How Good Without God?

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS (212 pp.)--by Albert Camus--Knopf ($3.50).

The garden which Voltaire advised the French to cultivate (instead of listening to crazy Germanic philosophers) has turned out to be a stony little half-acre.

Furthermore, the horticulture is hampered all the time by the heavy tread of Germanic philosophers among the petits pois.

When Novelist Albert Camus (The Plague, The Stranger) wrote his essay on The Myth of Sisyphus in 1940 (now fully published in the U.S. for the first time), the agony of Western civilization and the German occupation of France seemed to make deadly plain what such Nordic philosophers as Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Jaspers had argued: that man's reason cannot give reason to man's life. In this extremity, some intellectuals got religion; others followed Jean-Paul Sartre into leftwing, atheistic existentialism. Camus, however, tries to escape both from the existentialists ("Negation is their God") and from God. Things would be for the best in the worst of all possible worlds, says Camus, on one condition: man must admit that life has meaning only when he recognizes that it has no meaning. Man's fate, according to Camus, is best symbolized by Sisyphus, the Greek hero who was condemned by the gods to roll a great boulder to the top of a hill. The gods saw to it that it always rolled down again, till the end of time.

Hope or Despair? With this myth, Camus brings up a series of questions which have often been asked in the 20th century: Since God does not exist, under whose spiritual authority do I act? Since there is neither sin nor Hell, why do I feel so awful all the time? Since the past is just one damned thing after another, how did I get this way? Since there is no future, what is the use of going on? The Almighty set his canon against Hamlet's self-slaughter, but what is there to hold me back?

Camus pushes these questions up the fashionable modern Parnassus--inhabited by Dostoevsky, Kafka, Gide, and all manner of existentialists. In the end, a little existentialist moss clings to his rolling stone, and Camus achieves his answer: "Crushing truths perish by being acknowledged . . . There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." Sisyphus has achieved "a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair)." Rope or Cravat? While it is no news, of course, that French intellectuals of the Left have left the church, a lot of people will wish that they would stop arguing so noisily on the steps. Nevertheless, Camus is an honest, deeply intelligent man of near genius, who has tried to restate basic Christian morality in terms acceptable to an atheist, e.g., the Christian habit and virtue of pity. This may be a little like weeping for Tiny Tim while refusing to believe in Dickens. But U.S. readers, or at least those who have not taken their philosophy with Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, will find a troubling power in Camus' negative thinking, a disturbing spiritual autobiography and what Camus himself calls the description "of an intellectual malady."

Most will agree with Camus that the disappearance of God from the calculations of the modern intellectual has put a rope of despair round his neck. And they may respect Camus' astonishingly simple faith that things will be more comfortable if it is agreed to call despair "lack of hope," and the rope a cravat.

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