to make it coincide finally with his condition. One can go no farther; no progress can find a place in this instantaneous tragedy.” Sartre, “Réponse à Albert Camus,” 346. The fact that Sartre’s piece is highly polemical does not mean that it is wrong, but we should perhaps pause before accepting its argument, particularly because Camus himself did not accept it.

André-A Devaux, “Albert Camus: Le christianisme et l’hellenisme,” Nouvelle Revue Luxembourgeoise (January–April 1970): 11–30; Jean Onimus, Albert Camus and Chris- tianity,trans. Emmett Parker (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1970); Henri Peyri, “Camus the Pagan,” in Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Germaine Brée (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962); William Hamilton, “The Christian, the Saint, and the Rebel: Albert Camus,” in Forms of Extremity in the Modern Novel, ed. Nathan A. Scott Jr. (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1965), 55–74; Merton, “Camus: Journals of the Plague Years”; Albert Camus, The Plague, with introduction and commentary by Thomas Merton (New York: Seabury Press, 1968).

not think this outcome was idiosyncratic. Like his religious colleagues, Camus sensed keenly the emptiness of modern life. Also like them, he believed that this emptiness had been caused, at least in part, by a narrowing or impoverishment of the full range of human experience, and thus pointed to some greater or transcendent reality. McBride, like Devaux et al., takes this as evidence of a religious longing in Camus comparable to the one we find in Augustine. But since Camus consistently denied that this longing had any comparable Christian fulfillment, McBride claims that he was left with a conception of human life as ultimately meaningless and morally indifferent.28
Despite these harsh and surprising conclusions, McBride praises Camus’ effort. Camus’ world may well be meaningless, but McBride claims that it is the right kind of meaninglessness.29 What kind is that? The kind that accepts the Christian notions of God and immortality as the only legitimate sources of meaning even though denying that these things exist. Whatever else we might say about such an argument, its effective truth is to guarantee the supremacy of Christianity and to render all possible alternatives to it at best intellectually suspect and at worst positively dishonest.
There is some evidence in Camus’ books to support this type of reading. What it amounts to is a variant of the transcendence/immanence argument so common in Dostoevsky’s work and in the contemporary debates between Christians and moderns generally.30 Camus uses the argument in The Rebel as a way to organize his historical analysis of the changes in modern revolutionary movements from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.

28. McBride, Camus: Philosopher and Littératuer, 175–76.
29. Ibid., 175.
30. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976). The passage that most clearly illustrates the argument occurs in book six, “A Russian Monk.” There Father Zosima makes the following remarks: “God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up, but what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it” (299–300). As to the debate between Christians and moderns, see P. Travis Kroeker and Bruce K. Ward, Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001), particularly the chapter “Prophecy and Poetics,” 9–33, for a recent contribution. As to the moderns, I still like Marx’s “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” for its clarity about the matter. Karl Marx, Early Writings, ed. and trans. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw Hill, 1963), 43–59.

According to the argument, the movement from Rousseau to Hegel marks a gradual elimination of all vertical transcendence in favor of a philosophy of pure immanence.31 The most important consequence of this loss of transcendence was a corresponding loss of moral clarity and firmness. Actions are no longer judged good or bad according to their own intrinsic worth but in terms either of pure historical expediency or of the likelihood that they might precipitate a future realm of freedom which itself is not subject to any moral judgment. The argument’s appeal lies both in its simplicity and in the fact that it is often the shared self-understanding of the writers and political figures it seeks to explain.

Despite this appeal, I think Camus had serious reservations about the argument. Those reservations are apparent in a close reading of a book like The Rebel, which reveals not one but two different accounts of the nature and origin of modernity. These accounts amount to two different histories of the West and two different assessments of the roles played in it by the Greeks, Christians, and moderns.32 The second of these histories is the antithesis of the first. Rather than relying on the transcendence/immanence argument and its tacit acceptance of the Christian teaching as the true measure in such matters, it asserts that the real historical departure from the morality and culture of the ancient world occurred with the advent of Christianity, and that whatever the Greeks may have meant by notions like transcendence and immanence, it was not what Christians and moderns mean by them.33According to this second history, the Christian differentiation of a radically transcendent

31. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). “The regicides of the nineteenth century are succeeded by the deicides of the twentieth century, who draw the ultimate conclusions from the logic of rebellion and want to make the earth a kingdom where man is God” (132). A few pages later Camus writes of Hegel: “Hegel’s undeniable originality lies in his definitive destruction of all vertical transcendence—particularly the transcendence of principles” (142). The principles Hegel destroyed were those of the French Revolution, which had already destroyed the more robust idea of God as transcendent.
32. 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 Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, 2003.
33. Camus develops the following account in The Rebel, which is remarkably similar to a formulation he offers in Christian Metaphysics: “Metaphysical rebellion presupposes a simplified view of creation—which was inconceivable to the Greeks. To their minds there were not gods on one side and men on the other, but a series of stages leading from one to the other” (28).

divinity did not make real morality or virtue possible, but rather undermined morality’s experiential sources and encouraged a doubt about the morality of virtue from which it has not yet recovered.

While it is true that a book characterized by internal contradictions might be interpreted in any number of different ways, I think there is good evidence to suggest that this second history is Camus’ best. It recognizably continues the effort, first undertaken in Christian Meta- physicsand apparent in everything Camus had written since, not merely to contribute to the debate about the nature of modernity but to change its terms of reference. That change challenged orthodox opinion about the matter in two principal ways: it questioned the idea that Christianity and modernity were as antithetical as their respective adherents claimed; and it strove to take the Greeks seriously and at their own word, rather than yielding to the temptation to interpret them historically either as prototypical Christians or failed moderns.

So much for McBride’s analysis of Christian Metaphysics and its role in the development of Camus’ thought. As to the nature of his translation, I have only a few brief comments to make. The most significant difference between McBride’s translation and my own concerns their respective degrees of literalness. Beyond basic questions of accuracy, it is a difficult business to know how an author would sound in a language not his own. Some translators measure the fluency of a translation by its readability, others by its ability to retain the beauty of the original text. Both criteria are reasonable as far as they go, but both tend to measure the success of a translation by linguistic standards proper to the language of translation. Though this may seem both obvious and inevitable in the case of any translation, I think a few nuances are possible. Without suggesting any particular philosophical account of languages and their commensurability or incommensurability, I think it is safe to say that people who speak or write in different languages not only think similar thoughts in different words but also think those thoughts differently. Such differences are more circumscribed in the case of languages that have grown out of a common source language and thus share a wide literary, philosophical, and political background, and are far more acute in the case of those that have not. Nonetheless, even in the former case differences exist; and to my mind, a faithful translation will not try to smooth over the bits that jar or seem unfamiliar, but allow them to stand in order to test the reader’s patience and stretch his imagination in the hope that some unsuspected corner of the original text might be revealed. Though McBride’s translation is certainly fluent by any reasonable standard, I think it is too readable and perhaps too beautiful in English to retain the kind of literalness I have tried to achieve.

There are other important differences between our translations of Christian Metaphysics. McBride has made some effort to clarify Camus’ sources and the manner in which he uses and misuses texts.