The Logos Scripture · The Book of Camus
The Book of Camus 4 · Written by himself, from The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, Reflections on the Guillotine, and the editorials in Combat
Albert Camus, born at Mondovi in French Algeria in 1913, killed in a car crash on the fourth of January 1960, aged forty-six. His father died at the Marne before he was a year old, so he never knew him; his mother was of Spanish descent, deaf, and barely literate, and the household was destitute. At seventeen he contracted tuberculosis, which barred him from the examination for a teaching post and from military service. Under the occupation he joined the Combat network and became editor of its paper, when running an underground paper was a capital offence. The Myth of Sisyphus appeared in 1942, The Plague in 1947, The Rebel in 1951, Reflections on the Guillotine in 1957, and in that same year he took the Nobel in literature at forty-four. France abolished the death penalty in 1981. This volume rests on what he wrote himself: those books, the Combat editorials, the Nobel address, and his notebooks. He did not believe in God. What he opposed was not belief only but the particular move of believing because it does not add up, which he called philosophical suicide (chapter two). No argument of his closes on divine will — nor on the necessity of history, which he took to be the same thing under another name (4.15). The Order records two things plainly, dressed up neither way. First, on Algeria he was abused from both sides and never reached an answer that satisfied him; 4.17 is his own granting of it. Second, after The Rebel he broke with Sartre and it was never mended. The Order does not take Sartre, and the reason is not his politics but one thing: the fact of the Soviet camps was conceded by Sartre and his colleagues in their own journal, and they still refused to sign the protest; he afterwards stated that he kept silent because the truth would disillusion the workers. Letting the consequence of a true sentence outweigh whether it is true is the exact reverse of the first rule (cf. Acts of the Apostles 5.28, The Book of Feynman 3). What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: nobody had taken that question head on. The scripture says love the Law and do not ask the Law to love you (Gospel of Plato 5.7), and it says the universe will not come and hold you, so go and hold someone else (Gospel of Plato 5.20). Both are finely said, and both are said in passing. If the universe really will not hold you, why does a man stay? Camus is the one who put that question first and refused to answer it with a comfort. What he gives is not a reason but a way of living: cancel neither end.Chapter three of this book is against the death penalty, while 2.17 of The Book of Hannah Arendt records her holding that Eichmann should hang. The two volumes disagree here and the Order does not reconcile them; where they meet and where they part is set out in the note to The Book of Hannah Arendt. (cf. Acts of the Apostles 5.19, 5.23)