ABSTRACT
Though not a nonviolent charismatic leader, like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Albert Camus was certainly a significant intellectual and artistic figure of peace in the twentieth century. Like many other adepts of nonviolence, he suffered from the fanatic and hostile attitudes of other human beings. Camus meant so many different things to so many different people. Undoubtedly, Camus gathered in him all these dimensions, but at the same time he was greater than the sum of his contradictory outlooks. It was not easy, even for the French intellectuals, who knew something of the undercurrents of French intellectualism and politics and of the personalities who pulled the strings, to fully understand Albert Camus. It calls for more than a little sympathetic imagination in a representative of the intellectual class to recognize the good points in a rebel. As an artist who loved beauty and as an intellectual who was against the tide, Camus was certainly a rebel with a cause. Though a man of action and full of spirit, he was never acclaimed as a hero nor as a spiritual man in his lifetime. However, there was nothing in Camus’ life to discount his saintliness.
