The Church

The Church is presented not as a fully individualized institution with a developed internal structure, but as the religious authority whose doctrines define eternity, salvation, moral judgment, and the limits of legitimate human existence. Its decisive narrative function is oppositional: it condemns the actor’s desire to inhabit many lives, rejects the sovereignty of the present, and places eternal destiny above the intense but finite experiences through which the absurd person seeks to live.

Doctrine and Institutional Judgment

The Church condemns acting because theatrical practice appears to multiply the soul. In the actor’s assumption of different bodies, voices, passions, and characters, it sees an emotional excess and a mind unwilling to accept the restriction of a single life. The actor’s preference for the present and his triumph of Proteus are treated as negations of Christian teaching. Eternity, in this account, is not a field for experimentation; a person who prefers comedy to eternity has forfeited salvation. The Church therefore establishes an absolute opposition between being everywhere through successive roles and existing forever through religious redemption. The conflict is not merely theoretical. The actor’s profession becomes a spiritual scandal because it turns dispersion into a principle of life. The actor does not preserve one stable identity for eternity but spends himself among innumerable appearances, and the Church interprets this multiplication as a direct challenge to the unity of the soul. Its condemnation consequently targets not only the stage but the actor’s entire orientation toward the present, embodiment, and finite experience.

Actors, Excommunication, and the Refusal of Salvation

The Church’s severity is shown most sharply in its treatment of Adrienne Lecouvreur. On her deathbed, she was willing to confess and receive communion, but she refused to renounce her profession. Because she would not abjure acting, she lost the benefit of confession. Her refusal is interpreted as choosing an absorbing passion over God: she preferred fidelity to her art over entry into eternity. The scene makes religious judgment inseparable from personal identity, since renouncing the profession would have required her to repudiate the very practice through which she had lived most intensely. The actors of the era understood that entering the profession meant choosing Hell. The Church regarded them as dangerous enemies, and the denial of the last rites to Molière is treated as just, even though some writers protested that such a punishment should not be imposed on a genius. Molière had died onstage, still under actor’s make-up, completing a life devoted to dispersion; his genius did not excuse him, because genius itself refuses the institutional terms by which the Church offers absolution. The final religious sentence thus mirrors the actor’s own art: both require a choice between a single eternal destiny and the many finite lives of performance.

Eternity Against the Absurd Present

The Church’s promised punishment is contrasted with the punishment already contained in mortal existence. The actor knows that time will eventually end the sequence of roles, faces, and centuries he might otherwise have traversed. Religious threats may be vague, but premature death is immediate and irreparable: no afterlife can restore the sum of experiences that death interrupts if life is understood as finite and unrepeatable. The actor must eventually die both to the stage and to the world, confronting all he has lived and the irreplaceable character of that adventure. This opposition clarifies the essay’s larger philosophical conflict. The Church values forever, while the absurd consciousness values the present without appeal to another world. Its condemnation of acting therefore protects a coherent theology: salvation requires renunciation of dispersion, whereas the actor’s passion lies in multiplying existence before time closes over it. The institution defends transcendence precisely where the absurd position insists that finite life must not be exchanged for an unverifiable eternity.

Hope, God, and the Reversal of the Absurd

The same religious structure reappears in the discussion of Kafka, Kierkegaard, and Chestov. Their works begin from the absurdity of existence, yet their heroes repeatedly move toward God. They embrace the God who consumes them, and hope enters through humility. Because the absurd existence is taken to assure a further supernatural reality, the course of life is given an outcome after all. In this form, The Church is not only an external censor of worldly passion; it is also the destination toward which existential thought may secretly direct its despair. Kafka’s God is denied moral nobility, evidence, virtue, and coherence, but this refusal is interpreted as preparing a fall into divine arms. Once the absurd is accepted as a condition from which one may escape through God, it has ceased to be the absurd in its strict human sense. The Church’s promise of transcendence thus converts lucid confrontation into hope. The very leap that characterizes existential thought becomes, from this perspective, a repudiation of lucidity: pride abdicates in order to save itself, and suffering becomes meaningful because it leads beyond the human condition.

Relation to Secular Ritual and Human Responsibility

The Church’s authority is set against other forms of collective belief that organize human violence and hope. A boxing audience in Oran behaves like a congregation in a temple of whitewash, iron, and cement, while the fighters become figures before gods of violence. The crowd demands a clear winner and loser, then reverses its judgment when the two boxers embrace. This secular ritual simplifies moral reality into good and evil, but the embrace restores a limited human fraternity that the audience had momentarily forgotten. Unlike The Church’s promise of eternal judgment, the ring offers only an intense present communion whose gods distribute their miracles in the moment and contribute nothing to memory. The essay also distinguishes religious transcendence from the ethical obligations of the artist. The artist is not required to adopt social preaching, but as a human being he must respond to miners, prisoners, colonized people, and the persecuted. Those who are humiliated need voices capable of communicating their silence, and refusing this responsibility would deprive both them and others of hope. Art must serve suffering and beauty simultaneously rather than retreat into an ivory tower or become a social church. In that humanist alternative to institutional salvation, authentic creation opens prisons, gives form to shared suffering, and becomes a gift to the future without claiming the authority to judge from above.