The Preacher and the Plague

We are living a fatal plague, we do not know who will come out of it. Albert Camus published The Plague in June 1947, three years after the liberation of Paris from the Nazi occupation. The Plague is the tale of a natural calamity that descends on the Algerian town of Oran. Evil is the plague in the soul of man which continues pecking the liver of any man as in the case of Prometheus. I have locked up myself in the library of the University of Leuven to understand and defend God from the complicity of evil which was a problem of highest concern for me. In the aforesaid novel, Tarou while narrating the story of his life to Dr Rieux, tells: “I know positively … that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth, is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless movement we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest – health, integrity, purity (if you like) – is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous willpower