See also Camus Becoming a Christian?
I am in agreement with Steven on this (when I was in grade school, we used to pray that Lewis would become a Catholic -- this after reading The Screwtape Letters in class). But I think the case for Stevens's conversion is quite sound. There is probably no book I have read more than his Collected Poems, and I have long thought that it is a chronicle of a journey toward faith. Whenever he was in Manhattan, Stevens always took time to sit by himself in St. Patrick's Cathedral
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ReplyDeleteDear Frank,
ReplyDeleteAnd I couldn't agree more regarding your analysis of Stevens. No matter how hard my professors tried to convince me of the atheistic triumph of "Sunday Morning," I couldn't see it.
shalom,
Steven
"Co-opting dead authors says nothing whatsoever about the cause for which they are co-opted, but it says a great deal about those willing to do the co-opting."
ReplyDeleteThat pretty much says it all.
Having read Camus from end to end numerous times, I would point to the stories in "Exile and the Kingdom" and the "Lyrical Essays" as often being of deeply spiritual, even religious, feeling, but completely non-orthodox, and completely non-sectarian. Camus was a man deeply moved by life and experience—in an almost "religious" sense—but I find it very difficult to believe he would have converted to any organized religion. Institutions such as that were precisely what he wrote against many times, even in "Exile and the Kingdom."
I think Camus was genuinely religious. As for whether he would have converted? Don't know. Don't care.
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