Press Releases21 Nov 13

Irish News Article by Archbishop Richard Clarke marking 100th Anniversary of Camus’ Birth

The following article by The Most Revd Dr Richard Clarke, Archbishop of Armagh, first appeared in The Irish News on Thursday 7 November 2013, the 100th anniversary of French philosopher Albert Camus’ birth, and is provided here for wider interest with permission.

ALBERT CAMUS (1913–1960)
An Outsider for Our Time?

Albert Camus, the French intellectual who was born in Algeria one hundred years ago this month, still exercises a strange fascination over many modern Christian thinkers, for all that he was without doubt an atheist.

He was in every respect an outsider. Born into poverty in Algeria just before the First World War, his father was killed early in the War and the young Camus was brought up in slum conditions in Algiers until a watchful teacher persuaded his reluctant family to allow the young Albert to continue his education.

Probably as a result of childhood deprivation, Camus suffered from tuberculosis throughout his adult life. Nevertheless he achieved extremely well academically (although he had to work part–time to fund his studies), and moved to France in his mid–twenties.

Although always reticent about his own achievements, Camus played an important and dangerous role in the French resistance underground during the Second World War. Intellectually he remained something of an outsider to himself – a communist, he had an intense hatred of totalitarianism in any form and his condemnations of communism as it evolved into Stalinism led to a bitter break with Sartre and his coterie.

Committed to non–violence and a strenuous opponent of the death penalty, Camus was far from a fashionable figure in his lifetime although, in 1957, he became a Nobel Prize Winner (for literature) at an unusually young age. Taking a lift at the last minute with his publisher from Lourmarin in southern France back to Paris, Camus was killed in a car accident on 4 January 1960, at the age of forty six.

Where, then, does the continuing fascination of Camus lie for us? Although many have tried to systematise his work as a classical existentialist philosopher, he was in fact not a particularly systematic thinker. He was certainly not doctrinaire and he had a very strong sense of paradox. From a Christian perspective, I see him as a sympathetic observer of religion in general (and Christianity in particular) from outside. And it is sometimes the outsider who can see most clearly into the depths of what we are.

Camus was never disrespectful of religious belief even though he would never have claimed such belief for himself. (Interestingly however, his post–graduate study was in Christian philosophy.) We can continue to learn from this outsider’s observations. A novelist as well as a philosopher, his most famous novels are The Outsider and The Plague. Both remain readily available in good translations. It is to these two novels I now make brief reference.

The Outsider – more correctly ‘The Stranger’ – tells of a man who remains utterly detached from the world in which he lives, equally aloof from life and death. He accidentally kills another man (probably in self–defence) but, following his arrest, makes no attempt to defend himself against the death sentence. Camus points us – at times terrifyingly – to the logic of meaninglessness; death has no meaning because life has no meaning. Those (such as the prison chaplain) who wish (one can scarcely call him a hero) to turn to God seem, ironically, to be more concerned for themselves than for him. It is almost as though they need to convince themselves of God, rather than save Meursault. Although a tragic figure from our perspective, Meursault is profoundly and disarmingly honest, even as he points us to the logical consequences of an emptiness of life. Those of religious faith should find such a novel spiritually both disturbing and deeply provocative, both of these in the very best sense.

If The Outsider is about non–engagement, The Plague plunges us into the meaning of true involvement with the sufferings of others, from the perspectives of an atheist doctor and a Christian priest. Holding a conversation just after they have both witnessed the death of a small child who has died of the plague which is ravaging the town in which they live, the doctor and the priest talk about what makes them do what they do. Although the doctor can see no meaning in the death of the little girl (and nor can the priest), they both realise that what has brought them there is love, and the doctor hesitantly suggests that this love may indeed be something beyond what divides them.

Although Camus is perhaps best remembered as the philosopher who concluded that there is an innate absurdity to all human existence, it would have to be added that he was never content or at ease with this conclusion. He makes the astonishing comment in his philosophical work, The Myth of Sisyphus, that ‘sin is the absurd without God’. Could a Christian writer have put it better?

Albert Camus was indeed a strange figure, an outsider from first to last. As Christian believers, perhaps we can have the humility to learn something of our own faith, and even to deepen our faith, from the insights of this particular outsider?