- Camus, Essais,1226. Camus makes the same argument in The Rebel:“The Greek idea of evolution has nothing in common with our idea of historical evolution. The difference between the two is the difference between a circle and a straight line. The Greeks imagined the history of the world as cyclical. Aristotle, to give a definite example, did not believe that the time in which he was living was subsequent to the Trojan war” (189–90).
- Camus, Essais, 1225.
- This kind of argument was made popular in the modern period by Kierkegaard’s work.For a clear statement of the argument, see Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death,trans.
Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 87–96. - Camus, Essais, 1225–26.
Though Camus’ Greek account is better than his Christian account, both are hampered in some measure by Christian assumptions that distort the historical record and force Camus to solve Christian problems with Greek formulae.81 But there are moments when Camus manages to break free of these Christian assumptions entirely. Then he offers a different interpretation of the Greeks and a very different critique of Christianity. “In this world, in which the desire for God is getting stronger, the problem of the Good loses ground.”82 This is a stunning remark. Here Camus makes it clear that the Christian longing for God or transcendence is not the same thing as the Greek aspiration to virtue, and that far from surpassing the Greeks in terms of its moral seriousness or courage, Christianity actually falls far short of their best insights and even diminishes the ancient and persistent human desire for the Good. This is an insight that is not limited by Christian assumptions, and it is not the only one of its kind in Christian Metaphysics.
Though Camus usually interprets the Greeks as having a purely rational conception of the world, one that is governed by logic in the narrow sense as the principle of noncontradiction, there are other instances in which he says that such an account distorts the true nature of reason.83This distorted reason turns on the assumption that truth and beauty are somehow opposed, and that so too are the human capacities by which they are apprehended. Camus claims that this opposition is not native to the
- Ibid., 1251. This is the way Camus describes the role of the Gnostics in the evolution of Christian metaphysics: “Gnosticism poses problems in a Christian manner; it solves them in Greek formulas.” This is an endless undertaking and a futile one, I think. There is no solution, Greek or otherwise, to a problem to which it is not addressed; and since in his best account Camus claims that many of the Christian problems he identifies are false or misleading, there can be no true solution to them.
- Ibid., 1227.
- This account of reason is apparent in the concluding remarks of Camus’ chapter onAugustine: “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. Providentialism, 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 civilisation, in the person of Plotinus, stopped halfway” (ibid., 1307).
Greeks, but rather was first introduced by Christianity: “For the Christian who separates Reason and Beauty, the Truth of Beauty, Reason is reduced to its role of logical legislator. And thus conflicts between Faith and Reason become possible. For a Greek, these conflicts are less acute, because Beauty, which is both order and sensitivity, economy and the object of passion, remains a ground of agreement.”84This brief remark undermines the Christian notion of an opposition between faith and reason, the heart and the mind, and thereby also one of the most common ways in which the Greeks are misinterpreted today, whether one does so with approbation or disapproval.
I do not think that the competing interpretations of the Greeks and Christians apparent in Christian Metaphysics are due to Camus’ uncritical appropriation of conflicting literary sources, as Archambault claims. Rather, I think they are provoked by Camus’ serious engagement with the subject and his attempt to overcome certain Christian and modern assumptions about the nature of the Greeks and the role of Christianity in the advent of modernity. Even in this early book Camus is asking the right questions, and against the habits of his time he demonstrates a remarkable sense of what is at stake in the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.
Camus’ concern with the relationships between the Greeks, Christians, and moderns continues in his later works, particularly in his two booklength essays, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. It is arguable that in this period of Camus’ career, say roughly from 1943 to 1953, these relationships are his principal concern. But the manner in which he addresses them changes, as do the kinds of problems he confronts and the solutions he proposes. Over the course of his career, Camus attempted a number of different ways of distinguishing between the Greeks and the Christians, each with its own set of problems and its own contradictions. If there is one thing that is common in his work in this respect, it is this pattern. The pattern also has another feature. In subsequent books, the contradictions continue to work in much the same way that they do in Christian
- Ibid., 1272. Although this analysis takes place in the context of a discussion of Plotinus’s role in the evolution of Christian metaphysics, which was to soften the notion of reason into the notion of participation, it is clear that Camus is here speaking about an older Greek tradition.
Metaphysics.In each case, there is a predominately Greek approach to the subject that exists uneasily alongside an essentially Christian approach.
What defines both traditions in each new formulation differs, of course. But the pattern itself remains the same.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, the Greek aspect of Camus’ analysis is apparent in his highly critical assessment of Christian and modern apocalyptic aspirations and in his attempt to formulate his own interpretation of the absurd or modern nihilism.85But there is a reverse side to Camus’ critique that belies acceptance of at least one feature of the Christian teaching. Although Camus argues that our modern sense of meaninglessness is not due to the loss of an apocalyptic fulfillment in either the Christian or the modern sense, his critically clarified account of the absurd constantly threatens to teeter into nihilism for precisely this reason. There is an abiding sense in The Myth of Sisyphus that without the final reckoning entailed by such a fulfillment, morality and goodness are groundless.
In one formulation, Camus interprets Christian and modern apocalyptic constructions and their derivations as pseudo-problems to be rejected outright in favor of an entirely different kind of interpretation. In another formulation, those constructions, despite Camus’ critical analysis, somehow remain the measure of truth in such matters. The periodic denials of all value and meaning in The Myth of Sisyphus are typical in this regard.86Camus never says these things in so many words, of course, and there is ample evidence in the book that he is uneasy with this conclusion. Nonetheless, the contradiction exists, and a lack of clarity about its character is responsible for a good deal of the scholarly confusion about the nature of Camus’ achievement.
In The Rebel, such contradictions become even more explicit even while they are formulated in different terms. Archambault and others like to point out the difficulties surrounding Camus’ use of nature and history as means of distinguishing between the Greeks and Christians.
- See my unpublished manuscript, “Albert Camus’s Absurd Man: A Reconsiderationof The Myth of Sisyphus,” 6–16.
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 53, 59. The following two texts are exemplary in this regard: “At this point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.” “Once and for all, value judgements are discarded here in favour of factual judgements.”
There are such difficulties in the text, but they are by no means the most basic or the most important ones. The Rebel is a history, a history of rebellion and its role in the advent of the modern Western world. The most provocative and contradictory feature of Camus’ analysis is his history of antiquity. To state the matter simply, the primary contradiction in Camus’ ancient history lies in his conflicting interpretation of Christianity. This contradiction also
