Albert Camus' Rejoinder to the Absent God and the Absurdity of Existence in The Plague

Abstract

If the universe we inhabit is the handiwork of an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent God as the Western and Christian worldview would have us believe, and if we are to trust the categorical affirmation made right in the first book of the Bible that God saw that all that he created were good, how do we reconcile with the countless faces of suffering and evil that we encounter every day? Today, our attempt to reconcile with the silence of God against the cries and prayers of humanity for deliverance from the COVID-19 pandemic leads us back to the question of the absurdity of existence that the Existentialists wrestled with. The French novelist, Albert Camus, explores the question of the absurdity of human existence at length in his novel, The Plague, from an existential philosophical perspective. He does so, depicting the contrasting responses of two of his characters – Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest who is the voice of organized religion, and Dr. Bernard Rieux, a surgeon, humanist and atheist who is the voice of science and rationality – to the plague that smote the coastal city of Oran in Algeria. This chapter analyses the responses of Paneloux and Rieux in order to underscore Camus’s answer to the immediate question of the silence of God against human suffering and the protracted question of the absurdity of human existence in line with the response of Rieux, which, in fact, is Camus’ philosophical response to the absurdity of human existence. In the concluding observations, this chapter argues that the spirit and mission of Rieux in the novel are both an inspiration and an invitation to all in times of pandemics, especially in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, to face all odds with stoic courage and total commitment.