It is also one to which I think most writers would readily assent, if only the cameras were turned off.
Second, Camus’ extraordinary popularity and the pervasive sense on the part of his readers that something distinguished him from the usual run of modern and Christian critics alike is itself a good indication that there is more real content in his books than Archambault admits. Eric Voegelin describes Camus’ popularity and the meaning of this sense rather well: “At more than one American university, I could observe that the imitation of Camus’s meditation has become, for numerous students, the method of catharsis. In this way they rid themselves of the intellectual pressure of either the leftist ideologies or the neo-Thomists or existentialist theologians, according to their respective milieu.”52 Of course, popularity is not proof, and the fact that Camus was neither an existentialist nor a Thomist does not mean he was necessarily a Greek. But all the indicators suggest that he was unquestionably something other than modern or Christian; and given his own repeated affirmations and the judgment of his readers, Greek is an appellation that is perhaps not too wide of the mark in this respect.
Moreover, Voegelin was not alone in his assessment of this aspect of Camus’ work, particularly as it is expressed in The Rebel. While the brightest lights of the French literary and philosophical world were busy panning The Rebel as intellectually sophomoric and politically reactionary, a man like Martin Buber was writing to Camus to congratulate him on his remarkable achievement and to seek permission to have the book published in Hebrew “because of its importance for human life at this hour.”53 And Hannah Arendt for her part was sending Camus encouraging notes and commenting to others that he was by far and away the best man in France at the time.54Voegelin, Buber, and Arendt all had their own philosophical projects, each with its own emphases and differences. Yet they all sought to articulate an alternative to the modern project, and they all had reasons to hesitate over Christianity. The fact that they all
- Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans. Gerhart Niemeyer (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 172.
- Martin Buber, The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr, trans. Richard and Clara Winston and Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1991), 568–69. - Todd, Camus: A Life, 307.
recognized Camus’ effort as compatible with their own is telling in this regard. It is not proof either. But it is highly suggestive of the nature of Camus’ accomplishment.
Finally, there are also reasons to question Archambault’s substantial analysis of Camus’ Hellenism and his assessment of Christianity. Archambault argues that the most distorting feature of Camus’ account of the relationship between Greeks and Christians is his “innate gift or compulsion for reflecting in antithetical terms, particularly with regard to this historical problem.”55 A few pages later, Archambault repeats the claim and gives it more weight by listing and then discussing the various types of antitheses Camus finds between the two traditions. Archambault’s formulation of these antitheses will be familiar to any student of Camus and any reader of current Camus scholarship: “Hellenism is rebellious, whereas Christianity is resigned; Hellenism is esthetic, whereas Christianity is moral; Hellenism is tragic, whereas Christianity is dramatic; Hellenism is ‘natural,’ whereas Christianity is ‘historical.’”56 Archambault adds important qualifications to these formulations and acknowledges that Camus himself hesitated about a number of them.57Nonetheless, he stands by his argument that this type of antithetical thinking is an essential feature of Camus’ books and that it is responsible for much of what is distorting and misrepresenting in them regarding the Greeks and Christians.
This is an important but difficult matter to discuss, in part because such tendencies do exist in Camus, but also because the field is overladen with scholarship that has itself become an object of study with its own categories and concerns, many of which have little to do either with Camus or with the original texts. Nonetheless, a few brief remarks are possible here. In Archambault’s view, Camus’ tendency to think in antithetical terms makes the difference between the Greeks and Christians seem absolute when in fact it is not.58 This in turn distorts both traditions. For Archambault’s Camus, the Greeks inhabit a static universe, bereft of progress or movement, while the Christians abandon all sense of nature and natural limits in order to be caught up in the movement
- Archambault, Camus’ Hellenic Sources, 63.
- Ibid., 76.
- Ibid.
- Archambault argues that Camus acquired this tendency from writers like Nietzscheand Rougier, particularly the latter’s book on Celsus. Ibid., 63–64.
of a providential history. Stated in this way, the argument is certainly false. From Parmenides to Plato (to say nothing of Homer), the Greeks knew both that time or history exists and that there are things that move and things that do not; and anyone who reads Augustine or Saint Francis knows that Christians experience and love nature too.
There is no doubt that Camus did at times formulate the relationship between the Greeks and Christians in these or similar terms. But there is much more to Camus’ argument than Archambault supposes. Why Archambault misses it is hard to say. It might be a question of intent.
A good deal of Archambault’s critical analysis is devoted to teaching his readers the proper Christian account of the relationship between nature and history and nature and supernature rather than to interpreting Camus’ complex but provocative argument.59 Unlike Archambault, for Camus Christianity is the real source of this antithetical structure. Archambault himself is not unaware of the possibility. Shortly after charging Camus with the use of such a structure, he cites what is perhaps its most famous Christian expression, Tertullian’s “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”60Although Camus was tempted by such antithetical formulations, particularly in The Rebel, there is good evidence in his books that he recognized their limitations and was working toward a better account. I turn to that account now.
The notion that positions or ideas are antithetical is of course nothing new historically, but the Christian formulation gives that notion a new meaning and a much harsher cogency. Christianity insists and has always insisted that its revelation offers a unique insight into the human condition that differs qualitatively from any account that preceded it. It is therefore both historical and apocalyptic in the strongest sense. Ancient Greek oppositions or antitheses worked differently. They always took place against an enormous backdrop of agreement and shared meaning. Another way to say this is that the ancients never allowed the self affirmation for self interest inherent in the assertion of their difference to eclipse their awareness of the profound sameness of all human things.
- See his discussion of nature and history particularly, ibid., 90–95.
- The original text is from Tertullian, On Prescription against Heretics, chap. 7, trans.
P. Holmes, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1870), 15:9. Archambault cites it from Camus, Essais, 1244. The full text in Camus reads as follows: “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? . . . Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel.”
In Christianity that restraint is severed.61 Though the historical results of that severing were in no way inevitable or fixed (people could have simply chosen to ignore it), it is arguable that much of what we know as the modern project was informed and inspired by it. The political antithesis that today goes by the name of totalitarianism is fiercer and intellectually more rigid than anything the ancients imagined; and our antidotes to that fierceness and rigidity—deconstruction or postmodernity—are weaker and less discriminating than what the ancients proposed. All this I assert in Camus’ name.
As I have said, there are also ambiguities in Camus’ account. There are moments when he seems to accept the antithetical structure of the Christian account as a way of framing his discussion.62 At such moments, the Greeks disappear from Camus’ analysis as a genuine alternative and he instead vacillates awkwardly between the two contemporary poles of the antithesis—modernity and Christianity. When this happens, even the Christian and modern apocalyptic formulations begin to make their way back into the analysis. Once the antithesis is accepted, these outcomes are inevitable. Its either/or structure is inherently apocalyptic; and intellectually all one can do is to vacillate, because the structure of the problem makes any choice between modernity and Christianity inherently unstable. One rejects the untenable teachings of one tradition only to find oneself forced to accept those of the other. And in either case one is denied some essential feature of human life (e.g., goodness, meaning), because the antithetical structure leads one to believe that it is possessed solely by the other side.
One of the things that distinguishes Camus from other critics of the modern project is that he had the courage and the honesty
