••• The International Writers Magazine - Book Review

Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism by Albert Camus, translated by Ronald D. Srigley, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, and London. 2007. 148 pp. ISBN 978-0-8262-1753-0. • Charlie Dickinson review

A lesser-known book by Albert Camus is Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, the university thesis he completed at age twenty-two. Camus shows that Plotinus’ Neoplatonism critically gave an evolving Christianity a ready-made metaphysics that would help it advance into the Greco-Roman world beyond its Judaic origins.

The first chapter of Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, "Evangelical Christianity," characterizes the "early adopters." As Camus repeatedly states, for these Christians, faith in God was everything. They rejected all speculation about God. The Incarnation was the essential fact for belief. God made the Word (logos) flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. And if Jesus Christ was martyred and suffered crucifixion (for detail, Camus references Renan's Vie de Jesus, which was reviewed here), evangelicals looked beyond the excruciating death to a resurrection days later as proof of God's promise of immortal life. Moreover, with Paul accepting gentiles, evangelicals pointedly separated Christianity from its roots in Judaism.

The Christian Gnostic sects to follow were, as Camus writes in his second chapter, openly anti-Jewish. Gnostics were obsessed with the world's evil. They asserted the God of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) and what he created were evil. “Be fruitful and multiply” was an injunction to be refused. Salvation came from gnosis (knowledge) of an ineffable God in the hereafter. Asceticism and sacrifice were escapes from worldly suffering.

If Gnosticism dead-ended, Plotinus (A.D. 205-269) in the third chapter gives Christianity a solution to blend the originality of Christianity (the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) with Greek thought-forms. In his Enneads, the desire to know God leads to meditation on the beautiful, which in Plotinus’s three-part schema advances from the Soul present in mortals up to Intellect that orders the world; that is, in turn, subsumed in the One, which is ultimately non-local, everywhere and nowhere, or God.

In the fourth chapter, we read that Augustine was an admirer of Plotinus. The latter's three-part metaphysics became the well-known Trinity, or as Augustine says, "In the Incarnation of the Son, it is the whole Trinity that is united to the human body." It is Neoplatonism that gave Augustine a doctrine of humility and faith. Thus, at the threshold of the Middle Ages, Christianity has broken with Judaism and is engaged with the larger Greco-Roman world.

In sum, an authoritative first work for a future Nobel Laureate.

© Charlie Dickinson 10.9.23
http://www.cosmicplodding.net

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