- Camus, The Rebel, 27, 28.
- Ibid., 288. This is most evident when Camus frames the rebel’s principal task as oneof attempting to hold together God and History, rather than choosing between them, as do both moderns and Christians. But this is merely the Christian account in secular dress, and it differs fundamentally from what Camus earlier says about the Greeks, for whom such a choice was meaningless. “Metaphysical rebellion [the choice between God and History] presupposes a simplified view of creation, which the Greeks could not have. For them there were not gods on one side and men on the other, but degrees that lead from the latter to the former. The idea of innocence opposed to culpability, the vision of a history epitomized entirely by the struggle between good and evil, was foreign to them” (Camus, Essais, 439–40).
Compared to Camus’ other books, Christian Metaphysics is a minor though important work. Despite the remarkable maturity of its insight, the book was written when Camus was very young, and so bears the marks of youth. It was written in order to fulfill the requirements of a university degree, and is therefore limited by a scholarly aim and format that was not native to Camus’ writing and which he would soon abandon. Perhaps most important, Camus himself did not prepare the manuscript for publication. This last limitation is one that applies to all posthumous publications of Camus’ works, from his early essays and first novel to the initial installment of The First Man.67
These limitations notwithstanding, Christian Metaphysicsis an important book. It adds significantly to our understanding of the highest reaches of Camus’ philosophical ambition and the direction of his thought. Apart from its own content, that importance is attested to in two principal ways: Camus’ abiding concern with the subject matter of Christian Metaphysics, which he explores both directly and indirectly in virtually all of his subsequent books; and his decision to make that subject the theme of his third proposed philosophical essay, tentatively titled “The Myth of Nemesis.” I will discuss the argument of Christian Metaphysics, comment briefly on its relationship to two later essays, The Myth of Sisyphusand The Rebel,68and then say a few words about Camus’ plan for “The Myth of Nemesis” as he describes it in his Notebooks.
Anyone who reads Christian Metaphysicsis left with a number of conflicting impressions. There is an unmistakable sense throughout the work that Camus prefers the Greeks to the Christians. But there are also passages in the book, particularly in its final pages, in which he seems to favor Christianity, both as preferable in itself and as the only effective alternative to the modern project.69Apart from Camus’ preferences, there are substantial conflicts in the analysis, too. For instance, at times Camus suggests that there is a longing for transcendence or God in the
- Albert Camus, Cahiers II: Youthful Writings. Albert Camus, A Happy Death, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). Albert Camus, The First Man, trans. David Hapgood (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1995).
- A similar type of comparative analysis could be done just as well with Camus’ fictional works, but that would require more textual analysis than is possible here. The common literary form and philosophical content of Christian Metaphysicsand the essays lend themselves to this type of analysis and will make the discussion that much more economical in this regard.
- Camus, Essais, 1310.
Greeks that is similar to the one found in Christianity. However, at other times he says that such a longing is foreign to the Greeks.70 And though he sometimes argues that Christianity revives the Greeks’ tragic sense of life, he also claims that its hope in God and its advocation of humble submission to the divine order effectively undermine that sense.71 All these different assertions can be found in Camus’ analysis. What are we to make of them?
Conflicting or contradictory accounts cannot be reconciled, and I will not attempt to do so in the case of Christian Metaphysics.However, such accounts are often very telling and sometimes reveal patterns that can teach us about the kinds of problems with which an author is grappling. This is true in the case of Christian Metaphysics. I think there are two distinct interpretations of Hellenism and Christianity in Christian Metaphysics. One of these interpretations is Greek, the other Christian, though even in the former case traces of Christianity’s influence remain. I think the existence of these two conflicting accounts is evidence of both Camus’ uneasiness about Christianity and his inability to escape its assumptions completely. Camus knew or sensed that the Greeks were different, that they were people who needed and should be heard on their own terms and who perhaps could help us better understand our troubles.72 But the pressure exerted by Christianity and modernity was pervasive and deep, and Camus was not immune to it. Christian Meta- physics is Camus’ first attempt to free himself from that pressure and to reach some decision about the Greeks and Christians. His achievement is the foundation on which his later books are constructed.
Sometimes Camus argues that the longing for fulfillment or a homeland of the soul is a fundamental and constant human desire. So too, he claims, are the kinds of experiences that provoke that desire—the sense of all that is hard and immovable and tragic in life. That is Camus’ Greek account. When arguing in this way, Camus interprets Christianity as having revived that longing and that tragic sense in comparison to a Greek culture that had become decadent. This is also Nietzsche’s argument in
- Consider only Camus’ introduction. In it he says both that the Greeks had a “realtradition” of this longing and that they denied that God or the supernatural exists. Ibid., 1226–27.
- Ibid., 1309, 1298.
- Camus makes a compelling case for the Greeks in this respect in his essay “Helen’sExile,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 148–53.
The Birth of Tragedy. According to Nietzsche, the Greeks “knew and felt the terror and horror of existence.”73 But through the influence of Socrates and the advent of the “theoretical man,” that tragic sense died. “Apollinian contemplation” and “Dionysian ecstasies” were then replaced by “cool, paradoxical thoughts” and “fiery effects,” both of which mimic the original but lack its substance.74These later Greeks got their cheerfulness and tragedy on the cheap. And Nietzsche claims that in comparison to them, Christianity’s principal innovation was to renew the spirit of the older Greeks in some measure: “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 antiChristian sentiment.”75
Despite its favorable assessment of Christianity, Camus’ interpretation rests on principles that are opposed to its self-understanding.
According to that self-understanding, Christianity’s insight into the human condition is absolutely unique and thus unprecedented historically. And although it entails suffering, its vision is not tragic in the Greek sense, because it promises a final liberation from the self and its attachment to the world, which is the cause of its suffering.76 Camus’ interpretation denies that uniqueness and the developmental history on which it rests. And when he applauds Christianity’s renewal of tragedy, his compliment also contains a critique or insult, because it implies that Christianity’s seriousness is to be measured by the extent to which it approximates the teachings of those from whom it most wished to distinguish itself, the Greeks.
As I have said, Christian Metaphysics also contains another, very different interpretation of the Greeks and Christians, one that belies an
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case against Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), sect. 15.
- Ibid., sect. 12.
- Ibid., sect. 11.
- Both aspects of the Christian teaching are nicely stated in the following passage fromBruce Ward and P. Travis Kroeker’s book on Dostoevsky’s prophetic Christianity: “Only by dying to the isolation of immanent earthly realism can one become alive to life itself and thus ‘bear fruit.’ It is a vision that reverses the cosmologies and ideologies of modernity no less than it did the expectations of Jews and Greeks in Jesus’ time.” Kroeker and Ward, Remembering the End, 20.
acceptance of Christianity’s own self-understanding. In opposition to his Greek account, Camus here argues that the longing for a homeland of the soul is a desire that the Greeks did not experience, and indeed that their understanding of human life was constructed on assumptions that are inimical to such aspirations. He denies that the Greeks had any meaningful sense of the supernatural or God and therefore experienced no desire for a transcendent fulfillment comparable to the one we find in Christianity. Nor were they troubled by apocalyptic conceptions of history or the problem of human destiny. According to this account, the Greeks believe in a “cyclical world, eternal and necessary, which could not be reconciled with a creation ex nihilo and hence with an end of the world.”77When Camus speaks about the Greeks in this way, there is no trace of the charge of decadence, nor does he say that their insight into human life has anything particularly tragic about it. These Greeks are cheerful and untroubled, to the extent of being satisfied with a “sportive and aesthetic justification of existence.”78
Even though Camus is sympathetic to the Greeks understood in this way, the interpretation itself turns on assumptions inherent to the Christian historiography which are anything but sympathetic to the Greeks. It is a familiar argument to our modern ears: the Greeks have only reason and the mind, not spirit or soul; the
