All or Nothing: Reflections on the Suffering of Children

Fifty years ago, the French existentialist philosopher, Albert Camus, published what has come to be regarded as one of the masterpieces of modern fiction, his great allegorical novel, The Plague.1 On the surface level, it is the story of the impact of an outbreak of the bubonic plague on the people of Oran, a coastal city in Algeria. On a deeper level, it is a study of the impact of totalitarianism on mid-twentieth century civilization. And on a still deeper level, it is an inquiry into how human beings handle suffering--their own, and that of their neighbors. It is what Camus has to tell us about human suffering, and especially the suffering of children, that I want to discuss here. I will focus on one scene in particular, the story in Part IV of the death of young Jacques Othon, the son of the city magistrate, and its effects on two other characters, Dr. Rieux, a physician, and Fr. Paneloux, a Jesuit priest. But my remarks won't be restricted to commentary on Camus' novel. I'm a theologian, not a literary critic. And this gathering is a retreat, not an academic conference.2 So I'll take the liberty of delivering what is, in both form and content, more of a sermon than a scholarly essay on what is surely one of the most troubling problems that people of faith--and people of conscience, whether they are people of faith or not--must face: the fact that children suffer and die.

Now, this is a subject of deep personal significance to me. My twelve-year old daughter, Sarah, is afflicted with two different, unrelated, but equally catastrophic physical disorders. They are chronic conditions, not acute and fatal ones like the bubonic plague. But they have left her severely physically disabled, leading a life of constant discomfort and mortifying dependence on others. And one of those conditions was caused by a brain tumor, the removal of which might have blinded or killed her, though thank God it did not. So you can imagine how overwhelmed I was to read Camus' description of the suffering and death of young Jacques. As it happens, I shall say nothing more today about Sarah's situation, but I do want to begin with a personal anecdote, one that took place several years before I was married, and long before Sarah was born. It was the first time I had to face the issue with which I am dealing today, and it was to foreshadow many subsequent experiences, both as a parish pastor and as a father.

I was still a seminarian at the time, serving as a summer intern at two small rural churches in upstate Vermont. One day, the senior pastor asked me to call on a parishioner who had not been to church for a while, a woman in her mid-thirties, a self-employed hair-dresser and wife of the local Chevrolet dealer. I called to make the appointment, and when I arrived she invited me into her kitchen, poured me a cup of coffee, and then told me the following story: She and her husband had, at the time of my visit, been married for about ten years. They had always wanted children, and had begun trying to conceive shortly after their wedding, but to no avail. After some years, they decided to undergo the hassles and humiliations of fertility treatment. The procedures were successful, and in due course they gave birth to a beautiful, blue-eyed, tow-headed son, whom they named Chad. He was healthy at birth and for the first couple years of life. But at the age of three, he contracted some strange wasting disease, and after a few weeks of agony died in his mother's arms. Several years had gone by since this catastrophe. No more children had come along. The husband buried his grief in overwork. The wife sat home alone, listless, occasionally taking a customer or two at her beauty salon, which adjoined the house, but otherwise cut off from human companionship. And cut off from divine companionship, too, since she had quit coming to church, angry--quite literally as angry as hell--at God. After telling me her story, she asked me, in a voice choked with tears of bitterness, "Why did God let my baby die?"

How do you answer a question like that? I had taken pastoral counseling courses in seminary, but nothing I ever learned in those courses prepared me for this. I like to think that the Holy Spirit intervened at that moment, for I think that what I said was basically right, though I shudder now at the blunt way I put it. What I said was this: "I don't know why God let your baby die. But if I did know, I wouldn't tell you. For I respect you too much to try to replace your son with pious formulas. His death was a tragedy. It deserves tears, not explanations." After twenty years of pastoring and teaching theology, I hope I could say that with a bit more tact. But I would still say it: Religious theories, when used to explain human tragedies, are insufferable blasphe- mies. Even the promise of resurrection, when trotted out too soon or too glibly, especially to parents who have watched the lid close on a two-foot casket, begins to look like a piece of clerical flim-flam, designed not to bring divine consolation to those who mourn, but only to cover up the embarrassment of the preacher in the presence of the brokenhearted.

Now, I don't mean to imply that the Christian gospel has nothing to say about human tragedy in general, or about the suffering of children in particular. I simply mean that how and when we proclaim the gospel are as important as what we say. In the classroom, there is nothing more pointless than an answer to an unasked question. In the sick room or the funeral parlor, there is nothing more pointless than a theoretical answer to an existential question--even if that answer happens to be impeccably orthodox. For such an answer prevents both persons, the questioner and the answerer alike, from really "living the question,"3 from feeling its sting, from facing the dark mystery of human life...and therefore from growing in Christian faith. For Christian faith is not what you have when all your questions are answered and all your doubts are allayed. It is what you have when you experience the presence of God in the midst of your unanswerable questions and irresolvable doubts.

Of course, there is no guarantee that you will feel God's presence in the midst of your questions and doubts. Apparently Albert Camus did not. But Camus did have the grace (and I use this word intentionally and in its precise theological sense) to realize that some people do, and he admired them for so doing. Are they mistaken in this? As an atheist, Camus thought so. But far better that mistake, if it is a mistake, which at least has the moral courage to face the questionableness of human life squarely, trusting only in the hidden presence of divine grace, than the self-delusion of those pious folk who think they have the answers to all life's questions, and therefore don't really have to brave the terror of those questions. Some people prefer the security of religious orthodoxy, which is so often blind to whatever unpleasant realities don't square with the official formulas, to the unfathom- able mystery of God, which alone enables us to see life and death for what they truly are.

The character in The Plague who represents the response of unconquerable faith to indescribable tragedy is Fr. Paneloux. Paneloux is not a foil or a fall guy in this novel, although his convictions are ultimately rejected by the author. He is described as "a learned and militant Jesuit" (17), "a stalwart champion of Christian doctrine at its most precise and purest, equally remote from modern laxity and the obscurantism of the past" (87). In Paneloux's second sermon, delivered shortly after he had witnessed the horrifying spectacle of Jacques Orthon's suffering and death,4 he makes the following extraordinary statement:

My brothers, a time of testing has come for us all. We must believe everything or deny everything. And who among you, I ask, would dare to deny everything....Religion in a time of plague [can] not be the religion of every day. While God might accept and even desire that the soul should take its ease and rejoice in happier times, in periods of extreme calamity He [lays] extreme demands on it. Thus today God [has] vouchsafed to His creatures an ordeal such that they must acquire and practice the greatest of all virtues: that of the All or Nothing (224f). Of course, Paneloux himself chooses the All. That is, he chooses to believe that in some mysterious way the plague that has befallen Oran is a visitation of God, something that works for the good of those who love God. He even tells his congregation that since the plague is God's will, they too should will it: "Thus and thus only the Christian [can] face the problem squarely and, scorning subterfuge, pierce to the heart of the supreme issue, the essential choice. And his choice would be to believe everything, so as not to be forced into denying everything" (225). Please note that Paneloux is not advocating religious masochism or recommending the sort of fanatical pursuit of martyrdom that was so common in ancient North African Christianity5 and has reappeared in various guises over the centuries. Wishing suffering upon oneself is as sinful as wishing it upon anyone else. But he is saying that the proper Christian response to the sufferings that inexplicably befall us is to search for the saving grace of God that must be found there if it is to be found anywhere. If we resent the fact that we must suffer, then we display a lack of faith, an inability to rely upon God in situations where we are helpless. And if we lack faith in such situations, then what we call faith during our "happy times" may prove to be little more than an anxious desire, dressed up as conventional piety, to keep our health and prosperity. But that isn't trusting in divine grace; that's only wishing for good luck.

Of course, the world is full of such people, as Camus realizes. They are not prominently featured in this novel, but they make their appearance as the faceless, rootless crowds in the streets and taverns, lurching back and forth between self-deluding optimism and self-destructive despair, alternately resorting to quack nostrums and religious superstitions that cannot stop the plague, and to orgiastic dissipation that expresses their sense of powerlessness before it. Camus despises such people. They lack the courageous faith in the All which is displayed by his Fr. Paneloux.6

But they also lack the courage to face the Nothing which is shown by the novel's protagonist, Dr. Rieux. Representing Camus' existentialist ideal, Rieux sees no ultimate meaning, much less evidence of divine grace, in human suffering. And if there is no ultimate meaning in suffering, then there can be no ultimate meaning in human life itself, from which suffering is ineradicable. Humanity is alone in the universe, alone with its pain. Asked if he believes in God, Rieux pauses, sensing the gravity of the question. "No," he finally says, "but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out" (126). Later, after a momentary outburst of rage and grief over the death of young Jacques, he tells Paneloux, "Until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture" (218). But although he has lost his faith in God, he has by no means lost his sense of duty. He refuses for the sake of conscience to set personal welfare ahead of the public good. Moreover, Rieux sees no reason to congratulate himself for doing his duty, or to imagine that his campaign against the plague is some grand act of moral "heroism" (163). Rieux does not understand himself to be "working for man's salvation," but simply to be "doing [his] job." (219). But in his matter-of-factness and self-diffidence, as in his dutifulness and courage, Rieux, the existentialist antihero, looks surprisingly like Fr. Paneloux, the Christian saint.7 Thus, for Camus, to choose the Nothing is not to fall into nihilism, cynicism, and despair. It is only to reject any religious system, philosophical theory or political ideology that tries to justify the tragedies which happen in the world, and to refuse public applause or eternal compensation for ministering to the victims of these tragedies.

I said earlier that this presentation would have the form and content of a sermon. Every sermon needs a text, so let me now give it one: "Not every one who says to me, Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven" (Mt. 7:21). This text is directed to us Christians, who need to be reminded that unbelievers sometimes do God's will better than we do. Precisely because they are not looking for a reward for their good works, they display a virtue greater than those Christians who act from mercenary motives. It also reminds us that compassionate actions, not pious formulas, are what count as far as God is concerned. Are we willing, as disciples of the Crucified, to be present to those who suffer, not armed with "explanations," but simply there. The effort to "explain" human suffering is a fool's game. One look at a young plague victim "racked on the tumbled bed, in a grotesque parody of crucifixion" (215), one look at a father carrying his son's casket by himself from the hearse to the grave, one look at your own daughter being prepped for brain surgery, settles that point. Fr. Paneloux the self-sacrificing apostle of the All, who insists on finding the "severe mercy" of God everywhere,8 and Dr. Rieux, the self-sacrificing follower of the Nothing, who refuses to make peace with suffering anywhere, are in absolute agreement on this point.

Every sermon also needs an application, so let me add one of those, too. In our professional capacity as college teachers, most of us don't run into dying children or bereaved parents every day. But we do face adolescents and young adults who have experienced suffering, and who come with many questions about it. We must be prepared for these questions, and I would suggest that adequate preparation consists in knowing when and how not to answer them. That is, as Christian educators, one of the best lessons we can teach our students is to differentiate existential questions from theoretical ones. That does not mean, on the one hand, that we should dismiss existential questions from our classrooms, as if such questions were irrelevant to academic inquiry. That response only reinforces the division between the life of the mind and the quest of the spirit--a division alien to Christianity. Nor does it mean, on the other hand, that we should turn our seminars into catechism classes or encounter groups, as if our task were to settle everything for our students. What it does mean is that we should be alert to the pain and sorrow that often lurk behind some of the deepest questions our students ask, and help them to see that intellectual honesty and spiritual maturity consist neither in avoiding such questions, nor in pretending to know the answers to them, but in living them in faith. Christian faith consists not in knowing the reasons for all things, but in encountering the Holy Mystery at the heart of all things--including things that we don't, and can't understand, such as human suffering.

But while some of our students must be conjured away from their tendency to intellectualize human suffering, others come with little or no direct experience of suffering and with the desire to avoid it at all costs. We have a responsibility to this group, too. We must, to paraphrase Fr. Paneloux, teach them the greatest of all virtues: that of the All or Nothing. We must warn them against the tawdry vice of the "Something," against Laodicean lukewarmness, against superstitious or self-serving piety, and against what John Wesley called "Almost Christianity." We must expose their tendency to see their college education and their Christian faith as mere instruments for a life of money-making and pleasure-taking, a life immune to the sorrows of the world, untroubled by the prick of conscience, secure in their felicities, confident that God is smiling benignly on them and on the prosperous world they inhabit. We must open their eyes to the connection between the cross of Calvary and the deathbeds in the pediatric ward, so that, on the one hand, their juvenile piety acquires mature moral force, and, on the other hand, their exposure to the grim realities of life is sanctified by the consciousness of God's abiding presence.

NOTES

1. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1991). Page numbers will be given in the body of the text.
2. This article is adapted from a lecture, or rather a sermon, which was delivered at the College of Arts and Sciences Retreat at Seattle Pacific University on September 17, 1997. The entire day was a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Camus' great novel and its enduring significance. It should be noted that SPU is affiliated with the Free Methodist Church, and all its faculty and staff are practicing Christians.
3. Cf. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1962), pp. 34f: "...I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue."
4. The fact that the following remarks are made in Paneloux's second sermon, after he had witnessed Jacques's death, is significant, in light of Rieux's verdict on Paneloux first sermon: "Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn't come in contact with death; that's why he can speak with such assurance of the truth--with a capital T. But 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" (126).
5. One of the earliest Christian martyrologies was The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, written in Carthage about the year 203. The heroines of this document appears at points not just to accept martyrdom as the price of fidelity to Christ, but almost to revel in the opportunity to die for their faith. Other North African writers, such as Tertullian, Cyprian, and some of the Donatists, express similar sentiments. For an elegant discussion of the theme of "sacrifice and suicide" in the Carthaginian tradition, see Joyce E. Salisbury, Perpetua's Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 49-57.
6. Camus' ambiguous attitude toward Christianity is revealed in the comment Rieux makes on Paneloux's first sermon: "I've seen too much of hospitals to relish any idea of collective punishment. But as you know, Christians sometimes say that sort of thing without really thinking it. They're better than they seem" (125). Only those who are willing to be among the victims (as Paneloux later proves to be) have any right to talk about human catastrophe as divine judgment.
7. Several of the other main characters, despite their entirely secular, even atheistic orientation, display great moral courage--often after undergoing a decisive "conversion" through the experience of suffering: Rembert, the Parisian journalist, spends most of the novel thinking only of his safety and his sex life and trying desperately to escape from Oran, but then decides, just as he is about to be smuggled past the city gates, to stay and help Rieux. Tarrou, the erstwhile communist, has seen how secular messianism degenerates into murderous zealotry, and has pledged himself to become "a saint without God" (255). Even Orthon, the city magistrate, who is at first dubbed "Enemy Number One" for saying that, as far as the govern- ment is concerned, "It's not the law that counts, it's the sentence" (146), is later forced to endure his son's death and a lengthy stay in a quarantine camp, and then takes a leave of absence from his office and volunteers for duty in the camp.
8. Cf. Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977). The phrase, "severe mercy," was taken from a letter Vanauken received from C. S. Lewis, offering condolence on the death of his wife. Vanauken reprints the letter on p. 209 of his magnificent work.

Acknowledgement

Rev. Richard Steele, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Theology at Seattle Pacific University. Dr. Steele served on the Stauros Board of Directors from 1994 - 1997. Stauros is grateful to Dr. Steele for allowing us to publish this heretofore unpublished paper.