The works of Camus, as they stand interrupted by fate, utter a pagan message which is to be set beside that of the great pagans of antiquity and that of some of the modern pagans to whom Christianity owes an immense debt of gratitude—for they have asked the right questions and constrained Christians to evolve ever more satisfactory answers to them. "Neo-paganism is the great spiritual phenomenon of our age"—thus wrote, in The Drama of Atheistic Humanism (1944), the eminent Jesuit thinker, Father Henri de Lubac, who deplores it, but courageously concedes that many noble souls, indeed many "blinded Christian souls" are attracted to the renovated paganism of today.
Instinct and doctrine blend in Camus's pagan assertions. His early series of essays, Noces (Nuptials), sings a paean to the wedding-feast of sky, sea, and the Algerian earth, supplemented by several equally rapturous prose canticles in honor of his "invincible summer" burning through the hours of distress and squalor in his youth. Their motto is a vehement denial of any longing for another life. Four pages before the volume closes, he propounds the conclusion: "The world is beautiful and, outside it, there is no salvation." The opening lines of the book are a disclaimer of all myths and intellectual structures erected to frustrate or to justify man's naïve desire for earthly happiness. "There is but one love in this world. To embrace a woman's body is also to retain, close to one, that strange joy which descends from the sky to the sea … I love this life with abandon and I want to speak of it freely; it fills me with pride at my human fate." Hic et nunc: here and now Camus, the young Pagan, like his three immediate predecessors in French literature, the Gide of Fruits of the Earth, Montherlant, and Giono, wants to savor the delights of life. The notion of hell appears, but as a pleasant joke, conceived by the imagination of most virtuous persons. Immortality, and any ultimate rewards promised to those who elect the Pascalian wager, are spurned. "I do not choose to believe," states the worshipper of the wind at Djemila, in Noces, "that death opens onto another life. To me it is a closed door." Those delusions are but an attempt to unburden man of the weight of his own life. And Camus prefers to carry his burden himself. (p. 66)
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