In the book "Albert Camus, the nostalgia for God"(Javier Marrodán, 2024), the author is astonished that Albert Camus is quoted by very different people. One can discover phrases of his in an incendiary anarchist publication, in the proceedings of a congress of agnostics, in a novel set in the Algerian desert or in a solemn homily by Joseph Ratzinger.
Albert Camus (Algeria 1913 - France 1960) looks through his characters into almost all the abysses of the contemporary world. The Patrice Mersault of "The Happy Death". is a transcript of the restless and audacious young man who explores the paths to happiness. The Sisyphus who descends to pick up the stone and the doctor Rieux who tries to relieve his hopeless patients of "The Plague". their deepest experiences and aspirations.
Agitated souls
The Jean-Baptiste Clamence of "The Fall". is a spontaneous prophet in the desert of the twentieth century because his creator was one too, even if he was not always understood or heeded. They are also children of the spiritual uncertainties of Albert Camus the Daru who sets the Arab of "The Guest" free. and the engineer D'Arrast who plays the role of the Cyrenian in "The Growing Stone"., and Kaliayev delaying the assassination of "The Righteous". to prevent the death of children.
Behind them, with their longings and their despairs and their nostalgia, they allow us to enter into the agitated and generous soul of their creator. They are all "exiles" of the Kingdom. All of them make plausible the possibility of a happy Camus.
Communist Party and anarchism
Camus became interested in the labor and social injustices of the French Algeria where he was born. He joined the Communist Party in 1935 and collaborated in the "Journal du Front Populaire", where he earned a reputation as an indomitable and committed intellectual. He was later accused of being a Trotskyist and preferred to leave the party due to serious disagreements before being expelled "in a scandalous manner".. The anarchist Andre Prudhommeaux introduced him in 1948 to the libertarian movement. In 1951 he published his essay "The Rebel Man"., which provoked the rejection of Marxist critics and others close to him such as Jean-Paul Sartre. At this time he began to support various anarchist movements, first in favor of the workers' uprising in Poznan, Poland, and then in the Hungarian Revolution. He was a member of the Fédération Anarchiste.
It is significant that many of Camus' reflections are acceptable to any Christian. Moreover, many of them offer suggestive stimuli to consider a better life, also from a Christian perspective.. "Please pray for the eternal happiness of Brand Blanshard and Albert Camus, two honest atheists who helped me become a better Catholic.", proposes in the dedication of "Forty Reasons I Am a Catholic"., the book by philosophy professor Peter Kreeft.
"Each generation believes it is destined to remake the world.", said Camus in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. And he added: "Mine knows, however, that it will not redo it. But its task is perhaps greater. It consists in preventing the world from falling apart.".
Christian thought
Charles Moeller deals with Camus in the first chapter of the first volume of his encyclopedic work "Twentieth Century Literature and Christianity.". He explains there that the writer creates characters, such as Tarrou in "The Plague"., that they are "desperate saints"., "faithful to the religion of the Beatitudes" even though they do not believe in Jesus, men capable of selfless love, open to transcendence, who practice honesty and speak of "tenderness" in order not to use the word "charity"..
When in December 1948 the Dominicans invited him to give a lecture in their Parisian convent of Tour-Maubourg, the still young writer explained that he did not feel "in possession of any absolute truth or any message"., so that it could "never" start from the principle that Christian truth is "illusory"., but only from the fact that he had not been able to enter it.
Atheism and ethical demands
The philosopher Reyes Mate has written that Camus "knew". that modern man is the result of the death of God, and that it is only possible to make sense of suffering -one of his most irreducible concerns- if one does not lose sight of the Christian tradition in whose bosom he himself was born. It is understandable then that in the "Letters to a German friend" try to make a Nazi pagan understand how the absence of faith does not lead to arbitrariness in the determination of moral right and wrong, and how his atheism is perfectly compatible with a high ethical requirement to give meaning to human existence. In the spring of 1943 he wrote that, in spite of the "certainty" of that "Everything is allowed". that he made famous Ivan KaramazovIt is possible to impose some renunciations on oneself: for example, that of not judging others.
This same philosopher is convinced that "the greatness" of Albert Camus derives from his way of facing the mystery of evil and the reality of suffering. In the tormented geography of the 20th century - the Marne, Warsaw, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Siberia, Algeria, Prague... - he manages to overcome what some authors have called "the silence of God." to propose a way of living and relating to the world and to others.
Consciousness of the sacred
In an interview he gave shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Albert Camus was asked about Christianity: "I am aware of the sacred, of the mystery in man, and I see no reason not to confess the emotion I feel before Christ and his teaching" (Albert Camus, p. 4)., he replied, although adding shortly thereafter that he did not believe in the resurrection.
Today it is known that in the last years of his life he frequented an American church in Paris and forged a deep and lasting friendship with Methodist pastor Howars Mumma, with whom he chatted extensively about God, religion, the Bible and the Church. "I have lost faith, I have lost hope. It is impossible to live a meaningless life.", confessed to him in one of their first meetings.
