Thus the problem of revolt that Camus is studying is historically specific in two senses. Metaphysical revolt presupposes certain views of the nature of human beings and of the world to which they feel rightfully accustomed. These views have developed primarily in the West. On the other hand, the emergence and development of metaphysical rebellion cannot be adequately understood without grasping the culturally specific ontology that emerges in a Judeo-Christian world. Here the depth structure of psychic needs must be emphasized as must the patterns of belief and institutionalized practices. At the center of Camus’s concern is the meeting place of metaphysical views about the nature of the world and the place of human beings therein with the pattern of conceptual needs to which they have become accustomed, and without which they might not be able to make sense of, or be comfortable with, their life.
A pattern of thinking and feeling has developed that is particular to Western civilization. It thus marks the mind and heart of those who grow up within it. The structure’s metaphysical frame pervades the personal concerns of individuals. It thus tends to condition the explicit conflicts upon which practice and theory concentrate. That frame has been shaken by the failure of its explicit formulations over the past 200 or more years. But the explicit struggle to deal with the loss of belief in the Christian cosmic drama has, nevertheless, played itself out within the preset contours of
the Judeo-Christian meaning-frame.2 For Camus the historical specificity of metaphysical rebellion, not to say its logical presupposition, is given by the root structure of the Judeo-Christian vision of the world.
“It is a Christian way of thinking to consider that the history of man is strictly unique” (R, 189). For the first time in the West, and perhaps uniquely on earth, people have come to see their lot as strung out on a temporal scale. Previously the cycle of the seasons marked the progression of events. Now birth and death are no longer part of an unending cycle; they are singular moments in an unrepeatable and irreplaceable linear drama. Thus origins and ends assume transformed significance, while death fundamentally challenges the meaning of an individual life.
Here the birth of the messiah is no longer a cyclical event, repeated in festivals and rituals.3 It now marks a unique historical moment that once and for all transfigures what went before and will go after. And so with The End. The day of judgment will put an end to this historical process, ushering in a definitive reconciliation. Perhaps only such a messianic apocalypse could respond to the desperate cravings for salvation of individuals facing the prospect of a certain death without the assurance of a cyclical resurrection.
Of course, the Christian drama was a sacred one, at its outset easily merging experientially with the rituals and festivals of a cyclical world. Thus Easter merges with pagan festivals of rebirth, symbolically expressed in the ritual use of Easter eggs. But that may be seen as simply a preemptive compromise. The deeper metaphysical burden would have its day. It is not appropriate here to pursue the historical intricacies.
Sacred history slowly becomes profane history. The future replaces the past as the reference point. Death and evil are seen as unmitigated threats to the meaning of life and the trust that can be placed in the world around us. No longer is nature our home. Rather, it increasingly becomes the setting in which this cosmic drama of individual salvation is played out. Even later, it becomes a resource to be used for individual or collective purposes. Ulti-mately, nature becomes “natural resources,” even “raw materials.” As human events become pervasively historicized, sacred beliefs are first rationalized, then merged with the practical concerns of public life. They become subject to the struggle for power and to the test of material success.
Justification might be by faith alone, according to Luther and Calvin, but “good works will not be wanting in those who believe.”
“Christians were the first to consider human life and the course of events as a history that is unfolding from a fixed beginning toward a definitive end, in the course of which man achieves his salvation or earns his punishment” ( R, 189). Here is a mindscape that dramatizes to the point of unbearable singularity the life passage of each individual. This life is our only one. It has a quite specific date of birth and an equally specific, though yet unknown, date
of death. The passage is a one way ticket, the destination not in doubt. Hence time becomes central in the West. A linear time, it marks history, not as a story, but as an unrepeatable dramatic unfolding. Where is it coming from? Where is it going? And what am I doing here? These questions gain new poignancy. No wonder that with Christianity, a new sense of the personal and the subjective emerges. Never before has personal destiny taken such a threatening turn—and the possibilities of concrete reconciliation seemed so distant. No wonder the heightened need for personal salvation and its increased centrality in the thought and experience of the West.
Only Judeo-Christianity could have given birth to our modern sense of history, and to a philosophy of history as a purposeful succession of unique events, culminating in a definitive reconciliation, wherein one might see God face to face. The symbols of Christianity “are those of the drama of the divinity which unfolds throughout time” (R, 190). This is divine history, meaningful and unidirectional. Its end is a definitive resolution of death and evil. It is the salvific resolution of our finite and temporal plight. The more difficult our actual situation, the more essential the faith in its ultimate fulfillment. Before this drama of salvation, practical affairs pale. Nature, the setting for this drama, can offer nothing in the way of succor. It is the realm of suffering and death. No wonder “the hostility of historical methods of thought toward nature, which they considered as an object not for contemplation but for transformation” (R, 190).
Nature was not the home of the spirit, a realm from which to seek guidance. At best it was an instrument, at worst a prison. No wonder we are overwhelmed by ecological problems. “For the Christian, as for the Marxist, nature must be subdued,” while “the Greeks are of the opinion that it is better to obey it” (R, 190).
As all depends upon The End, all is judged in its light. From thinking that those who are good will be saved, it is easy to slip into thinking that those who are saved must have been good, then that what is good is what will get one saved, and finally that whatever gets one saved is good. Thus moral judgment is merged with historical success, slowly, imperceptibly, but inescapably. The ethic of worldly success tends to emerge from the bowels of the otherworldly hope for salvation. Christianity’s “originality lay in introducing into the ancient world two ideas that had never before been associated: the idea of history and the idea of punishment” (R, 190). By the way it develops, history will pass judgment on individuals and movements, justly punishing those who do not live up to its demands or who deny its direction. Strip off the transcendent content of this belief system, and we see, according to Camus, “the Christian origins of all types of historic messianism, even revolutionary messianism.” How else can one make sense of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of Karl Marx, in which he speaks of Communism as the resolution of the conflict between Nature and History, Essence and
Existence, and which knows itself to such? (R, 193).
THE TRANSITION TO MODERNITY
“Metaphysical rebellion, in the real sense of the term, does not appear, in coherent form, in the history of ideas until the end of the eighteenth century —when modern times begin to the accompaniment of the crash of falling ramparts” (R, 26). The metaphysical ramparts that are falling are those that sustained the Judeo-Christian providential cosmic drama. Having introduced into history the notion of a personal god who was more than an explanatory principle or a natural force, the Jews had clearly separated the natural from the supernatural. By designating nature as God’s creation, they had made the divine responsible for what happens on earth. Not surprisingly, in view of the growing emphasis on the personhood of the divinity, natural as well as supernatural events increasingly took on moral character. Or rather, the natural human tendency to evaluate natural events in the light of moral responsibility became a matter of transcendent significance.
Further, when the natural and the supernatural are separated in accord with the actions of a divine creator, it becomes possible to conceive of another who is responsible for our fate. “The only thing that gives meaning to human protest is the idea of a personal god who has created, and is therefore responsible for, everything” (R, 28). “Only a personal god can be asked by the rebel for a personal accounting” (R, 31—2). “Metaphysical rebellion presupposes a simplified view of creation—which was inconceivable to the Greeks.