Christ and Rachel's weeping

Christ and Rachel's weeping is a relation that Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the narrator of Albert Camus's The Fall, constructs to undermine the traditional Christian image of Christ's innocence and to universalize guilt. By linking Christ to the biblical figure Rachel, who weeps for her children massacred by Herod, Clamence argues that Christ knew he was not altogether innocent—that he had committed other crimes, even if he did not know which ones. This relation becomes the theological cornerstone of Clamence's own doctrine of universal guilt and the impossibility of innocence.

The Slaughter of the Innocents as Christ's Original Crime

Clamence asserts that the real reason for Christ's crucifixion, carefully hidden for two thousand years, is that Christ knew he was not innocent. He had committed other crimes—specifically, the Slaughter of the Innocents. The children of Judea were massacred while Christ's parents were taking him to a safe place; they died because of him. Clamence imagines Christ's horror at the blood-spattered soldiers and the infants cut in two, and insists that Christ could not forget them. The incurable melancholy that can be felt in every act of Christ, Clamence claims, is the sadness of a man who heard night after night the voice of Rachel weeping for her children and refusing all comfort. The lamentation would rend the night, Rachel would call her children who had been killed for him, and he was still alive.

The Crime of Not Dying Oneself

Clamence deepens this relation by defining crime not as making others die, but as not dying oneself. Christ, familiar with everything about man, brought face to face day and night with his innocent crime, found it too hard to hold on and continue. It was better to have done with it, not to defend himself, to die, in order not to be the only one to live, and to go elsewhere where perhaps he would be upheld. Clamence identifies with this predicament: he himself has known the torment of being unable to carry on, of having no idea how to reach the next minute. He loves Christ, his friend who died without knowing, because Christ cried aloud his agony.

The Suppression of Christ's Complaint

Clamence notes that the third evangelist, Luke, suppressed Christ's cry of abandonment—"Why hast thou forsaken me?"—calling it a seditious cry. By censoring this complaint, the evangelist inadvertently shouted aloud what he proscribed. The world's order, Clamence observes, is ambiguous. Christ was not upheld; he complained, and as a last straw, he was censored. This suppression, for Clamence, is a model of how human judgment operates: it silences the truth of shared guilt.

Clamence's Own Relation to the Drowning Woman

Clamence's personal history mirrors the structure of Christ and Rachel's weeping. On the Pont Royal, he witnessed a young woman in black leaning over the railing, then heard the sound of a body striking the water and a cry repeated several times that suddenly ceased. He stood motionless, told himself he had to be quick, but felt an irresistible weakness. He went away and informed no one. Years later, on an ocean liner, he saw a black speck on the steel-gray ocean and thought at once of a drowning person; he realized that the cry from the Seine had never ceased, carried by the river to the waters of the Channel, across the ocean, and that it had waited for him until the day he encountered it. The cry continues to await him on seas and rivers everywhere, in the bitter water of his baptism. Clamence's failure to save the drowning woman is his own version of Christ's complicity in the deaths of the innocents: he, too, is alive while another has died.

The Universalization of Guilt

Clamence uses the relation of Christ and Rachel's weeping to argue that every man testifies to the crime of all the others. He rejects the idea that innocence can be asserted of anyone, while guilt can be stated with certainty of all. The Last Judgment, he declares, takes place every day. Christ left humanity alone to carry on, knowing what he knew, but incapable of doing what he did and of dying like him. People have tried to get help from his death, but too many now climb onto the cross merely to be seen from a greater distance, trampling on the one who has been there so long. Clamence's own solution—the profession of judge-penitent—is an attempt to extend condemnation to all, to thin it out, and to avoid being judged personally. By accusing himself and then passing from "I" to "we," he provokes others to judge themselves, relieving himself of the burden. The relation of Christ and Rachel's weeping thus becomes the theological foundation for Clamence's entire system of universal guilt and his own role as a false prophet who judges without absolving.