Page - 132 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

133 | www.limina-graz.eu Laurens ten Kate | Strange Freedom But perhaps we can trace Camus’ humanist vision back to the ancient mys- terious Christian idea: “be in the world but not of the world.”3 We see this paradox in Camus’ poetic plea to understand freedom as: “[an] eternal tension between beauty and pain, between love for peo- ple and the absurdity of creation, between unbearable loneliness and the deadly tiresome masses, between rebellion and consent. And on this nar- row level […] every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. […] But in that risk […] lies the freedom of art. A difficult freedom, one that seems rather like the discipline of an ascetic? So it is.” (Camus 2004, 167) Such a strange concept of freedom was met with fierce contempt in 1950s Paris. The “police forces” Camus speaks about are not only the politico- economic powers of capitalism and communism, but certainly also those of the existentialist movement itself. The arrows of all these powers are aimed at both detached art and detached philosophy. The ideologies Camus refers to have long since disappeared, or at least have been transformed. The Cold War leading to an Iron Curtain between ide- ologies and their political embodiment in diametrically opposed state eco- nomic structures; the ever-pervasive role of the churches in social life, at least in Western Europe; the energy and discipline of the post-War recon- struction period—this was the ideological world of my parents, driven by a forward-looking spirit. After the repression and terror that had colored the lives of those who had lived through the war, their experience of a new freedom involved speaking as little as possible about freedom. Theirs was a negative freedom: to be freed from absolute lack of freedom and make a fragile new start in history; you had to accept your freedom and – most im- portantly – not stir up problems by asking questions. But that is precisely what Camus did in his lecture. Strange Freedom and the Market Today, more than sixty years later, a large number of Europeans are freer than ever, and we smile at the narrow-mindedness of the 1950s. But have we really become less ideological in the 21st century? If so, how? And are we freer? That is one of the central questions of this article. “How can this strange freedom of creation survive in the midst of so many ideological police forces?” 3 See, for example, John 18:36, where Christ presents his preaching in the world as a ‘kingdom’ that is not of the world.