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by Howard Mumma
Paraclete, 217 pages, $15.95

When Albert Camus's The Fall was published in 1956, "numerous pious souls" thought the famous atheist, existentialist novelist, and philosopher was nearing conversion—so says French critic Alain Costes. Methodist pastor Howard Mumma was one of those pious souls and for good reason.

Mumma is no wishful thinker, no pious Christian admirer who imagines reasons to list Camus among the saints. Over several summers, as he served as guest minister at the American Church in Paris, Mumma was sought out by Camus. Sworn to secrecy at the time, Mumma now reconstructs the "irregular and occasional" dialogues that took place before Camus's tragic death in a car accident on January 4, 1960. These dialogues climaxed with Camus's request to be baptized privately.

To me and, I imagine, to many not quite so pious readers of Camus, the conversations this book describes come as a stunning revelation—but not one lacking credibility. Still, some readers will surely find this revelation a serious challenge to Camus's intellectual stature and will refuse to believe it.

There is, of course, little way for readers now to verify whether these dialogues took place, or to verify the accuracy of Mumma's memory then or now, 40 years later, when he is in his 90s. Still, the details of the setting for the dialogues and the reconstructed interchanges have the ring of truth.

Camus had long dealt with religious issues: the meaning of life, the problem of evil, the feelings of guilt, the foundation for morality, the longing for eternal life.

Though, as Camus tells Mumma, "The silence of the universe has led me to conclude that the world is without meaning," he had already confessed in an essay written in 1950 that he had made his whole life an attempt to "transcend nihilism." His three major novels—The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1956)—deal with profound moral and spiritual issues. Still, none of them—nor any of his short stories, dramas or essays—gives any indication that he was seriously considering conversion to Christianity.

Camus rejected both Marxism, his constant enemy, and Christianity, his frequent sparring partner. His main sticking point was the problem of suffering and evil. Camus refused to believe in the existence of a God who is both omnipotent and good. The world taken on its own is meaningless. If there were a God, then there might be a meaning to the world. But the profound suffering of the innocent is universal. God—if there is a God—does nothing to prevent it or alleviate it. Therefore he either does not exist or he is not omnipotent and not worth believing in. Worse, he may be evil himself.

Camus's response to this meaningless world is to rebel, to launch an attack on suffering. In the image of his novel, it is to fight the plague.

What attracts all morally sensitive readers to Camus's philosophy is its honesty, its openness to the reality of suffering, his refusal to accept any cheap answers, but at the same time his passion to act positively, not only to have compassion on the suffering but, as an intellectual with stellar gifts as a writer, to encourage others to do so as well. Without believing in anything "transcendent," he calls us to "transcend" nihilism by our actions, to make meaning where there is no meaning.

What Mumma shows us, however, is a Camus who had doubts about his own solution and premonitions that genuine meaning did in fact exist in God as understood by traditional Christianity. "I am searching for something I do not have, something I'm not sure I can define," he tells Mumma in their first encounter. The world is not rational, it does not fit human needs and desire. "In a word, our very existence is absurd." Suicide seems the only logical response.

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October 23 2000, Vol. 44, No. 12