That Great Absence

Albert Camus's 1947 novel The Plague has apparently become a best-seller during lockdown. The adaptation on Radio 4 yesterday, itself a version of Neil Bartlett's 2017 stage play, was rather good, I thought. Bartlett updates the narrative, set in an Algerian French town, to make the character of Dr Rieux a black woman (and therefore a lesbian as she refers to her wife throughout), and another of the main characters black. This makes the story more diverse and engaging, and less tethered to its setting, which is barely relevant. 

I can't speak for the original play, but the radio version also does something else: it disposes completely of one of the other central characters, the town's priest, Fr Paneloux. Paneloux believes that the plague is a divinely-ordained scourge and a test of faith, and in Camus's novel he functions to bring up a set of issues around belief and purpose. Camus had little time for Christianity and Fr Paneloux isn't a sympathetic figure, so his absence from the updated version of The Plague is no great loss to Christian apologetics. But it also means that there is no religious discourse in the drama, and if it was produced 'under lockdown conditions' because it was felt to speak to the times, this must mean those who put it together didn't feel that religion has anything meaningful to add, even so it can be exposed as false. Not even its errors are relevant anymore.

It's yet another example of how modern intellectuals and opinion-formers have no interest in religion, or don't feel equipped to deal with it when it crops up in an older narrative. It's so remote from modern experience that they feel their audience won't understand it, they lack the apparatus to explain it, and nothing it has to say is felt to be important anyway. It's the one great element of the past whose links with the present have withered to nothing. 

And yet curiously elements of Christian narrative keep recurring in hard times, even when they're not genuine. The Church of England recently published a theological paper (a rara avis in itself, having nothing to do with homosexuality) entitled Crisis, Scarcity and Christian Ethics - a short note for chaplains which is very worthwhile overall. But it includes an intriguing mention of one Fr Guiseppe Berardelli, a Lombard victim of the epidemic, who is supposed to have given up his respirator in hospital so that a young person from the town could use it, and died a few days later. After his funeral service in Bergamo a longstanding friend of the priest's claimed that this story was untrue: Berardelli simply couldn't wear the respirator, and refused to accept it, rather than deliberately giving it up to another person. The news of the fake news hasn't got to the Church of England yet.

Part of us, then, still expects priests to be self-sacrificing, to exemplify the very best of what we aspire to be. I am moved that this desire persists, despite all the Church has done to hurt and damage the people who have trusted in it. It shows, perhaps, that it still bears the stamp of divine love. Perhaps, armed with this generous expectation on their part, we might be able to persuade our fellow, non-Christian human beings that such an idea is still worth thinking about.