PART 1 - Epidemics and “God”: The Covid-19 Pandemic, Albert Camus’ 'The Plague', and the Question of God

PART 1: Covid-19, The Plague, and “Limit Experiences”

(Link to Part 2; Link to Part 3)

The Covid-19 Pandemic as a Limit Experience

     As I begin to write this essay (early April 2020), the world is still very much in the thick of the Covid-19 Pandemic which began in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and has since swept the whole world prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare it a pandemic in March 2020. The pandemic has resulted in a major global crisis not seen at this scale since perhaps the Second World War and it has and continues to result in many unfortunate and terrible events such as the high number of deaths among the most vulnerable classes of people, the overwhelming of healthcare systems in many countries, a wide-scale economic fallout, further suffering for the poor and marginalized, and so forth.

     With so much loss in terms of lives, jobs, mobility, and stability the world over (and thus immense suffering for multitudes), this experience can very rightly be called—what theologian David Tracy refers to as a—“limit experience.” (Incidentally, Tracy posits that as a key ingredient for a critical theological reflection about life and existence.)

     A limit experience can be described as a moment of intensification when something major—be it an event, an overwhelmingly magnificent or evil person, extraordinary beauty, a serious crisis or the like—so powerfully discloses the mysteriousness of human existence that it necessarily calls for an effort on the part of those experiencing this event as “a limit” to make some sense of this event’s mysteriousness that transcends the limits of ordinary human understanding (hence, “limit”). How to do that? By attempting an interpretation of the experience (or “interpretive understanding”). That’s just a fancy way to say: to put forward a possible explanation of the event. Of course, it is obvious that the effort to make sense of limit experiences often takes place in the midst of many strong positive and negative emotions, such as hope, faith, love, anxiety, sadness, anger, fear, despair, etc., elicited by such powerful experiences.

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Albert Camus’ The Plague

     As I watched the “normal” world I knew rapidly “fall apart” in the face of the pandemic with countries taking unprecedented steps (at least in our recent memory) that practically stopped all semblance of normalcy in life for the purpose of stemming the tide of the contagion (such as drastic lockdown measures with their huge impact on ordinary social functions), I was reminded of a novel of French literary figure and philosopher Albert Camus appropriately entitled The Plague. This work reflects on human life and existence in the light of a similar yet smaller scale event. And boy did the novel speak anew to me in a powerful way! It brought home the naked fact that Covid-19 is perhaps the big limit experience our generation has to go through in our lifetimes.

     Camus’ novel tells the story of an otherwise dull and predictable French colonial town on the Algerian coast called Oran where a plague surfaces without warning in the 1940s. The protagonist is a medical doctor - Bernard Rieux who also acts as the main narrator. The whole novel is filled with his experiences and reflections on life as he works with quiet consistency on the frontlines of Oran’s plague.

     Oran, we can say, represents a typical place (“everyplace”) where people (“everyhuman”) go on with their lives, attending to the many humdrum and ordinary occurrences in life while taking things for granted as the unremarkable part of the dull and boring normalcy of everyday existence. All this continues until a dark spectre of impending doom appears on the scene. In Oran’s case, it is the plague; in our case, it was Covid-19. And then, quite literally, all hell breaks loose: people are terrified and panic; they withdraw and protect themselves; they blame others; they sink into melancholy and despair; many (especially among the vulnerable classes) succumb to the disease and die, sometimes without anyone beside them. We are witnessing this tragedy happen as I write now in places like Northern Italy, Spain, and New York.

The Plague and the “Absurdity” of Life

     Camus is known for emphasizing what he called “the absurdity of life.” Apropos that, these lines from an online YouTube video by The School of Life on Camus and The Plague are just too good not to be mentioned in full here because it explains Camus’ dominant intention for writing the novel:

Camus was drawn to this theme because in his philosophy, we are all—unbeknownst to us—already living through a plague: that is, a widespread, silent, invisible disease that may kill any of us at any time and destroy the lives we assumed were solid. The actual historical incidents we call plagues are merely concentrations of a universal precondition; they are dramatic instances of a perpetual rule: that we are vulnerable to being randomly exterminated by a bacillus, an accident, or the actions of our fellow humans. Our exposure to plague is at the heart of Camus’ view that our lives are fundamentally on the edge of what he termed “the absurd.” Proper recognition of this absurdity should not lead us to despair pure and simple. It should—rightly understood—be the start of a redemptive tragi-comic perspective. Like the people of Oran before the plague, we assume that we have been granted immortality and with this naivety come behaviours that Camus abhorred: a hardness of heart, an obsession with status, a refusal of joy and gratitude, a tendency to moralize and judge (School of Life, 2020).

     Curiously, for Camus, the fact that human life is absurd in this way because it can be summarily rendered meaningless by death (through, say, a random infection from a plague) was his very reason for advocating that we dedicate ourselves to our “damned” fellow humans and “work without hope and despair for the amelioration of suffering” (School of Life, 2020).

Is “Absurdity” the Best Description?

     I wonder though: Isn’t Camus’ “absurdity” better rendered by other (more positive) concepts? Take the Japanese concept of “hakanai” (ephemeral) as an example. When the sakura (cherry blossom) trees break forth with their gloriously beautiful flowers in the spring (normally in late March or early April in Tokyo), the blossoms (especially in their full-bloom state called mankai) last for a very short time—around 4-5 days at their peak of beauty. After that, they start to fall and the pristine cherry-coloured trees turn into a more messy mixed sight of pink and green. Because of this, we have a saying in Japanese that goes like this: sakura wa hakanai kara koso utsukushii (The cherry blossoms are beautiful, above all because they are so short-lived!). 

     Hence, the Japanese take advantage of that short time frame to admire, enjoy, and savour nature’s beauty by staging hana-mi (flower viewing) sessions where they celebrate life under the full-bloom sakura blossoms. Concretely, they savour the short-lived beauty of life symbolized by the cherry blossoms by, of course, viewing the sakura, but also eating, singing, drinking and getting drunk, and enjoying nature and the presence of people they hold dear. Isn’t that the spirit behind Camus’ so-called “absurd”? This wonderful thing called life is absurd (by that he seems to mean “so beautifully fragile and ephemeral”) so if we could do something to support and foster it in its fragile and ephemeral beauty, let’s do it!

Camus against the Conventional Religious Views of His Time

     In the novel, this perspective on life as absurd is the one espoused by the protagonist Dr. Rieux. His counterpart is the Jesuit priest Père Paneloux who, at the height of the plague when many people are dying, preaches a sermon in which he explains the plague as God’s punishment because of their sins. If they take this as an occasion to repent, they would gain eternal life (Part 2). Later on, Paneloux urges the townspeople to accept whatever happens in life as God’s will (Part 4). The priest exemplifies typical religious ways of responding to calamities – the ones often advocated by Christianity for most of its history. It is clear though that Camus scoffs at this kind of response to disaster because key figures in his story such as Dr. Rieux and the mysterious Monsieur Tarrou, who selflessly volunteers to form sanitary squads to help move patients and corpses at the height of the plague, do not believe in God while at the same time maintaining a high standard of ethical principles and action – they dedicate themselves tirelessly in service for the alleviation of the suffering of their fellow townspeople.

     The narrator (who turns out to be Dr. Rieux himself) explains along the way that since life is absurd in its arbitrariness with regard to the destruction of life, the only way to combat an absurdity like the plague is for humans to band together and struggle with all their might against what threatens life. Tarrou even reflects that the plague is in a sense within everyone and the right thing to do is to exercise the utmost care to infect as few people as possible. This, I thought, is amazingly and prophetically relevant today because it is what we commonly hear in our own pandemic experience in 2020! Tarrou and Rieux are also portrayed as affirming life to the full especially in the scene where they meet as friends to enjoy some moments of respite and relaxation and even agree to go for a swim as an affirmation of their life and health (Part 4).

The Plague as an Existential Condition

     Back to the story plot. The plague becomes even worse and many more people in Oran succumb to it, even apparently P. Paneloux himself who passively submits to treatment, gazing all the while at the cross. Tragically, even the selfless M. Tarrou dies of the plague just a short time before the lockdown of the town is to be eased. On this occasion, Dr. Rieux concludes that the only things one can gain in the conflict between life and death are knowledge and memories.

     Finally, the situation becomes better as shown vividly by the reappearance of live rats in the town. Eventually, the gates of the town are reopened and the crisis is surpassed. As Dr. Rieux hears the happy sounds of the liberated townspeople, he poignantly reflects on the plague and muses that this joy is actually always an endangered one because the plague (as an existential condition) never disappears for good. It is always lurking somewhere, ready to reappear for the “bane and enlightening” of us all (Part 5).

... CONTINUED IN PART 2 ...

(Link to Part 2; Link to Part 3)

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Works Cited and Other Works for Further Study

Cupitt, Don (2015). Creative Faith: Religion as a Way of Worldmaking. Salem, OR: Polebridge.

______ (1999). The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech. London: SCM.

Gregg, Carl (2012). “Do We Need a Moratorium on ‘God’?” Patheos, Published October 8, 2012. Accessed April 22, 2020. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2012/10/do-we-need-a-moratorium-on-the-word-god/.

Johnson, Elizabeth (2007). Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God. London: Bloombsury.

Küng, Hans (1981). Does God Exist? An Answer for Today. New York: Vintage.

School of Life (2020). “Albert Camus – The Plague.” YouTube Video, April 1, 2020. Accessed April 20, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSYPwX4NPg4&t=62s.

N.T. Wright (2020). “Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It's Not Supposed To.” Time, March 29, 2020. Accessed April 12, 2020. https://time.com/5808495/coronavirus-christianity/.

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