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Albert Camus was a figure greatly admired during the second half of the twentieth century. His chilling evocation of the absurdity of human life in The Myth of Sisyphus,1 his stinging critique of the hypocrisy of bourgeois society in The Outsider,2 and his vivid depiction of Nazi oppression, and resistance to it, in The Plague,3 struck a chord with a Europe devastated by the violence and suffering of two world wars. Camus' work still appeals today: a new Pléiade edition of his complete works is in preparation;4 the translation of his articles for the Resistance periodical Combat has revived interest in him in this country.5 In a new century, still dominated by violence, in which religion is seen by many as contributing to that violence, the challenges posed for Christians by Camus' atheist humanism remain powerful. My aim in this article is to explore the nature of those challenges and to consider some of the ways in which Christians are seeking to respond to them.
The Myth of Sisyphus begins with the statement that there is only one serious philosophical problem, that of suicide, deciding, that is to say, whether or not life is worth living. The image of the human condition, presented by Camus, is of Sisyphus, condemned for eternity to roll a stone up to the top of a hill, only to see it roll down again. The human condition is 'absurd'. We, who are filled with the desire for clarity, are trapped in an irrational universe, indifferent to our needs and desires. We know that either God is all-powerful and we are not free, or that he is not all-powerful and we are free. Only when we cease to deceive ourselves and accept the absurdity of our condition will we find happiness.
The abstract concept of the absurd is given a social context in The Outsider. A young clerk, Meursault, leads an uneventful life, characterised by the routine of travelling to the office, working, travelling back home and sitting on his balcony in the evening, watching the world go by. When the novel opens, he has just received the news of his mother's death in an...