book, Institutes of the Christian Religion, has greatly
influenced most Protestant Christian churches.
Further Readings
Calvin, J. Institutes of the Christian Religion,vols. XX and XXI, J.
T. McNeill, ed., F. L. Battles, transl., Library of Christian
Classics. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960.
Dillenberger, J., ed. John Calvin: Selections from His Writings.
Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Höpfl, H. The Christian Polity of John Calvin.Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Monter, E. W. Calvin’s Geneva.New York: Wiley, 1967.
Parker, T. H. L. John Calvin: A Biography.Philadelphia: West-
minster Press, 1975.
Wendel, F. Calvin: The Origins and Development of His Religious
Thoughts.New York: Collins, 1963.
Camus, Albert (1913–1960) French essayist,
novelist, and playwright
Camus was born into impoverished conditions in
Mondovi, Algeria. His father was killed in World War
I, and his mother worked as a charwoman to support
the family. Camus won a scholarship to attend the
Algiers lycéein 1923 and later studied philosophy at
the University of Algiers, where he obtained a diplôme
d’études supérieuresin 1936 for a thesis on the works of
Plotinus and St. Augustine. During this period, Camus
began to write and produce plays for the Théâtre du
Travail (Workers’ Theatre), which sought to expose
working-class audiences to the theater, and he also
briefly belonged to the Algerian Communist Party
(1934–35). Camus then began a career as a journalist,
producing book reviews and a series of articles detail-
ing the injustices of life in Algeria under the colonial
rule of the French. In 1940, he moved to Paris and
became active in the resistance movement during the
German occupation of France. For two years after the
war, Camus served as editor of the Parisian daily Com-
bat,a position that allowed him to deepen his engage-
ment with political activism but which ultimately left
him disillusioned at the absence of moral integrity in
politics.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Camus wrote the
major publications that established his reputation,
including The Stranger(1942), The Myth of Sisyphus
(1942), The Plague(1947), The Rebel(1951), Exile and
the Kingdom(1952), and The Fall(1956). In 1957, he
received the Nobel Prize for literature. Camus was
killed in a car accident near Sens, France, on January
4, 1960.
Camus is generally, though sometimes controver-
sially, associated with the movement of French EXIS-
TENTIALISM. Although he was closely associated for a
time with Jean-Paul SARTRE, their relationship ended in
a bitter dispute, and Camus often expressed reserva-
tions about existentialist philosophy. Nevertheless,
Camus’s reflections on the human condition and his
focus on the moral dimensions of human life have
important affinities with the existentialist tradition.
Two notions in particular can be seen as forming the
nucleus of Camus’s thought: the notion of absurdity
and the notion of revolt.
In his early writings, Camus struggled with the
apparent contradiction of human existence, namely, that
human beings desire to find a meaningful world and
instead find a world without meaning. This contra-
diction underlies the notion of the absurdity of life
because there are no guarantees for the validity of values
used to guide human existence. In a striking analogy,
Camus compares life to the myth of Sisyphus, suggest-
ing that human actions are akin to the labors of Sisy-
phus, who was condemned by the gods to roll a stone
up a mountain, watch it roll back down, and repeat the
process endlessly. Given the absurdity of existence,
Camus examined the question of whether our lives are
worth living in a meaningless world. His response was
that the indifference of the world to the fate of human-
ity provides the very motivation for human action, in
terms of rebellion against that indifference.
Camus’s later writings thus focused on the notion
of revolt. According to Camus, the individual’s only
defensible response to the absurdity of existence is
revolt, in particular against both the passive nihilism
of meaninglessness and the prevalence of social and
political injustice. He viewed revolt as a means to the
creation of human solidarity by prompting moral
action that helps to cultivate a sense of humanity
while resisting any form of religious or political abso-
lutism. In Camus’s words, “I revolt, therefore we are.”
In the end, Camus articulated an ethics of revolt that
sought to expose the extent of our responsibility for
the conditions of human existence. Hope and courage
rather than despair and fear are the positive qualities
of revolt, whose aim should be to overcome human
isolation and to promote mutual respect for the basic
RIGHTSof all persons.Further Reading
Bronner, S. E. Camus: Portrait of a Moralist.Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1999.Camus, Albert 47