Whatever the historical accuracy of this analysis, two points ought to be noted. First, Camus underlines a difference of temperament distinguishing the sensitivity of the pagan Greek from that of the Christian. These contrasting sensitivities account for the distinctiveness of their metaphysical perspectives, according to Camus. Second, the dynamic tension between these two perspectives sets the context for much of his subsequent intellectual reflections. Throughout his work these contrasting themes find expression, from the early concern with death, hope, and salvation in Two Sides of the Coin and Nuptials, through the struggles with natural evil in The Plague and the concern with totalitarianism in The Rebel, to the problem of self-consciousness, guilt, innocence, and bad conscience in The Fall, and ultimately, throughout, with the pervasive concern for working our way out of our exile to an earthly kingdom.
What affective tonality does Camus find at the root of these contrasting metaphysical formulations, leading him to identify more closely with the Greeks? It is the centrality of bodily experience: the sensual, pulsating organism in innocent union with a natural world. The body, a creature of time and place, ever renewed by the cycles of nature, desiring, feeling, moving, growing, aging, and ultimately dying; the body, animated by activity, exhausted by effort, and cleansed by the sea; the body, exalted by beauty and ravaged by time, continually consecrating our sensual union with the earth in a present devoid of any transcendent future. The innocent harmony of this transient body with the cycles of nature is the locus of the pagan sensitivity with which Camus feels that profound accord he wishes to celebrate. No sense of original
sin here; no dichotomy between sensual wants and spiritual needs; no guilt or shame about nudity; and no mystified hope for another life. No mystification of reason, only the demand for a lucid perception of the body’s place in nature. Time is the matrix of action, marking the passage of days by which life exhausts itself, not a transcendent symbol of a redemptive suffering.
Time is cyclical, not linear: It takes us nowhere but to death while taking nature to eternal renewal. This nature of seasonal cycles is not a place for progress as far as human destiny is concerned. Our fate is sealed, our destiny circumscribed. The injunction from Pindar that Camus offers as the epigram to The Myth sets the frame: “Oh my soul, do not aspire to immortal heights, but exhaust the field of the possible” (MS, 2; E, 93).’ Actually, TheMyth of Sisyphus can be understood as an attempt to resurrect this pagan sensibility from within the heart of—
and in opposition to—the decaying bourgeois Christian world.2
Camus is not, of course, a pagan Greek. He could no more be one than could a modern Greek. Too much Christian history stands between him and them. But he shares with them a sensibility, however transfigured, that adds an original dimension to his reflection upon our epoch.
The root of that vision is the body’s passion for living, grounded in an unreflective sense of natural innocence. Sharing the Greeks’ sense for human dignity, he felt no need to apologize for his belief that happiness is a legitimate human aspiration. It is simply the articulation of this dignified sense of natural innocence. He once said that sin was a concept he could never understand, meaning that he had no experience of sin. He did not feel that he had to justify his existence or that existence needed any justification. Nevertheless, he did experience quite
profoundly the problem of evil. He rejects the Christian conception that evil is a necessary part of a salvific process in which all will be set right in the fullness of time, as well as the Greek notion that it is only the result of ignorance or error. Evil always remained for him an unjustifiable rupture, an inexpiable injustice. Suffering and injustice lacerated him. He shared with Ivan Karamazov the torment occasioned by the suffering and death of the innocent, as he shared Ivan’s refusal to deify a creation or to love a creator that could permit such events. He was at one with Doctor Rieux in rejecting Father Paneloux’s claim that “either the suffering of innocence was a necessary element in a divine justice or we must believe in God and accept all on faith.” For him, “Christianity in its essence … is a doctrine of injustice. It is founded on the sacrifice of the innocent and the acceptance of this sacrifice. Justice on the contrary does not proceed without revolt” (A/I, 46).
Yes, there is evil and unjust suffering, but they call not for acceptance and resignation, but for revolt. Revolt against a condition in which “men die and they are not happy”; revolt against a world in which some people use others tor their personal satisfaction or in the service of an ideology proclaiming that all wrongs will be righted in the future or the hereafter. Rather, what alone is given to us is the moving present, and it is here that we must root our being if we are to be nourished and to grow in happiness. The Greeks knew this. They had a vision of life appropriate to their climate: a clear, lucid view of our possibilities for happiness and of the inevitability of death. All was of this world, with the afterlife but a pale replica of this life.
No doubt there were mysteries; but they were not transcendent or supernatural, and they did not cloud one’s thinking. Camus could not accept the Greek notion that unaided reason can penetrate the secrets of nature any more than he could accept the notion that the world was made to the measure of human beings. Yet he remained committed to a reason without shadows.
He rejected Greek anthropomorphism, but shared their overriding concern for human destiny. No place here for the spirit of totality to take root: that will to deny the evidence of the body, of the senses, of nature; the unlimited desire to make the world over again, to reject this life for the future or the hereafter. The needs of the body and the cycles of nature placed limits on human endeavor and offered commensurate rewards. Despite the sacredness of life, there is no messianism in this world of light and death, of which Camus could say, “All my Gods have feet of clay” (Nuptials, in LCE, 105).
At the center of Christianity, on the other hand, stands the mystery of the Incarnation—of the transcendent becoming finite, of innocent suffering offering redeeming grace, which in “the fullness of time” will remake the world and humans. Innocence crucified, accepted, and believed in is the core of the Christian solution to the problems of evil and death. And to this solution Camus’s rejection resounds, viscerally at first, and then with increasing clarity and persistence. Yet he shared the Christian sense of the tragedy of the human condition. He felt passionately the need to give coherence, order, and meaning to the human drama. “Greek by his need for coherence,” as he wrote of Augustine, “Christian by the uneasiness of his sensibility” (E, 1295); Camus located himself at the crossroads of these conflicting sentiments. If he rejected the often naive Greek rationalism, he similarly rejected a Christian mysterious irrationalism. Reason, however limited and circumscribed, is all we have to light our way, and it must be held responsive to the demands of the poor creature enamored of the natural light that leads only to death.
Of Christianity he writes:
Providentialism, creationism, philosophy of history, concern for humility, all of these themes we have noted confront the attitude of the Greeks. That Greek naivete of which Schiller speaks was too pervaded by innocence and light to abdicate without resistance. The effort of the conciliators [of the first few centuries of the Christian era] was to transform the very instrument of this attitude—Reason ruled by the principle of contradiction into a notion shaped by the idea of participation (E, 1307).
Ultimately, Christianity sacrifices not the individual, but rationality—our sole resource for working out our natural destiny—on the altar of messianism, thus bathing the suffering of innocence in the waters of a transcendent and mysterious grace. Greek light is overwhelmed by Christian shadows. Totality replaces moderation. And the body, rooted in the present and demanding dignity and happiness while lucidly facing death, is reduced to a humiliated supplicant bowing down in prayer and hoping to see “as through a glass darkly” an infinite and unknowable God upon whose will our salvation depends.
THE ALGERIAN MAN
Within the geography of Camus’s mind, the “Algerian Man” has a unique place. Here is the “natural home” of the human spirit, both ground and limit. Playing a logico-biographical role, it refers to the actual experiential conditions out of which Camus emerged, while taking its contours and meanings from the reflective appreciation that he brought to bear upon their description. It is a mythologized portrait of a collective type, suffused with the unique perspective and sensitivities of the author.