The Votary

RESISTANCE, REBELLION, AND DEATH (272 pp.)--Albert Camus--Knopf ($4).

Collections of sermons, except those by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, usually sell about as well as a Swahili grammar. But Alfred A. Knopf has published such a collection, the difference being that the sermons deal with the theology of politics, and were composed with aphoristic brilliance by the late Albert Camus. The author called them actuelles, or occasional pieces, and he thought as highly of them as he did of his novels, plays and philosophical essays. He may well have been right.

A Question to Christians. Camus appears in this collection in all his familiar and significant roles. He appears, in the first place, as a French Algerian who inherited a built-in controversy more bitter at his death last year than it was at his birth 48 years ago. His views on the desperate issue are included in this volume, but his plan for a federation of settlements along communal lines seems today as remote from realization as his other proposal --mutual forgiveness between the fratricidal factions.

He appears next as a French patriot during the German occupation. Camus was an underground fighter and won a celebrated anonymity for his editorials contributed to the illegal Combat. The experience did two things for his prose style. He guarded and measured out his words as if they were blood plasma, and he was so totally committed that later he could write to someone doing some painless cheering for the Hungarian rebels: ''We may be generous only with our own blood." Camus was not just a voter in a democracy; he was one of its votaries.

The realization that he had staked his life on his words gave a living urgency to his expression of the elementary axioms of democracy; in chaotic times he was obliged to rediscover and reformulate the democratic principles that are today the comfortable cliches of an affluent society.

Finally, Camus appears as a man in conscious conflict with himself, as a man of profound Christian instincts but a humanist by faith. In all his controversial and critical writing, he constantly appeals to the principles of a Christianity he repudiated. When Camus touches directly on this issue, vital to the whole pattern of his life, he becomes, for the first time, almost tongue-tied. In an address to Dominicans who had invited him to speak, he wonders aloud whether he is in danger of being a "lay pharisee" when he claims the right to ask Christians to be Christians. He makes but one attempt to define the difference between their faith and his own: "If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man." Unresolved at his death, the conflict gave a tensile shape to everything he wrote, and serves to illustrate Yeats's aphorism: "Of our argument with others, we make rhetoric, of our argument with ourselves, we make poetry."

A Hand to the Enemy. But for Camus' special force and the fate that put his life in extreme situations, his French rhetorical style--"the French flux," in Arthur Koestler's gibe--might sometimes be almost embarrassingly like tears at a civic funeral or listening to a man explain at length how very much he loves his mother. But Camus had earned the right to speak of tragic matters in unembarrassed tones of tragedy. Constantly he asserts his claim to personal and intellectual "honor," an old-fashioned conception, he concedes. No reader will deny that he has established his claim.

Haunted by questions of death and justice, he is at his best when both matters are involved, as in his Reflections on the Guillotine, in which he argues with greater force and eloquence than Koestler in Reflections on Hanging (TIME, July 29, 1957) against capital punishment.

Perhaps his most generous rage was stirred by the Hungarian revolt, which made him close his accounts with the fellow-traveling French left. "Let us not forget that when totalitarian society, by its very principles, forces friend to denounce his friend, Western society, despite its wanderings from the path of virtue, always produces a race of men who uphold honor in life--I mean men who stretch out their hands even to their enemy to save him from suffering or death."

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