The question concerning religion lies at the heart of the existential thinking and writings of Camus. The centrality of the question concerning religion is because the question of the meaning of life is the beginning, extent, and destination of Camus’s version of existentialism in the sense that, for Camus, religion used to make life and existence meaningful; that is, the death of God has brought human beings face to face with the meaninglessness of existence, the silence of the world, and the groundlessness of life.
Such unbearable and holding sway meaninglessness, silence, and purposelessness, as The Myth of Sisyphus makes clear and confirms repeatedly, bring with them into one’s possibilities the possibility of suicide, of killing oneself, of letting oneself disappear into nothingness, for if there is nothing but meaninglessness, if the world is unbearably silent, and if hoping is useless, then why should one continue living and why should this suffering from the absence of meaning be endured?
For Camus, the human condition is absurd in the sense that our constant longing for meaning always encounters the unbearable, irrational, and “unreasonable silence of the world“. We are merely aliens in this world, only strangers in “a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights”.
It is in light of this alienation from the world, our strangeness and homelessness, and the sudden absence of illusions and lights first made apparent because of the death of God that the question of suicide becomes an urgent problematic for Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.
What then is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels like an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce be tween man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
“Longing for death” is the result of the world’s refusal to offer, and to make ready and available, meaning to us and for us. The world is indifferent, refusing, absolute, silent, and immovable. This is why Camus insists that the absurd is a condition that does not belong in the world; it rather emerges from the abyss that separates us and our longing for meaning from the world and its silence and indifference.
This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together. It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together. This is all I can discern clearly in this measureless universe where my adventure takes place.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
It is in the midst of the silence of the world and the absence of any answers and answering that Camus poses the question of religion as a path in which meaning and purposefulness reside as possibilities. That is, religion offers itself to human beings as a possibility of existing in a world that is still meaningful; a world that is not devoid of directions and directionality. In other words, for Camus, religion makes the world and human existence meaningful because it offers answers, promises another world, and thus overcomes this world and its silence.
Camus says that religion tempts us to escape the absurd and to endeavor to cover over it; something that Kierkegaard insists on and carries out because of his fear of living in the absurd and his failure to embrace it. Kierkegaard’s philosophical suicide is taken by Camus as an attempt to escape the lucidity of the absurd in favor of what is desired and desirable in its comfort.
For Camus, Kierkegaard’s philosophical suicide, or Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, is neither a heroic confrontation with existence nor a lucid act, but rather a turning to the unknown and the unknowable so that the experienced in its groundlessness could be covered over, eluded, and made entirely silent.
This turn to the unknown and the unknowable is, for Camus, a declaration that even choosing an absurd God is more desirable than accepting an absurd condition in the world, since Camus says that for Kierkegaard God is absurd because God is incoherent, incomprehensible, and unjust. That is, for Kierkegaard, even an absurd God is more acceptable than a groundless existence in a silent world.
Camus says that absurd reasoning is only after the truth and what is true and not what is desired and desirable. Absurd reasoning is only after what unsettles and disrupts even if it is unbearable and not after what is comfortable. Seeking only the truth and what is true means, for Camus, that the silence of the world must be embraced; that is, our fate must be welcomed and confirmed.
Not only should the silence of the world be heard and confirmed, but also demanded. This demand for silence means that, for Camus, the absurd is a question of endurance, of bearing the weight of meaninglessness without surrendering and without turning away from our absurd condition. The question that Camus poses is whether “it is possible to live without appeal”, to which Camus’s writings in their entirety respond in a way that welcomes, embraces, and confirms the absurd in a manner of lucid hoping by refusing the comfort and desirability of religion, by refusing to turn toward the unknown and the unknowable, and by embracing our absurd condition.
What he demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned : he wants to find out if it is possible to live without appeal.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus