Justified True Belief

(●) The novelist who stated the case against a meaningful universe more honestly than almost anyone, and who then asked Christians to answer him out loud. + In 1948 a group of Dominican friars in Paris, members of the Catholic order founded to preach and to argue, invited an unbeliever to come and tell them, to their faces, what the world expected of Christians. The man who accepted was in his mid-thirties, the author of a novel about a murder on an Algerian beach and an essay about a man rolling a rock uphill forever. He stood up in their monastery and told them he would not pretend to be one of them, that he did not share their hope, and that he wished they would say what they believed plainly enough to leave the simplest man in no doubt. That is the shape of Albert Camus’ whole relationship with the Christian faith, and it is why Christians still have reason to read him. He was not secretly religious, and nobody should pretend otherwise on his behalf. What he did instead is the one thing an honest opponent can do that is worth more than agreement: he took the question seriously, he refused the cheap versions of his own position, and he held the church to its own standard rather than to a lower one. The life behind that hour in the monastery was short and crowded. He lost his father before he could remember him, grew up in three rooms in a poor quarter of Algiers with a mother who could neither read nor hear well, caught tuberculosis at seventeen, joined the French Resistance, won the Nobel Prize at forty-four, and died in a car crash two years later with an unused train ticket in his pocket. He was forty-six.

(●) 1913 AD: Born on a farm estate in French Algeria, and fatherless within a year. + Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 at Mondovi, a wine-growing settlement in the east of French Algeria that is now the town of Dréan. His father Lucien was a cellarman on the estate, a poor Frenchman of the kind the colony was full of. Within the year France was at war. Lucien was called up, wounded at the Battle of the Marne, and died of his wounds in a hospital at Saint-Brieuc on 11 October 1914. His son was eleven months old and would later say he knew his father only through two or three sentences other people had repeated to him. The widow took her two boys to her mother’s flat in Belcourt, a working quarter of Algiers: three rooms, no running water, no books. Catherine Camus was of Spanish descent, partly deaf, and could neither read nor write, and she cleaned other people’s houses for a living. Her son adored her. He also could never talk to her about anything that mattered to him, and that silence between two people who loved each other is somewhere underneath almost everything he wrote. He was baptized a Catholic as an infant, in the ordinary way of such families, and nothing followed from it. What he had instead of religion, and never stopped being grateful for, was the Mediterranean: sun, sea, football, and a body that worked.

(●) 1924 AD: A primary school teacher noticed him, and argued his family into letting him go on. + Boys from Belcourt left school at fourteen and went to work. The reason Camus did not is a schoolmaster named Louis Germain, who taught him in his last year at the communal school, kept him behind for free coaching, and then went to the flat to persuade his grandmother that the boy should sit the scholarship examination for the lycée, the state secondary school that carried a boy on toward a university. Camus passed, and in the autumn of 1924 he entered a world where the other boys had bookshelves at home. Thirty-three years later, a month after the Nobel Prize was announced, he wrote to Germain: "But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you." And then, in the sentence that everyone remembers: "Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened." The letter is dated 19 November 1957 and is printed at the end of The First Man (David Hapgood’s translation). He dedicated the published Nobel addresses to his old teacher. Here is the part that matters for reading him later. Camus came out of that childhood without bitterness about it and without romance about it either. He never wrote as a man who had been cheated. He wrote as a man who had been poor, had been happy anyway, and therefore did not believe that happiness has to be bought with a philosophy.

(●) 1930 AD: Tuberculosis at seventeen closed the future he had planned and turned him toward philosophy, and to Augustine in particular. + He kept goal for Racing Universitaire d’Alger, and a goalkeeper is the one player on the pitch who is alone and cannot pass the problem on. In 1930 he began coughing blood. Tuberculosis in 1930 was a death sentence that took its time: no cure existed, treatment meant rest and altitude and hope, and the disease came back at him for the rest of his life. It ended the football immediately. It also, years afterward, barred him from sitting the agrégation, the competitive examination that opened a French teaching career, because candidates had to be certified healthy. So a boy who had every reason to expect a long ordinary life was told at seventeen that his body was unreliable and that he might not have one. He did not take this as an argument for despair. He took it as a fact to be held steadily, and holding an unwelcome fact steadily, without flinching and without dressing it up, became the thing he valued most in a mind. What the illness left him with, once the pitch was closed to him, was books. He read philosophy at the University of Algiers under Jean Grenier, and in 1936 submitted the dissertation for his diplôme d’études supérieures, the higher diploma a French student took after the first degree: Métaphysique chrétienne et néoplatonisme, "Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism." Neoplatonism is the late pagan philosophy that taught that everything real flows out from one perfect source, the way light pours off a lamp and thins as it travels, and the subject of the dissertation was the road that runs from Plotinus, the greatest of the pagan Neoplatonists, to Augustine, the North African bishop who became the West’s greatest theologian. Camus and Augustine were born about thirty miles apart, sixteen centuries apart, and the young man knew it. He spent that year of his life reading, closely and sympathetically, the Christian thinker who had asked his questions first.

(●) 1940 AD: He crossed to France as the war closed in, edited a Resistance paper, and published The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. + Before the war he was a journalist in Algiers for Alger républicain, and in 1939 he ran a series called "Misère de la Kabylie," the misery of Kabylia, on the starvation of Berber villagers under French administration. It was accurate, it was unwelcome, and it helped get the paper shut down and Camus blacklisted in the colony. He was twenty-five. He went to Paris in March 1940 to work on a newspaper, then back to Algeria, then to France again in 1942, and this time he stayed, kept there by the German occupation and by his own lungs. In 1942 Gallimard published L’Étranger, The Stranger, the short flat novel about a man who shoots an Arab on a beach and is condemned less for the killing than for not weeping at his mother’s funeral, and Le Mythe de Sisyphe, The Myth of Sisyphus, the essay that gave the word "absurd" its twentieth-century meaning. In 1943 he joined the Resistance network Combat and began writing for its clandestine newspaper, carrying copy and proofs under a false identity card while the Gestapo hunted the press. When Paris was liberated in August 1944, Combat came out into the open with Camus as its editor, and the readers who had been clipping those anonymous editorials discovered who had written them. He was thirty, and for a few years he was the conscience of literate France. It is worth holding on to this when reading the philosophy: the man who wrote that the universe is silent was not sitting comfortably while he wrote it.

(●) 1947 AD: The Plague made him famous, and his refusal to excuse Soviet terror cost him his friends. + In June 1947 he published La Peste, The Plague: an epidemic seals the Algerian city of Oran, and a doctor, a priest, a journalist and a stranger each decide what to do about it. Everyone read it as the occupation in disguise, which it partly is, and it sold enormously. Then came the quarrel that defined the rest of his life. Camus had watched the Resistance dissolve into a peace in which the intellectual Left excused Soviet labor camps as the cost of history. He would not. In 1946 he published a series in Combat called "Neither Victims nor Executioners," arguing that a man may fight and still refuse to become a murderer. In 1951 he made the case at book length in L’Homme révolté, The Rebel: revolutions that promise a perfect future end up feeding the present to it, and any cause that permits the killing of the innocent has already lost whatever it was defending. Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal reviewed the book savagely in 1952, Camus replied, Sartre answered in print, and a friendship of nine years ended in public. Camus was mocked as a sentimental moralist, a beautiful soul who did not understand history. He was largely alone for the next decade, and largely right. None of which made him easy to live with. In these same years he drank, chased women, and wrecked a marriage that was already fragile, and La Chute, The Fall, published in 1956, is a self-portrait written with a knife.

(●) 1957 AD: The Nobel Prize arrived in the middle of a war in which he could not take a side. + The Algerian war began in 1954 and tore him in half. He was a Frenchman of Algeria who had spent his youth documenting what French rule did to Arabs and Berbers, and whose illiterate mother still lived in Algiers on a tram route. In January 1956 he went to Algiers and appealed publicly for a civil truce: both sides to spare civilians, whatever else they did. A crowd of Europeans surrounded the building and shouted for his death while he spoke. Almost nobody wanted a man who would not pick a flag. On 17 October 1957 the Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was forty-four when he received it that December, and he thought it had come to him far too early. At a meeting with students in Stockholm on 12 December an Algerian challenged him for his silence, and Camus answered that he had always condemned terror, that he must also condemn a terrorism that struck blindly in the streets of Algiers and might strike his own mother on a tram, and that if that was justice he preferred his mother. The newspaper report compressed it into "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice," and the compressed version followed him for the rest of his life and long after it. The fuller sentence is the one worth weighing, and it is not a retreat from justice but a refusal to call the killing of one’s mother by that name. The same year he published Reflections on the Guillotine, the essay against capital punishment that helped end it in France, written out of the one story his mother told him about the father he never knew: Lucien Camus had gone before dawn to watch an execution, believing the murderer deserved it, and had come home and vomited.

(●) 1960 AD: He died on a straight road, with an unused train ticket in his pocket. + On 4 January 1960 Camus was riding back to Paris from the south of France in a Facel Vega driven by his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard. On a straight stretch of the Route nationale 5 near Villeblevin, not far from Sens, the car left the road and hit a plane tree. Camus was killed instantly. Gallimard died a few days later. In Camus’ coat was a train ticket he had bought and decided not to use. A man who had written that the world is indifferent and that death is arbitrary was killed by an arbitrary death at forty-six, and every obituary said so. He would have found the irony obvious and uninteresting. In the mud near the wreck lay a briefcase holding a hundred and forty-four handwritten pages of an unfinished novel called Le Premier Homme, The First Man: the story of a boy in Belcourt, his silent mother, his schoolmaster, and a father he goes looking for in a war cemetery and finds only as a name on a stone. His daughter published it in 1994, thirty-four years later, and it turned out to be the warmest thing he ever wrote.

What He Taught

(T1) We ask the world what it all means, and the world does not answer; that mismatch is the absurd. + Most weeks nobody thinks about this. You get up, you go to work, Monday follows Sunday, and the rhythm carries you. Then something stops it. A diagnosis, a death, or nothing dramatic at all, just a Tuesday when the whole routine suddenly looks like scenery, and the question arrives: what is any of this actually for? Camus thought that moment was the beginning of honest thinking, and that most philosophy exists to help people get past it quickly. He gave the mismatch a name: the absurd. It is worth being exact, because the word has drifted. Camus does not mean that life is silly, and he does not mean that the world is chaotic. He means a relationship between two things, each reasonable on its own. On one side there is a human being who needs the world to make sense and cannot stop needing it. On the other side there is a universe that is not hostile, merely mute. The absurd is neither of those two alone. It is the gap where they meet, "born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world," and it disappears the moment you let go of either side. That is why he thought the question of suicide was the first question in philosophy rather than a morbid aside. If there is no answer to the silence, does a person have any reason to keep going? He asks it plainly and he spends the rest of the essay refusing to say yes for any comfortable reason. A Christian reader should notice how much of this a believer can affirm. Scripture also says that the world as we find it is not right, that it groans, that our longing outruns anything here (Romans 8:22–23). What Camus denies is that the longing is evidence of anything. He treats the ache as a brute fact about us, and there he and the gospel are already parting.

(Q) "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." + Source: Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, opening lines of "An Absurd Reasoning" (Justin O’Brien translation, 1955). The opening lines of the book, finished in Oran in February 1941 by a man in his twenties with tuberculosis and published the next year in occupied Paris. He goes on to say that he has never seen anyone die for a philosophical proof, but has seen many people die because they judged that life was not worth living, so the meaning of life is the urgent question and the rest can wait (T1).

(T2) A leap to God is an escape from the question, not an answer to it. + This is the charge a Christian has most reason to hear from Camus, and it deserves to be heard at full strength before anything is said back to it. Having named the absurd, he turns on the thinkers who had got there before him and asks what they did next. Three of them get named. Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish writer who had described the anguish of faith better than anyone, ended by embracing the very thing he could not understand. Lev Chestov, a Russian religious philosopher, said in effect that God is precisely what human judgment cannot reach: "we turn toward God only to obtain the impossible." Karl Jaspers, a German philosopher, pushed his reasoning until it broke down, and then took the breakdown itself as the sign of something waiting on the far side, rather as a traveller who finds every road blocked might conclude that the country beyond is being guarded. Camus calls all three moves by one name, and it is a deliberately shocking one: philosophical suicide. Not the killing of a body, but the killing of a mind, a thought that reaches its own limit and then abolishes itself rather than stand there. The accusation is not that faith is false. It is that faith is a change of subject. You ask whether a person can live with the silence, and the answer comes back that the silence is really a voice. "This leap is an escape," he writes of Chestov. Of Kierkegaard he says something crueler and sadder: "Kierkegaard wants to be cured." A Christian can answer this, and should, but only after granting what is true in it. Camus is exactly right about a faith that is merely a refusal to look. He is wrong that this is what Christian faith has to be. The New Testament does not offer a leap away from evidence; it stakes everything on a public event and invites the check: if Christ has not been raised, says Paul, then the whole thing is empty and Christians are to be pitied (1 Corinthians 15:17, 19). That is not a mind abolishing itself. That is a claim with a way to be wrong. Camus never engaged that version, and the honest thing to say is that it was not much on offer in the French Catholicism he knew.

(Q) "I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone." + Source: Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, "Philosophical Suicide" (Justin O’Brien translation, 1955). He has been tracking the leap back to the one step that makes it work. That step runs: here is something that surpasses me, therefore it must be more than human. Camus’ answer is that the "therefore" is superfluous, because a thing can outrun my understanding without being divine. Just before the sentence he writes that seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. His reply is not a denial that anything lies beyond; it is a refusal to build on what he cannot see. "If I recognize the limits of the reason," he adds, "I do not therefore negate it" (T2).

(T3) The man who says no to his master discovers a value he shares with every other human being. + Picture a workman who has taken orders for twenty years, a good many of them worse than the one he gets on a Tuesday morning, and who this time puts down his tools and says no. The Rebel opens on exactly that man, and Camus asks what he has just done. He has drawn a line, which means he thinks there is something on his side of it that ought not to be crossed. And he did not invent that something on the spot. He is appealing to it. This is the turn that saves Camus from the nihilism he is usually filed under. Nihilism is the view that there are no real values and therefore nothing is forbidden; Camus spent his last decade arguing that his own starting point does not lead there. In the absurd, he says, suffering is private. In rebellion it becomes shared, because the workman who refuses on his own behalf has appealed to something he must grant to every other person as well. The individual protest turns out to have a whole race inside it. He puts it as a deliberate rewrite of Descartes’ famous proof of his own existence from the fact that he was thinking: "I rebel, therefore we exist." And a value that belongs to everyone sets a limit on what the rebel may do, which is the hardest half of the book. If the reason I refuse is that persons may not be treated as material, then I may not treat persons as material either, and no promised future licenses it. That is the argument that finished him with the Left in 1951 and is the reason he wears better now than the people who laughed. Christians should recognize the shape of it immediately, and should also notice the load-bearing beam that is missing: Camus needs there to be something about a human being that may not be violated, and he has no account of where that comes from. Scripture has one, and it is the first page (Genesis 1:27).

(Q) "I rebel, therefore we exist," said the slave. + Source: Albert Camus, The Rebel, Part Three, "Historical Rebellion," closing section "Rebellion and Revolution" (Anthony Bower translation, 1953). The formula is first set down at the end of Part One, where Camus has just said that rebellion does in ordinary life what Descartes’ cogito, the "I think, therefore I am," does in thought: it is the first thing a man can be sure of. The difference is that it does not leave him alone with it, because the value he has appealed to belongs to everyone else as well. Here, hundreds of pages later, he puts the formula in the slave’s mouth again and traces what the next two centuries did with it. Revolt against a human master grew into revolt against the whole scheme of things, which is what Camus means by metaphysical rebellion, and that larger revolt added a clause of its own: "we are alone." On that addition, he argues, the revolutions of the twentieth century built their camps (T3).

(T4) A scheme of things in which children are tortured is not to be loved, whatever else is true of it. + Here Camus stops arguing and writes a scene, and the scene has done more damage to easy theology than the arguments ever did. In The Plague, the Jesuit Father Paneloux has already preached one sermon telling the sealed city that the pestilence is the flail of God and that they have earned it. Then a magistrate’s small son catches the plague, and Paneloux stands at the bedside for the whole of it beside Dr Rieux, who does not believe in God and is trying every drug he has. The child takes a long time to die. Afterwards the two men are in the schoolyard and Rieux, who has been up for weeks, says something furious. Paneloux, gently and with no triumph in it, offers the oldest answer there is: perhaps we should love what we cannot understand. Rieux will not have it. Notice how Camus has set this up, because it is the measure of the man. He could have made the priest a fool or a hypocrite. Instead Paneloux is brave, works in the wards, and goes on to preach a second sermon in which he faces the dead child squarely and asks his people to believe all or to deny all. Camus gives him the better exit line of the exchange: "Ah, doctor, I’ve just realized what is meant by ‘grace.’" And he lets Paneloux settle it: the two of them are working side by side for something that unites them, "beyond blasphemy and prayers." This is the problem of evil in its sharpest form, which is not an equation but a room with a bed in it. The Christian answer is not that the death was good, and any answer that says so should be abandoned. It is that God has not stayed outside the room: the cry from the cross is the same cry, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46), and the promise is not an explanation but an ending, in which he wipes away every tear and death is no more (Revelation 21:4). Camus knew that answer and did not take it. What he would not do is pretend the question was smaller than it is, and Christians who have watched a child die should be slower than most to hold that against him.

(Q) "No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture." + Source: Albert Camus, The Plague, Part Four (Stuart Gilbert translation, 1948). Dr Rieux answers Father Paneloux in the schoolyard, minutes after the death of Judge Othon’s son. Paneloux has just said that the thing is revolting because it passes our understanding, "but perhaps we should love what we cannot understand" (T4).

(T5) Take away God and the guilt stays; only the forgiveness goes. + Camus’ last finished novel is the one his admirers talk about least, and it is the one a Christian should read first. The Fall is a monologue. A man called Jean-Baptiste Clamence buttonholes a stranger in an Amsterdam bar and tells him his life over five days. He had been a successful Paris defence lawyer with a private income of good deeds: he gave up his seat, helped the blind across the street, took the cases nobody would pay for, and enjoyed every minute of the view from up there. Then, crossing a bridge over the Seine one November night, he passed a young woman leaning on the rail, walked on, heard the sound of a body hitting the water and a cry repeated several times as it went downstream, and kept walking. Nobody ever knew. Nothing happened to him at all. And the whole edifice came down anyway, because he had found out what he was. What Clamence does next is the invention of the book. He calls himself a judge-penitent: a man who confesses his own sins at length and in public, in order to earn the right to accuse everybody else. Hearing him, you slowly understand that the stranger in the bar is you. "Don’t wait for the Last Judgment," he says. "It takes place every day." Camus is showing what is left standing when God goes: not freedom, but a courtroom with no judge and no acquittal, in which everyone is guilty, everyone knows it, and the only available career is to get your confession in first so you can start prosecuting. Clamence says he would rather see religion as a "laundering venture," which it was once, briefly, and his complaint is that the laundry closed. Scripture agrees with his diagnosis exactly and then says the thing he cannot: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us" (1 John 1:8), and then, one verse later, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). A confession with nobody to hear it is what Clamence has, and it is a description of hell.

(Q) "I’ll tell you a big secret, mon cher. Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day." + Source: Albert Camus, The Fall (Justin O’Brien translation, 1957). Mon cher is French for "my dear fellow," one of the endearments Clamence uses on the stranger he is dismantling. He has just said he is inclined to see religion as "a huge laundering venture," which is what it was once but briefly, "for exactly three years," and has not been since. The joke is about the public ministry of Jesus, and it is a bleak one (T5).

(Q) "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." + Source: Albert Camus, "The Unbeliever and Christians," an address at the Dominican Monastery of Latour-Maubourg, Paris, 1948; in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (Justin O’Brien translation). He has just refused to soften anything for the occasion: "I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence." Earlier in the same address he had laid down his terms, among them that he would never start from the supposition that Christian truth is illusory, "but merely from the fact that I could not accept it."

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He asked the church for plain speech, and the request has outlived the quarrel that prompted it. + The 1948 address to the Dominicans is a short piece and half of it is housekeeping: Camus laying down the terms on which he will talk. He will not pretend to a faith he lacks. He will not flatter. He will not soften his mind or ask them to soften theirs, because "the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain what they are and speak their minds." Then, having cleared the ground, he tells them what he actually came to say, and it is a complaint about volume. During the war, he says, he waited for a great voice to speak from Rome, and millions of men like him never heard it. He has since been told that the condemnation was in fact issued, though in the language of papal encyclicals, the formal letters a pope addresses to the whole church, "which is not at all clear." His verdict is one sentence long and Christians have been quoting it against themselves ever since: "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." He was capable of the same directness the other way. When the Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel attacked his play State of Siege for setting its terror in Spain rather than somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, Camus answered in Combat with "Why Spain?": France had not yet expiated its own share in Franco’s victory, and a man who keeps quiet about one terror the better to fight another has given away the only thing a writer is for. "There are some of us who do not want to keep silent about anything." Camus argued with Christians as though they were worth arguing with, which is a form of respect that is easy to miss when the arguing is loud.

(†) Christian writers took The Plague as the question their theology had to be able to survive. + The most sustained Christian reading of Camus came from an unlikely quarter: a Trappist monk in Kentucky. Trappists are Cistercians of the strict observance, which means an order that keeps silence, rises for prayer in the small hours and works its own land, and that is a long way from a table in a Paris café. Thomas Merton, whose Seven Storey Mountain had made him the best-known monk in America, spent the last years of his life reading Camus and wrote seven essays on him, gathered as a section of their own in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton. One of them, "Albert Camus and the Church," appeared in The Catholic Worker in December 1966 and takes up the Latour-Maubourg address to the Dominicans directly, treating the demand for plain speech as a summons the church had not yet answered. Merton read The Plague as "a protest against all forms of passive submission to unhappiness and unmeaning," which is a Christian reading and a fair one, and he said of Camus that here was a man "with whom my heart agreed." Why a monk should care is not hard to see. Camus had written the priest in that novel as a serious man. Father Paneloux is not the village idiot of unbelieving fiction; he preaches a bad sermon, watches a child die, preaches a harder and better one, works in the wards until he falls ill himself, and dies holding a crucifix, his record card marked "Doubtful case." A Christian reader who wants to complain about the portrait has to reckon with the fact that the first sermon Camus put in his mouth has been preached from real pulpits in real epidemics, and that the correction Camus makes to it is the correction Scripture makes to Job’s friends. So the book became, and remains, a standard text wherever Christians take up the problem of evil: not because it settles anything, but because it states the objection in a form that cannot be answered with a diagram. Any theodicy, meaning an attempted justification of God’s goodness in the face of suffering, that cannot be said out loud in the schoolyard after that child dies is not worth saying anywhere.

(†) Christians have been eager to claim him, and the evidence for a late conversion is thin. + Camus is the sort of unbeliever believers want on their side, and the wanting has produced some poor history. In 2000, an American Methodist minister named Howard Mumma published Albert Camus and the Minister, an account of conversations he said he had with Camus at the American Church in Paris in the late 1950s, in which Camus is described as drawn to the faith and asking about baptism. Mumma was ninety-one and writing from memory of events forty years past. No trace of the meetings has turned up in Camus’ notebooks or his letters, his biographers do not record them, and the book should be read as one old man’s recollection rather than as evidence. A reader who wants to know what Camus thought about Christianity has better sources, all of them published in his lifetime and none of them ambiguous. The honest summary is the one he gave the Dominicans. He did not think Christianity was obviously false; he said so, unprompted, in a room full of friars. He simply could not accept it, and he said that too. Both halves of the sentence are his, and taking one without the other is the kind of handling he spent his life objecting to.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the leap he described, the value he borrowed, and the forgiveness he could not find. + Camus deserves the disagreement stated at full strength, which is what he asked for. - The leap is not the only door. His charge of "philosophical suicide" lands on a faith that arrives by abandoning the mind, and the New Testament does not arrive that way. Paul rests the entire case on a datable public event and names the conditions under which it collapses: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). Peter tells ordinary Christians to be ready with a reason (1 Peter 3:15). Camus was answering Kierkegaard and Chestov, and against them he had a point; he was not answering this. - Rebellion needs a floor it cannot supply. The whole argument of The Rebel turns on there being something in a human being that must not be violated, and Camus takes it as given. Where would such a thing come from, in a universe that is merely silent? Scripture answers with a fact about origins rather than a feeling about worth: every person is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), which is why the line the rebel draws is really there and not just felt. - Guilt without absolution is a diagnosis, not a resting place. Clamence is right that the judgment happens daily and right that he cannot get clean. What he lacks is a judge who forgives, and the offer he refuses to look for is the one thing that would end his monologue (1 John 1:9). - Hope is the difference, and Camus said so himself. "I do not share your hope." He was exact: the divide is not about the evil in the world, which he and the church describe almost identically, but about whether anything is going to be done about it. Paul concedes the stakes without blinking: "If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied" (1 Corinthians 15:19), and then, "But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Corinthians 15:20). Sisyphus keeps the rock, and is asked to be happy anyway. The Christian claim is that the rock has been taken away. None of this makes Camus a lesser man than his readers. It makes him a witness of a particular kind: someone who looked hard at a world without God, reported what he saw with great accuracy, and refused every consolation on the way, including the ones his fellow atheists were handing round. The church has always needed people like that, and has usually treated them badly. Camus asked only to be answered clearly. Two thousand years of Christian thought ought to be able to manage it.