Albert Camus, Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism. Trans. R. Srigley.

Columbia and London:

University of Missouri Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8262-1753-0. 148 pp.

The work translated here is Camus' thesis for the diplôme d'études supérieures, roughly the
equivalent of a American master's thesis, submitted in 1936 to fulfill the final requirement for his
undergraduate degree at the University of Algiers, when he was 24. The handwritten title on a surviving
typescript calls it Hellenism and Christianity: Plotinus and St. Augustine, which gives a slightly better
indication of the young author's preoccupations. He aims to find what is original about Christianity,
and then how it was combined with Greek reason, via Augustine's appropriation of Plotinian
Neoplatonism, to produce both doctrinal Christianity and Christian metaphysics. The work has four
chapters, titled "Evangelical Christianity" (on the original Christian Gospel), "Gnosis," "Mystic
Reason" (on Plotinus) and "Augustine." It is not a significant contribution to Augustine scholarship. It
is an intriguing episode in the long history of appropriations of Augustine's thought, opening a window
on the scholarly basis of Camus lifelong attraction to and rejection of Catholic Christianity, which he
largely identified with Augustinianism.

As scholarship, it is apprentice-work, both derivative and not quite reliable. On the other hand, as
Camus' first engagement with themes that would remain central to his own philosophy, it is fascinating.
Here one sees Camus operating as patristic scholar, quoting Scripture, the Apostolic Fathers, Justin
Martyr, Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and Athanasius (interestingly, not Irenaeus or
any of the Greek fathers after Athanasius), as well as Plotinus, all in French, and Augustine, mostly in
Latin (often inexact). He is informed by the major French scholarship on late antiquity (De Faye,
Cumont, Arnou, Bréhier, Guitton, Boyer) before the era of réssourcement. He sees Augustine's
Neoplatonism as an unlikely fusion of incompatible commitments, a "second revelation" that combines
the Christian obsession with evil and salvation, sin and grace, with a Hellenic emphasis on coherence,
order, limit and reason.

Camus identifies the Incarnation as the "center of Christian thought" (p. 46) as well as its
"irreducible originality" (p. 44). But for Camus, Incarnation does not signal a divine commitment to
the goodness of the material world but hope for a spiritual kingdom in which to find salvation from its
evils, sin and especially death. Its meaning is summed up in the cross, "the terrifying image of torture
that Christianity has erected as a symbol" (p. 48). One hears Camus' own preoccupation with the
problem of death in his description of early Christian pessimism in the face of "the humiliation and
anguish of the flesh" and "the physical terror before this appalling outcome" of death (p. 47).

Camus' counter-portrait of Hellenism is strikingly incoherent. Much of the contrast he develops

between Christianity and Hellenism depends on the old Schillerian portrait of the cheerful, innocent
Greeks, "the Greece of light" as he calls it (p. 40), appealing explicitly to a Mediterranean sensibility, a
love of light and limit and reason that recalls Camus' early lyrical essays, written about this time, with
their celebration of a hedonistic life lived "without appeal," without metaphysical comfort in the harsh,
lucid sunlight of his beloved Algeria. But at the same time Camus was also absorbing the newer,
Nietzschean portrait of "the Greece of darkness," which he takes to be a pessimistic strand of Hellenism
represented by the Greek mystery cults and strengthened by the influx of oriental religions in the
Roman empire. This dark side of Hellenism, with its deep desire for God, opens the Mediterranean
world to the Christian Gospel.

Gnosticism represents for Camus a kind of misfire, an failed attempt to combine Christianity and
Hellenism by solving Christian problems of salvation using Greek formulas of knowledge. Plotinus, on
the other hand, prepares the way for Augustine's fusion of Hellenism and Christianity by softening
Hellenic reason, shifting it from the stark lucidity of the principle of non-contradiction to the mediating
power of the concept of participation. This relaxation of the harsh light of reason, making room for an
emotional desire for God to be cast in Greek logical forms, is also essential to the Athanasian doctrine
of the Trinity as Camus understands it.

Then comes Augustine, like an Algerian from Camus' lyrical essays, "highly passionate, sensual. .
. Greek in his need for coherence, Christian in the anxieties of his sensitivities" (p. 116f). His concept
of the intelligible Word is thoroughly Plotinian, but the union of Word with flesh in the Incarnation is of
course miraculous, contradictory, a sheer fact of history--in a word, Christian (p. 126). Moreover,
Augustine makes a dogma of the Christian sense of faith as emotional dependence, giving us the
doctrines of original sin and an arbitrary, predestined grace. Ever afterward, the term "grace," with its
overtones of human inadequacy, humiliation and dependence on God, sums up everything Camus finds
objectionable in Christianity.

A long translator's introduction sets this early work in the context of Camus' oeuvre, particularly
The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. It offers an alternative to the interpretation of Joseph McBride,
whose book Albert Camus: Philosopher and Littérateur (1992) includes the only previous English
translation of the text. McBride's Camus is more familiar--the atheist whom Christians love, because
his philosophy of the absurd rests on the longing for an ultimate intelligibility that is missing from the
world only because God does not exist. Srigley's Camus is more Nietzschean, less captive to nostalgia
for Christianity, looking to the ancient Greeks as an alternative both to Christianity and to its offspring,
modernity. The incoherences of Camus' immature scholarship lend support to both views, but in the
end a Nietzschean interpretation seems a better fit. Young Camus clearly does not like the murky
emotional dependence he sees in Christian faith and grace; its only attraction is the promise of a
solution for the problem of death, which he evidently treats, already in this text, as a temptation to be
resisted in the name of lucidity. In his concluding portrait of Augustine, his fellow Algerian converted
to a new faith, he sums up all the emotional and metaphysical power he rejects.

Phillip Cary
Eastern University