I know I wasn’t alone in turning to Albert Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague when coronavirus struck. It tells of the rise and fall of an epidemic that hits Oran, an Algerian city, and its devastating effects on the inhabitants. As the story unfolds, it raises the age old questions of, as the town doctor puts it, “the only certainties we all have in common, which are love, suffering and exile”.
The local priest, Father Paneloux, interprets the plague as the judgment of God on the faithless people of Oran, and decides that either he has to give up his faith, or accept the plague as God’s will — there is no middle way. Camus obviously thought this as well. He doesn’t even consider the possibility that God might be opposed to the plague, or even more so, than the inhabitants of the city. And so he raises the age old question: if God is all powerful, and hates it as much as we do, then why does he allow it to happen?
Over the years, theologians have taken three broad approaches to the problem of evil. Evil exists either because God thinks it is in some way good for us in a wider mysterious plan (as Father Paneloux thought), or because of a power at work within the world opposed to the will of God, or because of the misuse of human free will. In other words, either the blame lies with God, with Satan or with us.
Now each of these has something to be said for it. We all know from experience how struggles and suffering can teach us a great deal. There are other times when we have to reach for the language of evil — something dark and superhuman, whether in the cold malice of a psychopathic child abuser, the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, or the death cult of ISIS. And it’s also true that much of the routine, daily misery we experience is down to the hurt we do to each other, whether by careless words, deliberate cruelty or sheer neglect.
Yet none of these arguments really satisfies. The idea that God deliberately sends disease or death and the misery they cause because it’s good for us is hard to accept in a Covid-19 ward. Not every bit of inexplicably nasty behaviour can be blamed on the Devil. And it’s hard to see how human choice explains the mutation of a virus like this one.
There is a reason they don’t provide a rational explanation for evil. It is because evil is, by definition, irrational and devoid of explanation. There is a long tradition of Christian thinking that thinks of evil as the absence, or more precisely, the corruption of Good — a kind of ontological wasting disease, like a virus that destroys the cells it fastens onto. There is a randomness about evil that makes it unpredictable, without order or pattern.
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