The metaphysical dimension of this confrontation was underlined earlier when Rieux comments upon Paneloux’s first sermon. “Paneloux . . . hasn’t come in contact with death; that’s why he can speak with such assurance of the truth—with a capital ‘T’. But [if he] . . . heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed . . . he’d try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence” (P, 116). No, truth with a capital “T” is an abstraction —in a sense, just like the plague, and just as deadly In its Christian form it justifies submission and the acceptance of the death of innocence; in its revolutionary form it justifies radical intervention and the putting to death of innocence. Both in their own way join with those plaguelike forces that destroy the natural community of people in the face of death.
But there is a path beneath the absolute, and apart from it, that offers the possibility of a common ground where divergent commitments to the transcendent can still meet. “What I hate is death and disease,” observes Rieux. “And whether you wish it or not, we’re allies, facing them and fighting them together.” “We’re working side by side for something that unites us—
beyond blasphemy and prayers. And it’s the only thing that matters” (P, 197).
However much Paneloux is moved by the suffering of the judge’s son, and however much he commits himself to the day-to-day struggle to ameliorate the plague victims’ suffering, these are not answers, but only challenges posed to his faith in divine providence. Dedicated Christian that he is, he recognizes that there can be no more temporizing with faith. He addresses the predicament of the modern Christian in his second sermon. “My brothers, a time of testing has come for us all. We must believe everything or deny everything. And who among you, I ask, would dare to deny everything?” (P, 202).
In the crucible of such events, either one must be willing to place total trust in the goodness of a transcendent and somewhat inscrutable God, or, like Ivan, one must question that God in the name of a value one comprehends. The father was reported as admonishing:
There was no question of not taking precautions or failing to comply with the orders wisely promulgated for the public weal.. .. We should go forward, groping our way through the darkness, stumbling perhaps at times, and try to do what good lay in our power. As for the rest, we must hold fast, trusting in the divine goodness, even as to the deaths of little children, and not seeking personal respite. . . .
The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to the suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God’s
will ours. That is the faith, cruel in men’s eyes, and crucial in God’s, which we must
ever strive to compass. We must aspire beyond ourselves toward that high and fearful vision. And on that lofty plane all will fall into place, all discords be resolved, and truth flash forth from the dark cloud of seeming injustice (P, 205—6, my italics).
Father Paneloux3 has drawn the conclusion of the Kierkegaardian leap of faith; we must accept all and make God’s will ours; for that “alone can reconcile us to the suffering and the deaths of children.”
Paneloux councils an “active fatalism,” a “humiliation to which the person humiliated [gives] full assent. True, the agony of a child was humiliating to the heart and to the mind. But that was why we had to come to terms with it. And that, too, was why .. . since it was God’s will, we, too, should will it” (P, 203). Any other path would be dishonest, seeking the comforts of belief, without bearing its burdens.4
However active Paneloux’s practice, it is ultimately constrained and probably vitiated by its metaphysical resignation. Here, in Camus’s view, is the root moral failure of Christianity. It is built upon the acceptance of the death of innocence and is thus the ultimate negation of revolt.
A MORE MODEST FAITH
Rieux “is the only one who might still be able to play the role of confessor. He has been the priest of a religion without certainty and without hope —entirely relative and entirely human” (TRN, 1988). Thus Camus, in his Carnets, counterposes the doctor to the priest. No doubt Camus’s experiences and beliefs find expression in most of his central characters, especially Tarrou and Rambert, but it is probably Rieux who comes closest to the views of the author at this time in his life. In some working notes for the rewriting of the novel he had written: “One of the possible themes: conflict of medicine and religion; the powers of the relative (and how relative) against those of the absolute. It is the relative which triumphs or more exactly which does not lose” (TRN, 1949). While explicitly rejected by Camus in The Myth, Paneloux’s leap of faith dramatizes the only authentic religious position in the contemporary world.
In his speech to the Dominican monks in 1946, Camus had voiced Rieux’s faith first expressed to Rambert, “that there was some common ground on which they could meet,” (P, 80) by observing, “I share with you [Christians] the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die” (RRD, 53).
Thus for Rieux life is finite, suffering is all around us and to some extent inevitable, but we can strive to reduce its scope and amount. We must balance Tarrou with Rambert and Grand. The absurd as metaphysical solitude is our collective situation, and our minimum responsibility is to do whatever
is possible, within the limits of “our station and its duties,” to limit the damages. This sense of the morally self-evident is rooted in a metaphysical vision generated by the experience of absurdity. Echoing the theme of The Myth, expressed in its opening epigram, Rieux observed that “for those . . . who aspired beyond and above the human individual toward something they could not even imagine, there had been no answer. … If others, however, . . . had got what they wanted, this was because they had asked for the one thing that depended on them solely. …
It was only right that those whose desires are limited to man and his humble yet formidable love should enter, if only now and then, into their reward” (P, 271).
Yet Rieux “realized the bleak sterility of a life without illusion” about its ultimate absurdity. For those of us who feel the gut need for a transcendent faith, “how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for” (P, 262, 263). With needs similar to those of Paneloux, but incapable of believing, “Tarrou had lived a life riddled with contradictions and had never known hope’s solace.” The struggles of this post-Christian saint living in an era of the death of God sheds light upon the struggles of Rieux and Paneloux, helping to place them in their appropriate historical context.
SAINT WITHOUT GOD
“I had plague . . . long before I . . . encountered it here,” comments Tarrou. “Which is tantamount to saying I’m like everybody else. Only there are some people who don’t know it, or feel at ease in that condition; others know and want to get out of it” (P, 222). After having witnessed a trial and an execution, Tarrou’s “real interest in life” became the death penalty.
So I became an agitator. … To my mind the social order around me was based on the death sentence, and by fighting the established order I’d be fighting against murder. . . .
Needless to say, I knew that we, too, on occasion, passed sentences of death. But I was told that these few deaths were inevitable tor the building up of a new world in which murder would cease to be. . . . Whatever the explanation, I hesitated. But then I remembered that miserable owl in the dock and it enabled me to keep on. Until that day when I was present at an execution . . . and exactly the same dazed horror that I’d experienced as a youngster made everything reel before my eyes.
Have you ever seen a man shot by a firing squad?
And thus I came to understand that I, anyhow, had had plague through all those long years in which, paradoxically enough, I’d believed with all my soul that I was lighting it. I learned that I had had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of
people; that I’d even brought about their deaths by approving of acts and principles which could only end in that way. . . When I spoke of these matters they told me not to be so squeamish; I should remember what great issues were at stake. And they advanced arguments, often quite impressive ones, to make me swallow what nonetheless I could not bring myself to stomach. . . .