Truth is Stranger Than Fiction is Truth

Paul Auster's aptly named Travels in the Scriptorium takes the reader on a journey through the human condition, which is astounding, exhausting, and fulfilling all because the reader has a sense throughout that the books delights and disappointments are life's delights and disappointments. The book is not, in any traditional sense, pleasurable to read. Make no mistake. With his deliberately dry, encyclopedic style of narrative, Auster is not prone to cheap titillation. He is an absurdist author, as much as anything, and his novella deals with deep-seated questions of identity, knowledge, and existence. Travels will not make you laugh and cry and scream (except from boredom). It will make you think.

The premise of the story (and I give nothing away here, because there is nothing to give away) is that a certain Mr. Blank finds himself in an unfamiliar room almost completely without memory. Within moments of beginning the account, the narrator reveals to us that Mr. Blank, because of his strange condition, will find himself grappling not with trivialities but with more basic questions: "His mind is elsewhere, stranded among the figments in his head as he searches for an answer to the question that haunts him. Who is he? What is he doing here? When did he arrive and how long will he remain? With any luck, time will tell us all." As is so often the case, however, it turns out we don't have any luck at all. At the end of the story--through the means of a less than sophisticated plot device--the narrator reintroduces the questions to us as if to say, "Just in case you forgot, these are the important questions that didn't get answered."

The questions that form an inclusio for the entire piece are presented as peculiar to this unfortunate man in this extreme situation, but it should be immediately apparent to the reader that these are the very questions which are universal to mankind regardless of circumstance. Who am I? Why am I here? How long do I have? These are the most foundational of existential quandaries which transcend time and culture. In perfect concert with his absurdist forefathers, Auster sidesteps the primal impulse to construct answers to these questions. He clearly finds it more compelling to thrust the reader headfirst into the brick wall of reality: these questions never get answered. They are phantoms which disappear the moment we try to grasp them, like the "figments" that dance around in Mr. Blank's head throughout the story. Laments Mr. Blank, "I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist, whether I've ever existed at all." He cannot prove that he is, not even to himself. How is he then to demonstrate conclusively where or when or even why he is? Unifying theories are no sooner expressed than they prove to be inadequate, the falter under the crushing weight of everyday experience.

It is this everyday experience which forms the meat of Auster's tale and which makes the reading so dense. Auster takes pride in describing in minute detail every occurrence within the very limited frame of the story. Because of this, the story--like life--is both mundane and disgusting. Auster takes note of activities ranging from putting on a shirt to moving one's bowls. The narrative consequently proves dreary, non-linear, scatological, and pornographic in the way that life really is. There is a certain irony to the realization that in spite of the fact that we must constantly stand up, sit down, bend over, consider inconsequential choices, and actualize our decisions, we can barely stand to read about Mr. Blank doing all these things and more. At one point--apparently not above teasing his audience--the narrator declares that he sees no point in describing with microscopic precision some normal activity of Mr. Blank's, and the reader lets slip a deep sigh of relief.

This exhaustive account of nothing is not (or at least not entirely) simply to fill out the pages of what might otherwise be a very brief and hackneyed philosophical point. The reader's navigation through Mr. Blank's world becomes a kind of a reflection on how all life is supposition and inference and memory. Mr. Blank will dramatically vacillates from thoroughgoing empiricism (e.g. Mr. Blank sees no closet ergo he refuses to believe there is a closet, even though he seems to see the effects of the closets existence) to a fantastic epistemology which assumes causality in the most tenuous of circumstances (e.g. Mr. Blank health improves and so he assumes it has to do with proximity to Anna). Mr. Blank is a case study in the way humanity, no matter how noble our efforts or how convincing our self-deceptions, engage the world in ways which are ultimately inconsistent and indefensible. What Mr. Blank seems to know is suggested to be untrue. What he believes is impossible, the circumstance would seem to indicate is the case. What he considers important, the reader is inclined to think is trivial. What he disregards as inconsequential are the questions forefront in the other characters minds. Mr. Blank is a child and an old man and a type for all people.

There are of course countless other avenues which Travels offers to the reader's mind. One that particularly delighted me was the narrator himself, who takes great pains to present his narrative as if it is the result of hidden cameras and microphones yet he has no qualms about telling us not only what we can see and hear but what Mr. Blank thinks as well and how many seconds it takes him to think it. The narrator is, at any given moment, a character in the story, an entity on the same plane as the reader, and an omniscient observer. (The conclusion is likely intended to shed light on this, but I won't tip Auster's hand.) At the same time, the story often seems to be trying too hard. Still struggling with the question of existence, Mr. Blank wonders, "When was the last time someone took a photograph of someone who did not exist?" This strikes one, or at least struck me, as more akin to a lyric from a hipster anthem than a serious philosophical musing. Then again, it would be possible to argue that Auster does this deliberately since only rarely do people express themselves with any marked profundity.

That, in the end, is the beauty of Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium: it is as much or as little as the reader wants to make it. Any reader may pick up the work and decide, with equal justification, that Auster is a deeply engaging philosophical novelist or a tiresome author whose lack of compelling plot leaves the reader with only a drudging, unrewarding prose to suffer through. For my part, I would recommend the novella to anyone who delights in absurdism, fiction with a philosophical bent, or offbeat novels in general. With the exception of an extremely disappointing ending--which was a grossly transparent attempt to dress cheap Hollywood tricks like serious discourse--I found the work to be successful at its most obvious goal: provoking thought.

#300

In keeping with time honored tradition, this three hundredth post commemorates the great quotes that have appeared here over the last hundred entries. Below are my personal top ten notable quotables, though you are welcome and encouraged to disagree.

10) The last hundred posts began with one of my first comparative series, this one examining points of contact between Christianity and absurdism. As a near rabid fan of Albert Camus, it was difficult to select only one quote. Nevertheless, here is a thought of his from The Absurd and Science:

And here are the trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes -how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanisms and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.

9) More recently, we find ourselves int he midst of a comparative examination of Christianity and Jain. While there are still many great quotes yet to come in this series, the following excellent excerpt could have easily been from any number of Byzantine Christian mystics but is in fact a saying of Mahavira, posted in Christ, Jain, and the Material World:

...there is no analogy whereby to know the transcendent; its essence is without form; there is no condition of the unconditioned. There is no sound, no color, no smell, no taste, not touch--nothing of that kind. Thus I say.

8) The past hundred posts has seen an unusual output of advice to parents, including from such notable figures as Stephen Prothero and the inimitable David Bentley Hart. Still, none left quite the impression as J. C. Ryle, who proved that some child-rearing wisdom is timeless. While there is much to commend the meat of his teaching, the most memorable quote came from The Wisdom of J. C. Ryle: An Appendix:

Never listen to those who tell you your children are good, and well brought up, and can be trusted.

7) I find the news deeply frustrating, as so many of us do. No story has so grated against my sensibilities for the last hundred posts than has the unceremonious dismissal of Joe Paterno. Still, the best quote here has come from the relatively minor Rep. Brad Drake, with this profoundly nonsensical, self-defeating comment posted in the Oct. 19th edition of In Other News:

I have no desire to humanely respect those that are inhumane.

6) I never seem to be lacking in pithy, inspirational thoughts from great pacifists. Last time around it was J. W. McGarvey. This time, let me offer one from J. D. Tant in The Wisdom of J. D. Tant:

I would as soon risk my chance of heaven to die drunk in a bawdy house as to die on the battlefield, with murder in my heart, trying to kill my fellow man.

5) Without a doubt, the past six months in the United States has been completely dominated by the American electoral process. More important than anything the candidates might be saying is this sentiment from Stephen Prothero offered in Knowledge and Franchise:

Few Americans are able to challenge claims made by politicians or pundits about Islam’s place in the war on terrorism or what the Bible says about homosexuality. This ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads and effectively transferring power from the third estate (the people) to the fourth (the press).

4) Pope Benedict XVI has done more shocking things this year than kissing an imam. In addition to renewing the Catholic Church's stand against capital punishment, he had this to say about the Christian use of war in history, in Pope Shocks World by Doing the Right Thing:

"As a Christian I want to say at this point: yes, it is true, in the course of history, force has also been used in the name of the Christian faith," he said in his address to the delegations in an Assisi basilica.

"We acknowledge it with great shame. But it is utterly clear that this was an abuse of the Christian faith, one that evidently contradicts its true nature."

3) In a post which happened to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks which launched the world headlong into two prolonged multinational wars, I shared a Tentative Description of a Dinner Given to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower, a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

And after it became obvious that the strange rain would never stop and that Old Soldiers never drown and that roses in the rain had forgotten the word for bloom and that perverted pollen blown on sunless seas was eaten by irradiated fish who spawned up cloudleaf streams and fell on our dinnerplates

And after it became obvious that the President was doing everything in his power to make the world safe for nationalism his brilliant military mind never realized that nationalism itself was the idiotic superstition which would blow up the world

...The President himself came in

Took one look around and said

We Resign

2) On an anniversary which personally touched me a little more dearly, On the Anniversary of David Lipscomb's Death, I shared these thoughts of Price Billingsley on the great man who was so influential in his own day and continues to touch the hearts and minds of Christians who read his works:

I then got my first sight of the dear old Brother Lipscomb dead. I was amazed to see how fine looking and tall he was when straightened out in the casket. I saw him when he was dying, and a more abject object of decaying senility I never before beheld - body and soul distraught in the parting! But did I pity him? I pitied myself for not being as ready to die as he!

1) The recent past has had more than its fair share of high profile deaths, from entertainment stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Harry Morgan, to intellectual celebrities like Christopher Hitchens. The more important loss for many, however, was a completely overlooked Bible professor at a small Arkansas university. Before offering my own eulogy concurrent with his memorial service, I shared this quote from Amelia Burr on the day of his passing:

Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

Here's looking forward to another eventful hundred posts with even more memorable thoughts to share in the months to come.

The Absurd and Ignorance

This final exploration of the interaction of absurdism with Christianity proposes to look at a passage of Camus which is both true and antithetical to proper faith. Camus writes:

I want everything to be explained to me or nothing.

It is immediately striking to me how surigically this sentiment cuts to the heart of humanity's relationship with its own incomplete knowledge. We lament our own ignorance but only because we know that we are ignorant. The constant quest for knowledge by humanity is a product of the incompleteness of its understanding. The moment we unify two thoughts in our comprehension, there are four more born that are in total disharmony. The very fact of partial understanding exacerbates our ignorance and torments us. To understand nothing at all, including one's own ignorance, is perhaps the only desirable alternative to comprehensive understanding, at least from an existential standpoint. It is not for nothing that our culture has embraced the proverb, "Ignorance is bliss."

And yet, for Christians, partial knowledge is a necessary part of our faith. We can speak practically of the formal incompleteness of God's revelation as recorded in Scripture (even if we want to doctrinally assert its functional completeness), but there is an even more important gap in our knowledge. We do not yet understand even basic facts which are logically prior to Scripture: what is man, what is his purpose, why is the world so beautiful and terrible? Even as we begin to formulate responses--good, true responses so far as they go--to these questions, our self-perpetuating ignorance proves that the very ability to formulate the questions is itself a kind of curse. Consider, for example, how the problem of evil arises from such questions.

At the same time, we must embrace what partial knowledge we have with all the burdens it includes, because it is in this incomplete knowledge that we have the promise of total knowledge. Consider Paul in 1 Corinthians 13: "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." It is only in our lamentable state, steeped as we are in the torturous knowledge of our own ignorance, that we become aware of the prospect of full knowledge. The kind of comprehensive knowledge that Camus assumes to be inaccessible and therefore to validate the absurd, we have a secure hope of because we have been allowed to know in part.

In this is the substantial difference between a Christian absurdism and that of Camus. Understood as Camus did, the collision of man and an alien world could result only in futility and despair. Understood in Christ, the collision of man and an alien world gives content to a hope of true unification which includes and exceeds simple comprehensive understanding. Even the recognition of the ultimate futility of human efforts and the despair which inevitably results from that are transfigured in Christ; the very awareness of these weaknesses is a call to the promise of God. I can accept readily most of what Camus has to say as a genuine and unusually brilliant expression of the existential turmoil I see as intrinsic to this world. But as I cry out in his voice, I admit that there is an unknown and perhaps nonexistent interlocutor who calls back not with answers but with an invitation: "Come to me, and I will give you rest."

The Absurd and Science

Perhaps the most beautiful and compelling of all the passages I have encountered in Camus is his critique of the insufficiency of science to resolve the problem of the absurd. It is the ultimate aim of secluarist scientists to reduce the world to a mathematical series of formulas, and they assume that such a reduction is more or less inevitable. They treat the comprehensibility of the world and their materialist philosophy as so self-evident as to defy criticism. Camus, and of course others, have rightly observed that by all objective standards, science always ultimately dissolves not into scientific formulas but into romantic verse:

And here are the trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes -how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanisms and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.

It is intriguing how Camus' despair at the inability of science to resolve the absurd is also vividly poetic. It mirrors the sentiments of Petru Dumitriu as he laments the simultaneously mathematical and incomprehensible universe. But while Camus stops with the lament that he cannot find assurance that the world is his, Dumitriu so embraces the foreignness of the world that, so far from being his, he insists that it must belong to someone else:

For nothing is simple, and the universe is mathematicable, but incomprehensible -- really incomprehensible, and really constructed according to a plan that is not a human one.

The most perfect parallel to Camus' critique of science (at least that I have found) is actually in the work of G. K. Chesterton. Writing well before the birth of absurdism, Chesterton anticipated Camus' observations about science and its inability to adequately give answers to the truly pressing questions of the world. Just as it completely failed to resolve the problem of the absurd, science was totally impotent in the face of the ultimate question: why?

In fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties. But we cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince. As IDEAS, the egg and the chicken are further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears...It is the man who talks about "a law" that he has never seen who is the mystic.

Chesterton goes on with astonishing parallels to Camus and his complaint that science inevitably collapses into poetry:

Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.

Just as with Camus, Chesterton himself slips easily into his own rhetorical poetry when speaking about the world. They admit that awed ignorance is the appropriate response to reality and recognize that even science (in its own cold, self-deluded way) will always end at the same place as everyone else: wide-eyed wonder. It certainly raises questions about the whether or not apophatic thinkers have had it right all along; the end of human knowledge is silence before God. More to the point though, this realization should work to resolve the lingering fear that has been created by the false triumphalism of science with reference to religion. Faith has nothing to fear in science because science ultimately has nothing to say to faith. It is itself just a gelid, mechanical mysticism which has had the unfortunate fate of being so convinced by its own facade that it thinks it is somehow above and apart. In truth, science offers only transient answers to transient problems. It crumbles in the face of the absurd, like all human effort.

The Absurd and Christian Knowledge

In the course of a discussion on humanity's attempt to find clarity in the world, Camus wrote:

Whatever may be the plays on words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify.

It is intriguing how closely this idea parallels the hesychast understanding of what it was to know. For Camus, the act of trying to know was an attempt to impress a distinctly human character onto a decidedly inhuman world. Understanding was at its heart the human superimposition of its nature onto the nature of everything. This is his recognition of the human character of constructed meaning: because understanding is the effort to compose meaning and because meaning has the human intellect as its composer, to understand is ultimately to give an artificial human quality to reality.

This behavior is born from a desire for clarity and unity which is absurd insofar as real clarity and unity is impossible. This despair in the effort to know and the total inaccessibility the object to be known is echoed (or perhaps prefigured) in the hesycahst thought of the fourteenth century. Like Camus, the hesychasts recognized that the effort to know was an effort for unity (though they understood this unity metaphysically rather than in terms of mere logical clarity) but that the foreign nature of the world which was to be known made this ultimately impossible.

Unlike Camus, who stressed the flaw in humanity's expectation of unity, the hesychasts stressed the flaw in humanity's perception of ultimate disunity in the world. Relying instead on the knowledge the unity must be there (in part because of an existential predisposition to assume a unified, comprehensible universe) they translated the desire to find unity from a natural human yearning to an ethical imperative. Unity existed in the world and to know that unity was to have transcended the human predicament. This, incidentally, was achieved through union with the one object, unlike the perceived world, with which that union was possible: God. In union with the divine, the hesychasts expected to achieve a unified understanding of all reality. In an eschatological vision of perfect knowledge, Gregory Palamas writes of a time when humanity will know everything as it is because, through God, humanity has become a participator in the unifying principle of everything that is: light.

For it is in light that the light is seen, and that which sees operates in a similar light, since this faculty has no other way in which to work. Having separated itself from all other beings, it becomes itself all light and is assimilated to what it sees, or rather, it is united to it without mingling, being itself light and seeing light through light. If it sees itself, it sees light; if it behold the object of its vision, that too is light; and if it looks at the means by which it sees, again it is light. For such is the character of the union, that all is one, so that he who sees can distinguish neither the means nor the object nor its nature, but simply has the awareness of being light and of seeing a light distinct from every creature.

This is by no means an attempt to collapse Christian eschatology (or even epistemology) with absurdism. Camus and Gregory could hardly have arrived at more divergent conclusions about the possibility of knowledge. They begin, however, with a similar observation that when humanity attempts to understand the world the behavior is essentially unitive, born out of an innate human desire to collapse everything into a single system or schema. They both recognize the natural human despair when, by our own efforts, the desired and expected unity cannot be achieved. What is left, then, is to decide what to do with those observations.

The Absurd and Christian Theodicy

I have a proud and profound love for absurdism. I first encountered the movement in a general introduction to philosophy. The system was described to me thus: absurdism is the simultaneous belief that God must exist and that the world as we experience it precludes the existence of God. More even than a positive belief, absurdism is the recognition and acceptance of the absurdity of those two conclusions. It lives in and embraces that absurdity. It allows the absurd to color its thoughts and actions. At times, it even seems to revel in it.

Since that brief introduction, I have come to see the limits in the particular definition of absurdism--favoring instead a definition which focuses on both the necessity and impossibility of there being meaning in the world--but that original explanation has stuck with me nonetheless. In the fundamental contradiction of absurdism can be seen powerful links to an appropriate understanding of Christian theodicy. It is deeply existential in character, recognizing both the deep-seated human desire for God and our experience which defies His existence. Both are rooted in the very nature of human existence which both sees meaning (and with it, God) and knows at the same time that all meaning is illusory. We experience both a true sense of inclusion and even power in the world as both its masters and inhabitants, but we are constantly returned to an unshakable sense of alienation from it in our woeful ignorance and microcosmic insignificance, as if God is speaking to us once again from the storm.

Consider Albert Camus, the father of absurdism, on the paradoxical nearness and separation from the world, even ourselves:

A step lower and the strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is ‘dense,’ sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when under the familiar face of a woman, we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone. But the time has not yet come. Just one thing: that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this ‘nausea,’ as a writer of today calls it, is also absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd.

How can the world appear so empty and foreign in one moment and so profoundly meaningful in another? What if anything can resolve the absurdity we experience in a world which refuses to bend to our ideas of justice, goodness, or even order? What can resolve the absurdity of realizing that the meaning we know exists, we also know that we are creating ex nihilo? These are questions on which God may be brought to bear, not logically but existentially as a force which enters into the human experience and ameliorates our experience of the absurdity even if He declines to resolve it.

Just as they can speak to and give philosohpical vitality to Christian theodicy, Camus and absurdism have other points of contact with Christian thought. An examination of quotes from Camus juxtaposed with both classical and modern Christian thought can demonstrate places where both have a common object of critique and other places where there exists substantive tension between them which must be judged either creative or destructive. The next few entries will attempt to explore these points of contact with varying degrees of depth.