“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” (Albert Camus)
Albert Camus, from The Rebel:
Man can master, in himself, everything that should be mastered. He should rectify in creation everything that can be rectified. And after he has done so, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world. But the injustice and the suffering of the world will remain and, no matter how limited they are, they will not cease to be an outrage. Dmitri Karamazov’s cry of “Why?” will continue to echo through history…
Confronted with evil, confronted with death, man from the very depths of his soul cries out for justice. Christianity has only replied to this protest against evil by the annunciation of the Kingdom and then of Eternal Life—accompanied by a demand for faith. But suffering exhausts hope and faith and then is left alone and unexplained. The toiling masses, worn out with suffering and death, are masses without God…Christianity postpones, to a point beyond the span of history, the cure of evil and murder which are, nevertheless, experienced within the span of history…the innocent continue to die. For twenty centuries the sum total of evil has not diminished in the world. No paradise, whether divine or revolutionary, has been realized.
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present…men [now], abandoned to the shadows, have turned their backs upon the fixed and radiant point of the present. They forget the present for the future, the fate of humanity for the delusion of power, the misery of the slums for the mirage of the Eternal City, ordinary justice for an empty promised land…they no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of [our age] is that it no longer loves life…
Impatience with limits [and] despair at being human have finally driven [us] to inhuman excesses. Denying the real grandeur of life, [we] have had to stake all on [our] own excellence. For want of something better to do, [we] deified ourselves and [our] misfortune began…to learn to live and to die, and to learn to be human, [we must] refuse to be a god.
The rebel thus disclaims divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men…the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers and sisters are breathing under the same sky; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again renounce to a later time…with this joy, through long struggle, we shall remake the soul of our time. All men may indeed live [side by side], but on condition that they shall understand how they correct one another, and that a limit, under the sun, shall curb them all. Each tells the other that he is not God; this is the end of romanticism.
Ann: so I've heard, but please don't get me started on that topic. This excerpt from Camus caught my attention in part because I've been reading, in Berdyaev and other Orthodox writers, about "deification" ; while I find that idea fascinating and even inspiring, in the end I'm with Camus--we're better off if we just stick to being human.
Posted by: Jack Shifflett | 03/15/2020 at 09:46 AM
This is original sin.
Posted by: Ann Markle | 03/15/2020 at 09:33 AM