Existentialism and Christianity pt 3 Copyright Robert Fullarton 2013

Existentialism and Christianity pt 3

Copyright Robert Fullarton 2013

The centrality of suffering to human life was the thought in the motive of Dostoyevsky’s greatest fiction. The existentialist piece the notes from the underground expounding the sorrow, the bestial undercurrent of self loathing, wrath and resentment that perpetuates the world of the anonymous Russian official. The autobiographical writings the House of the dead, giving western audiences the honesty of long hidden Russian horror on the Tzarist labour camps. Too real was the suffering of Dostoyevsky- the man who had been wrongly accused on false, trumped up charges of conspiracy against the state, suffered the ambiguity and the terror of a mock execution, that was only called off at the last penultimate minute. The etchings of inner man are written in what Nietzsche would later coin the term, “written in blood”, to mean the honesty, the acute level of suffering that is accurately portrayed and defined in the work of art. The confinement of men- can be seen by some to be a confinement of human existence, for the worst part in penal servitude- goes deeper than the obvious chastisements and misdemeanours of state against the individual.

Camus himself calls life absurd, he tries to understand the hapless methodology of individual man against the external powers that derail and destroy him. He puts the gauntlet in the context of the myth of Sisyphus, man struggles against the abrasive forces that oppose him in health, freedom and happiness. In this context man is pushing the condemnatory boulder up the cliff –to reach the point of physical and spiritual rest- in great anguish and extreme fatigue and finds the boulder comes back hence from where it came from and the struggling man must once again give, heave and shift the burden and the punishment up the hill, where his condemnation continues until the “final curtain”. Life is declared to be absurd –almost a black comedy of the sickest humour for which Beckett perceived in a great malaise of heart- the struggle takes all our effort to control and it costs us our youth, our energy, our happiness, our expectations cost us dearly and in the end as Camus stated there is the absurd. The truth that war will always be war in the nature of human affairs, and human nature is aggressive and confrontational –the dialectics of peace and war, only concludes with there being war some may say! Man will play God until the end, when weapons are rivalled for far superior devices, until anatomical and nuclear destruction becomes inevitable.

Camus has further developed his postulation on the absurd in the book the rebel completed in 1952, written as a historical treatise on the nature of human rebellion and revolution, focusing on and giving attention to both the Russian and French revolutions to paint the dangers of human ideology and the very broad, perspective or changing definition of what man calls “freedom”, a word so often espoused as the misused shibboleth of the twentieth century. Camus posits at the heart of his argument that “man must rebel to exist”, his confirmations have come to the conclusion that all men cannot defeat the conditions of birth and life –the absurd- all men are born to great suffering and harassment, some are the persecutors while others are the persecuted, all men face mock trials and men face their natural executioner, they ultimately die in the effort to live.

Why not consider to yourself the thought and then consider it as truth...that man is not the lawgiver, nor the maker of principles...he is not even the arbiter but the fallen creature who in every residence of his dwelling shows his nature to be what it is...and as such..chaos reigns in a world of criminals and corruption but where does the source of purity lie outside the contagion? Where is the blinding light that touches the hearts of men and keeps them...in order...beauty and...meaning...it must be an order consisting in truth...but one which originated from outside man...and has since come to man...as the lost news of salvation for the congregations of the lost. The existentialist wines but the Christian talks of real pragmatic hope.