Writer · Contemporary
Albert Camus
1913–1960 · Absurdism; the philosophy of revolt and measure
An unbeliever who refused the name atheist, wrote his thesis on Plotinus and Augustine, and told the Dominicans of Latour-Maubourg in 1948 that he would never try to pass himself off as a Christian but shared their horror of a world where children are tortured.
Camus held that the human demand for meaning meets the silence of the world, and that this “absurd” must be neither evaded by suicide nor resolved by a leap of faith but lived with lucidity; The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Stranger (1942) are its first statements. The Plague (1947) and The Rebel (1951) move from the absurd to revolt: the rebel who says no affirms a limit and a human nature worth defending in everyone (“I rebel, therefore we are”), which is why Camus rejected both the guillotine and the revolutionary murders that Sartre's circle excused, and broke with them. His sense of measure was Greek and Mediterranean, his moral seriousness Augustinian; The Fall (1956) is a confession without absolution, and he was killed in a car crash three years after his Nobel Prize.
Why he matters: He is the unbeliever Catholics have most wanted to claim: Thomas Merton wrote seven essays on him, Jean Onimus devoted a book to his relation to Christianity, and his address to the Dominicans (“The Unbeliever and Christians”) asked the Church to speak plainly against evil, a demand later popes took up. His refusal to justify murder by history is the closest a secular writer has come to the doctrine of intrinsically evil acts.
Where to be careful
He denied God, providence, the immortal soul and any supernatural end, and held that hope beyond this world is a betrayal of it (Dei Filius chs. 1–2; CCC 1024–1029); his reading of the Fall and of grace in The Rebel is of a world without redemption. What remains is a defense of human nature, of limits, of the innocent and of the body's goodness that the Church can honor almost line by line.
Reading
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The Myth of SisyphusAlbert Camus · The absurd stated, and the refusal of suicide and of the leap.
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The RebelAlbert Camus · Revolt, limits and the case against justified murder; the book that cost him Sartre.
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Albert Camus and ChristianityJean Onimus · A Catholic critic on the Augustinian unbeliever.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.