A just judgement? Considerations on Ronald Srigley’s Camus’ Critique of Modernity

Introducing Srigley’s Camus’ Critique of Modernity

Amidst the present renaissance of interest in Albert Camus’ thought, Ron Srigley’s 2011 Camus’ Critique of Modernity has a just claim to stand out. In it, Srigley irreversibly challenges most popular images of Camus: whether as ‘nihilist’, moral exemplar, or belle âme unable to face the harsh realities of history and politics. What unites these views is the sense that Camus was a gifted litterateur, whose lyrical abilities far outstripped the cogency and profundity of his philosophical attempts. For Srigley, by contrast, as Srigley’s title suggests, Camus’ thought and entire oeuvre can only be understood as a work of political philosophy in the grand scale: one turning around, and dedicated to, reconsidering modernity, ‘the time of our lives’. Srigley’s book aims to establish Camus’ credentials as a vital, unique, contributor to the longstanding philosophical and socio-theoretical issues of the nature of, and prospects for, Western modernity.

Camus’ Critique of Modernity starts from the supposition that to fully understand Camus’ fictional works we must begin from an assessment of Camus’ much wider, and remarkably diverse, intellectual output. What emerges if we read Camus awake to his entire oeuvre, Srigley maintains, is not an indisputably gifted artist with a misplaced sense of his philosophical abilities. Srigley’s Camus is an author whose acknowledged wrestling in L’Étranger, La Peste, La Chute, and other works, with the great themes of his times – first the existential homelessness of later moderns, then totalitarianism and questions of politics – was informed by a deep grounding in the West’s great literary, philosophical and religious traditions. Srigley, who translated and introduced the 2007 English edition of Camus’ Diplômes d'Études Superieur thesis (Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism), highlights how from a young age Camus had been immersed in neoplatonism, Augustine, and the Church fathers, and had been preoccupied with what he would later call the ‘genuine and sole turning point’ in Western history: the transition at the end of antiquity from the Hellenic-pagan to the Christian-monotheistic cultural worlds (Camus 1966: 176). For Srigley, then, previous readings of Camus have simply not adequately countenanced the scope and depth of Camus’ philosophical and religious bildung. What they have accordingly missed is the extent to which Camus’ entire oeuvre – not simply L’Homme Révolté – represents a concerted attempt, prompted by the disasters of the 20th century, to generate a comprehensive understanding of Western modernity in light of its cultural antecedents.

For Srigley, the key to unlocking the significance of Camus’ thought lies in Camus’ telling choice to shape his work around, first, the Homeric-Hesiodic myths of Sisyphus (The Myth of Sisyphus), Prometheus (The Rebel), then Nemesis; but then also, according to the biblical motifs of Camus’ 1950s titles: The Rebel, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and The First Man. Srigley’s striking suggestion is that, by considering the sequence of Camus’ ‘biblical’ titles against the background of the source text itself, the larger story about Camus’ truly civilizational scope of concern emerges. According to most Christian theology, we know the first man precedes his archetypal rebellion against God, which leads to the fall, knowledge of good and evil, original sin and exile, and the need for transcendent, eschatological salvation. In Camus’ work after 1950, this sequence is reordered, and its termini are reversed. After the work on human revolt, Camus writes his dark novella The Fall and the haunting stories of Exile and the Kingdom. Only then do we arrive where the Bible begins, at Le Premier Homme. What we are in the presence of here, so Srigley argues, is a calculated, ‘Greek’ resignification of the West’s shaping Christian theologemes:

Camus’ reversal of the traditional symbolism is a way of giving a Greek meaning to a Christian image. People rebel, but there is no fall, no change in human nature such that an apocalyptic redemption is required in order to restore it. With the fall gone every human being is le premier homme … these human beings are not Christians, but Greeks and Mesopotamians and Jews. The sequence of titles and the images they entail suggest a movement back towards a beginning that Camus discovers to be ubiquitous in human experience … In this respect, The First Man would have offered an image of human nature healed of our apocalyptic madness … (Srigley 2011: 10; cf. Camus 2008: 125)

So the vital claim of Srigley’s reading of Camus, like Woelfel (1975) and Peyre (1962), is that Camus was at his heart a kind of neopagan, neo- or philhellenic author: ‘the homeland for which Camus longs and towards which his analysis moves is always identified with the Greeks and the “Mediterranean” world’ (Srigley 2011: 3). The reason animating Camus’ return to the Greeks is that from the mid-1940s, like Karl Löwith at the same time (Löwith 1949), Camus came to argue that the roots of the modern ideologies underlying Nazism and Stalinism lie in Christian concepts, particularly Christianity’s salvific eschatology and the theology of history. In these ideologies, the proletarian revolution or the advent of the millennial Reich and messianic Fuhrer take the place of the Christian last judgement, and the final redemption of the elect. The content in these ideologies is of course hostile to Christian theodicy. Yet the salvific form, together with a linear conception of history which denudes the non-human, ‘fallen’ world of intrinsic significance, remains constant. In Camus’ words, ‘only the symbols have changed’: ‘Communism is the logical consequence of Christianity. It’s a Christian kind of business’ (Camus 1966: 83; cf. 1971: 142–148, 204, 208–9, 249–250, 299, 306).

Srigley’s Camus’ Critique of Modernity is, however, a profoundly critical work. Srigley hopes to reshape the parameters of debates concerning Camus’ legacy. For Srigley’s admiration for Camus does not prevent him from centrally arguing that Camus’ work was decisively incomplete, in a way which goes some way to understanding Camus’ divided reception amongst secular and religious critics alike. For Srigley, Camus’ premature death prevented him from definitively resolving a series of ambiguities or contradictions in his thought. These contradictions, as Srigley sees them, go to the heart of Camus’ work, his assessment of the Greeks, Christianity, and the modern world. Camus oscillates in Myth of Sisyphus between an affirmative account of the absurd as the origin of post-theological value (based in the confrontation between the human desire for meaning and a world which finally resists this eros) and the quasi-existentialist or nihilistic claim that the world is meaningless. In The Rebel, Camus oscillates between a view that defends modernity as an age of legitimate revolt against theologically sanctified injustice, and an age whose totalitarian excesses reproduce eschatological motifs in secular guises. Equally, he equivocates between posing rebellion as a creator of values despite God, or as a discoverer of pre-existent limits in our nature. For Srigley, however – in what is arguably his most enticing contention – these hesitations are due not to personal, intellectual weakness, so much as the continuing, bulking weight of Christian-theological notions in the culture Camus inherited:

What threatened to derail the analysis was precisely the apocalyptic aspirations and their promises of immortality that Camus had set out to overcome. These aspirations and hopes had established themselves as the sole locus of meaning in the West for more than fifteen hundred years. So powerful was their influence that even critics tend to accept them as the paradigm of meaning. (Srigley 2011: 76)

In Camus’ ‘best’ moments, Srigley argues, Camus does not so much solve the ‘problems’ of the Meaninglessness of the world, the Meaning of History, or of the sinful pride of man. He dissolves them as ‘pseudo-problems to be rejected outright in favour of an entirely different kind of interpretation’ (Srigley 2007: 32, 33). Such Meaning was never available to human beings – History is not the kind of ‘object’ that might afford it. And we cannot know whether human nature is fallen, and so in need of some messianic redemption. ¹ Nevertheless, so Srigley claims, discernibly post-Christian framings of issues – notably including the Dostoyevskian ‘without God, everything is permitted’ – continue to ‘insinuate’ themselves into Camus’ thought, at least until The Rebel (Srigley 2011: 80). If Srigley’s reading of Camus is correct, it was only after 1951 that he came to recognize this problem. This explains Camus’ revising of his 1950 vision for three cycles of work, inserting instead an ‘intermediary stage’ built around a final work devoted to completing the total critique of modernity as impious child of Christian-theological origins: the tellingly titled 1956 work The Fall. In Srigley’s reading, this dark novella firstly shows unequivocally Camus’ assessment of the ‘profound complicity’ between the modern totalitarian temptation and the Christian assessment of the fallenness of human nature (cf. Camus 2008: 192; 1971: 189–193, 199, 204–208). Secondly, it uncovers the deep roots of these teachings in their appeal to ignoble self-love, and hybristic desire for immortality (Srigley 2011: 90–94, 98–105). Only after this critique was completed could work on The First Man begin, and with it Camus’ tragically foreshortened attempt to envisage a constructive philosophy based around the notion of love and the myth of Nemesis (Srigley 2011: 126–128).

Between yes and no: Questioning the ‘common origin’ argument

Our appreciation of Srigley’s programmatic reconception of Camus’ work we hope by now to be clear. Srigley’s book reasserts Camus’ credentials as a poetic but philosophical thinker to be taken extremely seriously. It goes some way to re-placing Camus alongside many other 20th-century (particularly German) thinkers, dedicated to rethinking modernity on the basis of critical reassessments of the West’s entire premodern heritage: Husserl, Heidegger, Löwith, Voegelin, Schmitt, Leo Strauss and Blumenberg. Our question to Srigley is whether Camus ever, even in his final writings, is so totally, uncompromisingly anti-modern as Srigley presents him as being. ² Srigley recognizes the entire strata of Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel that are characteristically modernist, and which in the latter work point to a legitimation of early modern historical and metaphysical revolt against the thrones, altars, and legitimating theologemes of Europe’s ancien regimes. ³ There is also Camus’ avowed aim to be as the ‘Descartes of the absurd’, finding an irreducible ground for ethical and existential meaning by way of a sceptical doubt of all inherited theological and rational systems (esp. Camus 1971: 22). ⁴ However, in Srigley’s account, these modernist moments are not part of Camus’ aimed-for solution to contemporary nihilism, with its totalitarian outgrowths. They are part of the problem: ‘perhaps he became a little too fond of the logical neatness of the project; or perhaps he had a touch of the disease himself’ (Srigley 2011: 8–9, 51, 77).

For Srigley, Camus in these moments lapses into the kind of ‘dialectical optimism’ he devastatingly criticizes in Hegel and Marx (Srigley 2011: 51). The key problem lies in Camus’ account of what he ambiguously calls the ‘metaphysical rebellion’ of modern philosophies, speaking both of their challenging of inherited Christian-theological premises and of the forms of avoidable human suffering these premises had sanctified as the by-products of God’s inscrutable will or providence (Camus 1971: 23–25). In Srigley’s account, such metaphysical rebellion is inevitably nihilistic, ‘extreme or excessive’: and ‘in his best account, Camus recognizes that the metaphysical rebel’s refusal to accept ‘the sufferings imposed by the human condition’ is a type of madness, simply’ (Srigley 2011: 51, 52).

Srigley’s claim here is closely connected to his similar disapproval of what he calls Camus’ ‘common origin’ argument, which we will focus on now. This is Camus’ notion that although we must urgently oppose the totalitarian justification of murder, we must nevertheless see the basis of the totalitarians’ manifest desire to dominate political reality and exclude all dissidence, in a common human need for unity, meaning, fraternity, and dignity (Camus 1971: 247–8, 250–251) So, Camus says in The Rebel:

There is no method of thought which is absolutely nihilistic except, perhaps, the method that leads to suicide … Terror and concentration camps are the drastic means used by man to escape solitude. The thirst for unity must be assuaged, even in the common grave. If men kill one another, it is because they reject mortality and desire immortality for all men. But they prove at the same time that they cannot dispense with mankind; they satisfy a terrible hunger for fraternity … Terror is the homage the malignant recluse … pays to the brotherhood of man. (1971: 247–248; cf. Srigley 2011: 51)

For Camus, we see, this is an argument for understanding, although neither for forgiveness nor for practical acquiescence to rationalized crime – if it is not in fact his version of a defining Greek idea, that evil hails from error or ignorance, not a broken human nature (Camus 2007: 41). Commenting for instance on Saint-Just’s claim that we ought to find the criminal less guilty than weak, Camus rejoins that this is ‘an admirable ambition.’ (1971: 124). The point is that our practical opposition and ethical outrage at political crime should not prevent us from seeing the deeply tragic relation between what Camus terms the human desire for unity and the desire for totality. For Camus, the desire for unity is universal and inalienable to all humans (‘common to both believers and rebels’ (1971: 233)), albeit capable of different symbolizations (1971: 101; Srigley 2011: 71). It is also the ground of their inalienable dignity: ‘there is not one human being who, above a certain elementary level of consciousness, does not exhaust himself in trying to find formulas or attitudes that will give his existence the unity it lacks’ (1971: 262). The desire for totality is contingent, avoidable, ethically bad, and prompted by claims to absolute or theological knowledge (1971: 193). It is an excessive misshaping of the basic human need to give unity to the world, when this crosses its own animating limit, and issues into the ignoble, finally murderous desire to lay conquest to ‘all or nothing’ of socio-political reality, if not ‘to annex all creation’ (1971: 103, 107, 233–235, 240). While Srigley at one point marks Camus’ distinction between unity and totality in The Rebel (Srigley 2011: 74), the weight of his argument occludes the way that for Camus, totality perverts – but in this way still bespeaks – the desire for unity (1971: 303). ‘A human being who has such excessive desires and acts on them’ as the ill-begotten desire for a final political solution, Srigley claims, is not (as for Camus) guilty of an excessive distortion of the human longing for fraternity and order. No, he ‘is simply not the same type of human being as one who does not’:

… neither the presence of good in all lives nor the permanent possibility of recognising that good and cultivating it – makes these lives good. There is no necessity, logical or otherwise, that the totalitarian dictator will turn the inescapable good of his soul to account or that the metaphysical rebel will desist from his revolt against ‘the whole of creation’ and there is no hidden goodness or moderation in either of these excessive revolts against the good. (Srigley 2011: 52)

Here we can agree with Srigley only that Camus does not always as consistently distinguish his terms as can be desired. Camus at times does seem to identify the desire for unity with a salvific desire for immortality, and a complete, anomic resistance to the order of the world, in which human suffering and mortality is an unavoidable necessity (e.g. 1971: 25, 100). More certain is that, in Srigley’s account, the legitimate desire for unity and the illegitimate desire for totality are collapsed into what Srigley differently terms a ‘permanent and inescapable desire for perfection’ or ‘salvation’ (neither term is used by Camus ⁵ ) – in order the better to oppose them both as implicated in the modern désastre (Srigley 2011: 73, 75, 82).

The same type of claim, we believe, can be levelled against Srigley’s treatment of a second, structuring distinction of L’Homme Révolté, to which Camus devotes the culminating section of the historical component of the book: that of rebellion versus revolution (Camus 1971: 105–107, 246–252). While we might agree with Srigley again that Camus sometimes comes close to conflating the two ideas, The Rebel wants clearly and programmatically to distinguish between rebellion – which Camus claims is an ‘essential dimension of man’ (1971: 21) in the face of senseless suffering and avoidable evils – and revolution, which Camus associates with totalitarian regimes and their animating desire for ‘gradually enlarging the stronghold where, according to his own rules, man without God brutally wields power’ (1971: 102). Yet this key Camusian distinction, even more than that between unity and totality, becomes invisible in Srigley’s Camus’ Critique of Modernity. Instead, Srigley identifies the early modern political and philosophical rebellions against the Christian order (against which Srigley, also, strongly protests) with the nihilistic, revolutionary desire to put human beings or regimes in the place of the dethroned deity. In Srigley’s estimation: ‘Camus’ method turns on the assumption that you can achieve a moderate or measured rebellion against evil by starting out with the extreme or excessive ambitions of metaphysical rebellion’ (Srigley 2011: 51). But this is impossible. For to be modern, for Srigley, at decisive moments just is, rigidly, to be an existentialist: ‘yet by allowing the existentialist denial of nature to stand, even for heuristic or methodological reasons, Camus gave a measure of legitimacy to the very kind of metaphysical rebellion The Rebel had been written to critique’ (Srigley 2011: 51, 77, emphasis added). And if we ask why Camus should have been drawn, despite his best insights, to seek the source of value in the moderns’ ‘metaphysical rebellion’ against God, the answer is that, here again, Camus’ thought has been held back by its felt need to respond to a deeply Christian question: ‘if we are alone beneath the empty heavens, if we must die forever, how can we really exist?’:

Marxism’s answer may not be an adequate one. But according to the argument of Camus’ Christian history [sic], it is the right kind of answer. The reason is that it contains the type of apocalyptic content required by the question. (Srigley 2011: 71)

The reader thus notes a hidden irony. Srigley seems to fall here into the same error he has earlier identified in Camus’ Critique of Modernity with the ‘Camus must be an existentialist’ misreadings of Myth of Sisyphus. As Srigley there had unpacked, these misreadings ignore Camus’ stress in that earlier work that the absurd is neither in man nor in a world stripped of meaning, but in the divorce or confrontation between the human desire for unity and a world which ultimately resists total rational comprehension. (Srigley 2011: 26–32). Srigley’s claim then is that Camus’ ‘heuristic or methodological’ defence of modern metaphysical rebellion involves an unwitting withdrawal from his own, ‘best’, non-existentialist position of 1942. The point can be made by contrasting with Srigley the attempt by Georges Bataille to argue against Camus, that rebellion per se must always involve an excessive desire for sovereignty. At the end of his analysis, Bataille recognizes that his interpretation ‘could still be considered debatable. One could doubt that Camus’ revolt could be confounded with an urge towards sovereignty’ (Bataille in Srigley 2011: 55). Srigley, by contrast, has no doubts. Rather than holding on to ‘the divorce formulation of the absurd’ from The Myth of Sisyphus which opposes the ‘nihilistic, existentialist claim that reality is inherently meaningless’, Srigley claims that Camus’ quasi-Cartesian language in The Rebel works to reinstate ‘as true or at least provisionally true the rebellious modern denial that such an order exists’ (Srigley 2011: 51). We disagree.

We would argue, contra Srigley, that Camus’ phenomenological analysis of rebellion in ‘L’Homme Révolté in fact makes more, not less, of his positive account of the absurd inherited from Le Mythe de Sisyphe. In The Rebel, Camus opens by stressing that while the rebel says ‘no’ to realities or actions whose justice or necessity he rejects, this very ‘no’ logically and ethically presupposes a ‘yes’ (Camus 1971: 13–15; cf. 8–9). This ‘yes’, in terms of the later terms of the text, is the basis of that sense of limits and mesure Camus argues the modern revolutionary philosophies forget, and which Camus aligns with Hellenic thought in The Rebel’s final pages: by his resistance, ‘[the rebel] affirms that there are limits and also that he suspects – and wishes to preserve – the existence of certain things on this side of the borderline’ (1971: 13). In terms of Camus’ account of human eros inherited from Le Mythe, this founding affirmation is identifiable with the elementary human demand for unity, meaning, and order. Moreover, as Srigley recognizes, L’Homme Révolté is clear in its account of early modern metaphysical rebellion against Christian theodicy that this primary affirmation of the inalienable dignity of human subjects is a vanishing, but legitimating, core to the modern, post-Christian age (Camus 1971: 21, 26, 100–101, 250–252).

Rebellion, the problem of evil, the legitimacy of the modern age

To emphasize again, Srigley is aware of moments in Camus’ text where he does defend the ‘empirically more moderate’ species of ‘earlier more moderate modern aspirations’ (Srigley 2011: 81, 82; cf. Camus 1971: 26, 247) Yet, tellingly, given his recognition that Camus was not an historicist thinker (Srigley 2011: 14), Srigley historicizes these moments. Camus did not recognize that early modern self-assertion was ‘substantially’ already the same kind of animal as the eschatological excesses of Leninism-Stalinism or Hitlerism. Only insufficient ‘time had elapsed for their full consequences to be realised or [for] the lingering influence of other non-modern factors had not yet been silenced entirely [which] kept them in check’ (Srigley 2011: 82). Here as elsewhere, we thus note, there is an unmistakable resemblance between Srigley’s account of modernity and that of modernity’s theological critics – for whom everything modern just is nihilistic, if not openly, then ‘in essence’ (e.g. Milbank 2006). Srigley’s qualification that other ‘nonmodern factors’ might have re-emerged during the early modern break with the ‘sacred world’ (1971: 21) to later be supplanted by political eschatology is truer to Camus’ intentions, and his universalism concerning human nature (e.g. Camus 1966: 78). For the limits uncovered by rebellion as Camus conceives them are transhistorical. And this means they are ‘in essence’ neither ancient nor modern. Such historical categories, and the attempt to rigorously segregate them, are just not Camus’ primary concern. In his 2007 introduction to Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, Srigley had accepted this, claiming that one thing Camus admired in the Greeks was how their restrained ‘self-affirmation … [did not] eclipse their awareness of the profound sameness of all human things’ (Srigley 2007: 24). In Srigley’s 2011 text, by contrast, we suggest that ‘that restraint is severed’.

If this limit is crossed in Camus’ Critique of Modernity, it seems to us, a likely genealogical cause is Srigley’s abiding debt to Eric Voegelin’s radical hostility to all forms of modern thought. Srigley’s first book was on Voegelin’s understanding of Platonic philosophy. ⁶ Srigley acknowledges the importance, and cogency, of Voegelin’s respectful reading of Camus in Anamnesis (Srigley 2011: 13–15, 55–58; 2007: 21–22). The point of difference is that Srigley is much more enthusiastic than his teacher about Camus’ admiration for the Greeks (Srigley 2011: 13). Voegelin, like Srigley’s Camus, sees modernity as a distinctly post-Christian, albeit heretical or ‘gnostic’, phenomenon. Its precondition is Christianity’s ‘de-divinising’ of the natural world which was for the Greeks ‘full of gods’ (Voegelin 1952, 122; Srigley 2011: 56). This leaves Christian subjects only the mediation of Christ, Church and sacraments (‘the tenuous bond of faith’; Voegelin 1952: 122; Srigley 2011: 57) between mundane and sacred reality. When this tenuous bond is broken at the end of the medieval period, secularized, replacement theologies which ‘immanentise the Christian eschaton’ fill the cultural void (Voegelin 1952: 163). Yet Voegelin’s attitude towards Christianity and paganism – in contrast to the modern age – is two-sided. While Voegelin, on the one hand, sees Christianity’s de-divinization as a necessary condition for the excesses of modernity, on the other hand he argues that the consciousness of antique paganism was ultimately overly naive, insufficiently ‘differentiating’ immanent and transcendent poles of human existence in ways that Platonic philosophy, then Christianity, achieved (Srigley 2011: 56).

Srigley certainly disputes Voegelin’s dismissal of the possibility of a renovated paganism. This is what his Camus aims at. Yet the deeper stamp of Voegelin, we would argue, is present elsewhere in Camus’ Critique of Modernity. In particular, in attempting to construct in Camus’ Rebel what Srigley claims are two rival Christian and Greek histories of the West (Srigley 2011: 60–76; 2007, 24, 28–31), he recurrently claims that Camus, like Voegelin, hesitated about a revamped Hellenism, finding the pagan Greeks insufficiently ‘serious’ in confronting the problems which provoke human rebellion: injustice, suffering, evil, and death. Although Voegelin was explicit in making this critique, Srigley’s interpretations of the passages in The Rebel adduced to support such a perspective are unmistakably forced (Srigley 2011: 62, 74–75; 2007, 29). Tellingly, at one point where Srigley claims that Camus was prey to doubts about whether Greek understanding was ‘sufficiently differentiated’ (Voegelin’s term), he refers in the note to Voegelin’s Anamnesis, not Camus or The Rebel at all (Srigley 2011: 75, n. 100).

Srigley’s stress on the non-historicizing nature of Camus’ rethinking of Western cultural history – together with his growing revolt against ‘German thought’ ⁷ – might have put us on our guard against reading Camus too closely alongside any of the great 20th-century geisteshistorikers. ⁸ The better comparison here is with Hans Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1993 [1966]), the consummate internal critic of this tradition. Blumenberg’s primary target in Legitimacy is the master notion of ‘secularization’. This is the idea, which appears in different guises in Schmitt, Löwith, Taubes, Heidegger, and Voegelin, that all seemingly distinct modern political and philosophical ideas are derivative, illegitimate or heretical copies of prior theological notions. For secularization theorists, there is no radical break between modern and medieval culture. There is just a fall of sorts, from a culture shaped by openly theological notions to one formed by their derivative, homomorphic successor ideas – so, famously, the modern sovereign is a ‘secularization’ of the creator god, the ‘state of exception’ secularizes the divine miracle, scientific ‘progress’ secularizes the linear, medieval-eschatological conception of history, etc. (Blumenberg 1993 [1966]: 13–16, 53–60, 92–93).

Three claims alone from Blumenberg’s magisterial text can concern us here, all of which we think are remarkably anticipated in Camus’ oeuvre, and bespeak a qualified defence of the modern age, in contrast to the extreme political projects and ideologies of the 20th century. The first is Blumenberg’s attention, echoed as we have said in Camus, to Cartesian scepticism and its search for new, post-theological foundations of knowledge. The limited ‘self-assertion’ of Descartes’ cogito sum was for Blumenberg rendered ‘legitimate’, indeed minimally humanely necessary, by the extreme irrationalism of later scholastic nominalism, with its prioritization of God’s inscrutable Will over his Intellect, and the resulting collapse of any sense of human belonging in the created world, or predictable order in the latter. ⁹ Second, Blumenberg denies that there is unbroken continuity between the medieval and modern ages, whether of ascent or fall (Blumenberg 1993 [1966]: 16, 97, 187). Between the two ages was a moment of rupture, and the emergence of a ‘sufficient rationality’ which cannot be equated with the forms of later modern thinking targeted as ‘secularized’ theological notions (Blumenberg 1993 [1966]: 99). For Blumenberg, to take the most relevant instance here, the resemblance between the Marxist-Leninist notion of History culminating in an immanent ‘end’ with the Christian theologies of history does not bespeak the secularization of a continuous theological content (1993 [1966]: 37–38, 49–50). It comes from the modern inheritance of a ‘debt’ of framing problems, not solutions (1993 [1966]: 48–49, 59–61, 64–65). As we have seen with Srigley’s Camus, Blumenberg’s idea is that the modern self-assertion, and its different foundations for knowledge, did not intrinsically need to answer the theological question of the Meaning of History (Wallace 1993: xx–xxi). The felt need to ‘reoccupy’ the inherited cultural ‘position’ of accounting for all human History, again as in Srigley’s Camus, came instead from an uncritical acceptance of the lingering cultural weight of the theological frameworks modernity succeeded:

Theology created new ‘positions’ in the framework of the statements about the world and man that are possible and expected, ‘positions’ that cannot be simply set aside again or left unoccupied in the interest of theoretical economy … it introduced titles into the budget of man’s needs in the area of knowledge, to honour which was bound to be difficult or even impossible for any knowledge that did not appeal … to transcendent sources. (Blumenberg 1993 [1966]: 64–65)

Third, then, in contrast to an implicit presupposition of the ‘secularization’ theses, Blumenberg contests the notion that modernity’s Christian predecessor culture was ever an unproblematically unified cultural framework, ¹⁰ whose modern supplanting must thus be attributed to an illegitimate, external source (for instance, human vanitas). If the later scholastics are drawn to hypostasize God’s omnipotent voluntas to such fearsome proportions, this is because, for Blumenberg, they had inherited from the Augustine stabilization of early Christianity a lingering, unsatisfactorily resolved problem (Blumenberg 1993 [1966]: 135, 137–8). Blumenberg calls the nominalism whose excesses necessitated modern self-assertion the second, failed theological attempt at ‘warding off Gnosticism’ (Blumenberg 1993 [1966]: 137, 127). Gnosticism’s division between a benign deity and the evil god of the physical world represented a coherent response (with some claim to biblical authority) to a problem which Blumenberg, like the young Camus, sees as decisively pressing in the Roman-imperial world: the problem of explaining ‘what is bad in the world’ (Blumenberg 1993 [1966]: 127; cf. Camus 2007: 42–3, 47–50, 67–70, 78–80, 107–110, 117–120). Augustine’s assertion of a single omnibenevolent creator-God makes rationalizing the existence of evil much more difficult than for the Gnostic polytheists who can slate evil home to some malign, lesser deity. Ultimately, ‘the justification of God’ necessitates Augustine’s remarkable slating of evil to Adam’s fall, the universal human inheritance of Adam’s guilt, and God’s unfathomable separation of the chosen elect from the rejected – a relocation of the Gnostic dualism ‘in the bosom of mankind’, in Blumenberg’s assessment (Blumenberg 1993 [1966]: 132–136).

The young Camus’ account of what he calls Saint Augustine’s ‘second revelation’ (Camus 2007: 45, 87, 115), which domesticated the eschatological dynamism of early Christian thought by appropriating neoplatonic categories, remarkably mirrors what Blumenberg ironically calls Augustine’s flawed ‘secularization’ of early Christian other-worldliness (Blumenberg 1993 [1966]: 37–45; Camus 2007: 62). What we’ll stress here is the way Camus’ account of early modern rebellion or ‘self-assertion’, as in Blumenberg, finds its abiding justification in the internal divisions of the Christian predecessor culture. More than this, and more directly than in Blumenberg’s more intellectualist account, Camus sees modern self-assertion as above all justified by the inadequacy of the Christian responses to the problem of evil. Influenced deeply by Nietzsche, Camus rails against what he calls two millennia of Christianity’s devalorization of the body, sexuality, and the natural world (e.g. Camus 1966: 4, 84; 1971: 299). However, as Christian critics like Archambault have seen, Camus’ deepest criticism of Christianity is that the Augustinian doctrine of a universally inherited original sin represents a deeply inadequate, if not inhumane, response to the problem of evil: ‘what I reproach Christianity with is being a doctrine of injustice’ (Camus 1966: 56; 63, 92). As The Rebel argues, Christianity’s best response to the problem of injustice and suffering was to point to the even more terrible, more unjust suffering of Christ ‘each time a solitary cry of revolt was uttered’. ¹¹ Its worse response was the notion of nemo bonus [no one is good], as Camus protested: ‘what right has a Christian … to accuse me of pessimism? It is not I who invented the “misery of the creature”, nor the terrifying formulas of divine malediction. It is not I who exclaimed “nemo bonus”, nor I who preached the damnation of unbaptised children’ (1960 [1944]: 31; 1966: 81; Archambault 1972: 152).

In Camus’ philosophical works, ¹² Camus’ most direct confrontation with the problem of evil – and his critique of Christianity – is found in his engagement with Ivan Karamozov: an encounter notably absent from Srigley’s Camus’ Critique of Modernity. What endears Ivan to Camus is Ivan’s position, which mirrors Doctor Rieux’s moving reaction (‘that one at least was innocent!’) to the small child Jacques’ death in La Peste: ‘If the suffering of children serves to complete the sum of suffering necessary for the acquisition of the truth, I affirm from now onwards that truth is not worth such a price’ (1971: 55). Camus’ analysis of Ivan’s spiritual trajectory indeed highlights decisively the Camusian distinction we saw above, between a legitimate rebellion against theological or secular rationalizations of injustice, and revolutions which end by mirroring the forms of the positions they oppose. Ivan’s initial revolt defies more than it denies, only blaspheming against God and asking Him to account, rather than claiming to overthrow Him (1971: 25). Ivan argues only that ‘even if’ God existed, he could not accept the price of the suffering of innocents (1971: 58, 102), if this was necessary to acquiesce to His order: ‘all the knowledge of the world is not worth a child’s tears’ (1971: 56). However, moved by ‘a prolonged meditation on this injustice’ (1971: 102), Ivan then makes a passionate but illogical ‘leap’. He passes from the justifiable claim that an omnipotent God who would create a world in which the innocent must suffer may not deserve our unqualified assent, to the more strident, indemonstrable claim that God does not exist (1971: 102) – in which he finds licence for complicity in parricide in the famous ‘everything is permitted’:

A more bitter approach, transformed the ‘even if you exist’ into ‘you do not deserve to exist’, therefore ‘you do not exist’. The victims have found in their own innocence the justification for the final crime. (1971: 74) ¹³

In Blumenberg’s language, which we are arguing applies remarkably to Camus’ form of argument concerning modern rebellion, Ivan’s revolutionary atheism, with its claim to absolutely know that no moral order exists, ‘reoccupies’ the type of absolute cultural position formally occupied by the theological system he has been raised in, but rejects. To repeat, though, for Camus, as for Blumenberg, there is no unavoidable necessity for such reoccupation, however understandable we may find it, according to the ‘common origin’ argument Srigley rejects. For Camus, it is a leap, a forgetting, a betrayal or a loss of fidelity to rebellion’s legitimate origins. ¹⁴ In historical terms, it marks the difference between the species of political thinking which came in the 20th century to justify genocide and totalitarian rule by single-party states, and the type of rebellious thought characteristic of early modernity which must now be reawakened against them.

We close this part by underscoring how, for all their similarities, Camus’ animating concern in L’Homme Révolté and elsewhere is not, like Blumenberg’s, solely with tracing the theoretical presuppositions of positions he opposes. Camus’ concern is with their practical, existential consequences – namely, that the claim to know a transcendent Meaning of Existence or History provides ideological licence for murder, oppression, and the destruction through calculated deceit of ‘the small part of reality that can be realised on this earth through the mutual understanding of men’ which rebellion at its origin aims to defend (1971: 283).

Conclusion: The Just Judges, or the other side of the fall

Our deepest concern here then is that, after framing Camus’ oeuvre in a way which powerfully shows Camus’ philosophical profundity, Camus’ Critique of Modernity attributes Camus with a too uncompromising hostility to modernity. What Srigley adds to the anti-modernism of thinkers like his teacher Eric Voegelin is an equally uncompromising critique of Christianity, seeing in Camus’ arch-antihero Jean-Baptiste Clamence in the 1956 Fall Camus’ final, most adequate image of the modern, pseudo-theological ‘disease’ which led to the gulags and lagers (Srigley 2011: 8). Our question here is whether this reading is either finally the best analysis of the whole of Camus’ oeuvre, or consistent with the spirit of an author who repeatedly asserted the need for a new philosophy whose moderation would come from its attempt to ‘exclude nothing’. ¹⁵ Just as the pages of Camus’ Carnets of the late 1950s do not bespeak such a total break with all things modern as Srigley suggests, neither does the late Camus dream of totally overthrowing everything Christian. In the final Carnets, Camus is toying with the idea of a ‘Christ-Pan’, alongside his ‘Don Faust’ (2008: 101). There is no textual evidence that the ‘strange form of love’ (1971: 304) Camus has argued animates human revolt could be reducible to Greek eros, as Srigley wants (Srigley 2011: 137–142). Non-sexual, and extended in principle to all contemporary men and women, it seems unmistakably closer to Christian agape. Indeed, in the same breath as advocating a ‘restoration’ of pagan thought, in a passage Srigley cites in 2007, Camus specifies that this ‘paganisation of belief’ would involve not jettisoning but ‘Hellenising the Christ’ (2008: 203; Srigley 2011: 35). Camus’ hope was ‘to restore … balance’, rather than divide and segregate the contemporary West’s source cultures. The concluding pages of L’Homme Révolté, his most strident statements against the Christian and modern turns away from non-human nature as object of contemplation and source of limits, nevertheless stress that:

Naturally, it is not a question of despising anything, or exalting one civilization [the Mediterranean] at the expense of another [the European], but of simply saying that [this] is a thought which the world cannot do without for much longer. (1971: 300)

Camus strongly opposed Christian theodicy, its pessimism about human nature, its other-worldliness, suspicion of the body and sexuality, and its eschatological messianism. Yet, as Archambault has noted, Camus’ own increasing concern with political justice and the defence of the oppressed brings him in inescapable proximity with Christianity’s historically novel concern for the ‘damned’ or humiliated (Camus 1966: 65; 1952: 169; Archambault 1972: 101–102). When Camus reads the Greek historians in the early 1940s, his Carnets do not blindly idealize the restlessly war-prone, slave-keeping Hellenes (1963: 112, 118; 1966: 120). ¹⁶

Even The Fall, central to Srigley’s claim that Camus was wholly anti-Christian, arguably does not unambiguously support the claim that Camus wanted a complete ‘break’ with the Christian legacy. Emblematically, there is one, deeply symbolically loaded, episode in its heart, which Srigley’s reading of The Fall overlooks. Our hero Jean-Baptiste Clamence, through a series of chances, has come into possession of the missing panel of Jan Van Eyck’s 1432 masterpiece The Just Judges, stolen from Saint Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent. The self-proclaimed ‘judge-penitent’ takes glib pleasure in his refusal to give it back to the authorities. The panel shows Christian judges on horseback, ascending to ask forgiveness from the lamb, Christ. In the context of Clamence’s confession of his vocation as a judge-penitent whose cynical calling requires that there can be no such ‘clemency’ or forgiveness, his hiding of these penitent, just judges suggests a profound inauthenticity to his position. Clamence can only buy his Augustinian or Machiavellian pessimism (Srigley 2011: 91–99) at the price of artificially suppressing the impulses to justice and forgiveness to be found even in the Christian heritage. We can think also, with Alfred Cordes, of The Fall’s remarkable closing passages. For here, moved by the Christian image (found in Van Eyck’s Ghent panels) of descending doves that Clamence oneirically sees in Amsterdam’s falling snow, ¹⁷ our judge-penitent is momentarily moved to lyricism. For an instant, genuine fellow-feeling breaks the monotony of his monologue:

Look, it’s snowing! Oh, I must go out! Amsterdam asleep in the white night, the dark jade canals under the little snow-covered bridges, the empty streets, my muffled steps – there will be purity, even if fleeting, before tomorrow’s mud. See the huge flakes drifting against the windowpanes. It must be the doves, surely. They finally make up their minds to come down, the little dears; they are covering the waters and the roofs with a thick layer of feathers; they are fluttering at every window. What an invasion! Let’s hope they are bringing good news. Everyone will be saved, eh? And not only the elect. (Camus 2000: 108)