[ Caligula] is putting his power in the service of a higher and more deadly passion [than that of murder]. He threatens everything which is most important to us. Doubtless, this is not the first time that one among us was possessed of unlimited power; but it is the first time that such a one made use of it without limits. That is what frightens me about him, and what I wish to combat. To lose one’s life
is a small matter, and when the time comes I will have the necessary courage. But what’s intolerable is to see one’s life being drained of meaning, to be told there’s no reason for existing. A man can’t live without a reason for living (TRN, 34; CTOP, 21).
Without a reason for living there obviously cannot be any reason for doing one thing rather than another. Thus at a lower level the metaphysical challenge robs ethics of its rationale. “I believe,” says Cherea, “that there are actions which are more beautiful than others.” To which Caligula counters that “all are equivalent.” “In order to be logical,” observes Cherea, “I should then kill or subjugate” those for whom I have at times such a desire. But “if everyone concerned themselves with fulfilling [such desires], we would not be able to live or be happy” (TRN, 78-9; CTOP, 52-3).
But what kind of rejoinder is that to the metaphysical challenge posed by Caligula? Cherea seems to recognize the theoretical inadequacy of his position when he earlier asserts that “one must strike when one cannot refute” (TRN, 35; CTOP, 21). But are we not then simply reduced to a struggle over power?
Caligula’s logic is coherent but neglects, Camus seems to suggest, the competing logics generated by perspectives rooted in nature, the body, and others. By failing to recognize these competing claims—thus operating with a truncated set of existential premises—Caligula presents the spectacle of a mind gone mad with reason. Cherea senses as much when he observes that “life is not possible if one pushes the absurd to its logical conclusions.” But he is not able to counter with an equally persuasive logic. At this stage in the development of his thought, Camus is himself struggling to find a rationale to counter the implicit nihilism of the absurd without abdicating to the proponents of philosophical suicide and the leap of faith. Poignant expression of the seriousness and difficulty of this struggle is given in his “Letters to a German Friend,” where the passionate logic of Nazism is countered by an equally passionate but not very convincing assertion of the value of human dignity. Cherea’s willingness to stake his life in defense of human dignity will have to await The Rebel for a more articulate exposition.12
While Caligula’s three alter egos share aspects of his passion, they do not follow him in his logic—a logic that leads to the subordination and eventual rupture of human relations. Faithful to the destructive potential of that logic—a potential he seems ever more aware of and committed to —Caligula destroys his relation to the body (symbolized by the murder of Caesonia), cuts himself off from the healing and restorative powers of nature to which he had once been drawn (symbolized by the rejection and departure of Scipio), and alienates himself from the world of others, thus motivating
the distinctive rebellions of Cherea and the Patricians, culminating in his own death.13
Caligula may be said to embody the absolutistic impulse essential to Western philosophical and religious traditions. When the mind demands totality and coherence at all costs, it is implicitly committed to the path of spiritual imperialism. Inevitably, it ruptures concrete relations with nature, the body, and others, leveling human values and wreaking havoc everywhere, ultimately engulfing itself.
As people who have made it, the Patricians express the self-confidence and righteousness of the ruling classes. No doubt the world has been made for them, and they deserve their place.
Their superiority has been ordained, it is as it should be, and it will not change. Of course, youth will have their dreams and should be humored, but not taken too seriously. Suffering comes and goes, but who is “able to suffer for more than a year”? They will have nothing of such youthful romantic sentiments. “Happily, grief is not eternal” (TRN, 9; CTOP, 4) while life reasserts its normal routines.
The Patricians thus embody what Nietzsche called the spirit of seriousness, so well expressed by Meursault’s prosecutor. Their place at the apex of the social order is assured. But heaven help those who tamper with the order of things, especially if they have the temerity to “insult. .. our dignity” (TRN, 31; CTOP, 19).14
Helicon, on the other hand, is the one character in the play who expresses no opposition to Caligula’s action. The only time he seems upset with his boss is when the latter refuses to resist his own assassination. Helicon rejects this passive submission to a destiny which Caligula himself has brought about (cf. TRN, 108). He cares nothing for metaphysical concerns. Far more practical, as befits a former slave, he is loyal to the emperor for the kindness he has been shown, and he knows that his position and power depend directly upon that of Caligula. If Caligula is overthrown or killed, Helicon’s fate will be similar.
In so describing Helicon, however, it must be clear that I am speaking of the person who appears in the final edition of the play. For no other character received as extensive a development following the original publication as did Helicon. He first appears in 1944 as little more than an unthinking lackey. He is ordered around by Caligula, without thinking does as he is told, and gives no thought to the meaning of anything. “As you know well, I never think”; to which the 1947 edition adds, “I am too intelligent for that” (TRN, 15; CTOP, 8). He thus expresses Camus’s simple, and perhaps stereotypical, distaste for official bureaucrats.
From 1947 through 1958, however, Helicon becomes a more articulate nihilist. It remains true that few things interest him, and that he agrees to help Caligula, as he says, quite reminiscent of Meursault, because he has no
reason not to (CTOP, 9). Yet he now can distance himself from Caligula sufficiently to justify not concerning himself with anything because Caligula, as an idealist, “has not yet understood” (TRN, 18).
Even more, Camus has come to appreciate somewhat more sensitively the needs that might motivate one loyally to perform some of the more distasteful though routine bureaucratic indecencies. In addition, Camus has developed a more refined distaste for the “guardians” of culture, for the intellectual and financial elites with whom he had had close and increasingly unpleasant relations in postwar Paris. Most particularly, he has developed a heightened sense of the hypocrisy of the liberal intelligentsia, who were quite willing to defend freedom with the lives of others, but were often quite unwilling to expend their personal privileges on behalf of the “lower” classes (cf. TRN, 89-90).15 Thus Helicon emerges as Caligula’s loyal functionary precisely out of appreciation for the latter’s generosity. His behavior offers a more sympathetic gloss on the subservience of the servants who, like the bureaucrats in Hitler’s Germany, carry out Caligula’s demonic orders, often against their will.
FROM ABSURDITY TO REVOLT
While the drama plays itself out on the ideological plane and in the confrontation of alternative psycho-logics, an almost inarticulate existential undertow seems to pull Caligula toward his own destruction. The demand for the moon but gives articulate expression to the basic need for an ultimate and transcending purpose. Only in the context of that root metaphysical demand does the action of the play make any sense. That metaphysical demand, expressing a deeply felt need, is what makes the character of Caligula so peculiarly modern.
“He is in each of us” (TRN, 1733), Camus had written. (Or at least in most Western males, but we will return to that later.) This is the ground of Caligula’s universality. Here lies the existential root of the demand for a metaphysical revolution that has for centuries plagued the West. “Each person carries within himself a part filled with illusions and misunderstandings which is destined to be killed” (TRN, 1742), observed Camus. This reiterates Cherea’s comment that Caligula is an aspect of himself that he tries to keep concealed (CTOP, 51).
No doubt here is the source, for Camus, of the appeal of religions and totalizing ideologies. But if we all share with Caligula the secret demand for a metaphysical revolution “which is destined to be killed,” and if, even more, we may harbor the wish that life be brought into conformity with OUT deepest desires, we must find a way to live through and purge those desires before they wreak havoc upon the world, our self included. Caligula
docs not. In seeking to bring into the world that “new man” (TRN, 1733— 4) which his insight required,16 “he challenges friendship and love, simple human solidarity, good and evil. He takes those about him at their word and forces them to be logical; he levels everything around him by the strength of his refusal and by the destructive rage to which his passion for life leads him” (TRN, 1727; CTOP, v-vi).