- [Camus repeats this account of Christianity’s break with Judaism and entrance into the Greco-Roman world in his essay “The New Mediterranean Culture”: “In the beginning Christianity was an inspiring doctrine, but a closed one, essentially Judaic, incapable of concessions, harsh, exclusive, and admirable. From its encounter with the Mediterranean, a new doctrine emerged: Catholicism.” In Lyrical and Critical Essays,
192.—Trans.]
own givens. Announced by Paul and John, elaborated by the Greeks, converted to Christianity, these formulas find their fullest expression in Augustinianism, but not, however, before a group of Christians had been lost in false reconciliations.
At bottom, the enigma is that this fusion had worked at all, because though the Greco-Roman world’s sensibility was open to the Gospel, Reason itself refused to accept a certain number of postulates. Provi dentialism, creationism, philosophy of history, a taste for humility, all the themes that we have pointed out run counter to the Greek attitude. This Greek naïveté of which Schiller speaks was too full of innocence and light to abdicate without resistance. The task of the conciliators was to transform the very instrument of this attitude, that is to say, Reason, governed by the principle of contradiction, into a notion shaped by the idea of participation. Neoplatonism was the unconscious artisan of this reconciliation. But there is a limit to the flexibility of intelligence. And Greek civilization, in the person of Plotinus, stopped halfway. It is in this gap that it may be possible to sense precisely Christianity’s originality. Of course, it is the Alexandrian Word that Christian thought has transported into its dogmas. But this Word is not distinguished from God himself, and it is generated and not emanated.
But the Word is in direct contact with its creature, for whom it came to die. And that which would appear contradictory to a Greek spirit is justified in the eyes of Christians by one fact: Jesus’ appearance on Earth and his incarnation. This is the word we find at the beginning and the end of the evolution of Christian metaphysics. It is also proof that Christianity has given up none of its primitive flavor in order to veil itself in Greek thought.
On the eve of the Middle Ages, the ancient human theme of the journey of a God on the earth is applied, for the first time, to the metaphysical notion of divinity. And the more the metaphysic is developed, the greater will be the originality of Christianity, insofar as it will increase the distance between the Son and Man and the notions that it transfigures.
Conclusion
We have bound ourselves to the solution of two problems:
the one, extremely vast, touching the relations between Christianity and Hellenism, the other, itself implicit in the former. The second problem deals with the role of Neoplatonism in the evolution of Christian thought. The material was too vast to have hoped to provide definitive responses. But we have examined, on the one hand, three stages in the evolution of Christian thought, and on the other hand, the culmination of the work of Greek thought in Neoplatonism. A simple comparison has furnished us with a few conclusions.
Christianity has borrowed from Greek thought its material and from Neoplatonism a method. It has maintained intact its profound truth by treating all difficulties on the level of the Incarnation. And if Christianity did not exactly originate this disconcerting way of posing problems, without a doubt Greece had absorbed it. Herein Greece had seen other problems. This, at least, remains precise, but how many other difficulties remain: the role played by Philo in the formation of Alexandrian metaphysics, the contribution of Origen and Clement of Alexandria to dogmatic Christianity, and the numerous influences we have evaluated: Kabbala, Avesta, Indian philosophies, or Egyptian Theurgy. But the exposition suffices. Let us hold ourselves to a few observations. Many speak of the hellenization of early Christianity. And as far as morality is concerned, the claim is no doubt true.1 But Christian morality is not the object of education; it is an inner asceticism that amounts to accepting faith. On the contrary, according to our work, one must speak rather of the christianization of a decadent Hellenism. And here the words have a historical and even a geographical meaning.
- The first systematic treatise on Christian morality, that of Ambrose, in the second half of the fourth century, is based, not on the Gospel, but on the De Officiis of Cicero.
But finally, is it possible, at the end of this study, to determine what constitutes the novelty of Christianity? Are there even notions that are properly Christian? The question is certainly topical. In fact, it is a particular paradox of the human spirit to grasp the facts and to be unable to comprehend the synthesis: for example, an epistemological paradox of a science, certain in its facts, but in that case insufficient, or satisfactory in its theories, but thus uncertain; or a psychological paradox of a self, perceptible in its parts, but inaccessible in its profound unity. In this regard, history does not deliver us from our anxieties, and to return to the profound novelty of the Gospel seems like an impossible task. We see well beneath these influences the syncretism from which Christian thought is born. But we are also aware that, were it dismantled entirely into foreign elements, we would still recognize it as original because of a more subdued resonance than the world has yet heard.
And if we reflect on the principle themes of Christianity—Incarnation, Philosophy according to history, the misery and sorrow of the human condition—we recognize that what matters here is the substitution of a “Christian man” for a “Greek man.” This difference, which we manage to define poorly in the doctrines, we experience by comparing Saint Jerome of the desert to those stricken with temptation and the young who listened to Socrates.2 Because if, moreover, we believe Nietzsche, and if we agree that the Greece of darkness that we mentioned at the outset of this work, the pessimistic Greece, deaf and tragic, was the mark of a strong civilization, it is necessary to admit that Christianity in this regard is a
- And Epistulae XXII, 7: “Moi, oui moi, qui par crainte de la géhenne m’étais condamné à une telle prison, habitée seulement par les scorpions et les bêtes sauvages, souvent je me croyais transporté au milieu des danses virginales, j’étais pâle de jeûnes et mon imagination bouillonnait de désirs.” Accoding to P. de Labriolle, Histoire de la littérature latine chrétienne, 451.
[Saint Jerome, Letter to Eustochium, 22.7: “There was I, therefore, who from fear of hell had condemned myself to such a prison, with only scorpions and wild beasts as companions. Yet I was often surrounded by dancing girls. My face was pale from fasting, and my mind was hot with desire [in a body cold as ice].” In Ancient Christian Writers: The Letters of St. Jerome, No. 33, ed. J. Quasten and W. J. Burqhardt, trans. C. C. Mierow (New
York: Newman Press, 1963), 140.—Trans.]
rebirth in relation to Socraticism and its serenity.3 “Men,” says Pascal, “being unable to cure death, are wise not to think about it.”4 The whole effort of Christianity is to oppose itself to this slowness of heart. From this is defined the Christian man and, at the same time, a civilization. Ch. Guignebert in his Christianisme antique speaks of Christian thought as a religion “of fanatics, the hopeless, and the beggars.”5The statement is true, but not as the author would like it.
Be that as it may, at the time of Saint Augustine’s death, Christianity was formed into a philosophy. It is now sufficiently armed to resist the tempest in which all will founder. During the long years, it remains the only common hope and the only effective shield against the calamity of the Western world. Christian thought had conquered through its universality.
- [Camus here repeats Nietzsche’s argument in The Birth of Tragedy. According to that argument, Christianity renews in some measure the tragic universe of the ancient Greeks. “It was this semblance of ‘Greek cheerfulness’ which so aroused the profound and formidable natures of the first four centuries of Christianity: this womanish flight from seriousness and terror, this craven satisfaction with easy enjoyment, seemed to them not only contemptible, but a specifically anti-Christian sentiment.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 78. Camus also repeats Nietzsche’s charge that ancient tragedy died at the hands of Socrates’ rationalism. Ibid., 95–96. The question of Christianity’s seriousness in relation to the world of the ancient Greeks was one to which Camus later returned in The Rebel. For a discussion of his various answers to that question, see Ronald D. Srigley, “Eric Voegelin’s Camus: The Limitations of Greek Myth in The Rebel,” paper presented at the meeting of the Eric
Voegelin Society, the American Political Science Association Meeting, Philadelphia, 2003.—Trans.] - [Camus offers no reference for this quotation.—Trans.]
- [Again Camus offers no reference.—Trans.]
Bibliography
Auxiliary Works to Christianity
Loisy.—Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien. Paris, 1919.
Cumont.—Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain. 1907.
Cumont.—Les Mystères de Mithra.
Foucart.—Recherches sur l’origine et la nature des mystères d’Éleusis. 1895.
Foucart.—Les Associations religieuses chez les Grecs.
Gernet & Boulanger.—Le Génie
