It’s interesting!! Merton came to grips with his problems within Westernized Christianity through Buddhism and Solomon thinks it is very likely that Camus would have come to grips with his problems as an atheist through Buddhism had he been allowed to make the trip he was planning to India to study Buddhism rather than being killed in a car accident.

It’s not that Buddhism is “the answer”, but it provides the missing link in Western man’s understanding of himself. Buddhist philosophy bridges the vast divide that has been created over the centuries in Western thought between lived experience and reason. Building the bridge doesn’t require that we become Buddhists. Merton remained a devoted Catholic. All that is required is a shift in perception.

Interesting quotes from the rest of Merton’s essays on Camus…

Camus: Journals of the Plague Years

“This is the source of Camusian anguish: Cartesian man, the detached subject, who is because he thinks (and thinks because he is Cartesian man), having started out with the assumption that everything thinkable is comprehensible, suddenly finds out that everything thinkable is absurd. Why? Not because of a metaphysical flaw in objective existents but because there is something the matter with the relation of the thinking subject to the object of thought. And what is wrong seems to be the relationship itself, to which Cartesian man has condemned himself by making it the ground of all his certitudes, including the certitude of his own existence.”

“Camus is, if anything, a classic moralist on the stoic pattern rather than an existentialist thinker.”

“To prefer abstractions to life is to end in absurdity and despair. Suicide is the collapse of the individual in the presence of the absurd. Murder - mass murder, war, genocide, and even capital punishment - is a moral collapse of society under pressure of the absurd.”

“The whole point of his first novel, The Stranger, is that innocence begins with the refusal to say what one does not and cannot mean, but that society demands of us that we repeat a whole series of prescribed declarations which we could not possibly mean if we reflected on their full implications… This is more than a judgment that society tends to be absurd: society will kill the man who refuses to be absurd along with it. Lucidity is punishable by death… The revolt is itself the beginning of authentic existence.”

“Clamence [from The Fall] is perhaps a kind of “saint without God”. He is activated not by life giving grace, but by the self-scrutiny of an ironic and hatefully lucid mind that is incapable of love. To be so activated is to be purified and damned at the same time, a kind of extreme Augustinianism in which to be judged is not a final end but only an endless fall into the void, a fall for which there is no ultimate landing. The only possible relationship with another is the relationship of subject to object, of judge to penitent - proving to the other that all have sinned and all are in despair, that all must condemn each other; proving that we are all in the void, that if God is dead all is permitted and all is meaningless… In such a universe, Love does not exist… Whether Nemesis or plague, The Fall represented a dead end beyond which there was no further progress possible in Camus’ artistic development. He had to take another course.”

” ‘The Absurd’ is not an object. It has no metaphysical existence of its own. It is not there until you put it there. You put it there by standing outside reality and looking in. You make life absurd by holding it at arm’s length. Once you step over the boundary line between subject and object, void and the absurd are no more. There is only that fullness which we begin to experience when we realize that “lucidity” is the light itself - the light we look not at, but with; the light that we not only have, but in some way are; “the true light that enlightens every man that comes into the world.” What Camus needed still to discover was that this light is pure mercy and pure gift and not the reward for a subtle, ironic. and self-conscious ethical concern.”

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Terror and the Absurd: Violence and Nonviolence in Albert Camus

“Absolute liberty becomes a prison of absolute duties” - including the duty to exterminate thousands of one’s fellow men in the name not of a happy and life affirming present but of a hypothetical happiness in the future. The “death of God” means in the end an imperialism of the spirit that seeks world hegemony and total control at the price of unlimited murder and terror.”

“God is regarded somehow as a need of man’s mind and heart; and indeed a certain kind of apologetic in the past has been all too ready to advance this distorted and inadequate view of God. Here God is seen simply as the projection of man’s need for clarity, for rationality. The act of faith, then becomes a determination to convince oneself that no matter how absurd things may look, they are in fact quite reasonable because God must make them reasonable. One believes because one refuses to despair of an absolute and infallible reason… But this assumes that God is merely called in to our lives as a kind of logical Deus ex machina and that he is little more than a convenient hypothesis. Is this what is really meant by God in Christianity?”

“…The vision of a St. Francis is not the vision of an abstract and purely transcendent God dwelling in eternity, but the immediate, overwhelming, direct, tangible confrontation of “God who is” simply in the “is-ness” of every day reality. The belief of a Franciscan in eternal life does not determine how he lives - it flows from his life and is part and parcel of that life. If Camus had been able to follow this through he would have realized that the abstract God he could not believe in was not, and never had been, the living God of authentic Christianity.”

Camus’ ethic was exactly that of Franciscan poverty. Camus writes: “If someone here told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write ‘I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.’ And as far as everything else is concerned, I say no.”

“The logic of revolt demands dialogue, openness, speech. Therefore revolt protests against the conspiracy of silence which, everywhere, both under totalism and under capitalism, seals men’s lips so that they do not protest against organized murder but approve it.”

“The question arises why Camus so easily identifies nonviolence with silence, submission and passivity when authentic nonviolent resistance is active and should be highly articulate, since, if it is understood in the Gandhian sense, it demands much more lucidity and courage than the use of force does… In any case, Camus refuses to accept absolute nonviolence. His Rebel may take up arms, and may indeed by compelled by duty to do so, but with one most important reservation: “Authentic action in revolt will consent to arm itself only for institutions which limit violence, not for those that give it the force of law.”… This is all very fine - but what war-making institution does not in practice claim to be limiting violence and fighting for peace? The escalation of the Vietnam War by the Pentagon is all, allegedly, in order to limit violence!”

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Prophetic Ambiguities: Milton and Camus

Merton compares Nietzsche’s “Superman” to Milton’s Satan which makes me think he’s probably completely misread Nietzsche. (He was writing in the 1960s so that’s not surprising. It’s taken a long while to weed out the truth from fiction about Nietzsche - especially since his “Will to Power” became heavily and falsely associated with Nazism thanks to his sister who edited his texts in favor of Nazism without his knowing.)

Paradise Lost: “The title itself states the problem: man is created for peace, delight, and the highest spiritual happiness. In traditional language, he is created for contemplation. Not a loss of self in mystical absorption but self-transcendence in the dynamic stillness which, as the Zen Masters said, is found not in rest but in truly spontaneous movement. But man’s weakness and superficiality, his inordinate love of a self metaphysically wounded with contingency, makes the Paradise life impossible. And yet here too was no solution, only a kind of despair. What for Milton was a blind alley has become in modern consciousness, an obsession with illusory vitalism.”

“Though Camus may have started with Sisyphus, a figure somewhat similar to Milton’s Satan, he soon distinguished between liberty and anarchy, authentic rebellion and totalist nihilism, and in the end rejoined the kind of classic view of liberty which was the one Milton himself really held.”

“All these contradictions are symptomatic of one truth: our seemingly well-ordered and well-functioning society is a nihilist city of pandemonium, built on hybris and destined for cataclysm…But our future depends above all on this: the recognition that our present nihilistic consciousness is fatal and the development of a toally new state of mind, a whole new way of looking at ourslves, our world, and our problems. Not a new ideology, not a new formula of words, not a new mystique: but as Tillich said - a new man.”

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Camus and the Church

“If there is to be a choice between faith and the absdurd, his [Camus'] stoic consciousness will, in the end, dictate the choice of the absurd. And the “absurd man” of Camus remains strangely isolated, even though, if he is consistently faithful to his steady view of the absurd, he should proceed to a revolt that joins him in solidarity with other men of his own kind. But this solidarity lacks human validity unless it is in the service of life and humanity. In otherwords, revolt is legitimate only if it refuses all complicity with mass murder and totalitarianism of whatever kind, whether of the right or the left.”

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Three Saviors in Camus: Lucidity and the Absurd

“The Augustinian concept that the love of God was the ground of true communion among men because the caritas for God and man was one love, not two, apparently never struck Camus, though he knew Augustine up to a point. One of Augustine’s most characteristic doctrines is that the love of God is worthless if it does not imply communion with our brother: and the living unity of those united in charity forms one body, the Mystical Christ, “the city of God.” Here, one would imagine, was a basis for the kind of communication and solidarity Camus was really looking for. But we cannot question the sincerity or the reality of his repugnance for the pseudo Christianity that has so deformed the veritas caritatis and the caritas veritatis of Augustine!… Instead, Camus comes out with a rather feeble maxim of liberal and humanist morality. One respects his intention. Yet in reading the story, one feels that the ending is inconsistent with what the story itself has told us about the people he claims to love.”

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The Stranger: Poverty of an Anti-Hero

“Neither for Milton nor for Camus is the mere fact of rebellion sufficient to justify either Satan or Mersault. (Of course it is clear that the utter poverty and in some ways the helplessness of Mersault, and above all the total refusal of rhetoric and declamatory self-justification set him apart from the Satan of Paradise Lost.) But students and critics have habitually fallen into the temptation of thinking that the Satan figure is justified by his own rhetoric and by his own revolt.”

“Acceptance of the absurd, in Camus’ terms, does not justify life, does not give it meaning; it is the lucid acceptance of unmeaning. Furthermore, this is not the end, only the beginning: for to live in meaninglessness and absurdity is not an end. That would be simple nihilism and Camus was completely opposed to nihilism. But when one can face a life that is “without justification”, one is, according to Camus, prepared to go beyond to that solidarity in revolt and ultimately to that unity in love which he intended to explore in his later works. One starts, in other words, by renouncing the desire to be justified - one renounces hope of a consoling sense of one’s own clarity and rightness - in order to go on to that lucid solidarity in action and resistance that are conscious of their own limitations and respectful above all of life.”