Albert Camus, existentialist author of The Plague, The Stranger, and The Fall, died in a car accident on January 4, 1960 in Sens, Algeria.
I had not heard this story of Camus’s conversations with Methodist minister Howard Mumma until we read about it today in our new book, One Year Book of Christian History by Michael and Sharon Rusten.
According to Camus:
We have a right to think that truth with a capital letter is relative. But facts are facts. And whoever says that the sky is blue when it is gray is prostituting words and preparing the way for tyranny.
The night on Golgotha is so important in the history of man only because, in its shadow, the divinity abandoned its traditional privileges and drank to the last drop, despair included, the agony of death. This is the explanation of the Lama sabactani and the heartrending doubt of Christ in agony. The agony would have been mild if it had been alleviated by hopes of eternity. For God to be a man, he must despair.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
He does seem to have struggled, alternating between hope and despair. Maybe he finally found hope.
I belive Camus was discussing religion with a Catholic Jesuit at the time of his car crash…so he was a seeker, but not yet committed…
Did you know his book “The Plague” was an allegory of the Christian community of LeChambon? that saved many Jews?
God’s mercy will probably find him…