If someone told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine of them would be blank. On the last page I would write, “I recognize only one duty and that is to love.” And as far as everything else is concerned, I say no.
–Albert Camus, Notebooks
Just one more existential philosopher stealing from the Christian faith what he cannot derive on his own. If he followed his own ideas consistently, he wouldn’t be able to separate love from hate, mercy from murder. One is ultimately just as absurd as the other in a naked dead universe. But man finds it impossible to live that way.
carl
Carl in #1, you perhaps know that his masters thesis was on NeoPlatonism and Christian thought and he was very influenced from that point on by Saint Augustine.
The above is only one sentence, rather without the context in which Camus was writing, but it can open up a real can-of-worms when examined through atrocious real-world stuff. That may be what Carl is trying to get at. As in, “What, sometimes, do people do in the name of ‘love'”?
1. “I stalked and terrorized my wife because I LOVE her and I don’t want her to be with anyone else”…
2. Did Hitler do what he did out of “love” for Germany?
3. Would some say that pedophiles “love” their victims?
And so on…I find the statement and the inherent question interesting, and don’t seek to be antagonistic here; I’m just playing “devil’s advocate”.
Of course I believe love to be a beautiful and wonderful thing, a prominent building block of what makes us human. But “morality” or “ethics” cannot solely be “love”–how many times have others used “love” as an excuse to harm and abuse? It’s a mixed-bag…
Christianity is not a system of thought with God glued onto the side. In the absence of the Christian God, Christian ethic is absurd. It has no more meaning than the dust of the ground. Camus thought religion an act of cowardice and philosophical suicide. He cannot therefore consistently draw from Christian ethic even as he denies the source of Christian ethic. If God is dead, and the universe is naked, then love and hate blur into one and the same mist. Good and evil cannot be separated. Mercy and murder become indistinguishable. We would be forced to conclude that Nietzsche was right and that there is nothing of morality but the will to power. This is the conclusion that men refuse to accept. Having denied the existence of God, they still demand the benefits of God. If only the atheist would be consistent instead of stealing that which he cannot prove but cannot bear to exist without.
carl
Before criticizing Camus, Christians should read the last book he published, La Chute or The Fall. He saw humanity’s problem more clearly than many a theologian has; and there’s some reason for thinking he found the answer to it, too, before his untimely death.
PS here’s Fitz Allison in Fear, Love, and Worship: “The Fall is not a Christian book and Jean Baptiste is not even a good Jewish prophet, but no Christian will find anywhere a more uncomfortable anatomy of his own pride. It may be that we Christians need to face honestly the sickness of our pride that Camus shows us in the figure Jean Baptiste. Any Christian who criticizes Camus for not being Christian must face the equally serious charge of not living up to that which his own calling entails.”