Knowing that the world is broken is comforting. It would be troubling if we thought this place was perfect. This world is not Paradise and that is comforting because it gives us a double vision of reality: on the one hand we see suffering in the world and on the other hand we sense that this is not right and should be fixed. Pain and turmoil drive us to see that there is a righteous standard over the world. It is like a doctor discovering a tumor in a patient: he knows it is not supposed to be there. 

One day, Albert Camus and his friend were walking together around a city and they came upon a tragic scene of a small child who had been hit by a bus and seemed to be in a coma. A crowd gathered around the boy and some of the people began to wail in lament. Camus and his friend watched for a time. His friend says, “Walking away, Camus turned toward the landscape of blue sea and sky. Raising a finger toward the heavens he said: ‘You see, He says nothing.’” (Albert Camus and the Human Crisis, pg 38)

In this story, Camus is confronted with a truly tragic scene. However, his response fails to reckon with the full reality of this broken world. While he claims that God is silent, his shout of anguish is actually an unwitting witness to the reality that God is not silent at all. God has spoken His standard of justice in the world and we know that standard. That is why Camus cries out in anguish. He knows the world is broken and he wants things to be made right. God’s standard haunts Camus throughout his life but he never really embraces it which leaves him hovering in a twilight world of pain without hope. 

World is Strange 

A prime example of Camus’s struggle with God’s standard in the world is his novella, The Stranger. In that story, we find him making the claim that the world is silent in the face of tragedy. Camus tries to pull meaning out of that silence but he falls short. 

In the story, the main character Meursault is imprisoned for shooting a man. He is condemned for murder and sentenced to death. Throughout the book, Meursault insists that things don’t really mean anything. The book opens with him reporting that his mother died. He doesn’t know when it happened: maybe today or maybe yesterday. He says, “That doesn’t mean anything.” (The Stranger, pg 3) In another scene, he talks with his girlfriend, Marie, and she asks him if he loves her, and he responds saying, “I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so.” (The Stranger, pg 35)

Meursault embodies the nature of strangeness. The French term L’Estrange means someone who is from a foreign or strange land. Meursault is an outsider, disconnected from others. Camus underlines the disconnected nature of Meursault when he shoots the Arab man. The narrative, although it is first person, reports Meursault’s action as a disconnected third person viewer. He is so strange he is not even connected to his own actions.

At the end of the story, Meursault gains a moment of clarity and claims to have found happiness. He says, “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself–so like a brother really–I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again” (Stranger, 122). Let’s unpack this complex revelation.

Meursault is the Stranger in the story; that seems plain to the reader. However the revelation at the end isn’t so much about Meursault as it is about the world. In the story, Camus has been driving towards a vision of the world as indifferent and uncaring just like Meursault. Camus could have said the world is uncaring but he doesn’t do that. Rather, he holds up Meursault for the reader as the embodiment of the strange uncaring world. If the uncaring cosmos were a person, he would be Meursault. 

Meursault at the end claims to be happy about his death because he is going to be executed and nobody will care. He is a stranger and the world is a stranger. He claims that he and the world are brothers in this way because the world is a silent stranger, uncaring and empty just like he is. 

Meursault’s claim that he and the world are brothers should strike us as odd. On the one hand, we see in Meursault that the world is strange and uncaring and on the other hand, he claims that he is able to identify with the world as a brother. How is it possible for Meurseault to find the world like a brother if the world is a stranger? And here, we see that Camus has found the double vision of the world: the world is broken and that is good news. 

Camus, having stumbled upon this important double vision of the world, doesn’t know what to do with it. Like a doctor, he has found the tumor but he doesn’t know what the cure is. He cannot see the spiritual hope that God is not silent. 

The World Groans

When Adam and Eve sinned and ate the forbidden fruit, they unleashed a curse on all the world. This curse fell on people and everything in the world: rocks, trees, water, stars, and planets. This reality cuts to the problem that Camus raises: the world as both stranger and brother. God has made the world in such a way that all of creation is bound up in the fall of man. The world shares in the curse we brought on it. Paul in Romans says that creation earnestly waits for the revelation of the sons of God. The world is longing for the day when all tears will be wiped away. 

Our response to the suffering in the world is not just a reaction in us; the world shares in our suffering. Paul says, “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travailest in pain together until now.” (Romans 8:22) The world is not silent: it cries out like us at the pain in the world. A young child hit by a bus is horrific and the world joins us in groaning at this horror. 

The world is not just crying about the pain in the world but also about God’s redemptive work in the world. Paul says it is longing for redemption. This is where Camus fails to achieve a hopeful answer because he fails to see God’s redemption at work in the world. In the person of Jesus, God has personally experienced the broken world. Jesus suffered a cruel death and he also cried out in anguish. But his cry was “It is finished.” It is through his death and resurrection that all things are being made right.   

The double vision of the world as stranger and brother will not always be. One day, because of Jesus’ death on the cross, we will find the world is no longer a stranger but only a brother. This brotherly relationship will be established on the restored relationship that we have with God. This is the true comfort that the broken world points us to. The stranger will be brought home and adopted as a son.