How Augustine responded to the problem of evil without solving it
When we make sense of suffering, we lose our ability to protest against it.
There is an atheism that is entirely understandable. It is the hard-won atheism forged in suffering. Rather than an arrogance that imagines it has outgrown belief, such an atheism is an inability to believe born of empathy for those trod underfoot by the machinations of an inexplicable menace. This is not an atheism of comfort but of agony. It is the begrudging conclusion of cosmic loneliness arising from the experience of injustice.
This was the atheism of Albert Camus. We might even call it an Augustinian atheism, a regrettable conclusion reached after a long journey through what Camus called “the blood-stained face of history.” As he told the priests at the Dominican monastery on the Boulevard de La Tour-Maubourg in 1948, “I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.” He also admitted: “I feel rather as Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said: ‘I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere.’” Camus: Augustine sans grace.
The irruption of evil, its inexplicability, the madness of suffering, plagues Camus. This weight hangs over The Stranger, the story in which Meursault inexplicably shoots an unnamed Arab man on the shores of Algiers. Why did Meursault do it? There is no answer, no explanation, no chain of causality that grants the crime a place in the world. Not even Meursault can answer the question. The crime, like evil, is a surd, its own perverted ex nihilo. Meursault tries to stop asking “whence?” and instead finds happiness in “the gentle indifference of the world.”
