Albert Camus (1913—1960) - Richard Curtis

at his local haunt, a sailor’s bar near Amsterdam’s red light district, where, somewhat in
the manner of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, he recounts his story to whoever will hear it.
In the final sections of the novel, amid distinctly Christian imagery and symbolism, he
declares his crucial insight that, despite our pretensions to righteousness, everyone is
guilty. Hence no human being has the right to pass final moral judgment on another.
In a final twist, Clamence asserts that his acid self-portrait is also a mirror for his
contemporaries. Hence his confession is also an accusation – not only of his nameless
companion (who serves as the mute auditor for his monologue) but ultimately of the
hypocrite lecteur as well.
v. Christianity vs. “Paganism”
The theme of guilt and innocence in Camus’ writings relates closely to another recurrent
tension in his thought: the opposition of Christian and pagan ideas and influences. At
heart a nature-worshipper, and by instinct a skeptic and non-believer, Camus nevertheless
retained a lifelong interest and respect for Christian philosophy and literature. In
particular, he seems to have recognized St. Augustine and Kierkegaard as intellectual
kinsmen and writers with whom he shared a common passion for controversy, literary
flourish, self-scrutiny, and self-dramatization. Christian images, symbols, and allusions
abound in all his work (probably more so than in the writing of any other avowed atheist
in modern literature), and Christian themes – judgment, forgiveness, despair, sacrifice,
passion, etc. – permeate the novels. (Mersault and Clamence, it is worth noting, are
presented not just as sinners, devils, and outcasts, but in several instances explicitly, and
not entirely ironically, as Christ figures.)
Meanwhile alongside and against this leitmotif of Christian images and themes, Camus
sets the main components of his essentially pagan world view. Like Nietzsche, he
maintains a special admiration for Greek heroic values and pessimism and for classical
virtues like courage and honor. What might be termed Romantic values also merit
particular esteem within his philosophy: passion, absorption in being, sensory experience,
the glory of the moment, the beauty of the world.
As a result of this duality of influence, Camus’ basic philosophical problem becomes how
to reconcile his Augustinian sense of original sin (universal guilt) and rampant moral evil
with his personal ideal of pagan primitivism (universal innocence) and his conviction that
the natural world and our life in it have intrinsic beauty and value. Can an absurd world
have intrinsic value? Is authentic pessimism compatible with the view that there is an
essential dignity to human life? Such questions raise the possibility that there may be
deep logical inconsistencies within Camus’ philosophy, and some critics (notably Sartre)
have suggested that these inconsistencies cannot be surmounted except through some sort
of Kierkegaardian leap of faith on Camus’ part – in this case a leap leading to a belief not
in God, but in man.
Such a leap is certainly implied in an oft-quoted remark from Camus’ “Letter to a
German Friend,” where he wrote: “I continue to believe that this world has no
16