and finally rigidity of the limbs.”
- Porphyry, Philosophie des oracles, according to Saint Augustine, City of God, XIX, 23: “Laisse-la donc, obstinée dans ses vaines erreurs, célébrer par de fausses lamentations, les funérailles de ce Dieu, mort, condamné par d’équitables juges et livré publiquement au plus ignominieux des supplices.”
[Porphyry, Philosophy of Oracles, according to Saint Augustine, City of God, ed. V. J. Bourke, trans. G. Walsh, D. Zema, G. Monahan (New York: Image Books, 1958), 19.23, p. 472. Though Camus’ reference suggests that Augustine is the direct source of this quotation, it seems that it is actually taken from P. de Labriolle, La Réaction païenne, p. 243, in which the passage is quoted in full, and which is the source of the following quotation from Porphyry. It should also be noted that in French, Camus can quote the sentence as if its subject were Christianity itself, while in English translation it unavoidably refers to Apollo’s client’s wife, who has embraced Christianity.—Trans.] - Porphyry, cited by P. de Labriolle, La Réaction païenne, p. 211 [sic]: “Il se laissa frapper, cracher au visage, couronner d’épines . . . même s’il devait souffrir par ordre de Dieu, il aurait dû accepter le châtiment, mais ne pas endurer sa passion
