'Saints without God': Camus's poetics of secular faith

This article addresses Camus’s response to Christianity and the problem of suffering in the context of the early twentieth century. Owing to his association with the existentialist movement, it is often assumed that Camus, like many other French intellectuals of the period, rejected Christianity alt...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:  
Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. VerfasserIn: Whistler, Grace (VerfasserIn)
Medienart: Elektronisch Aufsatz
Sprache:Englisch
Verfügbarkeit prüfen: HBZ Gateway
Journals Online & Print:
Lade...
Fernleihe:Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste
Veröffentlicht: 2018
In: Nordisk judaistik
Jahr: 2018, Band: 29, Heft: 1, Seiten: 49-61
weitere Schlagwörter:B Camus
B Religious Imagery
B Transcendence
B Poetics
B Suffering
Online-Zugang: Vermutlich kostenfreier Zugang
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:This article addresses Camus’s response to Christianity and the problem of suffering in the context of the early twentieth century. Owing to his association with the existentialist movement, it is often assumed that Camus, like many other French intellectuals of the period, rejected Christianity altogether. For this reason, his sympathy with Christian thought is overlooked, and it seems altogether bizarre that some theologians even claimed Camus to be a convert. Among these wildly conflicting claims, Camus’s philosophical response to Christianity has become somewhat muddied; in this article I attempt to rectify this. I argue that Camus’s entire philosophy is underpinned by his response to Christianity, and that he wanted to re-establish the position of morality in the face of the problem of suffering. I thus demonstrate how his writings manifest this struggle to achieve this goal, in what I refer to as Camus’s ‘poetics of secular faith’. Camus once claimed, ‘I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist’. This article aims to elucidate just what is meant by a statement like this, as well as to catalogue and analyse Camus’s innovative attempts at reconciling spirituality and suffering through philosophical literature.
ISSN:2343-4929
Enthält:Enthalten in: Nordisk judaistik
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.30752/nj.68791