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Albert Camus: The First of the New Philosophers

Author(s): Jeanyves Guérin and Diane S. Wood
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Summer, 1980), pp. 363-367
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Albert Camus: The First of the New Philosophers
By JEANYVES GUERIN The French New Philos-
& DIANE S. WOOD ophers- Jean-Marie Be-
noist, Andre Glucks-
mann, Bernard-Henri
Levy, et alia- burst into public attention with a
proliferation of anti-Marxist tracts including Marx est
mort (Marxis Dead; 1970), La cuisiniere et le mangeur
d'hommes (The Cook and the Man-Eater; 1975), Les
maitres penseurs (The Master Thinkers; 1977) and La
barbarie a visage humain (translated by George
Holoch as Barbarism with a Human Face; 1977).
Termed "Solzhenitsyn'sChildren"by Michael Rubbo,
producer of the PBS documentary of that name on
them, the group had had their philosophical views
radically altered as a result of reading The Gulag
Archipelago. While the moral indignation of these
young thinkers heralds the attempt of contemporary
leftist intellectuals to find an alternative to Marxism,
the appellation "new" obscures the fact that their an-
alyses of the inherent dangers of Marxismrepeat argu-
ments made thirty years before by Albert Camus in
Lhomme revoke (translatedby Anthony Bower as The
Rebel; 1951). The current intellectual ferment as well
as the recent biography by Herbert R. Lottman (Gar-
den City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1979) prompts one to
reexamine Camus's penetrating discussion of meta-
physical and historical rebellion.
Camus himself was not a philosopher but a writer
with deep moral convictions who lucidly denounced
political terrorism, whether it originated from the
Right or the Left. The horrors perpetrated by Fascists
in Spain and Germany were as repugnant to him as the
sufferingin Soviet camps, for Camus believed that "all
executioners are of the same family."* No special ex-
cused status was given to any group: "We will name
concentrationary what is concentrationary, even so-
cialism"(Actuelles7, 386). In "The Cook and the Man-
Eater"(Paris, Seuil, 1975) Andre Glucksmanncame to
the same conclusion: "Russian or Nazi, a camp is a
camp" (37). To the victim, the political leanings of his
torturer are insignificant: "Nothing resembles a char-
nel house more than another charnel house, and a
tortured body doesn't show whether the torture was
"
'socialist' or 'capitalist' (75). Taking seriously the
plight of Kravchenko,Czapski, Gliksman, etcetera, an
earlier generation of those now called "dissidents,"
Camus could not excuse the existence of institutional-
ized torture in the Soviet Union, and he warned that
Marxismwould lead to the same concentration camp
universe as did Fascism. He lucidly perceived that the
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camps were an integral part of maintaining the state's
authority and that their occurrence in wartime Ger-
many and Stalinist Russia was a natural product of
authoritarianleadership.
Camps were a part of the machinery of the State in Ger-
many. They are a part of the machinery of the State in
Soviet Russia. In the latter case they are justified, it
appears, by historical necessity. . . . There is no reason in
the world, historical or not, progressive or reactionary,
that can make concentration camps acceptable. (Actuelles
I, 365)
He left sophists' rationalizationsto others. For Camus
as for Bernanos, crimes do not balance each other; they
accumulate. The horrible truth should in no case be
avoided, whether speaking of Makronissos, MacAr-
thur or the Algerian situation. Crime must be de-
nounced wherever it occurs. The label of the regime or
the historical plan proclaimed by its leaders cannot
serve as a valid excuse.
Infatuated with the Communist experiment in the
Soviet Union, the majority of the French Left of the
early fifties reacted strongly to the charge that the
concentration camp was an evil in itself. Whereas it
was Camus who maintained the spirit of the Resist-
ance, his former friends in intellectual circles
coalesced to berate him in the pages of the Communist
press and Les Temps Modernes. Openly breaking with
his friend to support the Marxist doctrine of efFicacity
against Camus's abstractions, Jean-Paul Sartre sided
with Francis Jeanson, Pierre Herve and Victor Leduc.
Simone de Beauvoir in her La force des choses (trans-
lated by Richard Howard as Force of Circumstance)
later expressed the scorn heaped on Camus's
bourgeois morality: "Camuswas an idealist, a moralist
and an anti-communist. . . . Camus became a more and
more resolute champion of bourgeois values; The Re-
bel was a statement of his solidarity with them" (New
York, Putnam, 1964, pp. 259-60). The intelligentsia of
the Latin Quarter generally ratified these judgments
and halfheartedly relegated the author of La peste {The
Plague) to being a "belle ame" or "un philosophe pour
classes terminales." The dialogue Camus relished was
no longer possible with those who confused dialectics
with party spirit or raison d'etat. Camus in The Rebel
(237) and later Glucksmann in "The Cook and the
Man-Eater"(186) likened this type of voluntary blind-
ness toward the truth about Marxism to the fairy tale
"
"The Emperor's New Clothes, where only a single
364 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
voice dares proclaim what should have been evident to
all.
Throughout the twentieth century writers with po-
litical interests have posed the question of whether the
end justifies the means. The conflict in opinion be-
tween two partisans of the Soviet Union, Henri Bar-
busse and Romain Rolland, is well known. Barbusse's
statement in he couteau entre les dents (The Knife
Between the Teeth)- "Whoever wants the end wants
the means. . . . Violence is the only reality of justice
today" (Paris, Clarte, 1921, pp. 46-47)- was coun-
tered by Rolland's view in Quinze ans de combats
(Fifteen Years of Combat): "It is not true that the end
justifies the means. The means are more important to
true progress than the end" (Paris, Rieder, 1935, p.
36). Opposing points of view were presented by char-
acters like Negus and Manuel in L'espoir (Mans Hope)
and the protagonists of Arthur Koestler's The Yogi and
the Commissar (he yogi et le commissaire). In Sartre's
play Les mains sales (translatedby Lionel Abel as Dirty
Hands) Hugo, who deemed that "All means are not
good," is contradicted by Hoederer, who retorts: "All
means are good when they're effective. . . . Well, I
have dirty hands. ... Do you think you can govern
innocently?" (New York, Vintage, 1949, pp. 223^-24);
and "the revolution's not a question of virtue but of
'
effectiveness (234). Morality serves only to inhibit
bourgeois intellectuals in their political action. Sartre,
in his treatment of Camus, rallied to the position of
Hoederer and supported Stalinist Russia.
Camus tackled the same subject in Lesjustes (trans-
lated by Stuart Gilbert as The Just Assassins), a play
contemporary to the Kravchenko affairwhich was re-
vived in 1978. He considered the terrorists of the
abortive 1905 Revolution to be some of the last true
rebels. The idealist Kaliayev, who refuses to sacrifice
the innocent niece and nephew of the Grand Duke, is
juxtaposed with Stepan, who does not possess these
scruples. For Camus as for Kaliayev, revolt had moral
limits which must not be transgressed, and the assassin
must pay for his crime by giving up his own life.
Barbarismcannot be combatted with more barbarism,
nor can unnecessary brutality be excused by hope for a
better future.
DORA: Openyoureyes, Stepan,and try to realizethat
the groupwouldlose all its drivingforce,were it to toler-
ate even fora momentthe ideaof childrenbeingblownto
pieces by our bombs.
STEPAN : Sorry,but I don'tsufferfroma tenderheart;
thatsortof nonsensecutsno ice withme. . . . Notuntilthe
daycomeswhenwe stop sentimentalizing aboutchildren
will the revolutiontriumph,and we be mastersof the
world.
DORA: When that day comes, the revolutionwill be
loathedby the whole humanrace. (New York,Knopf,
1966, p. 256)
Camus refused to justify violence even in the name of
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the postrevolutionary golden age. Recourse to it tight-
ly binds those who are personally responsible. In his
criticism of Lenin he stressed the insidious logic of
efficacity: "For the sake of justice in the far-awayfu-
ture, it [Marxist doctrine] authorizes injustice
throughout the entire course of history and becomes
the type of mystification which Lenin detested more
than anything else in the world. It continues the accep-
tation of injustice, crime, and falsehood by the promise
of a miracle. . . . All freedom must be crushed in order
to conquer the empire, and one day the empire will be
the equivalent of freedom" (The Rebel, New York,
Vintage, 1956, p. 233).
The Just Assassins also contains a reflection on the
realities of modern political praxis. With Machiavellian
thoroughness, the Marxists in power (Stalin) or those
in the process of seizing it (Stepan)pitilessly hunt down
'
as "idealists those who do not share their strategic and
philosophical concepts. Every skeptic is a potential
adversary and traitor. From this position logically fol-
lows the dissolution of the Duma, the elimination of
the Mensheviks by Lenin, Stalin's suppression of the
kulaks. In his polemic with Sartre, Camus went
straight to the essential of this authoritarianmentality:
"Whoever is not Marxist,honestly or ashamedly, leans
or becomes hardened to the right; that is the first
presumption, conscious or not, of the intellectual
method" (ActuellesII, 755). Whoever thinks different-
ly, whoever thinks freely, whoever does not think in
Marxistterms is, by these standards, to be shunned or
suppressed. By contrast, Camus saw the responsibility
of the intellectual to criticize all abuses, whether Marx-
ist or capitalist, in the service of truth and liberty. As
he expressed in his Nobel speech, the writer has two
principal tasks: "refusalto" lie about what we know and
resistance to oppression (New York, Knopf, 1958, p.
x). Both Solzhenitsyn and Glucksmannfollow this ideal
of courageous, independent thinking with their out-
spoken judgments of the East and the West. (On Sol-
zhenitsyn's Nobel address, see WLT 53:4, pp. 573-
84- Ed.)
The denunciation of the abuses inherent in political
systems is not the only link between Camus and the
current generation. Camus rejected the metaphysics
of history and the political logic of Marxism, including
the concept that it is scientific: "Marxismis not scien-
"
tific; at the best, it has scientific prejudices (Rebel,
220), a sentiment later echoed by Jean-Marie Benoist
"
in "Marx Is Dead. He continued with caustic com-
ments like "incomparable eye-opener" (Rebel, 201)
and "Marxis no more scientific in his attitude than La
Rochefoucauld"(Rebel, 221). Camus did not scorn sci-
entific reasoning but found that it was totally unlike the
pseudo-historical reasoning forged by those whom
*Actuelles II, in Essais, Roger Quilliot, ed., Paris, Gallimard,
1965, p. 802. Subsequent references will be noted parenthetically.
Published English versions of cited materialare listed parenthetical-
ly at the first occurrence of the respective works. All other transla-
tions are our own unless otherwise noted.

"
Glucksmannlater names the "master thinkers. Mod-
ern science does not lead to a single unequivocal ra-
tionality but to a set of concurrent and revisable
rationalities. Marx, a contemporary of Darwin and the
steam engine, could not satisfy the demands of re-
search in the nuclear age, and he appeared singularly
archaicto Camus in comparisonwith Einstein and with
Heisenberg, who substituted probabilities for strict
determinisms. Due to the dependence on Darwin as a
basis for its theories, the infallibilityof Marxismneces-
sitated denying modern biological discoveries. Thus
Lyssenko was given the "task of disciplining chromo-
somes" (Rebel, 222), and the fiction was maintained at
the price of human suffering: "Therefore it is not sur-
prising that, to make Marxism scientific and to pre-
serve this fiction, which is very useful in this century of
science, it has been a necessary first step to render
science Marxist through terror" (221).
According to the author of The Rebel, this misuse of
science was not a new phenomenon: "Afterall, there is
really nothing mysterious about the principle that con-
sists in using scientific reasoning to the advantage of a
prophecy. This has already been named the principle
of authority, and it is this that guides the Churches
when they wish to subject living reason to dead faith
and freedom of the intellect to the maintenance of
temporal power' (222). Glucksmann develops the
same theme at length in "The Master Thinkers" after
having written in "The Cook and the Man-Eater":"In
the prestige that the authority of knowledge confers, it
is the authoritywhich interests Marxism"("Cook,"63).
Camus and the New Philosophers share the view
that police states and not theoretical discussions have
made Marx'stheses into facts. The Rebel records how
the RussianRevolution was not a spontaneous uprising
of the masses but rather a carefully orchestrated show
of power: "By the logic of history and of doctrine, the
Universal City, which was to have been realized by the
spontaneous insurrection of the oppressed, has been
little by little replaced by the Empire, imposed by
means of power" (235). Glucksmann is also suspicious
of the causes of revolutions: "Revolutions, whatever
people say, are not contagious. . . . The apparent
is carriedby the 'science of the
revolutionary " contagion
revolution' ("Thinkers,"Paris, Grasset, 1977, p. 49).
Once the Marxist regime was established, its power
was maintained through force. Bernard-Henri Levy
writes in the same vein: "A luminous Archipelago,
which proves in letters of blood that Marxism is also a
police force" (Barbarism, New York, Harper & Row,
1979, p. 156).
Camus did not wait for Solzhenitsyn to incriminate
Lenin before assigning to him the historical responsi-
bility for the Archipelago. He did so in several incisive
pages of The Rebel to which Glucksmann and Levy do
not add substantially. Lenin, a reader of Kautsky,
doubted the Russian workers' ability to formulate a
revolutionary ideology. In addition, the conditions in
pre-industrialized Russia were different from those of
Marx's Germany in that there was no large working
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GUERIN & WOOD 365
class to act as revolutionaries. Consequently, Lenin
transferred to a group of radical intellectuals the re-
sponsibility for fomenting disruption. Camus, an au-
thentic child of the people, notes the assumption made
by this transference of leadership to a professional
revolutionary elite: "It is possible not to be proletarian
and know better than the proletariat what its interests
are" (Rebel, 227). Whereas the Bolsheviks made no
distinction between intellectuals and proletarians
when the party line was being followed, Lenin im-
posed leadership on the working class: "In plain lan-
guage, that means the revolution needs leaders and
theorists" (227).
The end result of this emphasis on theory was the
totalitarianstate: "The theoretician works unceasingly
to study the State; he ends up by succumbing to the
trap of the reason of the State: Iliad and Odyssey of all
political aristocracy,be it Marxistor not" ("Cook,"84).
Camus opposed ideological revolutions as counterpro-
ductive and leading away from increased human free-
dom: "All modern revolutions have ended in a rein-
forcement of the power of the State" (Rebel, 177).
Revolutionarywholesale terrorism is far from the indi-
vidual committed act of Kaliayev. Lenin, with his
attachment to authoritarianmethods, was no exception
and continually deviated from the revolutionary ideal
as outlined by Marx:"With each new difficulty encoun-
tered by the revolution, the State as described by Marx
is endowed with a supplementary prerogative" (633).
Prefiguring "The Master Thinkers," Camus traces
the origin of the Gulag back to nineteenth-century
German philosophers: "If Nietzsche and Hegel serve
as alibis to the masters of Dachau and Karaganda,that
does not condemn their entire philosophy. But it does
lead to the suspicion that one aspect of their thought,
or of their logic, can lead to the appalling conclusions"
(137). He thus does not affirm that Marx wanted the
Archipelago or that the Archipelago is Marxist, but at
the same time he does not find it to be totally foreign to
his logic. "The first Marxists," Glucksmann was to
write, "did not inscribe the Soviet camps in their pro-
gram. No more than liberal bourgeois dreamed of Hit-
ler" ("Cook," 15). The "master thinkers" are authors,
and as such they are simultaneously innocent and re-
sponsible for the crimes committed in their names,
under the cover of their doctrines.
Camus's analysis of Marx is especially interesting in
light of the New Philosophers' discussions. Camus
found in the thought of the founder of communism
several constants which established his kinship with
bourgeois Germanic ideology of the nineteenth cen-
tury, including his historical messianism, his belief in
"
progress and his "creative fatalism (Rebel, 192).
"Marx," he wrote, "justifies the order that is estab-
lished in his time. The most eloquent elogy of capital-
ism was made by its greatest enemy" (192). Even the
essentials of his theory of work-value were found in
Ricardo'sbourgeois economics, making Marx"an heir
before he is a pioneer" (197). The values contained by
his ethic- realism, force and discipline- retain the
366 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
imprint of German society in the process of indus-
trializing.
To the Hegelian-Marxist tradition of Nordic origin
which absolutizes politics and focuses on the State,
Camus opposed Mediterranean moderation, Hellenic,
suspicious of History and faithful to physis. Like the
New Philosophers, he adapted Nietzschean criticism
of doctrines which incorporated the Christian heri-
tage. He even drew a disadvantageousparallelbetween
Karl Marx and Joseph de Maistre, the counter-
revolutionary integrist. Camus found that "scientific"
socialism shared with Christian doctrine a hatred of
nature, millenarianism and references to an absolute.
Christianity and Marxismmay be reduced, in the final
analysis, to a hope in a better tomorrow. What dif-
ferentiates them is that in one case one sings the Veni
creator and in the other, the Internationale. The un-
certainty implicit in the Communist timetable for the
coming of the Revolution caused sentiments similar to
those of the early Christians:"The revolutionarymove-
ment at the end of the nineteenth century and begin-
ning of the twentieth lived, like the early Christians, in
the expectation of the end of the world and the advent
of the proletarian Christ" (Rebel, 210). Continuing the
analogy, Camus explained the tactics used by those
who attempted to justify the delay: "The only recourse
of the Marxists consists in saying that the delays are
simply longer than was imagined and that one day,
away in the future, the end will justify all. In other
words, we are in purgatory and we are promised that
there will be no hell" (222).
While awaiting the end of universal, terrestrial his-
tory, innocent people did not cease dying and being
tortured. Camus was unable to accept the fact that
tyranny could last for more than one generation, sig-
nifying for millions a life of terror. Since for Camus,
who did not hesitate to call himself a "pessimist" con-
cerning human destiny (Actuelles I, 374), there is no
religious salvation, neither could he accept the mes-
sianic view of future political salvation. Like Bernard-
Henri Levy, he did not believe in a perfect Utopian
City which would abolish evil forever, a metaphysical
and not merely a social goal. Marxist revolution was
definitively dismissed by this sentence, which could
have been found in Barbarism with a Human Face:
"Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an
oppressor or a heretic. In the purely historical universe
that they have chosen, rebellion and revolution end in
the same dilemma: either police rule or insanity"(Reb-
el, 249).
Concerned with the concrete, Camus examined the
realities and not the mythologies of Soviet Russia. The
outline of todays continuing great debate on Stalinism
is contained in The Rebel. Since 1917 the USSR has
preferred power to justice. An industrial society was
erected by fire and by blood in the East, not a socialist
society. Once again referring to Christianity, Camus
saw that just as the Church was not founded on the
Gospels, the Soviet Union was not based on the Com-
munist Manifesto. In both cases the Book was quoted
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as authority but the institution did not incarnate the
essential message.
"The ideal regime based on collective property
could be defined, according to Lenin, as justice plus
electricity. In the final analysis it is only electricity,
without justice" (Rebel, 215). Glucksmann continues
in the same vein: "Electrificationplus the power of the
camps" ("Cook," 125). Camus intuited what has
escaped many learned theoreticians, that there are two
versions of modern production, one liberal-
capitalistic, the other capitalistic-state or Marxist-
Leninist. He explained: "Finally capitalistic society
and revolutionarysociety are one and the same thing to
the extent that they submit themselves to the same
means- industrialproduction- and to the same prom-
ise" (Rebel, 272). Continuing this analysis in terms
similar to those used later by Cornelius Castoriadis,
Maximilien Rubel, Andre Glucksmann and many
others, he added: "Industrialsocialism has done noth-
ing essential to alleviate the condition of the workers
because it has not touched on the very principle of
production and the organizationof labor, which, on the
contrary, it has extolled" (216). Thus Camus proved
that it is not with Marxand Lenin that one can change
one's life. The contradictions between official dogma
and Stalinist repression were blatantly obvious: "Con-
fronted with its officialdoctrine, the regime is forced to
choose: the doctrine is false, or the regime has be-
trayed it" (230).
Camus, more lucid than Sartre, dared destroy the
fiction maintained by decades of Leninism-Stalinism.
He viewed the Soviet Union as a coercive machine, a
terror of unfettered State, and not as a classless society.
Thus he himself preserves the plan, the socialist hope.
When The Rebel appeared, the Gulag Archipelago
continued to swallow up convoys of proletarians, but
the Marxist intelligentsia with few exceptions cele-
brated the achievement of socialism in the East.
Today the voices raised in indignation against the
socialist experiment are more numerous, but the New
Philosophers give little credit to Camus. Philippe
Nemo, Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreauprefer to
invoke Lacan, and Pierre Legendre even calls upon a
Lacanian politics, a strange concept since the illus-
trious psychoanalysthas not at this point revealed him-
self to be a political thinker. Bernard-Henri Levy
distractedly cites the name of Camus in Barbarism
with a Human Face, as do Andre Glucksmannin "The
Cook and the Man-Eater"and Jean-Marie Benoist in
he nouveaux primaires (The New Primaries).Two for-
mer Maoists, Claudie and Jacques Broyelle, in he
bonheur des pierres (The Happiness of Stones), pay a
much deeper tribute to the writer which ends with,
"we have all killed him, this Jew of a Camus" (Paris,
Seuil, 1978, p. 56).
Nevertheless, the lucid homages to Camus's princi-
ples by Eugene Ionesco and by AleksaridrSolzhenit-
syn in his Nobel address converge remarkablywith the
political stance assumed by the New Philosophers. If
the blase intellectuals of the cafes despise or feign to

scorn the moralismof Camus, the public and especially
the young public of France remains faithful to him.
Numerous polls taken in lycees and in universities
show that his books retain and doubtlessly are increas-
ing their audience. Before plunging into the superficial
or rigorous reading of the fashionable thinkers, more
than one New Philosopher must have permeated him-
Reflections on Artur Lundkvist's Agadir
By CZESLAW MILOSZ During the night of 1
March lybU an earth-
quake killed about
40,000 people in Agadir, a resort town on the Atlantic
coast of Morocco. One of the survivors was Swedish
poet and AcademicianArtur Lundkvist. His long poem
Agadir (1961) now exists in an excellent (so far as I can
judge, without knowing Swedish) translation by Wil-
liam Jay Smith and Leif Sjoberg from International
Poetry Press (Byblos Editions II, 1979, 55 pages) with
illustrations by William Libby.
Agadir is quite an extraordinarywork, when mea-
sured by the widely accepted habits of contemporary
poets. They take as self-evident that poetry has for its
domain the perceptions of an individual and by neces-
sity is rooted in the subjectivity of a given poet. A claim
to a description of the world in its real shape would be
dismissed as naive or arrogant,for it would presuppose
the existence of an "objective"reality, independent of
the way it is perceived by particular human beings.
Still, an earthquake like that of Agadir is a massive
reality, undoubtedly endowed with an objective exis-
tence, in that the difference between being dead and
alive does not depend on states of mind. Artur Lund-
kvist'sAgadir is a descriptive poem, an attempt to be as
faithfulas possible to what really happened. Its reader
realizes, by contrast, the extent to which he himself has
been trained in a generalized vagueness of outline, in
an art of glimpses, flickers and patches. Lundkvist's
visible struggle against that tendency gives to the
poem a quality of nearly heroic humility in the face of
the fact. His division of the whole into four parts- the
omens, the event, the survivors, the aftermath-
shows how strongly any description calls for hierarchy
and construction.
The richness of the poem may be measured by its
ability to invite reflection. The book is too beautifully
printed to spoil its pages with notes on the margins. (A
new edition, in hardcover and paperback, should be
available from Ohio University Press by the time this
essay appears.) Instead, I am writing some of my
thoughts down here.
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MILOSZ 367
self with the theses of The Rebel. The day will come
when one of them will recognize his debt toward the
person who had the courage to call himself not a rev-
olutionary but an "intransigent reformer" (Carnets,
vol. 2, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, p. 271).
Nanterre University I Texas Tech University
Who remembers the earthquake of Agadir today,
twenty years later? Very few people. When I heard of a
poem bearing such a title, my mind went blank, then a"
date flashed, connected with the "Morocco incident
announcing World War I: in 1911 the German gunboat
Panther arrived at Agadir. Only later, when I opened
the book, did my memory bring back French newspa-
pers of 1960 with the news of the catastrophe on their
front pages. What is the meaning of such an oblivion?
And why did the earthquake of Lisbon, in 1755, have
such a lasting effect, becoming the subject of philo-
sophical arguments? The number of victims? There
were around 60,000, and in proportion to the size of
the European population at the time, that was certain-
ly many more than the number of the dead at Agadir.
Still, this does not explain the impact of the disaster,
which led many men of letters, with Voltaire at the
head, to make out of the sad occurrence a weapon
against the believers in Providence. It was as though
the epidemics, floods, famines and destructive wars
visiting Europe through the ages were not enough.
Perhaps we underestimate the durability of the belief
in God's good husbandry and his managerialcare. Did
not Bossuet preach, just before the Age of Reason,
about the providential decrees of God which appointed
virtuous monarchs? Calamities appeared to be sent or
at least allowed by the Lord as a punishment for mans
sins- and this despite the Book of Job, where every-
one could learn that Job's sufferings had no relation
whatsoever to his guilt or merit.
Agadir did not give rise to the suspicion that the
earth shook because of the sins of the inhabitantsof the
town. Philosophically, the event was bereft of connota-
tion; nothing could be said except that the indifference
of the Universe toward man found its expression in an
accidental meeting of geological time with the time of
short-lived human beings. In Lundkvist's poem
perhaps the most dramaticfeature is the absence of an
addressee: the voice cannot curse, implore or protest,
for neither the earth nor the sky will listen.
I offer my own explanation as to why natural catas-
trophes are so easily forgotten today. They probably