… The idea of innocence opposed to guilt, the concept of history summed up in the struggle between good and evil, was foreign to them” (R, 28). Manicheism begins to emerge with the decomposition of the ancient world, but it lacks the Judaic sense of history and the stark vision of an absolutely transcendent and personal divinity. Christianity thus breaks new ground as it incorporates Greek rationality to make sense of God’s transcendent per-sonhood from which He freely chooses to create this world—for whose fate He must then take ultimate responsibility. Here are all the ingredients of the providential drama.
For 1,500 years the West lived in terms of this drama. Its theology, philosophy, law, politics, science, cosmology, psychology, economics were Christianized. The meaning of life, the role and status of individuals, the moral rules, the hopes and fears—all were played out in accordance with this divine plan. Even rebellions were reformations of a church gone corrupt or of rulers who usurped their power. “For as long as the Western World has been Christian, the Gospels have been the interpreter between heaven and earth. Each time a solitary cry of rebellion was uttered, the answer came in the form of an even more terrible suffering. In that Christ had suffered, and had suffered voluntarily, suffering was no longer unjust and all pain was necessary….Only the sacrifice of an innocent god could justify the endless and
universal torture of innocence” (R, 34).
But from the moment when Christianity, emerging from its period of triumph, found itself submitted to the critical eye of reason—to the point where the divinity of Christ was denied—
suffering once more became the lot of man. . . . The abyss that separates the master from the slaves opens again and the cry of revolt falls on the deaf ears of a jealous God. . . . Thus the ground will be prepared for the great offensive against a hostile heaven (R, 34-5).
The reasons are complex and obscure. The scientific revolution, the opening up of the market, technological breakthroughs, religious revivals, the rediscovery of the Ancients, the Renaissance, the discovery of the New World —all these mark a world in radical transformation. They culminate in the disintegration of the “ancien regime,” which was the social and institutional base for the merging of politics and theology in the doctrine of the divine right of kings. “Theocracy was attacked in principle in 1789 and killed in its incarnation in 1793” (R, 120). “Kings were put to death long before.” But previous rebels “were interested in attacking the person, not the principle.” “1789 is the starting point of modern times, because the men of that period wished … to overthrow the principle of divine right and to introduce to the historical scene the forces of negation and rebellion which had become the essence of intellectual discussion in the previous centuries” (R, 112).
But if “1789 is explained by the struggle between divine grace and justice” (R, 112), it is preceded by centuries of struggle over the injustice of our condition. The political challenges bubbling up throughout the long period of institutional transformations leading up to the French Revolution were fought out on grounds other than metaphysical revolt. They were more matters of person, power, and legitimacy. They were often expressed in terms of competing theologies, however much they may have been instigated by the economic transformations marking the emergence of bourgeois society. During this extended period, direct theoretical challenges to the Christian order, emerging imperceptibly out of internal critiques of particular claims to legitimacy—in the Reformation, in the discussions over the State, in the developing Social Contract theories, in the attempts to make sense out of the Copernican and Newtonian theories—appear first in works of the imagination. They ultimately find explicit and historically significant expression, for Camus, in those proto-romantic French contemporaries the Marquis de Sade and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Here, the struggle to dethrone the reigning absolute finally comes fully into the light of day.
In order to understand the logic of metaphysical revolt in the West as it develops into metaphysical revolution, we must look at its genesis and development in the imagination of these prescient theoretical forerunners. But first I must briefly specify the institutionalized form that takes hold of the West with the coming to power of the bourgeoisie. This process was no doubt furthered by the intellectual struggles that continually play themselves out in dialectical relation to the development of the bourgeois mainstream. Initially, rebellious thought is merged, and even identified, with that emerging mainstream, as both direct their attack at the ancien regime and its Christian order. Yet it is the bourgeois mainstream that increasingly becomes the subtle, even though long submerged, target of rebellious thought. Thus our metaphysical articulations in their institutional and rebellious forms are interwoven with this emerging bourgeois accession.
Bourgeois Visions
Nowhere is this relation more significant than with Marxism, perhaps the dominant challenge to the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. Camus stresses the common metaphysical roots by speaking of Marx’s “bourgeois prophecy.” “Marx’s scientific Messianism is itself of bourgeois origin. Progress, the future of science, the cult of technology and of production, are bourgeois myths, which in the nineteenth century became dogma” (L’HR, 239; R, 193).4
What is crucial here is the emergence of a new faith to replace a dying one. The age of enlightenment seems to usher in a faith in progress, in which the wonders of science, industry, and technology promise to bring heaven down to earth. A brief perusal of Condorcet will suffice for one to appreciate the messianic appeal of this ideal. With one Absolute fading, only another Absolute seems able to fill the void. The Moderns win the battle with the Ancients. The triumph is complete. The Future replaces the Past as point of reference. Industry replaces the Church, and Science replaces Reli-gion. But our providential fate is still assured. How else can one account for Adam Smith’s otherwise remarkable, not to say preposterous, faith—reiterating Mandeville’s fable of public virtue emerging out of unfettered private vice—in which the unseen hand will guide the market, bringing ultimate beneficence to all? Here we have the perfect “bourgeoisification” of Christian mythology. Humans are still fallen creatures. Original sin is our ineradicable self-centeredness. But through the no doubt miraculous intervention of the Holy Spirit’s unseen hand, our natural selfishness, when left to its own devices, will generate industriousness, which, guided by the law of supply and demand, will bring about the
“wealth of nations.” No trivial myth, this.
The age of the bourgoisie does not begin, however, with the explicit ac-knowledgment of the priority ultimately to be given to personal acquisition, material well-being, production, science, and industry—all subordinated to the fulfillments of an increasingly insatiable Ego. This Ego, which is supposed to think only of itself, will be well suited to a society increasingly dependent on the economic war of all against all, called “laissez-faire.” But all this only reveals the hidden underside of a world that bursts forth in words as a commitment to Progress painted in moral and even religious terms. The
fervor of the commitment to human rights and the declaration of the rights of man may promise a new world. It clearly is directed at the destruction of an old one.
The challenge is fundamental, while the promise is ambiguous at best. Camus singles out two key figures in this revolutionary confrontation with the ancien regime, Rousseau and St. Just.
With them, the emerging rational protest begins to take shape. The metaphysics of modernity is prefigured.
Rousseau
Rousseau seeks nothing less than to replace the old faith with a new one. This is not just a revolt, but the political equivalent of Newton’s revolution. “With The Social Contract… we are attending the birth of a new mystique, the general will being presented as God himself” (R, 115; L’HR, 147). “The Social Contract amplifies and dogmatically explains the new religion whose god is reason, confused with nature, and whose representative on earth, in place of the king, is the people considered as an expression of the general will” (R, 115).
To speak of a new religion is to highlight a profound metaphysical transformation. This inquiry “into the legitimacy of power” “assumes that traditional legitimacy, assumed to be of divine origin, is not established. Thus it proclaims another sort of legitimacy and other principles” (R, 114—5; L’HR, 146). Not only is the old world challenged, but a new one is to be put in its place. Neither the challenged nor the challenge, however, can do without absolutes upon which to rest their claims for legitimacy.
In point of fact, the values at issue for Rousseau are essentially Christian. “That is why the words that are to be found most often in The Social Contract are the words absolute, sacred, inviolable. The body politic thus defined, whose laws are sacred commandments, is only a by-product of the mystic body of temporal Christianity” (R, 115, 116).
These values, however, are to be grounded, if no less absolutely, at least with a different God. “The deification [of the people] is completed when Rousseau, separating the sovereign from his very origins, reaches the point of distinguishing between the general will and the will of all” (R, 116). By deification, Camus means that the people are here absolutized as a source of Truth. As transcendent to the flow of events, their decisions are beyond question. They are final. The same may now be said of the people as could earlier be said of the king: “Even though it is possible to appeal to the King, it is impossible to appeal against him insofar as he is the embodiment of a principle” (R, 113). Such a rule of governing is “arbitrary in principle.” Claim insight into the Truth and no further challenge is possible.