The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
While sheltering in place, assiduously trying to keep a proper social distance, I have read more on an average day than at any time since college and seminary. Looking back on it, I am probably reading more now than I did then. However, I am more than ready to escape my shelter and greatly to narrow my distance. Our necessary incarceration shall continue as long as it must, so I shall continue to read in order to try to salvage whatever is left of my mind.
A couple of weeks ago friends gave me a novel by Hermann Hesse called Narcissus and Goldmund. Hesse was a German novelist during the first half of the twentieth century who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Narcissus and Goldmund is about two young novices who met in a fourteenth century German monastery. Years later Narcissus became the abbot in the monastery, and Goldmund returned there, after having been gone for many years to live a dissolute life as a vagabond, while also acquiring great skills as an artist.
In the middle of the fourteenth century, Europe was struck by the bubonic, or black, plague. It is estimated that a third to half of the population died from the plague. There are numerous observations about the pandemic that Hesse made, and I suspect it was because of his thoughts that my friends sent me the novel. I want to quote several passages from a great writer that suggest the coronavirus is by no means a unique experience for the human race.
In his travels, Goldmund met a young man outside a village where the plague had slain most of the residents almost overnight. Goldmund said to him, “We two are in the same danger; it can hit you or it can hit me. Therefore we are staying together; we will either perish together or escape this cursed plague together….But until then, my friend, no one runs off, remember that! We need each other.”
Deduction: We too need each other. Though we are battling COVID-19 either alone or with someone else living in the same household, this is a communal, national and universal struggle. It is not us against the world; it is the world against the plague.
Moving on in his travels, Goldmund came upon many other places where the bubonic plague had ravaged the populace. He thought himself, “Worst of all, everybody looked for a scapegoat for his unbearable misery; everybody swore that he knew the criminal who had brought the disease, who had intentionally caused it….The rich blamed the poor, or vice versa; both blamed the Jews, or the French, or the doctors.”
Deduction: When people are facing the possibility of dying “before their time” (whatever that might mean), they look for perpetrators of their “untimely death.” Because the coronavirus started in China, many, including the US president, have called it the Chinese virus. Many Americans blame the president for being too slow in taking measures to halt the spread of the plague as soon as possible. The president blames the UN World Health Organization for being too slow in alerting the world to its danger. Trying to determine blame is perhaps natural. It is also a nasty and negative pursuit.
Finally, after Goldmund had concluded that his travels were all in vain, and that he had failed to find what he so longed for, Goldmund returned to the monastery and to his old friend Narcissus. Just before he entering into the cloister, he said of God, “I have come to doubt you, Lord. You have ill-created the world; you are keeping it in bad order….Have you completely forgotten and abandoned us, are you completely disgusted with your creation, do you want us all to perish?”
Deduction: Plagues inevitably cause religious and non-religious people to question God, and to wonder what are His purposes, if any, in the midst of so much sickness and death. To me it is inconceivable that God would deliberately cause a plague of any kind. Over time, plagues predictably happen in nature and in history, but it is not God who causes them. Like earthquakes or hurricanes or other natural disasters, plagues happen because they happen. Scientists can explain the conditions that cause them, but we don’t want answers from science; we want answers from God. And as in many other aspects of human existence, God does not answer our questions; Instead He offers us support and consolation and solace which He alone can provide.
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Nemesis was a Philip Roth novel I picked up some time ago on a table of free books. Roth is an American Pulitzer Prize winner. I was given Narcissus and Goldmund to read because of the coronavirus pandemic; I picked up Nemesis to read, which is about another plague, entirely by coincidence.
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up there. Nemesis, published in 2010, is a story that originated from his rich artistic imagination because of a polio epidemic which struck Newark in the early 1940s. Seeking to find a solution for the epidemic, a group of anguished citizens discussed how best to defeat their common foe. “Disinfect everything.” “Why don’t they spread some kind of chemical on the streets and kill it that way?” “Forget chemicals. The most important thing is for the children to wash their hands. Cleanliness! Cleanliness is the only cure!” “Look, you mustn’t be eaten up with worry and you mustn’t be eaten up with fear. What is important is not to infect the children the children with the germ of fear.”
Deduction: There are actions all of us can take to overcome plagues when they descend on us, and we want to do whatever we can as fast as we can to contribute to the epidemic’s cessation. Since the end of the nineteenth century, intuitively and intellectually we have known that we must practice constant cleanliness in the time of cholera or any other plagues. We also know we must avoid becoming immobilized by fear. Nevertheless, all plagues seem to have their own time schedules, and despite our best efforts, they hang on until they drop off. In the meantime, all of us need patience, whether or not we end up as patients.
The central character in Nemesis is a newly graduated teacher named Bucky Cantor. He enters the narrative as the summer director of a playground in a Newark park. One of the boys under his supervision was the first youngster on the playground to die from polio. Bucky Kantor went to see the boy’s parents. His father told Bucky, “As soon as the doctor came he immediately called the ambulance, and at the hospital they whisked him away from us – and that was it. We never saw our son alive again. He died all alone.”
Deducti on: In a normal death under normal circumstances, family members try to be with those who are dying to give them support and comfort in the moment of their death. But in a plague, patients are necessarily kept in isolation, and they must face life’s most incomprehensible challenge all by themselves. That isolation adds another agonizing level of sorrow to the survivors. The fiercely impersonal nature of plagues is something we never think about until we are enveloped by the contagion, and then nearly all our thoughts are concentrated on the implacable enemy we fear is waiting for us.
When other children on the playground are suddenly crippled or killed by polio, Bucky Cantor concludes that somehow it must be his fault. He is speaking to the father of the woman to whom he shall soon be engaged, who is a physician, and he tells Dr. Steinberg of his self-imposed culpability. The kindly doctor says, “You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you’re to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.”
Then Philip Roth has Bucky think to himself, “Doesn’t God have a conscience? Where’s His responsibility? Or does He know no limits?” Later Bucky says to Marcia, who by that time had become his fiancée, “Why didn’t God answer the prayers of Alan Michaels’s parents? They must have prayed. Herbie Steinmark’s parents must have prayed. They’re good people. They’re good Jews. Why didn’t God intervene for them? Why didn’t He save their boys?” “I honestly don’t know,” Marcia helplessly answered. “I don’t know either, (said Bucky) I don’t know why God created polio in the first place.”
Deduction: At this point in our own slowly unfolding saga, have you wondered whether you might be an asymptomatic unknowing carrier of the coronavirus? And if so, have you felt guilty, even though you might not be what you fear you might be?
If you have gotten past blaming the Chinese, or passengers flying in all directions from Wuhan or Beijing or Shanghai, or an overly cautious president, or various government or health officials who give conflicting summaries about what innocent citizens must do, does blaming God somehow give you consolation? Does “cursing the fates” bring relief? Does anything bring relief?
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Is it surprising to you that there are not more plagues than there are, or that there are not fewer plagues than there are, or that there are any plagues at all? Or does any of those questions enter your mind?
Hearing about or reading about the incessant news of our pandemic has personally numbed me to the vastness and the utter unpredictability of the virus. But reading these two novels has been, for me, a great help in trying to get my puzzled psyche around the reality of what we are facing.
In the sixteenth century, the importation of European diseases caused the greatest plague in the history of the human race, as millions of natives in both North and South America vanished from the face of the earth within a few months or years of seeing their first white men. Smallpox may have killed up to 90% of them. Hermann Hesse was writing about the second most lethal world plague in the fourteenth century. Philip Roth was writing about the first plague anyone over seventy five years of age can remember, although it did not seem exactly like a plague to us then. But it was very frightening, all the same.
Plagues prompt all kinds of questions, and the more lethal the plague is, the more demanding are the questions resulting from it. For many, the God-questions are the hardest. For others, God neither causes nor allows plagues; plagues simply happen, and are an inexplicable factor, among many others, in the natural order.
Millions are asking, “When shall we escape incarceration in our own homes?” Others wonder, “Do I have the inner strength and wisdom necessary to withstand this ordeal?” In the meantime, I, along with the psalmist, ask the eternal question. “How long, O Lord; how long?”
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be found at www.chapelwithoutwallshhi.org.