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)

The name of Pascal has been invoked in connection with that of Camus, perhaps too lightly. A writer in the Christian monthly Esprit, Simone Fraisse, rightly argued, in March 1959, that much deeper affinities linked Camus to Lucretius. To the Latin poet, Epicurus was already a man in revolt, spurning the concept of Providence, haughtily consenting to his role of Sisyphus: he did not deign to indict the gods, for they had no share in the evil of the world. They passively watched it. Camus read his own mood as a rebel, intoxicated with the absurd, in the "prodigious image of divine sanctuaries swollen with the accusing corpses of the plague" which closes Lucretius's sixth and last book. But he added to Lucretius's resigned pessimism the modern concept of men's solidarity. After writing in Noces that "there is no shame in being happy," he had a character in The Plague, Rambert, remark, when faced with the omnipresence of evil: "There is shame in being happy all alone."

Much wishful thinking has been lavished over The Fall…. [Readers] of misguided good-will, lured by the title, thought they could descry anticipatory signs of a Christian attitude in The Fall. Meursault [in The Stranger] was in a sense an innocent sentenced for a crime which he had committed but not willed, and could be viewed, as Camus owned ("paradoxically," he underlined) as "the only Christ that we deserve." To searchers for allusions, Meursault's last wish for a large crowd to witness his execution, "so that all be consummated" might even recall the "consummatum est" whispered by the crucified Christ in the nineteenth chapter of St. John. But the hero of The Fall is an embittered, sarcastic nihilist, a garrulous talker merging his own guilt in the guilt which he instills in all those whom he forces to listen to him. If anything, that baffling tale should be read as a satire of the self-indictment practised by Christians and atheistic Existentialists alike, by Dostoevsky's "buffoons" as Camus called them in his "Exil d'Hélène," and by the advocates of universal and unlimited responsibility. After Tarrou and Rieux [in The Plague], the mouthpieces of a lofty ethics which did without God so that nothing be ravished from man's prerogatives, those idealists dreaming of being saints without God and pure of all expectation of any reward, Clamence [in The Rebel] strikes us as a totally desperate and sneering cynic. The book, unlike The Plague, truly has "no exit." Clamence's hell is, as in Sartre's play, the judgment of men, the glaring presence of the others.

Camus is profoundly opposed to all Christianity stands for: first the notions of incarnation, of grace, of redemption, of repentance, and of collective guilt for some sin committed, unbeknown to us. In that sense, as Camus himself remarked … and as J. P. Sartre had shrewdly explained as early as February 1943 ("Explication de L'Etranger" in Les Cahiers du Sud) [see excerpt above], Camus stands at the opposite pole from Kafka, "the novelist of impossible transcendence": for Kafka, enigmatic signs appear to point to an inhuman and undecipherable order; for Camus, there is no transcendence whatever. The very notion of sin, he avers, is meaningless to him. (pp. 67-8)

But Camus's most original revolt is against hope…. Camus indicts hope as a form of resignation, robbing man of energies which he needs, in order to enrich a God who "hardly needs them."… (p. 68)

Camus's world is one of universal condemnation to death, as Pascal's world was. But to the stranger, to the unfortunate men of good will in Oran harassed by the plague, to his companions in the Resistance, to the unbelievers of today who spurn the use of those small screens which Camus declared he had seen in Italian museums, through which the scaffold was concealed from men sentenced to death, to the bitter characters sketched in The Fall and in Exile and the Kingdom, the issue seems to require an anti-Pascalian answer: what are the positive values which persist in this world of mortals sentenced to death? Such paganism or disbelief in Christian values is a novel phenomenon of the twentieth century. Camus noted it in a curious footnote to his article, "Portrait d'un élu," in Cahiers du Sud, April 1943: "Contemporary unbelief does not rest on science as it did toward the close of the last century. It denies both science and religion. It is no longer the skepticism of reason in the presence of miracle. It is a passionate unbelief." (p. 70)