If Rambert’s situation starkly reveals the nonrationality of our condition, as his efforts to escape its limits suggest a possibly universal urge to transcend finitude, his explicit values and practical strategies are but one of the ways in which we may respond. While persevering in his futile effort to escape quarantine and be reunited with his love, he challenges Rieux whom he accuses of “being capable of dying for an ideal. . . . I’ve seen enough of people who die for an idea. I don’t believe in heroism. . . . What interests me is living and dying for what one loves'” (P, 149). “There’s no question of heroism in all this,” responds Rieux. “It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting the plague is—common decency” (P, 150).
Two conceptions of what matters in life are at odds here, entailing differing attitudes toward our involvement with others. Rambert’s conception of love is immediate and personal. Like stage settings, extensive personal relations often interfere with satisfaction. There is something very real and tangible in his commitment that is not easily denied. Only such romantic love can yield the happiness that makes life worthwhile, he feels. And yet ultimately he concludes that he cannot turn away from Oran’s fight against the plague. After deciding to join the volunteer work teams, he responds to Rieux’s observation that “there was nothing shameful in preferring happiness” with the powerful: “Certainly. But it may be shameful to be happy by oneself.”
The moral quandary in which each finds himself is summed up by Rieux: “For nothing in the world is it worth turning one’s back on what one loves. Yet that is what I’m doing, though why I don’t know. That’s how it is, and there’s nothing to be done about it. So let’s recognize the fact and draw the conclusions” (P, 188—9). The most immediate and precious human values are often put to the rack by our condition, calling for a collective response. But there are no assurances of success, nor any clear sense of what success may consist in. There are, however, some immediate and tangible costs but no viable alternatives. Here, in this metaphysical blind alley, is the suggestion of a direction, the sense of a deeper value. The ache of separation bears witness to the longing for union that is the metaphysical root of love: to be one with another. Our existence, for which ultimately there are facts but no reasons, bears witness to the pervasive demand to alleviate the ache that is
the experience of our finitude. The separation of lovers occasioned by the plague may have only brought more clearly into focus the already existing fact that love had been allowed to be reduced simply to the habitual satiation of physical needs apart from the vitalized and sensitive sharing of common experiences and perceptions that alone can seriously address our metaphysical hunger. Thus the recognition of the common tragedy that is the plague can make our collective predicament evident to all, thus establishing the minimal conditions for bringing
human beings together in a collective effort.
A CHRISTIAN WITNESS
If the plague dramatizes our finitude, it does so as a force of nature, thus avoiding the question of radical evil. We may through negligence participate in evil, but we do not positively will it.
“The evil that is in the world always comes from ignorance,” observes Rieux, expressing a modified humanist faith, “and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad. . . . But they are more or less ignorant . . . the most incorrigible vice being mat of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill” (P, 120—1). Belief in the possession of a truth that justifies murder —what may be called the problem of historical evil—was the problem faced by Tarrou, to which I will shortly turn. In The Plague, Tarrou sets forth the problem of logical murder, which Camus will take up in detail in The Rebel. But it is with Father Paneloux that we directly encounter the effort to make sense of natural evil.
We first meet Paneloux, perhaps the most sympathetically drawn Christian in all of Camus’s fiction, as “a stalwart champion of Christian doctrine.” In an early draft of his manuscript the narrator remarks that Paneloux “had published . . . commentaries on St. Augustine which showed him entirely in accord with the doctrine of his master” (TRN, 1979). His initial response to the plague is thus not surprising.
Calamity has come upon you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it. . . .
If today the plague is in your midst, that is because the hour has struck for taking thought. The just man need have no fear, but the evil doer has good cause to tremble. For plague is the flail
[fleaux] of God and the world His threshing floor, and implacably He will thresh out His harvest until the wheat is separated from the chaff. There will be more chaff than wheat, few chosen of the many called. Yet this calamity was not willed by God. Too long this world of ours has connived at evil, too long it has counted on the divine mercy, on God’s forgiveness. . . . for a long while God gazed down on this town with eves of compassion; but He grew weary of waiting . . . and now He has turned His face away from us. And so, God’s light withdrawn, we walk in darkness, in the thick darkness of the plague (P, X6 X).
Here we witness an unquestioning faith in the purposefulness of divine creation, along with the Augustinian solution to the problem of evil: that it is but a privation of good. If God does not sustain us in the good, we fall prey to the evil inherent in our sinful nature. As creatures ever turning away from God, we are responsible for our torments. We are not innocent, though God is blameless. Even more, this pestilence is both just divine retribution and an occasion for individual enlightenment. “The first time this scourge appears in history, it was wielded to strike down the enemies of God. . . . Thus from the dawn of recorded history the scourge of God has humbled the proud of heart and laid low those who hardened themselves against Him.
Ponder this well, my friends, and fall on your knees” (P, 87).
Not revolt but guilt, self-condemnation, and passive acceptance are the message of the Christian Paneloux. “No man should seek to force God’s hand or to hurry on the appointed hour, and from a practice that aims at speeding up the order of events which God has ordained unalterably from all time, it is but a step to heresy” (P, 90). We must accept our suffering with a renewed faith in divine justice. Punishment is our just reward for turning away from God. Only if we humble ourselves before the plague in contrition for our sins can we be reconciled to God and the divine order of things.
In short, Christianity justifies suffering in the name of guilt—original sin —and absolves God and his Creation of responsibility. It is the message, as Camus had noted as early as his dissertation, that builds our salvation upon our acceptance of guilt for the death of the innocent Christ. Its message is that God’s grace is available only to the contrite—while rebellion is a prideful challenge to God’s divinely ordered world.
But then Judge Othon’s son dies, “racked on the tumbled bed, in a grotesque parody of crucifixion” (P, 193). Surely he could not have been guilty. “In the small face, rigid as a mask of greyish clay, slowly the lips parted and from them rose a long, incessant scream, hardly varying with his respiration, and filling the ward with a fierce, indignant protest, so little childish that it seemed like a collective voice issuing from all the sufferers there” (P, 194). This moves Paneloux to fall on his knees and ask God to spare the child, but to no avail.
In the face of the palpable purposelessness of this crushing fate, there can be no more self-satisfied and rational faith. Outraged by the “death-throes of an innocent child,” a “mad revolt”
bursts from Rieux. To Paneloux’s searching “perhaps we should love what we cannot understand,” Rieux angrily retorts: “No, Father, I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.” This metaphysical rebel echoes Ivan Karamazov, whom Camus quotes in The Rebel: “If the suffering of children . . . serves to complete the sum of suffering necessary for the acquisition of truth, I affirm … that truth is not worth such a price” (R, 56). Rieux rejects a grace he cannot understand for the practical efforts to ameliorate human suffering. “Salvation is too big a word for me,” he says to Paneloux. “I don’t aim so high. I’m concerned with man’s health; and for me his health comes first” (P, 197).