THE ANTI-HUMANISTS

Master and Pupil (Robert Royal, Crisis)

[A] touching relationship, long known to students of Camus's work, can be traced more fully now with the publication of Albert Camus & Jean Grenier: Correspondence 1932-1960 (University of Nebraska Press), translated by Jan F. Rigaud. These letters record a lifelong intellectual and spiritual friendship. Grenier began it by going out of his way as Camus's teacher to visit him in his poor home. Camus was encouraged by this show of respect to exert himself in order to become a worthy conversation partner. More concretely, Grenier convinced Camus's poor family to let him continue his education.

This had intellectual as well as personal dimensions. Grenier oversaw Camus's thesis on "Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism," a subject that attracted master and pupil alike for its intrinsic interest--a comparison of two high points of the human spirit, one Christian, one pagan--but also because it was a subject that had engaged a great ancient predecessor in the region, St. Augustine. Both were open to a larger horizon than was typical among contemporary intellectuals. Or as Camus was to formulate it later, Grenier "prevented me from being a humanist in the sense that it is understood today--I mean a man blinded by narrow certainties. ' Contrary to almost the whole of modern French thought, Camus believed that it was better to be "a good bourgeois than a bad intellectual or a mediocre writer," and he and Grenier strove to avoid the vanity and self-deception endemic to French intellectuals.

Both had intermittent attractions to Christianity, especially Catholicism, because, as Grenier put it, it reflected the principle that there is "no truth for man that is not incarnated." And Grenier could be merciless toward what he believed was a "dilettantism of despair" among many French intellectuals. But they were also put off by the harsh tone of many people in the French Church at the time, which seemed particularly offensive because of the Church's historical failings, as they saw it. Camus confesses at one point: "Catholic thought always seems bittersweet to me. It seduces me then offends me. Undoubtedly, I lack what is essential." That may be true, but it is also a sad commentary on Catholic history in France that these two good men, flawed and perhaps blinded as they may have been by certain modern intellectual currents, felt such ambivalence. The sense of guilt (personal and universal) in the later Camus is so palpable and profound that many people believe that had he not died at age 47, he would have eventually become a Christian. It1s a pious wish, but I have always thought it ignored certain invincible circumstances. These letters have not changed my mind.

But what a wonderful record of human honesty and affection they offer, especially for our time. Both had seen the results of murderous philosophies of human perfection, and Camus would be pilloried by the French intellectual establishment, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre, for his deep critique of Marxism in his L'Homme Revolte (The Rebel). In it, Camus argued that we have an obligation to rebel against injustice but must never allow that just impulse to become absolute revolution against the human condition. Because when we do, we turn into perpetrators of injustices worse than those we seek to eliminate. Or as he put it in the opening sentence of that work, a line that could almost serve as a motto for his and Grenier's work in the face of so much that was--and is--simply mad among French intellectuals: "There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic."

A lynching or a pogrom is a crime of passion. The Holocaust was a crime of logic. Both kinds of crime are terrible, but the difference is significant. It's a distinction the humanist must deny. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 30, 2003 10:02 PM