Bertrand Russell dismissed all religions as “a disease” and criticized the way Christians reacted to the Black Death during the Middle Ages, arguing that their huddling in churches did more to spread the bubonic plague than their prayers did to stem it.
Yet the famously contrarian agnostic includes in his autobiography an experience that, for believers at least, seems to imply a universal need for God in confronting life’s traumas.
He writes about being at the bedside of a woman suffering intense pain. In what he describes as a near-mystical experience, he states that in those moments he felt that “the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable.”
“Nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached,” he continued.
The British philosopher was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 for his writings in defense of “humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.” He is one of the few exclusively non-fiction writers to receive the honor. (With characteristic wit, he said he felt like a very intelligent but plain woman who had been complimented on her beauty.)
Seven years later, Albert Camus, another non-believer who produced philosophical works, was awarded the Nobel for Literature. But Camus was primarily a fiction writer. His second novel has received some renewed attention in recent weeks for obvious reasons. Its title is “The Plague.”
The book tells the story of a French Algerian town in the 1940s that is quarantined from the outside world because of an outbreak of bubonic plague. Published in 1947, the tale’s literal plague can also be read as a metaphor for the Nazi occupation of France – the author had worked with the French Resistance — or for any other manifestation of evil.
Like Bertrand Russell, Camus denied the existence of God. But unlike Russell, he was strongly influenced by Saint Augustine, and he recognized humanity’s natural spiritual impulse. “The Plague” reflects his deeply felt but ambiguous views on faith. According to Camus’ biographer Herbert R. Lottman, the French author Francois Mauriac, another Nobel Laureate, thought of Camus as “a natural Christian … anima naturliter in Saint Augustine’s phrase.”
“It’s true that I don’t believe in God, but that doesn’t mean I’m an atheist,” Camus once said, adding the opinion that “a lack of religion was vulgar and even hackneyed.” (The author died at the age of 47 in a car accident, and some people believe he had been considering a return to the faith at the time of his death.)
The narrator of “The Plague” is a physician. He does not believe in God, but he recognizes that doctors and pastors are both devoted to healing and comforting those in their care. “Any country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping from breath on his deathbed thinks as I do,” he says.
Another major character is a scholarly Jesuit priest. The most emotional and horrific scene in the book has the two men at the bedside of a child dying a painful death. Both are devastated by the experience. Immediately afterward, the priest tries to comfort his companion. But the doctor, at that point, has no patience for theology. He angrily snaps, “And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”
Calming down, he apologizes for his outburst and acknowledges that he and the priest are “working side by side for something which unites us.” Even while reaffirming his own atheism, he tells the priest, “God himself can’t part us now.”
Another character in the story is Jean Tarrou, who throws himself wholeheartedly into fighting the disease and helping its victims, with full knowledge that his volunteer work will most likely lead to his own infection and death. Which it does.
Like the doctor, he is an atheist, and he asks, “Can one be a saint without God?”
The question is enigmatic, and the answer may be equally mysterious.
The doctor, who works to exhaustion but refuses to see himself as heroic, is a compassionate man who cannot reconcile the suffering he witnesses with an all-good God. Confronted with the physician’s atheism, the priest responds, “I just realized what is meant by ‘grace.’”
The priest, and many Christian readers, may be left with the impression that in any saintly work — that is, in every situation in which individuals or groups work to heal the sick, comfort the grieving, provide for the poor, feed the hungry and welcome the stranger — surely the hand of God, somehow, in some way, must be present.
Carl Peters is managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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