Faith and the Absurd

Just because I've been thinking about the post-war intellectual scene... A paper I wrote in late 2006 on the Plague by Albert Camus. I have not included citations because I don't want to get into the formatting...

It is a truism to remark that, in times of disaster, the true nature of humanity is brought to the fore. Such a remark is an oversimplification and, what’s more, implies a natural state of being that underlies normal human affairs, waiting to be discovered once said affairs are interrupted. Good students are taught to be wary of such claims. Nevertheless, as is oft the case, a truth underlies the truism: disaster brings the ever-present realities of the human condition more directly to our attention. At the most basic level, we are all subjected to the absurd—the certainty of death and the uncertainty of meaning. In a situation where our ever-impending death becomes all the more pronounced, or alternately, in situations where the normal human affairs that keep us distracted from this truth are stripped away, the individual is faced with the realities of the human condition, the reality of the absurd. It is this situation that Albert Camus presents to us in his 1948 novel The Plague, a book that borrows from earlier works of existential philosophy, and lays the groundwork for Camus’ later more theoretical works. I wish to situate The Plague (qua book) and the plague (qua phenomenon) in the scope of existentialist thought. So doing serves not only to expose the novel’s philosophical aspirations, but allows an illustration of otherwise dense topics through individuals, albeit fictional, with whom we can relate. This short essay will attempt this task by discussion the two sermons1 given by Father Paneloux in The Plague. After a brief summary of the first sermon, I will analyze it according to the Sartrian notion of bad faith. As Paneloux’s second sermon is intended to amend the first, after its summary, I will present Camus’ later idea of metaphysical rebellion as a possible response to Sartrian bad faith.
Paneloux’s first sermon takes place during the onset of the plague that has befallen the French-Algerian town of Oran. It comes as the climax of a Week of Prayer, an ecclesiastical bid to do battle with the epidemic. The thesis with which Paneloux begins his oration is one of what may be called a traditional Christian moralist sort: “Calamity has come on you my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it2.” The priest then goes on to cite the appearances of plague in the past and the religious meanings they were taken to have. Thus we have the plague ravaging Egypt in the book of Genesis, we are told of an Italian plague understood as angelic justice, and of the Abyssinians zealously welcoming death-by-plague as a road to divine salvation. This plague, he implies, ought to be understood no differently. The people of Oran are being taught a lesson ,“the lesson that was learned by Cain and his offspring, by the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, by Job and Pharaoh…3” In short, the plague was a punishment for their sins, a collective punishment for collectively ignoring God and going against His ways. And yet, the learned Jesuit contends, this very punishment gives one access to God’s will. As His wrath is coming to the people of Oran due to their lack of faith and obedience, the Plague can be seen as a lesson in faith that should be, in some sense, welcomed by the pious:
[The Plague] gives us a glimpse of that radiant eternal light which glows…in the dark core of human suffering…[this light] reveals the will of God in action, unfailingly transforming evil into good. And once again today it is leading us through the dark valley of fears and groans towards the holy silence, the well-spring of all life. This, my friends, is the vast consolation I would hold out to you, so that when you leave this house of God you will carry away with you not only words of wrath, but a message, too, of comfort for your hearts.4
Thus, the plague is judgment manifest, a judgment that the citizens of Oran must, in a certain sense embrace. The salvation Paneloux preaches can come about only through internalization of the verdict he claims is latent in the epidemic. Innocence in the eyes of Paneloux’s God can come only through admission of guilt that the plague signifies.
A similar mechanism arises in Sartre’s elucidation of the notion of bad faith, found in his 1943 text Being and Nothingness, specifically in the bad faith of the critic. The critic, as defined by Sartre, is an individual who demands sincerity of an Other. The critic demands a confession of the person who offends her sensibilities. This confession is not the confession of an act, however, but a statement of identity—an ontological confession. The critic demands that the offending individual admit to being the offending individual as a means of reconciliation. Sartre’s example is Homosexuality. The critic demands that an individual who engages in acts deemed homosexual identify oneself as “a homosexual”. Furthermore, this so-called sincerity, this identification as the personification of the offending traits is, from the point of view of the critic, a positive and necessary step towards a renunciation of the offense. Of course, this is a contradiction, and one that serves to establish a Hegelian dynamic of power—the subversion of a slave’s freedom to a master’s will.5 Sartre illustrates:
Who cannot see how offensive to the Other and how reassuring for me is a statement such as, “He is just a paederast,” which removes a disturbing freedom from a trait and which aims at henceforth constituting all the acts of the Other as consequences following strictly from his essence.6

Just as Hegel’s Master is unable to become fully self-conscious due to his failure to recognize the agency of the slave, the critic is in a state of bad faith due to his demand that the Other nullify the threat of her freedom. An individual so classified (i.e. a self-admitted “homosexual” or a “pederast”) has made of himself a permanent Other, denying the possibility for mutual recognition, for the essence he has claimed is of a different species than the essence of the critic. By bringing this state of affairs about, the critic undoes the threat of the other at the expense of the realization of human freedom.
What Sartre’s critic does with “homosexual”, Paneloux’s sermon does with “sinner”. To Paneloux’s reasoning, the plague is to be understood as brought about by the sins of Oran. By the vehicle of his sermon, he hopes to bring this realization about in the minds of its citizens. Sartre references the saying, “A sin confessed is half pardoned,”7 and Paneloux is invoking the same. For the priest, this is an interpretation of Christian forgiveness—recognition of oneself as a sinner and subsequent trust in God’s response. Yet the mechanism is the same as that of the critic. Paneloux, faced with the absurd as manifest in the plague, demands that the citizens identify as sinners. Threatened both by the human freedom to ignore God, and (more importantly), the chaos and irrationality of the reality of the plague, Paneloux turns to bad faith. As Camus later writes, the absurd is the confrontation of the human need for order with the irrationality, and terrifying unpredictability of the conditions of the world.8 One such response to the absurd, then, is such a turn towards bad faith.
Paneloux’s Second sermon, however, represents a change in the man. Some time after the delivery of his first sermon, the scholarly Jesuit (who, distinct from a parish priest, has less day to day contact with the world outside of his studies) becomes involved in Rieux and Tarrou’s sanitation squads. In this capacity, Paneloux comes face to face with the symptoms and fatalities of the plague. This exposure sparks a change in Paneloux, a change that reaches its climax after he and Rieux witness the death of the Magistrate’s small son. In the aftermath of the small boy’s suffering, Rieux lashes out at the priest, negating the implicit demand of the first sermon, shouting, “That child, anyhow, was innocent, and you [Paneloux] know that as well as I do!”9 Rieux-as-narrator informs the reader that this event and the conversation that followed had a profound effect on the priest, who invited Rieux to his next sermon.
Right from the onset of Paneloux’s second sermon, we are informed that he has ceased referring to his listeners as “you” and instead speaks of “we”. He goes on to say that, in the months since he last spoke, they had come to know the plague better. What he claimed in his first sermon, he still holds to be true. His thoughts, however, had “lacked charity,”10 and in this second sermon his change of emphasis is be key. The task of the Christian, he explains, is to find the good in all situations, including such suffering as the plague. The good Christian ought to take what is before him and learn what it has to teach him. Indeed, a child’s suffering is reprehensible. Paneloux specifically cites a child’s innocence. And this presents a contradiction, for how can a Christian believe in a Christian God, and yet recognize the truth of innocent suffering, of needless suffering? All must be believed, or, alternately, all must be denied. The citizens of Oran “must acquire and practice the greatest of all virtues: that of the All or Nothing.”11 Indeed, if one holds that God can control the plague, then one must assume that He wants it to be. And if He wants it to be, then the believer must learn from it, must accept it, must will it, as well. This is the only consistent manner of dealing with theodicy, the only consistent way of believing in God.
Indeed, we find ourselves back at the absurd. Rather than circumventing the absurd, as in the case of Sartre’s bad faith, we have a confrontation with it. The absurd—that dissonance between our desire for order and the harsh irrational reality in which it finds itself—is acknowledged. Rather we find ourselves dealing with another mode of amelioration. Camus specifically references the “All or Nothing” six years later in The Rebel. Again hearkening back to the Hegelian struggle for recognition between master and slave, Camus focuses on the act of rebellion when the slave refuses his role and demands treatment as an equal.
Having up to now been willing to compromise, the slave suddenly adopts (“because this is how it must be…”) an attitude of All or Nothing… The rebel himself wants to be “all”—to identify himself completely with this good of which he has suddenly become aware and by which he wants to be personally recognized and acknowledged—or “nothing”; in other words, to be completely destroyed by the force that dominates him.12
The slave, aware that the previous order did not treat him as an agent, as a mutually recognized other, prefers death to its return. The moment of rebellion makes an irrevocable change. Indeed, Camus continues a year later in The Myth of Sisyphus, “A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.”13
Paneloux, in his second sermon, has found himself face to face with the absurd. His understanding of God—his ordering principle of the universe: the belief in the plague as justified punishment—stands in strict juxtaposition to the world as he sees it—irrationality: the death of M. Othon’s son. Forced, as he himself expresses it, to choose between all—the absurd—and nothing—nihilism. Either what he holds to be true (God and his having witnessed needless suffering) are true, or he can hold nothing to be true. In having to confront this choice, he becomes a figure of rebellion.
And so he makes his choice, and chooses to accept what he sees. He and the citizens of Oran must accept the existence of the absurd. Nihilism he rejects offhand, for who, he asks, can believe in nothing. And yet the absurd is a dissonance—the very notion of its “acceptance” is not intuitive. Nevertheless, Paneloux seeks to trust the absurd—to learn from it, and to derive from it some semblance of meaning. But Camus tells us, both subtly with the Jesuit and explicitly years later in Sisyphus, that we cannot trust in the absurd as though God; we cannot make the absurd our God. The absurd is not a thing, an object from which we can derive answers or meaning—it is the very clash between our desire to find such a thing and the world that denies us our quest for order. It is a relation that exists within the human mind vis a vis its desires and the outside. It does not exist outside of the mind. It is a struggle between the mind and its environment.
…I must admit that that struggle implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction ( which must not be compared to immature unrest). Everything that destroys, conjures away, or exorcises these requirements…ruins the absurd and devalues the attitude that may then be proposed. The absurd has meaning only insofar as it is not agreed to.14
And yet such an exorcism is what Paneloux attempts to do. He agrees to the absurd. He looks to it for meaning. And so his rebellion leaves him unfulfilled. He, like Camus’ reading of Kierkegaard and Chestov, attempts to fashion a God out of the absurd and thus to circumvent the problem again, simply one step deeper than the relatively superficial circumvention found in bad faith.
All or Nothing: Tarrou explains, “When an innocent youth can have his eyes destroyed, a Christian should either loose his faith or consent to having his eyes destroyed. Paneloux declines to lose faith, and he will go through with it to the end.”15 And so Paneloux does not die in bad faith. He is consistent and authentic with regard to his beliefs. However he doesn’t die with a sense of meaning. Waiting for meaning from his acceptance of the absurd, he dies with none. Camus calls it philosophical suicide: thought having negated itself to transcend itself in its very negation.16 It is a leap of faith, and as such, philosophically untenable. Paneloux’s recognition and amelioration of his own bad faith was necessary, but insufficient. He still failed to create his own meaning, looking instead to the absurd as God.
It is in this way, then, that Camus’ early novel foreshadows the explicit philosophical moves he makes within the existentialist tradition. To speak in terms of bad faith is not enough, for it does not address the reality of the absurd (or, perhaps more appropriately, the absurdity of reality). Sartrian existentialism runs the risk of philosophical suicide—the acceptance of the absurd and therefore failure to create meaning for one’s self. The existentialist project must therefore look beyond the internal self-coherence embodied in bad faith, and must look to the all or nothing implicated in metaphysical rebellion against the absurd in order to properly address the issue of meaning. Though both thinkers develop such concepts over several decades, the nascent beginnings of this process start to unfold in The Plague.