For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here.

 

I have come across an impressive amount of self-styled insight in the past few days: what the world will look like after the virus, how we should reshape it, what an opportunity this is, how things will never be the same again…

I’m grateful for the viewpoints these opinion pieces offer, for the triangulation of the two-dimensional axis running between my personal experience and the news media with a perspective that seeks to reach beyond the present to envisage what might come next.

But I also wonder. I wonder how all these writers know what is around the corner, and why they are telling the rest of us about it now. I wonder about all the lines being drawn between the enemies of the future and those who will inherit the post-COVID earth, between “we” who understand what needs to change and “they” who stand in the way of that change.

Is this sort of post-COVID prophecy a case of intellectual profiteering, as some have accused it of being? Is it the discursive equivalent of looting? Let us not answer with a simple “yes” or “no”. There are always mixed motives in all our actions, and it would be as hasty to dismiss all talk of self-serving reasons behind this writing as it would to make such reasons the exhaustive explanation of the current rage for post-COVID prophesies and predictions.

I have also been revisiting the Christian passion narratives over the past few days, and one feature that struck me on Friday evening—prompted no doubt by its juxtaposition in my mind with the current spate of post-COVID predictions—was Christ’s sense of when to speak of the future, casting grand visions of a fairer and transformed society, and when to remain silent, his sense of when weeping was the best response to a situation (three times in the gospels), and his sense of needing to withdraw from crowds desperate for his words of wisdom, in order to pray.

Jesus’s journey to the cross marks the end of his teaching ministry and a moment when action takes centre stage. John’s gospel is most explicit: Christ knows when “the time has come” (John 12: 23) to enter Jerusalem and go to his death. He is in control of the timing; he chooses when to stop preaching to the crowds and walk into the lion’s den, when to hand himself over. He is remarkably taciturn throughout what passes for his trial, only confirming Pilate’s question “Are you the Christ” with the most ambiguous of responses “You have said so” (Matthew 27: 11, Mark 15: 2, Luke 23: 3).

The reason we have Good Friday at all is because Christ knew when to stop speaking to expectant and enthusiastic crowds, and when to “passer à l’acte”. Please forgive the Gallicism: the French “passer à l’acte” expresses something that eludes the English “take action”. It captures the idea there is a moment when it behoves to move from word to deed.

Camus understands this kairotic imperative in La Peste, tracing the limits of language in relation to the worst horrors of the plague. After the Jesuite Paneloux’s first sermon—an eloquent and sensitive allocution that stresses the mysteries of divine action and hints at the plague as a punishment for sin—we read these lines about Tarrou’s response to the stirring disquisition:

Le prêche de Paneloux était aussi rapporté, mais avec le commentaire suivant : « je comprends cette sympathique ardeur. Au commencement des fléaux et lorsqu’ils sont terminés, on fait toujours un peu de rhétorique. Dans le premier cas, l’habitude n’est pas encore perdue et, dans le second, elle est déjà revenue. C’est au moment du malheur qu’on s’habitue à la vérité, c’est-à-dire au silence. Attendons. » (132)

Tarrou has some comments on the sermon preached by Paneloux: “I can understand that type of fervor and find it not displeasing. At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, in other words, to silence. So let’s wait.”

Ever since David Jack drew my attention to this passage in a comment on a previous post, I have been drawn to the equation of truth with silence here. There is something of the Job’s comforter about one who always seeks to fill the silence of grief with words of wisdom. There is a time in the progress of a plague when words show themselves to be fools and the truth is found in silence.

My four year-old is beginning to learn music at the moment. In his class there is a sound that the children make for a rest in the score: saah (rhymes with car). A score without any “saahs” is a cluttered, arythmical cacophony, as is a life of endless prophesy and endless wisdom but no silence and no action. Jesus could preach as good a sermon as anyone, but he also knew when to withdraw, when to remain silent, when to weep, and when to “passer à l’acte” and die on the cross.

Perhaps the reader of this post is thinking at this point, “Physician, heal thyself.” Is this exploration of language, silence and action itself just one more attempt to claim that its writer has seen something that others have missed? Undoubtedly. Does it fall into the trap it urges others to avoid? Inevitably.  It is, like all the prophetic opinion pieces circulating at the moment, drawing its own little line that divides those who “get it” from those who don’t, friends from enemies. It is composed with an amalgam of civic and selfish motives. Isn’t that the inevitable knife-edge on which we all write, for which there is no remedy?

It is, perhaps, a dilemma that cannot be resolved in words, only with actions. The logic of line-drawing that characterises comment on COVID-19 and beyond creates friends and enemies, good guys and bad guys (even if the bad guys are those who divide the world into good guys and bad guys, and the good guys are those who don’t). But the cross disrupts and subverts the comfortable logic of “us” and “them”: Christ died for his enemies, for those on the other side of his line. This is what is missing from Rieux’s revulsion at a God who would let the plague occur.

The questions for all of us who presume to have something to say about COVID-19 are: where do our words find their limit? When do we stop writing, and remain silent? When do we stop writing, and act? It is not a question with which to beat others, but for each of us to ask of ourselves.

Does Christianity have something to say about the current pandemic? It surely does, but framing the question in terms of “having something to say” brutally narrows the scope of any possible response. One thing the Easter season shows us is that Christianity does not meet tragedy only with words and ideas about a God who remains remote. It meets tragedy with a person and with actions, with a God who came close, suffered, died, and rose again to punch an opening of resurrection hope in the claustrophobic cell of human suffering. It was an action that these words are far too inadequate to express.