Life, Death, and Meaning in The Plague
Life, Death, and Meaning in The Plague
By James W. Sire
By James W. Sire
In The Brothers Karamazov (1880) Dostoyevsky has Ivan Karamazov say that if God is dead everything is permitted. In other words, if there is no transcendent standard of the good, then there can ultimately be no way to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, and there can be no saints or sinners, no good or bad people. If God is dead, ethics is impossible.
Albert Camus picks up that challenge in The Plague (1947), which tells the story of Oran, a city in North Africa, in which a deadly strain of infectious disease breaks out. The city closes its gates to traffic and thus becomes a symbol of the closed universe, a universe without God. The disease, on the other hand, comes to symbolize the absurdity of this universe. The plague is arbitrary; one cannot predict who will and who will not contract it. It is not “a thing made to man’s measure.” It is terrible in its effects—painful physically and mentally. Its origins are not known, and yet it becomes as familiar as daily bread. There is no way to avoid it. Thus the plague comes to stand for death itself, for like death it is unavoidable and its effects are terminal. The plague helps make everyone in Oran live an authentic existence, because it makes everyone aware of the absurdity of the world they inhabit. It points up the fact that people are born with a love of life but live in the framework of the certainty of death.
The story begins as rats start to come out from their haunts and die in the streets; it ends a year later as the plague lifts and life in the city returns to normal. During the intervening months, life in Oran becomes life in the face of total absurdity. Camus's genius is to use that as a setting against which to show the reactions of a cast of characters, each of whom represents in some way a philosophic attitude.
. . . The old Spaniard . . . had retired at age fifty and gone immediately to bed. Then he measured time, day in and day out, by moving peas from one pan to another. “‘Every fifteen peas,’ he said, ‘it's feeding time. What could be simpler?’” The old Spaniard never leaves his bed, but he takes a sadistic pleasure in the rats, the heat, and the plague, which he calls “life.” He is Camus's nihilist. Nothing in his life—inside or out, objective world or subjective world—has value. So he lives it with a complete absence of meaning.
M. Cottard represents a third stance. Before the plague grips the city, he is nervous, for he is a criminal and is subject to arrest if detected. But as the plague becomes severe, all city employees are committed to alleviating the distress, and Cottard is left free to do as he will. And what he wills to do is live off the plague. The worse conditions get, the richer, happier, and friendlier he becomes. “Getting worse every day isn’t it? Well, anyhow, everyone’s in the same boat,” he says. Jean Tarrou, one of the chief characters in the novel, explains Cottard’s happiness this way: “He’s in the same peril of death as everyone else, but that’s just the point; he’s in it with the others.”
When the plague begins to lift, Cottard loses his feeling of community because he again becomes a wanted man. He loses control of himself, shoots up a street, and is taken by force into custody. Throughout the plague his actions were criminal. Instead of alleviating the suffering of others, he feasted on it. He is Camus's sinner in a universe without God—proof, if you will, in novelistic form that evil is possible in a closed cosmos.
If evil is possible in a closed cosmos, then perhaps good is too. In two major characters, Jean Tarrou and Dr. Rieux, Camus develops this theme. Jean Tarrou was baptized into the fellowship of nihilists when he visited his father at work, heard him argue as a prosecuting attorney for the death of a criminal, and then saw an execution. This had a profound effect on him. As he puts it, “l learned that I had had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people. . . . We all have the plague.” And thus he lost his peace.
From then on, Jean Tarrou has made his whole life a search for some way to become “a saint without God.” Camus implies that Tarrou succeeds. His method lies in comprehension and sympathy and ultimately issues in action. He is the one who suggests a volunteer corps of workers to fight the plague and comfort its victims. Tarrou works ceaselessly in this capacity. Yet there remains a streak of despair in his lifestyle: “winning the match” for him means living “only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!” So, writes Dr. Rieux, the narrator of the novel, Tarrou “realized the bleak sterility of a life without illusions.”
Dr. Rieux himself is another case study of the good man in an absurd world. From the very beginning he sets himself with all his strength to fight the plague—to revolt against the absurd. At first his attitude is passionless, detached, aloof. Later, as his life is deeply touched by the lives and deaths of others, he softens and becomes compassionate. Philosophically, he comes to understand what he is doing. He is totally unable to accept the idea that a good God could be in charge of things. As Baudelaire said, that would make God the devil. Rather, Dr. Rieux takes as his task “fighting against creation as he found it.” . . .
I have dwelt at length on The Plague (though by no means exhausting its riches either as art or as a lesson in life) because I know of no novel or work of existential philosophy that makes so appealing a case for the possibility of living a good life in a world where God is dead and values are ungrounded in a moral framework outside the human frame. The Plague is to me almost convincing. Almost, but not quite. For the same questions occur within the intellectual framework of The Plague as within the system of Sartre's “Existentialism.”
Why should the affirmation of life as Dr. Rieux and Jean Tarrou see it be good and Cottard's living off the plague be bad? Why should the old Spaniard's nihilistic response be any less right than Dr. Rieux's positive action? True, our human sensibility sides with Rieux and Tarrou. But we recognize that the old Spaniard is not alone in his judgment. Who then is right? Those who side with the old Spaniard will not be convinced by Camus or by any reader who sides with Rieux, for without an external moral referent there is no common ground for discussion. There is but one conviction versus another. The Plague is attractive to those whose moral values are traditional, not because Camus offers a base for those values but because he continues to affirm them even though they have no base. Unfortunately, affirmation is not enough. It can be countered by an opposite affirmation.
*Excerpted from The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog, sixth edition, by James W. Sire (IVP Academic, 2020), 116-120.
— James W. Sire (1933-2018) was a widely respected apologist, author, and lecturer who worked for more than thirty years as senior editor at InterVarsity Press. His many books include Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept, Apologetics Beyond Reason, Habits of the Mind, and the seminal text The Universe Next Door, which has sold nearly 400,000 copies.
Recommended Resource
One primary goal we have as Christians is to understand the Bible in order to grasp what God has communicated to us through it. This is challenging, however, because we are separated from Scripture’s authors by language, culture, and time. Thus, much in Scripture can appear to us to be confusing, mysterious, or even contradictory. That’s why a volume like Murray Harris’s Navigating Tough Texts: A Guide to Problem Passages in the New Testamentis so useful.
Harris, Professor Emeritus of New Testament Exegesis and Theology at Trinity Evangelical Theological School, draws on a lifetime of expertise to clarify and explain dozens of challenging passages throughout the New Testament. A few examples include:
What Jesus meant when he said, “the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence, and violent people have been raiding it” (Matt. 11:12).
What he meant by “binding and loosing” on earth and in heaven (Matt. 16:19).
The meaning of Paul’s reference to those “who are baptized for the dead” (1 Cor. 15:29).
How we should understand Paul’s attitude toward slavery as expressed in the book of Philemon, and many more. This segment is excerpted below.
PAUL AND SLAVERY (Phlm 15–16)
Onesimus was a slave of Philemon in Colossae who had not only run away from his master (Phlm 15–16) but had also absconded with some of Philemon’s money or possessions (vv. 18–19). Attracted by the anonymity and excitement of a large metropolis, he traveled furtively to Rome, where somehow he met the imprisoned Paul, who led him to faith in Christ (v. 10). Paul soon discovered him to be an able and willing helper as well as a Christian companion (vv. 11–13, 16). Other considerations apart, Paul would have liked to keep Onesimus at his side (v. 13), but he felt compelled to send him back to Colossae so that Philemon, the legal owner of Onesimus (v. 16), might himself have the opportunity of receiving him back as a Christian brother (v. 16) and of possibly releasing him for further service to Paul (vv. 14, 20–21). Accordingly, Onesimus returned to Philemon with this letter.
Although this letter is not an essay on slavery, from it we may deduce Paul’s attitude to slavery. To begin with, Paul apparently accepted slavery as an inevitable part of the social, economic, and legal status quo, without questioning or trying to justify its existence. But acceptance of the status quo should not be equated with endorsement of the status quo. Toleration is not the same as approval. Paul did not object to slave ownership within Christian ranks, but he encouraged masters to reward slaves suitably for honest work, to desist from threatening them (Eph 6:8–9), and to give them just and equitable treatment (Col 4:1). He elevated the status of slaves by addressing them as persons and as moral agents who were responsible, and ought to be responsive, to their earthly masters as well as to their heavenly Lord (Eph 6:5–8; Col 3:22).
Further, when Paul emphasizes Onesimus’s true identity as a dearly loved Christian brother (v. 16), he sets the master-slave relation on a new footing. “It may be that he (Onesimus) was separated from you (Philemon) for a short time precisely so that you may have him back permanently, no longer regarded as merely a slave (hōs doulon) but as more than a slave—as a dear brother” (vv. 15–16). Paul is undermining the discrimination that is at the heart of slavery and sounding its death knell. In this letter, Paul, a highly educated Roman citizen, is championing the cause of a destitute runaway slave whose life was potentially forfeit because of his flight and his theft (vv. 17–19).
Did Paul advocate freeing slaves? When he expresses his confidence that Philemon would obey him and accept Onesimus back and forgive him (v. 21a), he adds that he knows Philemon “will do even more than I ask” (v. 21b). That undefined additional element could well be the setting free of Onesimus for Christian service either at Colossae or at Rome with Paul. When he is discussing possible changes of status for believers (including slaves) in 1 Corinthians 7:17–24, his general advice is “remain as you were when God called you” (see 1 Cor 7:17, 20, 24). But in 1 Corinthians 7:21b, he parenthetically states an exception to the general principle: “But if you are actually able (kai dynasai) to gain your freedom, seize it all the more.”
It is fair to conclude that by his teaching and his example, Paul was laying one of the explosive charges that would one day—although sadly, belatedly—detonate and destroy the institution of slavery.
Find Navigating Tough Texts: A Guide to Problem Passages in the New Testament at Lexham Press or Amazon.
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