c) Here then occurs the notion that interests us. If it is true that manis nothing and that his destiny is entirely in the hands of God, that works are not sufficient to assure him of his reward, if the “No one is good”30 is well founded, who then will reach the Kingdom of God? The distance between God and man is so great that no one can hope to fill it. No man can reach God, and only despair is open to him. But then the Incarnation offers its solution. Man being unable to rejoin God, God descends to him. Thus is born the universal hope in Christ. Man was right to put himself in God’s hands, seeing that God offers him a most boundless grace.
- [Camus makes the same argument about the Judaic origins of the philosophy of history in The Rebel: “In its idea of history, Christianity is Judaic and will be found again in German Ideology” (190).—Trans.]
- Matthew 14:33, 12:58, 15:28.
- Matthew 10:16–18, 20:1–16, 25:14–23.
- Matthew 20:46, 25:34–36; Mark 10:17; Luke 10:24.
- [“Nemo bonus.”—Trans.]
It is in Paul that this doctrine is, for the first time, expressed in a coherent way.31 For him, God’s will has only one goal: to save man. Creation and redemption are only two manifestations of his will, the first and the second of his revelations.32 The sin of Adam corrupted man and led to death.33 He is left with no personal resources. The moral law of the Old Testament is content, in effect, to give man the image of the work he must achieve. But it does not give him the strength to achieve it. It thereby renders him twice guilty.34 The only way for us to be saved had been for there to come to us, to release us from our sins by a miracle of grace, this Jesus, of our race, of our blood,35 who represents us and is substituted for us. Dying with him and in him, man has paid for his sins: the Incarnation is at the same time redemption.36 But for all that, the omnipotence of God is not reached, because the death and Incarnation of his son are graces and not sanctions owing to human merit.
This de facto solution resolved all the difficulties of a doctrine establishing such a great distance between man and God. Plato, who had wanted to unite the Good to man, had been constrained to construct an entire scale of ideas between these two terms. For that he created knowledge.37In Christianity, it is not reasoning that bridges this gap, but a fact: Jesus is come. To Greek wisdom, which is only a science, Christianity opposes itself as a state of affairs.
Finally, in order to understand fully the originality of a notion so familiar to us, we require the opinion of the pagans of the period. A spirit as cultivated as Celsus did not understand it. His indignation is real. Something escaped him which was far too new for him: “I turn now to consider an argument—made by Christians and some Jews—that some god or son of God has come down to earth as judge of mankind . . . What
- Colossians 1:15; 1 Corinthians 15:45; Romans 1:14.
- Romans 1:20, 8:28; Ephesians 1:45, 3:11; 2 Timothy 1:9.
- Romans 5:12, 14:15–17, 6:23.
- Romans 3:20, 5:13, 7:7–8.
- Romans 1:3, 4:4.
- Romans 3:25, 6:6; 1 Corinthians 6:20; Galatians 3:13.
- [Camus makes a similar claim in The Rebel, though there he does not identify Plato as its author: “Metaphysical rebellion presupposes a simplified view of creation—which was inconceivable to the Greeks. To their minds, there were not gods on the one side and men on the other, but a series of stages leading from one to the other” (28).—Trans.]
is God’s purpose in undertaking such a descent from the heights? Does he want to know what is going on among men? If he doesn’t know, then he does not know everything. If he does know, why does he not simply correct men by his divine power? … Were they consistent, the Christians would argue that a god does not need to be known for his own sake, but rather wishes to give knowledge of himself for salvation—that is to say, in order to make people good and to distinguish the good from those who are bad and deserve punishment. But the Christian God is not so: he keeps his purposes to himself for ages, and watches with indifference as wickedness triumphs over good. Is it only after such a long time that God has remembered to judge the life of men?”38 The Incarnation likewise seems unacceptable to Porphyry: “If the Greeks do think that the gods dwell in statues, at least it shows a purer mind than the belief that the deity went into the virgin’s womb.”39And Porphyry is astonished that Christ had been able to suffer on his cross, since he had to be by nature impassive.40
- Celse, Discours vrai, Rougier trans., IV, 41: “Que si, dit-il, parmi les Chrétiens et les Juifs, il en est qui déclarent qu’un Dieu ou un fils de Dieu, les uns, doit descendre, les autres, soit descendu, c’est là de leur prétention la plus honteuse . . . Quel sens peut avoir pour un Dieu un voyage comme celui-là? Serait-ce pour apprendre ce qui se passe chez les hommes? Mais ne sait-il pas tout? Est-il donc incapable, étant donné sa puissance divine, de les améliorer sans dépêcher quelqu’un corporellement à cet effet . . . Et si, comme les chrétiens l’affirment, il est venu pour aider les hommes à rentrer dans la droite voie, pourquoi ne s’est-il avisé de ces devoirs qu’après les avoir laissés errer pendant tant de siècles.”
[Celsus, On the True Doctrine, bk. 5, trans. R. J. Hoffmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 77. Because of the structure of the English translation of this text, a more lengthy portion had to be cited in order to communicate properly the meaning of Camus’ French translation. It should also be noted that Camus’ version of the text differs, though not significantly, from Rougier’s translation. For the details of these differences, see Louis Rougier, Celse contre les Chrétiens (Paris: Copernic, 1977), 202. Rougier’s book, chapter, and section numbering differ from Hoffmann’s. Thus, apart from the omission of “bk. 2” from his note, Camus’ reference is correct.—Trans.] - Porphyry, Contre les Chrétiens, fragment 77 in P. de Labriolle, La Réaction païenne, p. 274: “Même en supposant que tels des Grecs soient assez obtus pour penser que les Dieux habitent dans des statues, ce serait encore une conception plus pure que d’admettre que le Divin soit descendu dans le sein de la Vierge Marie, qu’il soit devenu embryon, qu’après sa naissance, il ait été enveloppé de langes, tout sali de sang, de bile et pis encore.”
[Porphyry, fragment from Against the Christians, in Crafer, “The Work of Porphyry against the Christians,” 506. The details offered in Camus’ French text of Christ’s descent into Mary’s womb are missing from the English translation.—Trans.] - Ibid., fragment 84.
[The page reference for Camus’ note is p. 274.—Trans.]
Nothing, therefore, is as specifically Christian as the notion of Incarnation. In it are summarized the obscure themes that we have tried to delimit. It is concerning this immediately comprehensible de facto argument, in which the movements of thought had their end, that it is necessary to observe it living in those it animated.
II. The Men of Evangelical Christianity
A. The Works
Distaste for speculation, practical and religious concerns, the primacy of faith, pessimism regarding man and the immense hope which is born of the Incarnation—so many of these themes come alive again in the first centuries of our era. Actually, one must be Greek in order to believe that wisdom is learned. Christian literature since its beginnings includes no moralist, right up to the time of Clement and Tertullian.41 Saint Clement, Saint Ignatius, Saint Polycarp, the author of the doctrine of the twelve apostles and that of the apocryphal epistle, and the story of Barnabas are interested only in the religious side of problems. The apostolic story literature42 is exclusively practical and popular. We must examine it in its details in order to form a fairly precise idea of its spirit and characteristics. This literature was developed from 50 to 90 CE. That is to say, it can claim to reflect the apostolic teaching. Be that as it may, it comprises the following: the first epistle of Saint Clement (93–97 CE), undoubtably written in Rome; the seven epistles of Saint Ignatius (107– 117 CE), written in Antioch and along the coasts of Asia Minor; in Egypt, between 130 and 131 CE, the apocryphal Epistle of Barnabas;43 The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, probably written in Palestine (131–160
CE); the Shepherd of Hermas in Rome (140–155 CE); in Rome, or in
- Tixeront, Histoire des dogmes, ch. III: “The Testimony of the Apostolic Fathers.”
[The full title of Tixeront’s work is Histoire des dogmes dans l’antiquité chrétienne.— Trans.] - Ibid., chap. III, p. 115: “One gives the name of Apostolic Father to the ecclesiasticwriters who appeared at the end of the first century or in the first half of the second century and who were supposed to have received from the apostles or their disciples immediately the instruction that they transmit to us.”
- Or Didache.
Corinth, the second epistle of Saint Clement in 150 CE; the fragments of Papias, in Hierapolis in Phrygia (150 CE); in Smyrna, the epistle of Saint Polycarp and his Martyrium (155–156 CE).
