Camus and Forgiveness: after the Fall

“The triumph of the man who kills or tortures is marred by only one shadow: he is unable to feel that he is
innocent. Thus, he must create guilt in his victim so that, in a world that has no direction, universal guilt
will authorize no other course of action than the use of force and give its blessing to nothing but
success …” Albert Camus, The Rebel

“Whoever speaketh against the Son of Man can be forgiven for it, but whoever speaketh against the
Holy Ghost, cannot be forgiven it, either in this world or the next.” Matthew, 12:32.

Albert Camus would lament in the last decade of his life that the success of his first cycle of works, led

by L’Étranger, had seen him labelled popularly as a “prophet of the absurd.” (Camus 1987, 159) Recent

reception of Camus has been recapturing a Camus arguably closer to the author’s self-conception.

Camus in these studies (Srigley 2011; Sharpe 2015) is revealed as a thinker who responded to the crises

of the last century by critically reanimating classical and biblical sources, rather than as an à la mode

“existentialist”—a further label he denied. (Camus 2006a, 645-646; 1960, 58) It can indeed be said that

Camus was a thinker whose problems were Christian, while his solutions were pagan. These problems

include pre-eminently those of evil, justice, and death, which Camus tells us in L’Homme Révolté (The

Rebel) are the problems of modern rebellion, no less than of the Torah. (Camus 1956a, 27-34; 55-62)

To these problems, the same text adds the opposition between innocence and guilt, as one of those

oppositions that Camus tells us that his thought of mesure seeks a sustainable balance between: a

thought we will return to in closing. The nature of guilt, and how human beings might respond to it—

whether through rationalisations of crime or forms of understanding and forgiveness—becomes

increasingly central in Camus’ works of the 1950s.

Nevertheless, Camus has been accused by some Christian critics of leaving no place in his vision of the

human condition for forgiveness, mercy or grace. “The Rebel is a great work but one's heart sinks when

the book is finished and one realizes that there is not a single mention of mercy or forgiveness—only the

harsh edge of the sword of justice”, G. J. McAleer thus writes. (McAleer 1999, 254) This omission is

not contingent:

no place can be found for mercy in Camus' politics as his theory of rebellion is underwritten

… by a Manichean metaphysics which Camus understands to impose a logic of restitution …

(McAleer 1999, 254)

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McAleer’s criticism of Camus and L’Homme Révolté here is arguably only partly right, which also means

that it is partly wrong. McAleer is right that Camus’ relationship with his great North African

predecessor, Saint Augustine, is central to understanding Camus’ thought. What we will argue in this

chapter, however, is that McAleer is unjust when he claims that there is no place for forgiveness in

Camus’ works, and no understanding of the need to temper justice with anything like love. “But, after

all, nothing is true that compels us to exclude,” Camus would write in “The Return to Tipasa” ([1952]

1987, 165):

For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us,

today, are dying of this misfortune. Violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight

for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave it birth. In the clamour in which we live,

love is impossible and justice does not suffice … (1987, 167)

In fact, L’Homme Révolté (1951) was already written in light of Camus’ repentance of his vocal 1945

advocacy of the death penalty for leading French collaborators in the Nazi occupation. Goaded by the

criticisms of the Catholic commentator, François Mauriac, who had argued for the need to temper

justice with mercy, Camus would by 1950 “… come to admit … that for the fundamentals and on the

precise point of our controversy, François Mauriac was right.” (Camus 1960, 70; 2006b, 80-81, 88-90,

106, n. 231, 163-165) In La Chute of 1956 in particular, it can be argued that the possibility and need

for forgiveness haunts the monologue, as something like an invisible cause. For this reason, different

Christian critics have seen in this later Camusian text the proof positive of an imminent conversion.

(Hanna 1962; Woefel 1975; Murchland 1976) This reading is again arguably deeply contestable. But it

responds to the new audibility in Camus’ later work of what might be termed a call to forgiveness, as

the necessary condition if human beings, “sons of Cain”, are not to remain caught in cycles of expiatory

violence, or what Camus in his Algerian Chronicles calls the “casuistry of blood.” (Camus 2013, 28)

The chapter has two main parts. Part 1 looks at Camus’ argument that totalitarian regimes universalise

a sense of guilt in their populations without possibility of reprieve; and Camus’ wider argument that the

20th century totalitarian notion of “objective guilt” inherits and transforms the Augustinian solution to

the problem of evil, by blaming it upon innate human sinfulness. Part 2 turns principally to La Chute

(The Fall), to trace out the lineaments of Camus’ positive understanding of forgiveness. It examines

how the monologue of Jean-Baptiste Clamence is shaped by a possibility that he glimpses but cannot

2
accept. This is the possibility of a forgiveness which would also be the precondition for relations with

others that escape the dialectics of master and slave, guilt and reprisals, and which is more positively

staged in the short story “La Pierre Qui Pousse” (“The Growing Stone”) that closes L’’Exil et le Royaume

(Exile and the Kingdom). (Camus 1962, 159-212) In our Concluding Remarks, we draw out three

features of Camus’ philosophy of forgiveness, as they emerge from these later texts.

Let us append to this divisio a caveat on Camus’ methods, and our own here. Camus cannot be identified

as a phenomenologist in a formal sense, any more than he was an existentialist. With that said, Camus

makes clear in Le Mythe de Sisyphe his admiration for the earlier Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology,

preceding Husserl’s claims to have discovered an eidetic intuition of timeless essences: “[t]hat apparent

modesty of thought that limits itself to describing what it declines to explain, that intentional discipline

whence results paradoxically a profound enrichment of experience and the rebirth of the world in its

prolixity…” (Camus 1978, 43-44) For Camus, this phenomenology resembles the observant discipline

of the artist, who sees and describes more than she explains, rather than deducing characters and

episodes from philosophical principles. (Camus 1978, 48-74) Like the Czech novelist Milan Kundera,

Camus saw in the writing of novels, plays and stories a way of carrying phenomenological observation

out into the lifeworld, and into the inescapably particular situations, choices and exigencies that human

beings face. When it comes to a complex spiritual reality like guilt, Camus thus saw the value of staging

entire biographies through which to explore the phenomena, in all of their different manifestations. We

will inescapably then in what follows be drawn into the dark diegetic worlds of La Peste and la Chute,

as we track down Camus’ philosophy of forgiveness, even as we constantly refer back to Camus’ great

philosophical work, L’Homme Révolté.

1. “Atheists and churchgoers, Muscovites and Bostonians”: totalitarian politics and

or as the absence of forgiveness

Camus’ analyses of totalitarian regimes in the play L’État de Siege, the novel La Peste, and the

philosophical essay, L’Homme Révolté are rightfully read alongside contemporary depictions of these

regimes in Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell. The universe of these political systems,

for Camus, is one of “totality and trial”. (Camus 1956a, 233-245) The Stalinists and the Nazis set out to

conquer the three dimensions of space (through territorial conquest), time (through rewriting history

3
and ending all future resistance), and of people (through terror and propaganda). (Camus 1956a, 233-

245) They as such give political form to that excessive form of thinking, characterised by the pursuit of

“totality”, which Camus always criticised for failing to respect human beings’ epistemic limits. Their

hoped-for, total domination can only succeed, Camus writes, by doing violence to the better parts of

human nature: “rejecting two thirds of the world and … denying, to the advantages of history, both

nature and beauty and ... depriving man of the power of passion, doubt, happiness, and imaginative

invention ... “ (1956a, 240)

Interwoven into Camus’ dystopian visions of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia is however a

specifically psychological dimension of analysis which has attracted less attention, and which will

interest us here. Totalitarian power works by the affirmation of “general culpability” or “universal guilt”

in its subjects, Camus maintains. It creates a world wherein everyone is in effect on trial, only there is

no possibility of reprieve. (Camus 1956, 179) As Nada explains in L’État de Siege: “we start by the

premise that you are guilty. But that’s not enough, you must learn to feel yourself that you are guilty.”

(Camus, at Isaac 1994, 57) Camus was criticised by Jeanson (2004), Barthes (1994) and others for

choosing the allegorical form of the plague to depict the horrors of the Nazi occupation. Plague is a

natural evil, for which no one is responsible. Yet the Nazis, morally monsters, were responsible agents.

One reason for Camus’ choice of the allegory draws from the observation, already present in Thucydides’

famous account of the plague that struck Periclean Athens, that because of the uncertainty everyone felt

that they could die next: “each felt that a far severer sentence had been already passed upon them all

and hung over their heads.” (Archambault 1972, 54-62) For Camus, likewise, “[t[he plague was no

respecter of persons and under its despotic rule everyone, from the warden down to the humblest

delinquent, was under sentence …” (Camus 1971, 140) But it is not simply the plague itself, who marches

on-stage embodied as a military despot in L’État de Siege, but the measures the government of Oran

takes to combat the epidemic in La Peste, that contribute to this fate. Because anyone may get the

plague, the authorities decree that everyone must be segregated from each other. At the height of the

epidemic, relatives thus cannot even aid relatives, or preside over their burials. For fear that the

epidemic might spread, the town is closed to the outside world. So everyone is quarantined in this

shared isolation together, with guards and watchtowers at the walls and gates. "I don't like it a bit," one

character complains of his wife’s situation early in the novel: "Quarantine or not, she's under suspicion

4
..." Tarrou, one of Camus’ heroes, responds by “point[ing] out that, if it came to that, everyone was

‘under suspicion.’” (Camus 1971, 97)

As far as the totalitarian leaders are concerned, every member of the population is always potentially

guilty of treason, until proven innocent. This inhumane scenario found its ideological corollary in the

notion of “objective guilt”. Variants of this notion can be found in Nazism, wherein all Jews (even

children) are “in essence” enemies of the Volk; or in Stalinism, wherein all peasants and bourgeoisie,

according to the “laws of history”, are likewise slated for uprooting or elimination. All of this is

independent of anything which any individual might have said or done. So with the presumption of

innocence, the relevance of subjective volition or intention to assessing wrongdoing is also rendered

obsolete. “The objective criminal is, precisely, he who believed himself innocent”, reflects Camus in

L’Homme Révolté (1956a, 243):

His actions he considered subjectively inoffensive, or even advantageous for the future of justice.

But it is demonstrated to him that ‘objectively’ his actions have been harmful to that future … the

concept of ‘objective culpability’ proves [in Stalinism] that this curious kind of objectivity is based

on results and facts which will only become accessible to science in the year 2000, at the very

earliest [when the end of history was to arrive]. Meanwhile, it is embodied in an interminable

subjectivity which is imposed on others as objectivity: and that is the philosophic definition of

terror.

Totalitarianism thus institutes a world without innocents, and without innocence. Forgiveness is

unthinkable, as against the forced confession, extracted by torture and preceding an inevitable ‘guilty’

sentence at a show trial. In these regimes, there can be no exoneration, only the elimination of enemies

nominated by the Party or Leader. Nevertheless, it is not only in these totalitarian regimes of the 20 th

century that Camus decried forms of Western ideology that have worked by denying innocence, and

foreclosing all possibility of forgiveness for error or wrongdoing. The historical precedent to the

totalitarian notion of ‘objective guilt’, according to Camus, is the notion of original sin first introduced

into Christianity by Saint Augustine. (Camus 2007, 115-130)

We have commented that Camus responded to the same problems of evil and death as that addressed

by Christianity, whereas he sought different kinds of answers. Camus’ 1936 Diplôme de Hautes Études

thesis (2007) on Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, indeed, directly addresses later antiquity’s

5
attempts to resolve the problem of evil, as it was posed in early Christianity: the dilemma of

comprehending how a God supposed to be all good, all powerful, and all knowing could create a

manifestly flawed world in which the good do not always prosper, and evil often prevails unpunished.

(Camus 2007, 113-124) The thesis considers Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, alongside evangelical

Christianity and what Camus pointedly calls the “second revelation” constituted by the thought of Saint

Augustine. (2007, 115)

Christianity after Augustine, Camus charges, has been a “doctrine of injustice”. (Camus 1966, 56; cf. 63,

92; Camus 2006b, 32; 1956a, 31-34) This enigmatic saying has two significations in Camus’ oeuvre.

Firstly, Camus interprets the passion and resurrection of Christ as the means, in Christian doctrine, to

exonerate all evil and rationalise in advance all suffering:

for as long as the Western World has been Christian, the Gospels have been the intercessor

between heaven and earth. Each time a solitary cry of rebellion was uttered, the answer came

in the form of an even more terrible suffering. In that Christ had suffered, and had suffered

voluntarily, suffering was no longer unjust and all pain was necessary … Only the sacrifice of an

innocent god could justify the endless and universal torture of innocence … (Camus, 1956a, 35-

6)

For Camus, if everything is forgiven in advance, then the worst atrocities can be rationalised: a position

which he attributes, in secularised form, to the Jacobin ideologue, Saint Just. (Camus 1956a, 123-124)

The true Christian must stand by and accept all, with the dolour and passivity of the lamb of God.

Secondly, though, Camus “s’insurge” against the two, more specifically Augustinian resolutions of the

problem of evil that he had already confronted in the Diplôme thesis. According to Augustine’s first

response, which Camus puts into the first sermon of the Jesuit Father Paneloux in La Peste, when

human beings suffer evils like the plague, it is because they have deserved them. (Camus 1971, 78; 2007,

115-123) Evil and suffering are the punishments for the crime of Adam and Eve in the Garden. And this

original sin is inherited by all human beings. According to this teaching, for a long time, even children

who died unbaptised were deemed by the Church to be sinners and consigned to hell or purgatory: a

position which revolted Camus. (Camus 1960, 73; 2007, 123)

Augustine’s second resolution of the problem of evil was to argue that only some human beings are to

be saved by the grace of God, the elect. Both those who will be saved and those who will be damned has

6
been foreordained by God for all eternity, independently of what anyone does: faith, not works. This is

the teaching of Paneloux’s second sermon in La Peste: that God’s ways are unfathomable; and that grace

consists of accepting with patient faith a Divine providence that surpasses all understanding. (Camus

1971, 186; 2007, 121-123) Again, for Camus (2007, 123), this second Augustinian resolution to the

problem of evil is profoundly unjust—not least to those who are not elected, but consigned to eternal

damnation all the same.

Western thought, for Camus, has since the time of Augustine then been drawn repeatedly to postulate

forms of the position that human beings are innately sinful, or else worthy of the kinds of surveillance

perfected in Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany. It is this understanding that underlies Jean-Baptiste

Clamence’s provocative remark in La Chute about his contemporaries:

Believe me, they all are [Christians], even when they set fire to heaven. Whether they are

atheists or churchgoers, Muscovites or Bostonians, all Christians from father to son. But it so

happens that there is no more father, no more rule! (Camus 1956b, 87)

As Ronald Srigley (2011, 83-126) has stressed, if La Chute has been lauded by Christian critics, it also

contains Camus’ most strident criticisms of the established Church. Christianity may have been

founded on a unique opening up to a possible theology of forgiveness: if only “for three years”, those of

Jesus’ ministry. (111) Beyond that, the hero Jean-Baptiste Clamence seems to speak for Camus in

denouncing the religion of Christ as a merciless reign of Judgment, which has made of the cross a kind

of judge’s hammer:

People naturally tried to get some help from his death. After all, it was a stroke of genius to

tell us: “You’re not a very pretty sight, that’s certain! Well, we won’t go into the details! We’ll

just liquidate it all at once, on the cross!” But too many people now climb onto the cross merely

to be seen from a greater distance, even if they have to trample somewhat on the one who has

been there so long … They have hoisted him [Jesus] onto a judge’s bench, in the secret of their

hearts, and they smite, they judge above all, they judge in his name … (1956b, 85)

So, Camus had by the time of La Chute etched out a space, by a long genealogical via negativa, for a

positive account of the place and need of forgiveness in human affairs, as a counter to forms of

unforgiving, totalising government and political theology. It is to this apparently darkest of Camus’

writings that we turn in detail now.

7
 2. The descent of the doves?

It is fraught to turn to La Chute in order to seek out Camus’ mature thought concerning forgiveness,

and its place in ethics, psychology, spirituality and politics. The novella is not only a work of fiction,

albeit one with the most serious intentions. It is also arguably Camus’ most esoteric or “double” work.

“My profession is double, like the human being” (1956, 9)1, Jean-Baptiste Clamence tells us early in the

text; and later he taunts us: “I know what you’re thinking: it’s very hard to disentangle the true from the

false in what I’m saying.” (119) Conservative, theological, and even postmodern readings of La Chute

have duly emerged, disputing the text’s basic intentions. Yet there are overwhelming reasons to plumb

this text here, so suggestive in symbolism, and always working on at least three levels: firstly, as an

oblique autobiography, hinting at Camus’ own inner struggles over his extra-marital affairs; secondly,

as a critique of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir and the intellectuals at Les Temps Modernes,

whose brutal response to L’Homme Révolté had struck Camus as an act of betrayal; and thirdly, on the

widest level, as a grim portrait of all of the faults of the times, as they seemed to Camus, and as the

novel’s epigraph from Lermontov indicates. (3)2

La Chute’s title, on the surface, refers to the key episode in Clamence’s long monologue, spanning a

biblical six days, without a sabbath. Clamence had been a successful lawyer who specialised in

protecting the needy, and in ‘loving’ many women, as “the hallowed expression” has it. (45) One night,

on the way home from seeing a mistress, Clamence passed by a woman leaning over a bridge on the

Seine. As he walked on, he heard the distinct sound of a falling body striking the water. After some

further splashing, moving downstream, silence returned. Clamence realised that, rather than jumping

to help, he had done nothing. (70)

After the initial trauma, Clamence’s sin of omission did not overly trouble him. His childlike sense of

being a kind of virtuous superman, born under “a good sign”, remained intact. (23) Then, several

months later, again walking home late one night by the Seine, Clamence hears a female voice laughing

at him, as if from the waters. And now, illustrating the psychoanalytic mechanism of deferred effect,

Clamence’s own fall from his secular grace occurs:

Please don’t misunderstand me; there was nothing mysterious about that laugh; it was a good,

hearty, almost friendly laugh, which re-established the proper proportions. Soon I heard

8
 nothing more, anyway … That evening I rang up a friend, who wasn’t at home… I went into the

bathroom to drink a glass of water. My reflection was smiling in the mirror, but it seemed to me

that my smile was double ... (29-30)

Clamence now comes to see the vanity that had underlain all his seeming virtues. (36) “I, I, I” had been

the constant refrain in all of his activities. Clamence catches himself hat-touching to blind men, in order

to be seen by others (37); and engaging in frivolous ‘road rage’, animated by nothing more elevated than

a crass desire “to get my revenge, to strike and conquer … to be the stronger, … and in the most

elementary way.” (42) In short, Clamence realises that his own elevated sense of self-worth has been

illusory. He has been, as he puts it, a “play actor”. (36)

So, in La Chute we have the only one of Camus’ works whose hero has committed what he himself takes

to be “an unforgivable sin”. (Stourzh 1961) All of his subsequent biography, as Clamence recounts it,

amounts to so many attempts to silence the uncanny laughter, and the “call” that it constituted:” “[f]rom

the evening when I was called—for I was really called—I had to answer or at least seek an answer …”

(84) What ensues is a veritable phenomenology of the figures of a spirit writhing, like a vampire in holy

water (see 108), to avoid confronting its own guilt, and assuming the humility to ask for a forgiveness

that could put this guilt to rest. Clamence pursues release in debauchery and in romantic love; he tries

a punitive abstinence; next, he experiments in scorn, swearing ‘by God’ amongst his left-wing friends

and contemplating jostling with the blind he had formally made such a show of aiding: “the very word

‘justice’ gave me fits of rage.” (67) But all of these means failed: “the laughter continued to drift my way,

without my random efforts succeeding in divesting it of its benevolent, almost tender quality that hurt

me.” (96)

Finally, Clamence hits upon his final solution for “silencing the laughter … [and] avoiding judgment”

(131): the unlikely profession of a judge-penitent. “[A]fter prolonged research on myself, I brought out

the basic duplicity of the human being”, Clamence reports, rationalising away his particular

responsibility by generalising guilt. (91) Judgment and condemnation, he came to accept—projecting

his own self-condemnation—were likewise universal and inescapable:

Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate

commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided

by ourselves. You were speaking of the Last Judgment. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall

9
 wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgment of men. For them, no

extenuating circumstances; even the good intention is ascribed to crime. (81)

In such a universe of trial, the only way to allay the judgment of others is to stand in judgment over

them. But the only way to win the right to such judgment is by condemning oneself in advance, playing

the penitent, in order the better to then ascend to the judge’s bench:

My idea is both simple and fertile. How to get everyone involved in order to have the right to sit

calmly on the outside myself? Should I climb up to the pulpit, like many of my illustrious

contemporaries, and curse humanity? Very dangerous, that is! One day, or one night, laughter

bursts out without a warning … And so what?, you ask. Well, here’s the stroke of genius. I

discovered that while waiting for the masters with their rods, we should, like Copernicus, reverse

the reasoning to win out. Inasmuch as one couldn’t condemn others without immediately judging

oneself, one had to overwhelm oneself to have the right to judge others. Inasmuch as every judge

some day ends up as a penitent, one had to travel the road in the opposite direction and practice

the profession of penitent to be able to end up as a judge ... (137-138)

This “John the Baptist” for a fallen age, we thus discover, has been practicing his profession throughout

the long confession that has preceded this final revelation:

It consists to begin with, as you know from experience, in indulging in public confession as often

as possible. I accuse myself up and down. It’s not hard, for I now have acquired a memory ...

Covered with ashes, tearing my hair, my face scored by clawing, but with piercing eyes, I stand

before all humanity recapitulating my shames without losing sight of the effect I am producing,

and saying: “I was the lowest of the low.” Then imperceptibly I pass from the “I” to the “we.”

When I get to “This is what we are,” the trick has been played and I can tell them off. I am like

them, to be sure; we are in the soup together. However, I have a superiority in that I know it

and this gives me the right to speak. You see the advantage, I am sure. The more I accuse myself,

the more I have a right to judge you … (140)

Except that this glib solution does not quite work. “I am happy—I am happy, I tell you, I won’t let you

think I’m not happy, I am happy unto death!”, Clamence protests too much on the sixth day. (144) He

remains a monster of self-hatred: “To be sure, my solution is not ideal. But when you don’t like your

own life, when you know that you must change lives, you don’t have any choice, do you? What can one

10
do to become another? Impossible. … Don’t bear down too hard on me …” (144) Indeed, amongst

Clamence’s distinctions and digressions, there are several points in La Chute where a different vista

opens up, like sunlight bursting through thick cloud. In these moments of unguarded sincerity, we

glimpse the other side of the hellish world of universal judgment which Clamence has conjured in order

not to do penance for his guilt, alongside his own longing for a forgiveness he has first and foremost

denied himself.

The reader is tuned to hear these moments by Camus, firstly by the hero’s tell-tale last name,

“Clamence”. This connotes the very “clemency” that this tawdry “John the Baptist” wants to rob from

the world. Secondly, there is this John’s vision of Jesus, whom Camus is perhaps esoterically suggesting

that his Jean-Baptiste sets out to herald. This vision could be called Clamence’s Christology, except

that for Clamence, “the Nazarene” whom he calls “my friend” was not God, “you can take my word for

it”. (115) In Clamence’s perspective, Jesus welcomed the crucifixion, not to fulfil the redemptive

purpose the Church later attributed to him. It was because he was a fallen man, carrying a burden of

guilt. “The real reason is that he knew he was not altogether innocent”, he tells us:

If he did not bear the weight of the crime he was accused of, he had committed others … after

all; he must have heard of a certain Slaughter of the Innocents. The children of Judea massacred

while his parents were taking him to a safe place—why did they die if not because of him?... And

as for that sadness that can be felt in his every act, wasn’t it the incurable melancholy of a man

who heard night after night the voice of Rachel weeping for her children and refusing all

comfort? (112)

Yet Clamence admires something else in the Nazarene. This is the virtue of forgiveness which his many

followers have denied, in his name: “He spoke softly to the adulteress: “Neither do I condemn thee!” …

He simply wanted to be loved, nothing more. Of course, there are those who love him, even among

Christians. But they are not numerous …” (115) Twice in La Chute Camus draws on the traditional

symbol of the dove, connoting the Holy Spirit. In spite of his cynicism, Clamence remains capable of

imagining doves in the snowdrops hovering above Amsterdam. But their final evocation comes with a

pointed criticism of Augustinian Christianity, and the unforgiving doctrine of salvation by election:

See the huge flakes drifting against the windowpanes. It must be the doves, surely. They finally

make up their minds to come down, the little dears; they are covering the waters and the roofs

11
 with a thick layer of feathers; they are fluttering at every window. What an invasion! Let’s hope

they are bringing good news. Everyone will be saved, eh?—and not only the elect. (145; see

Cordes 1980, 145)

Finally, underscoring the place of forgiveness as the absent cause underlying Clamence’s tortured

monologue in La Chute, there is the uncanny business of the stolen Van Eyck panel that Clamence

shares with us at the opening of the last day. The panel in question is that of Les juges intégres (usually

translated as “the just judges”). It depicts judges of real integrity, in contrast to our monologist, doing

what Clamence will not do, going to offer penitence before the lamb, another symbol of forgiveness. For

this reason, Clamence has seized on the opportunity to acquire and hide the masterpiece from the

authorities: “because the judges are on their way to meet the Lamb, because there is no lamb or

innocence any longer, and because the clever rogue who stole the panel was an instrument of the

unknown justice one ought not to thwart.” (125-128; Wheeler 1982) By this act of larceny, which gives

a physical reality to the repression of forgiveness on which Clamence’s position stands and falls, all is

“in harmony”, so “I have the way clear to work according to my convictions.” (130)

All except that Jean-Baptiste remains in the seventh circle of Amsterdam’s canals, whose comparison

with the circles of Dante’s hell in the Inferno Camus early on alerts us to. (14) The seventh circle of Hell

in Dante is “reserved for those guilty of the most heinous sin, betrayal of those to whom they were bound

by special ties.” (Stouzh 1971, 49)

Concluding remarks

What then are the features of Albert Camus’ account of forgiveness, if we draw now the philosophical

thoughts from their symbolic and fictional clothing? First, it is above all self-forgiveness that attracts

Camus’ attention in the 1950s. “Yes, we have lost track of the light, the mornings, the holy innocence of

those who forgive themselves”, Clamence comments in another of his moments of lucidity. (145) It is

insofar as Clamence cannot forgive himself that he judges everyone else and finds them all, like himself,

wanting. Mutatis mutandis, it will be on the basis of an ability to judge oneself fairly, but forgive one’s

failings as a fallible human being and seek out redress, that Camus sees the possibility of an ethical life.

Self-forgiveness is then tied to that integrity of the penitent judges whom Clamence has silenced:

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 I have never been able to make up my mind to spit, as so many have done, on the word "honour".

No doubt because I … continue to be aware of my many human weaknesses and the injustices I

have committed … He whose passions, folly and faltering heart lead him into the most common

weaknesses must surely turn to something for help so that he can succeed in gaining some

measure of self-respect and thus become capable of respecting others. (Camus, at Stouzh 1961,

57)

Secondly, Camus’ position on forgiveness is nevertheless not an invitation to a different kind of

irresponsibility to that evinced by Clamence: ‘everyone is innocent, no one can be blamed …’ For

Camus, that is, forgiveness is to be distinguished not simply from guilt and condemnation, but also from

absolute innocence. Camus reviles the Church’s, then the totalitarians’ finding of original sin or

objective guilt. Yet Camus is not Rousseau, because he is not Augustine, Hitler or Stalin: “man is not

good, he is better and worse”. (Camus, at Stouzh 1971, 52) It is precisely the inability to assign degrees

of guilt that condemns Clamence to his hell in which he has “no friends … only accomplices”. (Camus

1956b, 73) If someone fails to jump in and save another, this is a grave fault; but nowhere near so grave

as wielding the knife, or betraying a colleague to authorities. Not all offences are worthy of hanging, and

in the cases of almost all offences, the culprit is not irredeemably fallen, beyond all hope of

communication and redress. Indeed, Camus came from shortly after 1945 to oppose “the guillotine”

altogether. (1960, 173-234) Camus’ larger philosophy of mesure applies here, that is to say:

Mesure … teaches us that … man is not entirely to blame; it was not he who started history; nor

is he entirely innocent, since he continues it. Those who go beyond this limit and affirm his total

innocence end in the insanity of definitive culpability. Rebellion, on the contrary, sets us on the

path of calculated culpability … (Camus 1956, 296)

Thirdly, for Camus—as the preceding two quotations each indicate—forgiveness is above all for Camus

the means, indeed the principal means, of establishing and maintaining solidarity in an imperfect

world, peopled by imperfect men and women. Races, tribes, individuals and nations have been slaying

each other ever since Cain, one character in The First Man comments darkly. (Camus 1996, 140) Almost

all have been acting in retaliation to others’ real or imagined crimes. If the reign of lex talionis is not

broken by amnesty or forgiveness, the cycle will never end except in apocalypse. At stake in the principal

importance the last Camus assigns to forgiveness is then its status as the precondition for what

L’Homme Révolté had already called a solidarity “in error and aberration”: as well as the “calculated

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culpability” that will always have to be weighed, in its differing degrees; where possible atoned for and

where impossible, punished with a justice tempered by understanding. (Camus 1960, 217) Such a

humane solidarity is Camus’ secular version of the Holy Ghost, whose doves we have noted hovering

pointedly above Clamence’s hell, without descending. Clamence’s sin, the gravest of all for Camus also,

is what the Christian tradition called the sin against this “Holy Ghost”: the denial of human fraternity.3

“You see, I’ve heard of a man whose friend had been imprisoned and who slept on the floor of his room

every night in order not to enjoy a comfort of which his friend had been deprived,” Clamence comments,

in another of his lucid episodes: “Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us? … Yes, we shall all

be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation.” (1956b, 32)

Camus’ L’Homme Révolté had already in fact concluded by telling us that true rebellion “cannot exist

without a strange sense of love … an insane generosity which consists of giving all to the present”. (1956,

304) This strange love that Clamence turns his back upon has its basis for Camus in the ability to judge

with reason, but to forgive with humility and understand with sympathy. It is impossible to prove, but

very plausible to surmise that this notion of forgiveness would accordingly only have become

increasingly central in the work Camus’ premature death prevented him from completing.

References

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Press.

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63. Paris: Seuil.

Camus, Albert. 1956a. The Rebel. Revised and complete translation by Anthony Bower, with a

Foreword by Sir Herbert Read. New York: Vintage.

Camus, Albert. 1956b. The Fall translated Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage.

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Camus, Albert. Resistance, Rebellion, Death. Translated with Introduction by Justin O’Brien.

New York: Vintage, 1960.

Camus, Albert. 1962. Exile and the Kingdom, translated by Justin O’Brien. Penguin, London.

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Isaac, Jeffrey. Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion. Yale: Yale UP, 1994.

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Wheeler, Bruton. 1982. “Beyond Despair: Camus’ The Fall and Van Eyck’s ‘Adoration of the

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1Unmarked page numbers in brackets in this section all refer to The Fall.
2 I have given a fuller reading of the text, particularly in relation to Camus’ falling out with Sartre et
al, in Sharpe, Camus, Philosophe, 318-354.
3 i.e. Gospel of Matthew, 12:32, quoted in epigraph above.

[Word count: total 6596; 49 endnotes; references 187; bibliography 461: text minus epigraphs 5650]

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