Is a Priest Justified in Consulting a Doctor?
We must either love God or hate him; we must either believe everything or deny everything; All or Nothing.
In Albert Camus’ The Plague, an epidemic of the plague wraps its hands around the neck of the Algerian port city of Oran. A set of characters swept up in events they cannot control, and their reactions to these events, compose the story of this novel.
Dr. Bernard Rieux is one of the first people in Oran to recognize the threat of the new sickness. He becomes friends with Jean Tarrou, a traveler who becomes trapped in the city after the plague begins its onset in earnest and the authorities lock down the city.
As the seriousness of the plague sets in, the town’s priest, Father Paneloux, gives a brimstone sermon to mark the climax of a Week of Prayer where he points toward the plague as the flail of God: “Calamity has come on you, my brethren,” he preaches, “and, my brethren, you deserved it.”
Rhyming with the famous sentiment from Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov that if there is no God, everything is permitted, Paneloux thunders to a packed church that the people of the town have grown complacent: “too long has [the world] counted on the divine mercy, on God’s forgiveness. Repentance was enough, men thought; nothing was forbidden.” He declares that God has “loosed on you this visitation; as He has visited all the cities that offended against Him since the dawn of history. Now you are learning your lesson, the lesson that was learned by Cain and his offspring, by the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, by Job and Pharoah, by all that hardened their hearts against Him.”
Paneloux says to the people of the town that this punishment from God is really an act of divine compassion worthy of rejoicing: “this same pestilence which is slaying you works for your good and points your path.” The suffering creating by the plague can reframe people’s priorities and provide them the catalyst to restructure their lives around God.
Later on in the narrative, Tarrou asks Rieux if he believes in God. Rieux responds flatly that he does not, and elaborates:
“Every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He’d try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence.”
Tarrou asks the doctor again, “Why do you yourself show such devotion, considering you don’t believe in God?”
Rieux replies that he had already answered the question, “That if he believed in an all-powerful God he would cease curing the sick and leave that to Him. But no one in the world believed in a God of that sort; no, not even Paneloux, who believed that he believed in a such a God. And this was proved by the fact that no one ever threw himself on Providence completely.”
An old joke goes something like this:
A storm descends on a small town, and the downpour soon turns into a flood. As the waters rise, the local preacher kneels in prayer on the church porch, surrounded by water. By and by, one of the townsfolk comes up the street in a canoe.
"Better get in, Preacher. The waters are rising fast."
"No," says the preacher. "I have faith in the Lord. He will save me."
Still the waters rise. Now the preacher is up on the balcony, wringing his hands in supplication, when another guy zips up in a motorboat.
"Come on, Preacher. We need to get you out of here. The levee's gonna break any minute."
Once again, the preacher is unmoved. "I shall remain. The Lord will see me through."
After a while the levee breaks, and the flood rushes over the church until only the steeple remains above water. The preacher is up there, clinging to the cross, when a helicopter descends out of the clouds, and a state trooper calls down to him through a megaphone.
"Grab the ladder, Preacher. This is your last chance."
Once again, the preacher insists the Lord will deliver him.
And, predictably, he drowns.
A pious man, the preacher goes to heaven. After a while he gets an interview with God, and he asks the Almighty, "Lord, I had unwavering faith in you. Why didn't you deliver me from that flood?"
God shakes his head. "What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter."
As the plague reaches its worst in the town, Father Paneloux tells Dr. Rieux that he has been working on an essay entitled "Is a Priest Justified in Consulting a Doctor?” The priest invites the doctor to an upcoming sermon that will touch on the theme of the essay. In the sermon, Paneloux grapples with the problem of the suffering of children: how can you explain it? Paneloux preaches:
There was no doubt as to the existence of good and evil and, as a rule, it was easy to see the difference between them. The difficulty began when we looked into the nature of evil, and among things evil he included human suffering. Thus we had apparently needful pain, and apparently needless pain; we had Don Juan cast into hell, and a child’s death. For while it is right that a libertine should be struck down, we see no reason for a child’s suffering. And, truth to tell, nothing was more important on earth than a child’s suffering, the horror it inspires in us, and the reasons we must find to account for it.
Paneloux plainly rejects the common rhetorical device of justifying the suffering of innocents with eternity in heaven. Instead, he argues that the people of Oran must accept their ignorance of God’s reason. “We should go forward, groping our way through the darkness, stumbling perhaps at times, and try to do what good lay in our power,” he declares. “As for the rest, we must hold fast, trusting in the divine goodness, even as to the deaths of little children.” Paneloux’s theology is to avoid a middle path; we must either love God or hate him; we must either believe everything or deny everything; All or Nothing.
The sermon ends. Tarrou, when the sermon is explained to him, remembers how he had known a priest who, after seeing a young man’s face with both eyes destroyed in the war, lost his faith.
‘Paneloux is right,’ Tarrou continued. When an innocent youth can have his eyes destroyed, a Christian should either lose his faith or consent to having his eyes destroyed. Paneloux declines to lose his faith, and he will go through with it to the end. That’s what he meant to say.’
Paneloux gets sick a few days after he delivers his sermon. He is overcome by fever and cough yet refuses the offers of his caretaker to fetch a doctor “because it is against his principles.” His symptoms don’t match the plague, but the Father’s condition steadily worsens despite his protestations against professional care. After Rieux inspects him against his wishes, Paneloux is sent to the hospital. Clutching his crucifix all the while, the Father is found dead the next morning.
At the hospital, on an index card next to his name the attendants write:
“Doubtful Case.”