Plotinus, that reconciliation concerns, not Greeks and Christians, but two similarly related aspirations inherent in the Greek traditions of late antiquity. The first of these aspirations is a mystical longing for God and a concern with the destiny of the soul that Camus argues had been gaining ground in the Greek world. The second is an abiding need for rationality or coherence and the notion of a permanent and intelligible order on which such coherence rests for its meaning.
The book’s final chapter—“Augustine”—is an analysis of Augustine’s attempt to synthesize Hellenism and Christianity. Camus’ central claim is that Augustine came much closer to accomplishing this synthesis than did the Gnostics, largely because of Augustine’s reliance on the preparatory work of Plotinus. Plotinus made Greek reason more amenable to faith through his notion of participation. Augustine could use this “softened” version of reason to make the Christian teachings concerning the Trinity and the Incarnation seem more plausible to the minds of Greeks and Romans alike. The result of Augustine’s effort was the creation of a Christian metaphysics, a combination of Greek philosophy and Christian faith that allowed Christianity to escape its parochial Judaic origins and extend its influence into the Mediterranean world. As Camus writes in the concluding chapter of Christian Metaphysics, “the miracle is that the two may not be contradictory.”17 Camus submitted his dissertation for assessment on May 8, 1936. On May 25, he received notice that it had been passed with a grade of 28 out of 40 and that he had been granted his diplôme d’études supérieures.18 The committee that assessed the work was made up of Poirier, Grenier, and the dean of the university, the Greek historian Louis Gernet. Poirier thought the work was a sound piece of writing. However, he also expressed at least a certain reservation about Camus’ philosophical abilities. Lottman tells us that in addition to the normal comments and corrections Poirier made on the text, he had also written: “More a writer than a philosopher.”19 This is an argument that Camus would hear frequently during his career. There are moments when he seems to have been tempted to believe it.20 It was first made publicly by
- Camus, Essais, 1306.
- A photocopy of the certificate appears in Todd, Camus: A Life.
- Lottman, Camus: A Biography, 109.
- In his notebook Camus wrote: “Why I am an artist and not a philosopher? Because
I think according to words and not according to ideas.” Camus, Notebooks 1942–1951,113.
Jean-Paul Sartre in his early essay on Camus, “An Explication of The Stranger.”21 Unfortunately for Camus, this argument later became something like the orthodox opinion of his work and was often used to dismiss his essays as beautiful but philosophically weak or even sophomoric literary exercises.22
One further technical matter about the text. There has been some dispute about the title of the work. Lottman refers to it as Neoplatonism and Christian Thought.This is the title given on the certificate issued to Camus for his diplôme d’études supérieures.23There is also another contender: an extant typescript of the work, formerly in the possession of Mme. Camus but now in the Camus archive, that bears the title, handwritten, of Hellenism and Christianity: Plotinus and St. Augustine. In his introduction to the Pleiade edition of Camus’ collected works, Quilliot argues that the true title of the text is Christian Metaphysics and Neo- platonism. He says that this is confirmed by his own notes of 1954, presumably taken during conversations with Camus, and by the work of M. Viggiani. He argues that further confirmation can be found in the fact that this is the title of the copy of the manuscript held by the university library of the Sorbonne.24 The documentary evidence, such as it is, seems to suggest that Quilliot is right. In addition to this evidence, we might also add that the title Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism has the further advantage of more accurately reflecting the actual substance of Camus’ argument in the text.
Though there is more than a little criticism in the remark, it demonstrates that Camus, at least for a time, accepted both the distinction and its application. By the time of The Rebel, I think he had rejected both.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, “An Explication of The Stranger,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Criterion Books, 1955).
- The argument is made by friends and enemies alike. Sartre makes it yet again in hisreply to Camus concerning The Rebel,though this time much more polemically. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Réponse à Albert Camus,” Les Temps Modernes 82 (August 1952): 334–53. Thomas
Merton, following Germaine Brée, makes the claim more gently and sympathetically. See Thomas Merton, “Camus: Journals of the Plague Years,” Sewanee Review (Autumn 1967): 726. Serge Doubrovsky uses a similar distinction between poet and philosopher to clarify the nature of Camus’ work and to defend him against critics who charge him with moralizing. Serge Doubrovsky, “The Ethics of Albert Camus,” trans. Sondra Mueller and Jean-Marc Vary, in Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Germaine Brée (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 72. - Todd, Camus: A Life. Todd’s biography includes an image of the original certificate issued to Camus bearing this title.
- Camus, Essais, 1223.
The only English translation of Christian Metaphysics and Neo- platonism currently available is that of Joseph McBride. McBride published his translation in 1992 as a chapter of his own book-length study of Camus’ philosophy, Albert Camus: Philosopher and Littérateur. His principal aim in that book is to explore Camus’ notions of absurdity and authenticity in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, to assess the influence of Saint Augustine and Nietzsche on these notions, and to argue that Christian Metaphysics played an important role in the construction of those works and notions.
I am sympathetic to McBride’s ambition, and I agree with him wholeheartedly about the importance of Christian Metaphysics. Apart from writers such as Jacques Hardré, Paul Archambault, and I. H. Walker, who have produced a few scattered studies, commentators have been notably silent about this book and its relationship to Camus’ mature thought.25 As I argue below, there is ample evidence in Camus’ oeuvre to show that the subject of this early essay remained a central feature of his later books and was essential to both his own philosophical project and his critique of modernity. What is less compelling is the substance of McBride’s analysis and the character of his translation. I will discuss McBride’s commentary first and then turn to an analysis of his translation.
In his introductory discussion of Christian Metaphysics, McBride offers a helpful, nonpartisan summary of the book’s four chapters and general structure. That summary is similar to the one offered by Jacques Hardré in his essay, “Camus’ Thoughts on Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism.” What McBride does not do is situate the text in the broader context of Camus’ published books or explain the nature of its influence on them. This is surprising because one of McBride’s main ambitions was precisely to explore that influence in the case of two of Camus’ earliest books, The Mythand The Stranger.What we find instead are several different thematic interpretations of these books, interspersed with lengthy commentaries on related aspects of Nietzsche’s or
- Jacques Hardré, “Camus’ Thoughts on Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism,”Studies in Philology64 (1967): 97–108; Paul Archambault, Camus’ Hellenic Sources(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972); I. H. Walker, “Camus, Plotinus, and ‘Patrie’: The Remaking of a Myth,” Modern Languages Review 77 (1982): 829–39.
Augustine’s work, the whole content of which is then said to be somehow related to the analysis offered in Christian Metaphysics. As to the substance of that relationship, McBride’s thesis consists of the claim, made largely in the book’s conclusion and on the basis of a rather impressionistic reading of a few select passages, that an unfilled “desire for totality” or God in the Christian sense is what gave rise to Camus’ notion of absurdity and that this desire remained a constant feature of his mature explorations of the human condition.26
McBride’s manner of interpretation is not new. It gained popularity in the late sixties and early seventies among readers who saw rightly that there was a good deal more to Camus’ work than what the standard existentialist interpretation would allow, and who were curious about his ambiguous relationship to Christianity. The essays and books of writers such as André-A Devaux, Jean Onimus, Henri Peyri, William Hamilton, and Thomas Merton are among the best in this regard.27Their efforts to read Camus afresh were certainly welcome and in their own way illuminated important aspects of Camus’ critique of modernity. Nonetheless, the results of these studies were very mixed and frequently misleading. The attempt to explore the religious side of Camus’ thought and to do so sympathetically often ended by confirming the very existentialist interpretation these writers initially sought to challenge. I do
- Joseph McBride, Albert Camus: Philosopher and Littérateur (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 175–77. This is essentially Sartre’s interpretation of Camus in his “Réponse à Albert Camus.” “But since, according to your own terms, injustice is eternal—that is to say, since the absence of God is a constant through the changes of history—the immediate relation, which is always begun anew, of the man who demands to have a meaning (that is to say, that a meaning be given to him), to this God, who remains eternally silent, itself transcends History. The tension through which man realizes himself—which is, at the same time, an intuitive joy of being—is therefore a veritable conversion that he snatches from everyday ‘restlessness’ and from ‘history’ in order
