Albert Camus

Albert Camus (IPA: [albɛʁ kamoo]) (November 7, 1913 – January 4, 1960) was a French-Algerian author, philosopher and journalist who won the Nobel prize in 1957. He is often associated with existentialism, but Camus refused this label. On the other hand, as he wrote in his essay The Rebel, his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism. On the subject of his belief or not in God, he writes in the third volume of his notebooks: "I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist".

His most important phrase for the future was: "All of us, among the ruins, are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism. But few of us know it".

Albert Camus founded in 1949 the Group for International Liaisons in the Revolutionary Union Movement, according to the book Albert Camus, une vie of Olivier Todd, a group opposed to the atheist and communistic tendencies of the surrealistic movement of Andre Breton. Camus was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (after Rudyard Kipling) when he became the first African-born writer to receive the award, in 1957. He is also the shortest-lived of any literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident only three years after receiving the award.

Camus preferred to be known as a man and a thinker, rather than as a member of a school or ideology. He preferred persons over ideas. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: “No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked…”.^[1].

In his collection of essays The Nuptials he wrote that he was a son of Greece. In his book “Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism”, Albert Camus takes a positive attitude supporting the Greek conception of Christianism (see the translation of Ronald D. Srigley). According to the Greek journalist Christos Papachristopoulos, Albert Camus had Greek origins and belonged to a special organisation of wise, Christian men called “Spartoi” or “Spartans”, that is the men belonging to “the city of god” Cadmus. In this group, also, belong George Orwell, Gabriel Marcel, Arthur Koestler, Karl Jaspers, Ernst Junger, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Maritain, Lev Shestov, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevski, Henri Bergson and Nikos Kazantzakis (see the book “Cadmus: the Great Priest of Eleusinian Mysteries” by Christos Papachristopoulos - 2007)