The Last Life
“A third-century Roman inscription at Timgad, in the south, exhorts: "The hunt, the baths, play and laughter: that's the life for me!" It is certainly a myth among the pieds-noirs, that the culture, sun-drenched and sparkling, dwelt in joy. But across the centuries, their voices—those resonating voices of Augustine and Camus—tell a different truth.
Both men asked, one before God and the other a man alone on his darkling plain, whether life was worth living; and both answered "yes" with a despera...tion and a defiance that can have been born only of "no." Catholicism's strict prohibition of suicide is, in fact, Augustine's. It was he who first threatened that eternal reward would be denied those dead by their own hands: "Christians have no authority to commit suicide in any circumstance." But his logic, so carefully worked, a subtle synthesis of commandments about self and neighbor, could only have been necessary if he saw the temptation. He, whose early laughter and revelry led, on his return to Algeria from Milan, to years of loss and tumult, who learned how much of earthly life was sheer endurance, wrote, in old age, that "from the evidence of this life itself, a life so full of so many and such various evils that it can hardly be called living, we must conclude that the whole human race is being punished." Hence his belief in Original Sin: we must be punished, at least, for a cause.MoreLess
Both men asked, one before God and the other a man alone on his darkling plain, whether life was worth living; and both answered "yes" with a despera...tion and a defiance that can have been born only of "no." Catholicism's strict prohibition of suicide is, in fact, Augustine's. It was he who first threatened that eternal reward would be denied those dead by their own hands: "Christians have no authority to commit suicide in any circumstance." But his logic, so carefully worked, a subtle synthesis of commandments about self and neighbor, could only have been necessary if he saw the temptation. He, whose early laughter and revelry led, on his return to Algeria from Milan, to years of loss and tumult, who learned how much of earthly life was sheer endurance, wrote, in old age, that "from the evidence of this life itself, a life so full of so many and such various evils that it can hardly be called living, we must conclude that the whole human race is being punished." Hence his belief in Original Sin: we must be punished, at least, for a cause.MoreLess
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