|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Albert Camus: Deprived of Grace
| Article
# : |
16192 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1989 |
7,987 Words |
| Author
: |
James V. Schall
James V. Schall is associate professor of government at
Georgetown University. His most recent work is entitled the
Politics of Heaven and Hell. |
A cartoon in the New Yorker showed a rather uppity couple leaving an elegant party, with host and hostess still seen in the doorway happily waving them good-bye. Some distance down the front walk, out of earshot, the vexed wife turned to her obviously self-satisfied husband, to reprove him with some acerbity: "You misquoted St. Thomas Aquinas, Albert Camus, and me." Needless to say, we can speculate, in these circumstances, which was the more faulty citation. But the juxtaposition of Thomas Aquinas and Albert Camus is, in the present context, fortuitous.
Indeed, Camus' great work on modern intellectual history, The Rebel, his penetrating prophecy of Western decadence, reminds us, in an odd way, of nothing so much as a book by perhaps Aquinas' greatest biographer, namely G.K. Chesterton's Heretics. I say that The Rebel reminds us of Heretics because, in an odd sort of way, both books are accounts of where exactly erroneous intellectual positions lead, first in the mind and then in reality. The only difference is that Camus, unlike Chesterton, never arrived at an Orthodoxy or a St. Thomas Aquinas. Hence, Camus' world is filled with a kind of heartrending urgency to discover a viable substitute for what is already known in faith. Yet Camus retained a quiet refusal to draw specifically revelational conclusions from his own premises. In this, he may have been, in his own terms, either ungenerous or ungraced. He was never unintelligent.
Chesterton held that, were it not already invented, he himself would have had to discover Christianity. For Camus, however, we only get "the Christ we deserve"--that is, the one we were historically given is not the one we deserve. We die for a truth that is not "the Truth." We practice "generosity," thinking that we need no grace either to know what generosity might be or to realize what more than ourselves we might need to practice it. Camus worried about the "object of faith" when, in the context of his own question, this object could be nothing else but the permanence of the believer in tension before the what is of existence itself, keeping him from nothingness.
Camus was, to be sure, aware of the problem connected with reason and revelation. Chesterton had observed in his St. Thomas Aquinas that revelation was singularly "democratic" because it included the non-philosophers--in fact, the vast majority of mankind--who had neither the time, incentive, nor capacity to sort out the intricacies of philosophic reasoning about God. Here, Chesterton was referring to Aquinas' famous question of whether in addition to reason revelation was "necessary." "The Second Reason [for this necessity],"
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
