Albert Camus

Below is as complete a version as I could find of the fragmentary address by Camus to the Dominicans mentioned in the previous article as a “must-read” for Christians in the middle of the last century.  If it was so then, surely it must be even more so now.

Inasmuch as you have been so kind as to invite a man who does not share your convictions to come and answer the very general question that you are raising in these conversations, before telling you what I think unbelievers expect of Christians, I should like first to acknowledge your intellectual generosity by stating a few principles.

First, there is a lay pharisaism in which I shall strive not to indulge. To me a lay Pharisee is the person who pretends to believe that Christianity is an easy thing and asks of the Christian, on the basis of an external view of Christianity, more than he asks of himself. I believe indeed that the Christian has many obligations but that it is not up to the man who rejects them himself to recall their existence to anyone who has already accepted them. If there is anyone who can ask anything of the Christian, it is the Christian himself. The conclusion is that if I allowed myself at the end of this statement to demand of you certain duties, these could only be duties that it is essential to ask of any man today, whether he is or is not a Christian.

Secondly, I wish to declare also that, not feeling that I possess any absolute truth or message, I shall never start from the supposition that Christian truth is illusory, but merely from the fact that I could not accept it. As an illustration of this position, I am willing to confess this: Three years ago a controversy made me argue against one among you, and not the least formidable. The fever of those years, the painful memory of two or three friends assassinated had given me the courage to do so. Yet I can assure you that, despite some excessive expressions on the part of François Mauriac, I have not ceased meditating on what he said. At the end of this reflection — and in this way I give you my opinion as to the usefulness of the dialogue between believer and unbeliever — I have come to admit to myself, and now to admit publicly here, that for the fundamentals and on the precise point of our controversy François Mauriac got the better of me.

Having said that, it will be easier for me to state my third and last principle. It is simple and obvious. I shall not try to change anything that I think or anything that you think (insofar as I can judge of it) in order to reach a reconciliation that would be agreeable to all. On the contrary, what I feel like telling you today is that the world needs real dialogue, that falsehood is just as much the opposite of dialogue as silence, and that the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain what they are and speak their minds. This is tantamount to saying that the world of today needs Christians who remain Christians. The other day at the Sorbonne, speaking to a Marxist lecturer, a Catholic priest said in public that he too was anticlerical. Well, I don’t like priests that are anticlerical any more than philosophies that are ashamed of themselves. Hence I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence. I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.

…

And why shouldn’t I say here what I have written elsewhere? For a long time during those frightful years I waited for a great voice to speak up in Rome. I, an unbeliever? Precisely. For I knew that the spirit would be lost if it did not utter a cry of condemnation when faced with force. It seems that that voice did speak up. But I assure you that millions of men like me did not hear it and that at that time believers and unbelievers alike shared a solitude that continued to spread as the days went by and the executioners multiplied.

It has been explained to me since that the condemnation was indeed voiced. But that it was in the style of the encyclicals, which is not at all clear. The condemnation was voiced and it was not understood! Who could fail to feel where the true condemnation lies in this case and to see that this example by itself gives part of the reply, perhaps the whole reply, that you ask of me. What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today. The grouping we need is a grouping of men resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally. When a Spanish bishop blesses political executions, he ceases to be a bishop or a Christian or even a man; he is a dog just like one who, backed by an ideology, orders that execution without doing the dirty work himself. We are still waiting, and I am waiting, for a grouping of all those who refuse to be dogs and are resolved to pay the price that must be paid so that man can be something more than a dog.

…

And now, what can Christians do for us?

To begin with, give up the empty quarrels, the first of which is the quarrel about pessimism. I believe, for instance, that M. Gabriel Marcel would be well advised to leave alone certain forms of thought that fascinate him and lead him astray. M. Marcel cannot call himself a democrat and at the same time ask for a prohibition of Sartre’s play. This is a position that is tiresome for everyone. What M. Marcel wants is to defend absolute values, such as modesty and man’s divine truth, when the things that should be defended are the few provisional values that will allow M. Marcel to continue fighting someday, and comfortably, for those absolute values.…

By what right could a Christian or Marxist accuse me, for example, of pessimism? I was not the one to invent the misery of the human being or the terrifying formulas of divine malediction. I was not the one to shout Nemo bonus or the damnation of unbaptized children. I was not the one who said that man was incapable of saving himself by his own means and that in the depths of his degradation his only hope was in the grace of God. And as for the famous Marxist optimism! No one has carried distrust of man further, and ultimately the economic fatalities of this universe seem more terrible than divine whims.

Christians and Communists will tell me that their optimism is based on a longer range, that it is superior to all the rest, and that God or history, according to the individual, is the satisfying end-product of their dialectic. I can indulge in the same reasoning. If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man. And not in the name of a humanism that always seemed to me to fall short, but in the name of an ignorance that tries to negate nothing.

This means that the words “pessimism” and “optimism” need to be clearly defined and that, until we can do so, we must pay attention to what unites us rather that to what separates us.

…

That, I believe, is all I had to say. We are faced with evil. And, as for me, I feel rather as Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said: “I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere.” But it is also true that I, and a few others, know what must be done, if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it. Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

Between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great unequal battle has begun. I have nothing but reasonable illusions as to the outcome of that battle. But I believe it must be fought, and I know that certain men at least have resolved to do so. I merely fear that they will occasionally feel somewhat alone, that they are in fact alone, and that after an interval of two thousand years we may see a sacrifice of Socrates repeated several times. The program for the future is either a permanent dialogue or the solemn and significant putting to death of any who have experienced dialogue. After having contributed my reply, the question that I ask Christians is this: “Will Socrates still be alone and is there nothing in him and in your doctrine that urges you to join us?”

It may be, I am well aware, that Christianity will answer negatively. Oh, not by your mouths, I am convinced. But it may be, and this is even more probable, that Christianity will insist on maintaining a compromise or else on giving its condemnations the obscure form of the encyclical. Possibly it will insist on losing once and for all the virtue of revolt and indignation that belonged to it long ago. In that case Christians will live and Christianity will die. In that case the others will in fact pay for the sacrifice. In any case such a future is not within my province to decide, despite all the hope and anguish it awakens in me. And what I know — which sometimes creates a deep longing in me — is that if Christians made up their minds to it, millions of voices — millions, I say — throughout the world would be added to the appeal of a handful of isolated individuals who, without any sort of affiliation, today intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and for men.

William Hamilton

This essay was published in a mid-’60s collection entitled Forms of Extremity in the Modern Novel, a bizarre little assembly of four essays of what passed as religious literary criticism in an age heavily influenced by Existentialism (if memory serves all of them quote Tillich as an authoritative and trustworthy voice).  The mid-century poohbah of religious literary criticism, Nathan A. Scott, Jr., served as the general editor and, naturally, wrote the first essay on Franz Kafka, which is mostly plot summaries.  His name is also featured throughout the “for further reading” section at the close of the book, surprising no one.  The second “essay,” by John Killinger (I haven’t heard of him, either), is a painful affair in which Mr. Killinger drenches Ernest Hemingway with unbridled adoration, exhorting us not to view Hemingway in terms of Biblical morality but in terms of his zeal for life, which excuses everything he ever said and did.  (For example, we are to honor Hemingway for taking his own life since he copied what his own father did in a kind of liturgical ritual of homage — yeah, as literary criticism goes, it was pretty awful.)  The final essay is an intriguing look at Graham Greene’s coarse Christianity, a gritty “real life” Christianity fit for the difficulties of the time when Christianity was considered a “safe yet irrelevant” idea.  The author, Raymond Chapman, does not quite make Greene sound like he speaks to us today (as we are in a drastically different cultural situation from 1965 in some ways, though strangely similar in others), but he did somehow make me more interested in reading Greene, which I didn’t think was possible.

The essay at hand was the best of the four, despite Mr. Hamilton’s pervasive apology for not writing actual literary criticism: it is rather an intellectual survey of ideas Camus wrestled with and how Christians should take a more meaningful engagement with them.  I haven’t read too much Camus either, and while this monograph does not necessarily make Camus jump to the top of my to-read list, Mr. Hamilton does offer some intriguing ideas on how Christians should and should not engage with the human world around us.  Tell me what you think.

Christians writing about literature have often been justly accused of offering moral homilies instead of authentic criticism.  Moral homilies are in disrepute among some Christians, but this is too bad, because we really are very confused morally, and need all the good homilies we can get.

This is by way of confessing that I am setting out deliberately to offer a moral homily based on some of the writing of Albert Camus, and underplaying, virtually ignoring, the usual functions of literary criticism.  This procedure may, in a curious sense, be faithful to Camus’ intent, for some have claimed — Sartre is one — that Camus’ fiction doesn’t really belong in the category of the novel at all, but rather stands in the tradition of the Voltairean moral tale.

I am further limiting myself by making use of a portion of Camus’ total work: my main interest will be in the novel The Plague (1947).  I shall also call upon some material from the “philosophical” work that serves as an interpretation of The Plague — The Rebel (1951), and also from that moving and fragmentary address to some Dominican monks that appeared posthumously in Resistance, Rebellions, and Death under the title “The Unbeliever and Christians” (1948).

I do not wish to overstress the arbitrary character of my choice of material.  This material is, I am persuaded, the center of Camus’ work and stands as his most typical and in some ways most influential writing.  Concentration on this limited area means I will make no attempt to present Camus’ literary and moral development as a continuous story with a plot.  We perhaps need only recall that his earliest writing is influenced by the physical climate of his native North Africa and contains moving words of praise of nature’s healing power.  Camus breaks into European fame with his first novel, The Stranger, which led him to be loosely identified with the postwar existentialist movement.  The nonfiction book of essays from the same period that is useful in interpreting The Stranger is The Myth of Sisyphus.  It is a study of suicide and the meaning of absurdist existence.  The plays Caligula and The Misunderstanding belong in this period as well.

The next period is that with which I am here concerned, the period of The Plague, The Rebel, and the play The State of Siege.  Rebellion has replaced absurdity as the central ethical term, and Camus is well beyond his existentialist mood.  He tries to face candidly some of the baffling ethical problems of the postwar world.  It is this Camus that a whole generation of young men and women since the war has studied with care, and it is this morally sensitive Camus, rather than the novelist, surely, who was given the Nobel Prize in 1957.  His accidental death deprived us, to be sure, of an interesting stylistic experimenter, a good novelist, but not a great one.  But his death deprived us, unquestionably, of a lucid moral voice, a kind of conscience for many of us who had lost or forgotten what consciences we once had.

The postwar American reader, then, read Camus, and still reads him, for largely nonliterary reasons.  He reads him not so much for pleasure or delight, but for guidance.  The classical guides of family, church, and school have for the most part dwindled into vacuousness, and we must catch our moral guides on the run.  If a novelist happens to serve us, so be it; we will not be put off by the litterateurs who frown at our shamelessly American and moralistic use of literature.  For in our country today, it still is blessedly the case that not everyone wants to grow up voting for nice candidates, reading Time and discussing its improbable contents with friends at parties, throwing up in the morning before going to the office as the psychic price of being paid well for useless work.  The Plague by Camus has been, can be, and should be used to illuminate this fissure in the gray flannel curtain.

I am choosing this particular Camus material for some brief comment because in it he tells us most exactly what kinds of choices are possible for us in the kind of world we have stumbled into.  The Plague is a novel about the interaction between three types of life, three models: the Christian, the saint, and the rebel.  The author is least involved, interested, and accurate in his portrait of the Christian; he most identifies with the rebel, but there is a deep affection that he cannot help showing for the figure of the saint.  I wish to look at his portrait of the three characters, which are also portraits of three ways of life.

In The Plague, bubonic plagues has broken out in the North African town of Oran.  We can study what Camus takes to be the Christian response to this crisis in the first sermon of Father Paneloux, the learned Jesuit priest.  The sermon is a reasonably accurate portrayal of the orthodox Christian attitude to suffering and evil, with a strong overtone of the Deuteronomic view.  The plague is God’s deliberate judgment on the people, the priest declares, a judgment they have fully deserved because of their sin.

Dr. Rieux, the novel’s narrator and Camus’ spokesman for the virtues of rebellion, comments after the sermon that he does not take Paneloux’s remarks too seriously, as Christians are usually better than their words.  As the plague progresses, the priest comes to take a more active part in the fight against it, and he clearly moves to a practical understanding of the meaning of suffering at variance with his conventional sermon.

The crisis for the priest comes as he and Dr. Rieux witness together the death of a small child.  The agnostic doctor, in his weariness, blurts out that the child was innocent and could not be taken as a sinner being punished by God through the plague.  The priest is somewhat taken aback by the doctor’s head-on theological attack, and suggests that perhaps men should love what they cannot understand.  The doctor refuses this piety, declaring that he will never love a scheme in which children die horrible and premature deaths.  Again the priest attempts to Christianize Rieux’s rebellion, saying that as a doctor he is really working for man’s salvation.  But again Rieux refuses the priest’s importunity.  No, he says, man’s health is my goal; salvation is a big word I have never understood.

The two part amicably, but the author has clearly given the exhausted doctor the better of the exchange.  The priest has been directly attacked, even if graciously and gently, for his answer to the problem of suffering.

Rieux hates Paneloux’s assurance that the plague is God’s judgment.  In a later sermon, the priest has clearly been deeply influenced by his experience with the plague and especially by his encounter with Rieux.  The second sermon proposes, both in its tentative style and in content, a quite different solution to the problem of suffering from the early confident and conventional one.  This new solution is partly agnostic in tone; there are many things we know, and there are some things we do not know.  The suffering of sinners we can understand, but the suffering of children we cannot.  But, Paneloux says, do we give up our faith just because there are some hard parts to it?  The love of God is a hard love, and it requires utter surrender, all or nothing.  If we have no answer to the special problem of the child’s suffering, we can stand, the priest concludes, with our backs to the wall, disclaiming easy answers, and point to the suffering of the man on the cross.  Instead of an answer, which the frst sermon had offered, the priest now refuses to solve the problem and asks for submission to the mysterious will of God, whose ways are past finding out.

Father Paneloux is a rather wooden character in the novel, and his Christianity, both in the unsatisfactory first sermon, and in the more convincing second one, is a rather still affair.  Camus is really offended by it, even in its revised form.  The author’s relation to Christianity, dramatically worked out in the scene between Rieux and Paneloux, is spelled out in a most interesting way in the fragments from the address to the Dominicans I have already referred to.

Camus stands before the monks as an unbeliever and as a rebel.  But, he tells them, he does not accuse Christianity of falsehood or illusion; he simply states that he cannot accept it.  What he seems offended by is the unwillingness of Christians to enter into dialogue with unbelief.  It is not that they are wrong, apparently, but that they are timid and dishonest.  “What the world expects of Christians,” Camus says, “is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear” so that no one can possibly doubt that they are willing to take a stand, to pay up, and if necessary to get hurt.  Behind this indictment is, of course, the fact of the papal agreements with Nazism and Fascism in the earlier days of this century.

Combining these actual words of Camus with the protest of Dr. Rieux against Father Paneloux, we come up with a two-part indictment of the rebel against the Christian.  First, the Christian is accused, because of laziness or fear, of keeping silence on the momentous issues of justice and freedom.  Second, if he is not afraid, he is accused of explaining evil away, by positing some eternal harmony, and thus taking away the need to overcome present injustice.  Camus did a thesis on St. Augustine when at the university, and often refers to that other North African’s frustration in being unable to find the source of evil.  Camus admits that the source or explanation of evil cannot be found, and he very nearly says it ought not even be sought, for even the search preempts the actual mitigation of evil in the real world.  This is nicely put by Dr. Rieux when he remarks that he would rather cure than know, as if the search for understanding took away somehow the desire to cure.  This points to a deep irrationalist streak in Camus; it is perhaps Algerian rather than French.

He concludes his remarks to the Dominicans: we may not know how to explain evil, but we know what to do.  Perhaps we cannot so remake the world that children will never again be tortured, he says, but “we can reduce the number of tortured children.”  If Christians, he concludes rather bleakly, lose the virtues of rebellion and indignation that have in better times marked them, then, he says, Christians will live but authentic Christianity will die.  What does he want of the Christian?  Not a clearer intellectual strategy, but a sustained and powerful voice, interceding, along with others, for children and for men.

Camus’ view of Christianity is radically ethical, and Christian health is identified with speaking out, breaking silence, entering into the critical issues of the day on the side of the oppressed.  In securer times, we might charge him with a too narrow, not theological enough, understanding of Christianity, but today I think we probably should allow him his attack.  In the encounter between the Christian and the rebel, Camus raises two issues, or, more exactly, three: one, the problem of a just solution to the problem of suffering (the difference between the first and the second sermon of Father Paneloux); two, the silence of the church in the face of evil (the accusation in the 1948 speech); and three, the relation between one and two: if you explain evil successfully, won’t you give up the fight against it?  Here is a sophisticated, and by no means settled, indictment against Christianity.  Will not the Christian have to move much closer to the world of the rebel before any satisfactory answer can be given to any of these three issues?  Can a Christian movement toward the world of rebellion be justified, tolerated, even imagined?

In the novel, the foil to Dr. Rieux who really interests Camus is not Father Paneloux at all, but the curious, shadowy, and appealing figure of Tarrou, who works with the doctor in organizing the campaign to control the plague.  Tarrou does in fact represent Camus’ way of dealing with the religious problem.  He is the man who is not content merely with fighting, curing, rebelling.  He is more than the rebel who affirms his solidarity with the earth, and with the defeated.  What that “more” is, however, and just how the vision of Tarrou differs from that of Rieux, the author has not made wholly clear.

We can see what Camus wanted to do.  In The Rebel, we recall his approving citation of the famous cry of Van Gogh, that though he can do without God, he cannot do without something that is greater than he is, which he calls “the power to create.”  As we carefully read Rieux’s meditations after Tarrou’s death it becomes clear that when Tarrou describes himself as a saint without God, Camus does intend to assign to Tarrou something that goes beyond the world of the rebel.  The rebel is the man who is content with earth and human love.  Tarrou and the saints without God have aspired somehow beyond the rebel’s goal, but — having refused a conventional religious or mystical interpretation of that “somehow” — Tarrou doesn’t really shape up as radically different morally from Rieux himself.  After Tarrou’s death, Rieux meditates, and note the deliberate imprecision of the language: “But for those others who aspired beyond and above the human individual toward something they could not even imagine, there had been no answer.”  Camus’ saints are not fixed on God; the admirable fools like Paneloux cover that field quite adequately.  The secular saints like Tarrou, it is clear, know even less peace at the end of their lives than do those who have opted for human life and love.

So, it seems, the saint is the man who walks the way of the rebel, and a little bit more.  He is perhaps slightly more interested in understanding, in comprehension.  (“Comprehension” is the word Tarrou mysteriously used once to describe his moral code.)  But Tarrou’s search for understanding is not rejected by Rieux, as is the Christian’s search, which, we may recall, is severely attacked as a concealed escape from the task of fighting evil.  The irrelevance of Christian explanations of suffering is an unshakeable conviction of both Rieux and his creator.  But Tarrou’s search for understanding is apparently acceptable to Rieux, perhaps because it is so imprecise and inchoate.  Camus seems to intend to distinguish the moral worlds of Tarrou and Rieux.  Tarrou is a trifle more objective and passive; understanding, we might say, requires a readiness to receive, a passivity, that will always be irritating to the rebel.  The secular saint, committed to understanding the richness and color of a tragic life, is bound to seem to the rebel as indifferent to political realities, afraid, over-intellectualizing.  But beyond this, Camus never sharply distinguishes the two moral visions, perhaps because he is quite close to both men, and wants both of them to appear to bear a portion of the truth.

We will turn in a moment to the two very effective scenes between the doctor and Tarrou in which Camus dramatizes for us the tension and agreement between the rebel and the saint without God.  We should note first that there is no confrontation in the novel between the Christian and the secular saint.  This is a confrontation we will have to imagine for ourselves.  I think that the issue between the two, had Camus brought them together in the novel, would have been over the nature of man.  Can a man achieve purity in the midst of a radically impure world?  The saint, even the secular saint, is a saint precisely because he has to answer “yes” to that.  The Christian, with his acute sense of his own sin and thus the sin of all men, answers “no.”  It may be the Catholic “no” which says, in effect, “withdraw partly from the world, pray passionately for it, do some of its work, but live apart, and you may become perfectly obedient to God, and in that sense a saint.”  The Protestant “no” differs slightly.  There is no purity in the world, and no place outside the world where it can be achieved.  Therefore live fully in the world, praise God and love your neighbor there, and call upon the forgiveness of sins to heal your inescapable impurity.  In the tension between the Christian and the secular saint, this is the issue.  Camus has rejected God, but he has not rejected the possibility of sanctity; his view of man is more optimistic than either the Christian or the secular existentialist one.  He makes this very clear in his address to the Dominicans, where he says that while he is pessimistic as to human destiny, he is “optimistic as to man.”  And the novel is full of this duality – a hatred, disgust, rejection of the world, “the indifference of the sky,” along with a trust in ordinary men.  At the very close of the novel, this duality is most sharply focused.  As he looks back on the plague, and how men have dealt with it, Rieux finds much to admire in the various ways men coped with its ravages, and much to admire in men themselves, but, he adds, there is only suffering, a never-ending series of actual or moral plagues, and no peace, no final victory.

We should not linger longer on this encounter between the Christian and the secular saint.  I am convinced that the Christian must come to terms with Camus’ confidence in the possibility of sanctity in this world.  I think that the transformation of sanctity into work, the change the sixteenth century effected, leading to the once creative and now demonic conception of the sanctity of labor, is no longer an acceptable one, and that alongside doing, acting, shaping, working, the Protestant must somehow learn to wait, to receive, to play, to waste time without guilt, and, it may even be, to be pure and transparent to the God that lies beyond him and his purity.

In the first dialogue between Tarrou and Rieux, Tarrou seems to hover on the edge of things, smiling mysteriously, asking questions, knowing all, agreeing with whatever the doctor says.  There is no debate at all, only a kind of interview.  Rieux’s position is much the same as that displayed in his argument with the priest, referred to above.  If I believed in an omnipotent God, Rieux says, I would give up curing the sick, and leave that all to him — exactly as Father Paneloux rejected the doctor’s help when he fell ill with the plague.  Tarrou doesn’t argue with this rather unformed idea of Rieux, and is content to nod sagely when Rieux defines his role as that of fighting against creation as he finds it.  This means no successes, no victories.  And when Tarrou asks him who taught him all this, Rieux replies, “Suffering.”

Later in the novel, Rieux and Tarrou have another talk and in this Tarrou tells a long story about his own past.  In this story are a number of reflections of Camus’ own autobiography, especially at the point where Tarrou speaks about his fundamental decision, the one that has shaped his life, his decision never to kill, to be an innocent murderer.  At the beginning of The Rebel, the figure of the rebel is defined as one who has refused to kill.  Thus Tarrou, and not Rieux, stands for the rebel at this point.

If Tarrou is the innocent murderer, Rieux is the healer, and the distinction between the passive saint — defined by a refusal — and the active rebel-healer — defined by a fight against creation — again reappears, and may well be the only useful distinction that we can draw between the two men.  Indeed, it seems to be the case that the “rebel” of Camus’ nonfiction book is really both Rieux and Tarrou, and it might be ventured that rebellion as a general ethical category must be said to include the idea of secular sanctity.

In any case, Camus never really developed the idea of the ethical man as one who refuses to kill.  He did move toward a passionate repudiation of capital punishment, but never toward anything like a pacifist point of view.  We are tempted to ask: Is this refusal to kill an absolute ethical stand, from the sophisticated relativist?  What is the relation of the refusal-to-kill of Tarrou and The Rebel to Albert Schweitzer’s “reverence for life”?  What is its application to the contemporary problems of war, peace, and weapons?

This is a fundamental point in Camus’ definition of “the rebel,” to which both Tarrou and Rieux seem to contribute — the rebel has refused to kill, even to participate in those licensed forms of killing that modern life allows.  He has thus refused to make history, and is an exile for the stream of history-makers, or killers, or users of power.  If one refuses to make history, to kill, what is it that one does?  Not, we have already seen, go to God.  Why not?  Because, as Camus writes in The Rebel, “The toiling masses, worn out with suffering and death, are masses without God.  Our place is henceforth at their side, far from teachers, old and new.”  The rebel is a man without God because the victims of history, the defeated, the poor, the masses, are without God, and if the rebel is to stand beside them honestly and helpfully, he must also be without God.

This is an odd and fascinating point of view, and it raises for the Christian some quite fundamental questions about Christian ethics.  But we must move on.  We have tried to show that artistically the encounter between the rebel and the saint is quite successful in The Plague, but intellectually rather confused.  We began by setting the two moral images over against one another, and ended by confessing that no really important distinctions could be drawn between them.  And we wondered after all whether Camus himself did not intend that the rebel of the nonfiction essay should encompass the novel’s “rebel” as well as the novel’s “saint.”

One can apparently be both a rebel and a saint, though not, as we shall see, a Christian and a rebel.  We must draw together and fill out our portrait of the rebel in Camus’ thought.

In The Rebel Camus is not just setting forth rebellion as one particular style of life among others.  It is the fundamental ethical category.  Indeed, it defines man as man.  Rebellion is acceptance of the world, it is the fight against the suffering in the world, it is the fight against the suffering in the world, it is identification with the victims of that suffering.  The individual, rebelling, finds a community, a solidarity with others.  I rebel, Camus states, therefore we are.

We have already sketched out the encounter between the rebel and the Christian.  For the Christian today, this is an important encounter, and for this reason it is unfortunate that Camus is not at his best in portraying it.  In The Rebel, we ought to remind ourselves, the world of rebellion and the Christian world of grace are defined as mutually antagonistic.  Nietzsche is praised for attacking not merely a distorted or idolatrous God, but the God of love himself.  So, for Camus, once man questions God, he kills him.  Once man questions God, in other words, he departs at once from the Christian world of grace, and becomes a rebel.  Any man who questions God can only be a rebel; he cannot be a Christian: “…only two possible worlds can exist for the human mind: the sacred (or, to speak in Christian terms, the world of grace) and the world of rebellion.”  Camus knows a little about Catholic Christianity, and this is perhaps why he has borrowed its popular all-or-nothing apologetics (either despair or Christ; Christ was either madman or divine, etc., etc.,).  We saw this sort of thing in Paneloux’s sermons in a suaver form, and it makes a very bad argument.

The rebel, we recall, was afraid of the Christian’s claim to know, particularly at the point of the problem of suffering.  “A man can’t cure and know at the same time,” Rieux insisted.  We’d want to ask “Why not?” but we also need to admit that there are dozens of immoral and irresponsible solutions to the problem of suffering that purchase logical precision at the price of moral insensibleness and blindness.

If the rebel fears the Christian’s attempts to understand and know, he does not fear the saint’s longing for understanding, perhaps because there is very little content to that longing, beyond a generalized feeling that there may be more than earth and human love and solidarity with the victims.  Tarrou’s “beyond” is really just a restlessness and a seeking, and thus not too different from the restlessness of Rieux himself, who had sadly rejected both God and the secular substitutes.  So, the rebel says, when the Christian goes beyond earth and man, he tries to become God and he ignores man, or, if he manages to be interested in the victims, it is at the price of not obeying his principles.  Any Christian who is socially responsible is thus inconsistent.  But when the saints like Tarrou long for the secular “beyond,” Rieux can only wish them well, and he neither rejects nor misconstrues nor ignores.  For all of his interest in dialogue, Camus really never seemed to experience authentic Christian dialogue, except apparently with politically confused intellectuals like Marcel, and he apparently never really sought it out.  One is tempted to say that it is too bad Camus knew so little about Protestantism and so much about Catholicism.

Thus, the rebel is afraid of the idolatrous element in man, and avoids turning himself into a god, not by confessing a true God, but by leaving the realm of gods altogether as too perilous a moral adventure, and by confessing his desire to be merely a man alongside his neighbors on this earth.  Life on this earth will give plenty of “tears of impotence,” but the only way to live and die is to join yourself to the earth; the only way to be a man is to refuse to be a god, for Camus is convinced that a man who tries to believe in God cannot stop until he becomes that God.  Man’s mind, another Frenchman wrote, is a perpetual factory of idols, and this may have been part of what Camus meant.  Christians have known enough dehumanized Christians not to be utterly contemptuous of Camus’ harsh assurance.

The rebel, at least in his embodiment as Dr. Rieux, is perhaps a little too conscious of his own integrity, too unwilling to allow radically different moral visions to have their own validity.  Rieux is the most guilty of this self-righteousness here, Camus least so in his touching address to the Dominicans.  (I ought to record my conviction that the few pages of this address are really very close to necessary reading for any member of the younger generation today who wants to see what choosing Christianity entails.)  There is, further, a very interesting bourgeois strain in the rebel.  “The thing was to do your job as it should be done,” Rieux remarks.  Hard work, plus compassion for the victims, plus the utter absence of illusions or hope.  God and a promise of a successful future have both been abolished from the moral vision of the rebel, because both may blunt the edge of compassion.  Faith is abolished for the rebel; hope is quite absent.  But love remains: “rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.”

Rebellion, then, has to do with the most fundamental decisions that we can make.  It is about vocation, it is about politics and race.  Can it be chosen by those today who have as yet no moral image that contents them?  Can it be wedded to the image of the saint, the one who spends himself for others, quite oblivious of himself?  Where are the saints to be found today?  They are clearly not in the Temple or in the Academy.  Are they in the Street?  And how can the rebel become Christianized without falling into the insensitive, intellectualistic, irrelevant traps that Camus has set, sprung, and charted?  What would a Christian rebel look like, and how would it be possible for him to live with other Christians?  And with non-Christian rebels?  And saints?

This is the sort of moral homily that The Plague seems to elicit today.  It is the sort of serious, if nonliterary, question that many have already put to the book and to the author.  I do not for a minute suggest that the three-fold triptych of Christian-saint-rebel stands for the only available moral positions today.  As a matter of fact, in the novel itself there are at least two other forms of heroism, both of which receive a most sympathetic interpretation from Camus.  One is Grand’s loyal and self-effacing service to the cause of stopping the plague; and the other is the figure of the journalist Rambert, who had chosen happiness, and whom Rieux refused to condemn, even when Rambert was trying to escape illegally from the plague-ridden city.

We have many moral images claiming our attention today, and a few of them are more insistent, more fashionable, and potentially more successful than any of the three that the novel offers.  There is, today as always, the martyr.  He has some affinity with Tarrou and the idea of the secular saint, but necessary to the idea of martyrdom is the idea of death, giving one’s life.  Camus does not deal with martyrdom for though all the people in the city of the plague are risking death, they are not martyrs because they did not choose to stay but were compelled to stay by law.  Contemporary Christianity has little room for martyrdom, for it is not dangerous to be a Christian in our world.  But somehow even our banal world seems always to find a little room for the possibility of martyrdom, even though there is a literary tradition stemming from Dostoevsky that is profoundly suspicious of the moral health of any martyr.  In the civil rights movement, something like martyrdom is taking place, and there will be a good deal more of the young instructing their elders on these matters, one suspects.  The martyr needs the danger of death, and one of the reasons the act of martyrdom is so difficult and rare is that we live in a culture that thinks it has abolished both the danger and the fear of death.

The playboy is another moral image still holding on in the urban centers of America.  It has been popular even with antimoralistic Christians and clergymen, and especially with large groups of young men and women unable to transcend the moral styles of fraternity and sorority life.  The fall of the playboy as a way of life, which we are beginning to witness, is not due to the denunciations of the righteous or the religious.  These denunciations have been nearly as silly as playboyism itself.  It is primarily laughter at it and boredom with it that has begun to cause the decline of the power of playboyism, and the emergence of a few young men and women who have on their minds one or two other matters besides innocent seduction.  But the life of the sensualist will always have its appeal; it is encouraged by the structure and ideology of American higher education, and if a magazine editor doesn’t come along to provide its marching orders, someone else equally unqualified will.

Related to the saint, though in somewhat sharper focus than Tarrou and the saint without God of Camus, is a moral image that might be described as that of the fool or the jester.  Its mark is not that overpraised virtue, the sense of humor, though there is a good deal of laughter here.  Its mark is innocence.  The fool or jester is always in contrast to power and success, and his function, as in Lear, is to comment on the hollowness of what the conventional world values.  Man as the innocent one is to the fore here: the sucker, the fall guy.  There is a strain of this in the radical teaching of Jesus; this vision fascinated Dostoevsky, and his Prince Myshkin is a classical portrait of the type.  And Christians will always be fairly close to this position (which probably needs a better public relations campaign that it tends to get in our day), whenever they see that at times the world is mastered as well by waiting, receiving, suffering, getting hurt, as by action, politics, and shaping.

The fertile and fascinating power of Albert Camus will be reported on for a good many years by men of many interests.  The specific moral and religious line I have taken is admittedly an incomplete interpretation of the man and his work, and should not be taken as an adequate literary criticism at all.  But I believe that I have described a part of the author’s intent, and I know I have described the way a whole generation of open and restless young men and women have read, reread, and acted upon the life and work of Albert Camus.