Should You Love Something You Can't Understand?

You see, the human mind is an explanation-seeking machine. We are constantly searching for explanations for why things happen or why they don’t. Sometimes we demand explanations. But they aren’t always there. And when that happens, we feel unsettled.

This is because we think that if we can understand something and explain it, then we can control it.

But what happens when we face a disaster that defies all reason? What happens when the "Why" has no answer?

It wasn't long ago—or it was long ago, depending upon how you consider a period of five years—that we all woke up in a world we no longer recognised.

The confusion. The disbelief. The frantic search for explanations. The denial that lasted too long. The loneliness that settled like dust. The strange silence of empty streets. The fear that clung to the air. The way normality vanished overnight. The terrifying news and data.

And the question on everyone’s lips was a desperate "Why is this happening?" We demanded logic from a virus that offered none.

We lived through a pandemic that was indiscriminate, invisible, and unstoppable for a time. This is the absurd in Albert Camus’ terms. And he explored it brilliantly in his novel The Plague.

The book was published in 1947. It’s a fictional story about a disease outbreak in an Algerian city called Oran. Now that we have lived and experienced a global pandemic, this story doesn’t feel fictional at all.

Just like the citizens of Oran in the book, we responded to the pandemic in wildly different ways: Some denied it was happening, some hoarded supplies, some became the unlikely heroes, some found God, some lost Him. But most of us just tried to survive.

I read this book during the pandemic, and I was shocked by how brilliantly Camus managed to capture human emotions, our mental state, and how we deal with meaningless suffering.

There’s a scene in the book that makes you ponder every time you think about it. 

Dr. Rieux and Father Paneloux have just watched a child die horribly from the plague. Rieux is furious, barely holding himself together. And Paneloux, the priest who has been preaching that the plague is divine punishment, quietly says:

Perhaps…

That word carries uncertainty, obviously, but here it carries a lot of weight as well. It's the uncertainty of a man whose faith has been shaken, who has just witnessed something that his theology and religion cannot easily explain. How do you reconcile a loving God with a child tortured by disease? How do you make sense of senseless suffering? And yet he’s not stopped believing.

Here Camus is trying to instill a possibility to accept mystery; to embrace what cannot be rationalised and to find peace in surrendering to forces beyond our comprehension. It's the religious response to the absurd: there is meaning, even if we cannot see it. He is pushing back against our instinct to solve life, to tidy it into causes and effects.

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But then, immediately, he proposes an opposing idea through Dr. Rieux:

This is Camus’ rebellion. This is a moment of revolt. You can almost see Dr. Rieux as Camus himself. 

He refuses to make peace with a universe that allows children to suffer. In his view, no divine plan, no cosmic mystery can justify it, and he refuses to love what he cannot understand.

Here, Camus rejects two notions:
Rationalism, which assumes the world is ultimately knowable, decipherable, and obedient to human reason, and
Religious teleology, which claims events—even suffering—follow a divine plan, and therefore carry inherent meaning.

In his view, both these notions soften reality by offering neat answers where life gives none.

That may seem quite nihilistic, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves because Camus is not advocating nihilism. That becomes clear from the conversation between Rieux and Paneloux later in the same scene.

Paneloux sees Rieux's refusal to accept the plague as evidence that he lacks grace—the ability to surrender to God's will. But notice what comes next:

This is Camus' philosophy in a nutshell.

Paneloux and Rieux couldn't be more different in their worldviews. 

The priest seeks meaning through faith. He sees suffering as a part of God's mysterious plan, and our job is to accept it with grace. 

The doctor, on the other hand, finds no meaning at all. He believes the universe is indifferent, and suffering is simply something to be fought, not accepted.

Yet they work side by side. They tend to the sick together. They exhaust themselves together. Their behaviour is identical even though their deepest beliefs are completely different.

We all saw something similar during the pandemic when people put their beliefs aside and worked together because we were all fighting against a common enemy.

Camus revealed something profound here: there is a form of solidarity that exists before our beliefs, prior to our philosophies. When we witness suffering, something fundamental in us responds. 

Rieux calls this "something that unites us," the only thing that matters. Not theology, not philosophy, not whether we believe in God or meaning or cosmic justice. Just the shared and immediate recognition that suffering should be fought, that the plague should be resisted, and we must stand together against it.

For Camus, this is the absurd hero's ethic: even in a meaningless universe, even without the promise of reward or cosmic vindication, we should choose to fight. We should choose solidarity. We should choose each other.

This scene is timeless because it shows us that:
Life continues to include plagues—literal and metaphorical—that escape understanding. The world remains absurd in the Camusian sense. We constantly crave answers that reality refuses to give.

Camus wants us to realise that love, empathy, and care often emerge not from knowledge but from presence.

What do you think? Do you believe everything happens for a reason and there’s some meaning in suffering? Or is there no meaning in suffering at all, and it’s something you must fight against?

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