Camus had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, and in the mid-twentieth century, tuberculosis was still an incurable disease in Europe. The French government was apparently unwilling to gamble on a man whose chances of survival were limited at best. Camus did what he could to overcome this impediment, as he would a few years later with regard to military service, but to no avail.9 As Lottman writes, “Camus would later tell Jean Grenier that a special commission of the Government General had deliberated at length on his case, finally issuing a definitive refusal of the medical certificate required for the agrégation. According to Jacques Heurgon, Camus’s request for a medical certificate was twice rejected.”10

René Poirier supervised Camus’ graduate studies and the writing of Christian Metaphysics. He was assisted by Grenier, who was also appointed to the university. Poirier had taught at a lycée in Chartres and at the University of Montpellier before being transferred to Algeria. He was disliked by many of the students because he was unsympathetic to their left-leaning politics. Though he was a member of the Communist Party at the time, Camus did not appear to have any trouble with him and sought to avoid unnecessary conflict. Roger Quilliot claims that although Poirier was Camus’ supervisor, Grenier was likely the principal influence on his choice of subject for the dissertation.11 From what we know of Poirier, that subject—the relationship between Hellenism and Christianity, particularly as it is manifest in the works of Plotinus and Augustine—was quite distant from his primary interests, which concerned the philosophy of science.12We know, however, that Grenier was encouraging Camus to read modern authors like Kierkegaard, Chestov, and Berdiaev, whose books explored that relationship in a contemporary context.13 This lends credence to Quilliot’s suggestion.

9. Ibid., 208–9.
10. Ibid., 110 n4.
11. Camus, Essais, 1220.
12. Todd, Camus: A Life, 27.
13. Todd claims that Grenier wanted Camus to write a thesis on the Hindu religion. Healso says that Camus chose Plotinus as one of his principal subjects precisely because neither Grenier nor Poirier were experts in the field. Ibid., 43.

Apart from his teachers, perhaps the most important influence on Camus’ thinking at this time was Nietzsche; his name appears frequently in Camus’ early Notebooks. In 1932, Camus published “Essay on Music,” which employs Nietzsche’s work as a template for the analysis.14 And in Christian Metaphysics itself, The Birth of Tragedy is a constant reference point for Camus’ attempts to describe the Greeks and to explain how the Christians departed from their teachings. Perhaps the most important aspect of Camus’ reading of Nietzsche was his insight into how basic the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns was to his project and the extent to which Nietzsche had sided with the former—and this in opposition to much contemporary scholarship that insisted, and still insists, on identifying Nietzsche with the moderns.15 Working out the consequences of this insight would be a central feature of all Camus’ subsequent books.
In its final form, Christian Metaphysics comprises four chapters, each one exploring a different stage or moment in the evolution of Chris- tianity. I discuss the central argument of the text below.

Here I offer only a summary of its chapters and their themes. The first chapter, “Evangelical Christianity,” examines biblical texts, the critiques of Porphyry and Celsus, and the works of several early church fathers—for example, Clement, Justin, Ignatius, Tertullian—in order to determine the novelty of Christianity in relation to the religious and philosophical thinking of the ancient world. In the second chapter, “Gnosis,” Camus argues that Gnosticism was not an exclusively Christian phenomenon but rather a collaborative effort on the part of a diverse group of writers who wanted to reconcile the Greek notion of reason with the emotional aspirations of Christianity toward fulfillment or salvation.16 Chapter three, “Mystic Reason,” is devoted entirely to an analysis of Plotinus’s Enneads.What Camus discovers in the Enneads is an attempt at reconciliation similar to the one found in Gnosticism. However, in the case of

14. Albert Camus, “Essay on Music,” in Youthful Writings, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 130–55.
15. A good contemporary example of this type of interpretation can be found inAlexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). For a recent interpretation that is much closer to Camus’, see Peter Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
16. See my discussion of Camus’ analysis in Ronald D. Srigley, “Albert Camus on Philoand Gnosticism,” Studia Philonica Annual, no. 305, ed. David Runia, 103–6 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995).

his own complicity in its excesses and confusions. He also understood their true nature. He knew that what prevented him from seeing the things with which he was confronted aright was not an intellectual problem in the narrow sense, nor simply his time understood as an external force, but a spiritual or existential malady that existed in the world around him and also in him. The following passage from “Return to Tipasa” is a moving account of his participation in at least one aspect of that malady: “I live with my family, who believes it reigns over rich and hideous cities, built of stones and mists. Day and night it raises its voice, and everything yields beneath it while it bows down to nothing: it is deaf to all secrets. Its power sustains me and yet bores me, and I come to be weary of its cries. But its unhappiness is my own, we are of the same blood. I too am sick, and am I not a noisy accomplice who has cried out among the stones?”63 I think that the real aim of Camus’ work, which is evident in Christian Metaphysics and in everything Camus wrote subsequently, from the anti-utopian analysis of The Myth of Sisyphus to the critique of metaphysical rebellion in The Rebel, is a c ritical assessment of the apocalyptic or totalitarian orientation of modernity and an attempt to track the historical and existential origin of that orientation back to its true source.64 In at least one instance, Archambault seems to concede that this may indeed have been Camus’ primary ambition, if not his greatest success. “If it be a Christian disease to feel dispossessed and cast adrift in a hostile universe, it is fair to say that, although Camus fought that disease tooth and nail, he never entirely convalesced.”65 But Archambault quickly returns to the text of his argument, and instead accuses Camus of confusing Christianity’s best and most philosophically sound insights regarding the human condition with the excesses of Gnosticism, excesses to which he says Camus himself was strangely attracted at the same time that he would have criticized their political and existential consequences.66

63. Camus, “Return to Tipasa,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 171.
64. For a fuller analysis of these efforts as they are undertaken in The Rebel, see Srigley,
    “Eric Voegelin’s Camus: The Limitations of Greek Myth in The Rebel.”
65. Archambault, Camus’ Hellenic Sources, 104.
66. Ibid. “I am rather inclined to think, however, that his metaphysical malaise was moreGnostic than Christian, the product, as it were, of a Graeco-Christian germ.”

Christianity is not a philosophy that is opposed to a philosophy, but an ensemble of aspirations, a faith, that moves to a certain plane and seeks its solutions within that plane.
But it is here, before speaking about what is irreducible in the two civilizations, that it is appropriate to introduce certain nuances and to keep in mind the complexity of the problem. It is always arbitrary to speak of a “Greek spirit” as opposed to a “Christian spirit.” Æschylus along with Sophocles, the primitive masks and the Panathénées, the lecythes of the fifth century alongside the metopes of the Parthenon, and finally the mysteries as well as Socrates, all incline to emphasize next to the Greece of light a Greece of darkness, which is less classic but just as real. But on the other hand, it goes without saying that one can draw out of a civilization a certain number of favorite themes and, with the assistance of Socratism, trace within Greek thought a certain number of privileged images, the composition of which inspires precisely what one calls Hellenism. Something in Greek thought prefigures Christianity, while something else rejects it in advance.

a) The Differences. It is possible in this manner to identify among Greeks and Christians irreconcilable attitudes before the world. As it is expressed in the first centuries of our era, Hellenism implies that man can be self-sufficient and that he has within himself the means to explain the universe and destiny. Its temples are constructed to its measure. In a certain sense, the Greeks accepted a sportive and æsthetic justification of existence. The line of their hills, or the run of a young man on a beach, provided them with the whole secret of the world. Their gospel said: our Kingdom is of this world. Think of Marcus Aurelius’s “Everything is fitting for me, my Universe, which fits thy purpose.”1This purely rational conception of life—in which the world can be understood completely—leads to a moral intellectualism: virtue is a thing that

1. Pensées IV, 23: “Tout ce qui t’accommode, Cosmos, m’accommode: rien n’est prématuré ou tardif de ce qui pour toi échoit à son heure; je fais mon fruit de ce que portent les saisons, ô nature. De toi naît tout, en toi est tout, vers toi va tout.”
   [“Everything is fitting for me, my Universe, which fits thy purpose. Nothing in thy good time is too early or too late for me; everything is fruit for me which thy seasons, Nature, bear; from thee, in thee, to thee are all things.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.23, in The Meditations