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He reasoned that life after death, if it exists, will make instant winners of us all because in betting on God we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Camus, however, refused to make the leap because faith, he said, gains nothing. To believe in an afterlife is to lose this life, which is the only one we have. For Camus, to leap or not to leap is the question and, in choosing one way or the other, men define their essence. Those who refuse to leap are free to define an essence, whereas those who leap abdicate their freedom by choosing to subordinate their will to God’s. Camus believed that men who opt for an afterlife are necessarily com­placent about this one. Their attention, he says, is focused on a nebulous future, whereas in fact the present requires every ounce of energy we have. The conclusion that all men are mortal beyond redemption precipitates an urgency that, in Caligula’s case, leads him to act violently and behave madly.

For Camus, however, although the urgency is there, violence is not inevitable, and he wrote much of his work, including Caligula, in order to demonstrate that although everything is possible, not everything is desir­able. At the end of the play, shattering the mirror in which he sees his reflected image, Caligula says that his freedom was not the good kind (p. 108, line 2). ‘The absurd’, says Camus in his Notebooks, ‘is tragic man in front of a mirror (Caligula). He is therefore not alone.’ Tragic man is man confronting his own mortality, and what he sees reflected in the mirror is not only his future death, but the image of total freedom. This freedom, this glimpse of the possible, exists always in the present. Moreover, the absurd posits the equivalence and permissibility of all acts. In his essay Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre, paraphrasing Dostoevsky, asserts that if God does not exist, everything is allowed. Indeed, within a framework of total permissibility Sartre advocates revolutionary violence (his book On Cuba is one example) as a necessary antidote to the inequities of the class struggle. Camus, in opposition to Sartre, wrote The Rebel in order to demonstrate that the bloodletting that is endemic to revolutions fails to solve socio-political problems because the new regime, using vio­lent means to consolidate its power, inevitably, becomes as unjust as the regime it has supplanted.

Violence as tragic farce in Camus’ s Caligula
http://faculty.cbu.ca/philosophy/caligula/biblio4.htm