Augustine for the Philosophers: The Rhetor of Hippo, the Confessions, and the Continentals

5. Love, and Interpret What you Will: A Postsecular Camus-Augustine Encounter

77 Ramsey eric Ramsey love, And interPret whAt you will A Postsecular Camus-Augustine Encounter 5 sPoken words setting the stAge even though one knows what one will say in a speech, one does not know what one will have said. in 1948 French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus delivered a speech to the Dominican Monastery of Latour-Maubourg to which his editors give the title “The Unbeliever and Christians.”1 This wonderful and thoughtful speech ends with Camus citing Augustine so as to call all who are willing to confront evil, which Camus here says is exemplified by the torture of children. He calls to those in the audience, in the midst of whom he is considered the unbeliever, to share his belief or faith in the power of words and dialogue. it is in this speech that i find the fitting text to stage the opening of a dialogic encounter between the thought of Augustine and Camus. The encounter attends carefully to words and dialogue and makes way for a philosophy of communication that sets hermeneutical and rhetorical themes as its centerpiece. By way of testifying to the dialogue, this essay responds to the question: What does it profit us to engage a Camus/ Augustine encounter in what contemporary continental philosophy of religion calls the postsecular world, or the age of interpretation?2 if the Camus/Augustine encounter i am staging takes off from the above speech by Camus, it had, of course, numerous other possible points of departure. For example, it is well documented that Camus’ novel The Fall can be understood as a secular version of Augustine’s Confessions, that The Plague is Camus’ account of the confrontation between a Catholic and a secular worldview facing off in the in the midst of crisis, and that Camus’ early dissertation work on neoplatonism and Christianity is his 78 f Augustine for the PhilosoPhers most detailed engagement in print with Augustine. no doubt each could serve as a beginning.3 For my part in the matter, because i share the unbeliever’s desire to see justice in a world lacking it in too great a measure, i am attempting what must at first seem a counterintuitive move—to bring the atheist Camus back to religion in the name of philosophical health. Following a reading of Gianni Vattimo, i shall orient Camus’ thinking such that it moves him away from some of his most cherished antireligious commitments while i embrace others of his key theoretical terms as examples of the hermeneutic theory of communication and rhetoric i shall develop. Throughout the whole of the reading, i shall use this understanding of hermeneutics to theorize appropriate contributions to a philosophy of communication. Although his direct statements leave religion behind, the concepts Camus carries forward—namely dialogue, solidarity, resistance to slavery, as well as faith, hope, and love—bring with them religious overtones and thus some lasting connections to and from Augustine’s Confessions. After quoting Camus from his early work that directly engages Augustine and wherein Camus says himself of the saint, “Greek by his need for coherence, and Christian in the anxieties to which his sensibility gave rise,” David Sprintzen goes on to write, “Camus located himself at the crossroads of these conflicting sentiments.”4 A place to begin, then, from these crossroads and the words spoken and shared with those monks Camus believed need to be his friends in the seeking of justice. A PostseCulAr understAnding, or Quitting the horizon of oBjeCtivity From the standpoint of continental philosophy of religion, the unmistakable philosophical and cultural event standing between Augustine and Camus is, of course, the death of G-d. i begin here so as to remind ourselves what is at stake in the postsecular encounter being staged. Consequently, we shall listen to nietzsche’s Madman who, in aphorism 125 from the Gay Science, announces this event and draws out its consequences.5 The popular reading of this event, the one passed around without nuance and used as a bludgeon by run-of-the-mill atheists, includes misunderstanding the target of the Madman’s words as being Christian believers. Although the Madman’s message comes at a point historically after Augustine and before Camus, by my reading its target is more so the Camus-like atheist than his faithful Christian forerunner, Augustine (nietzsche has words for the latter love, And interPret whAt you will f 79 elsewhere, to...