For Albert Camus the struggle to achieve meaning in human life must always be an affirmation of the love that engendered it. This conviction is the key thematic in Camus' novel, The Plague and finds expression in the character Tarrou. Tarrou's is a quest for total meaning in life: "What interests me is learning how to become a saint." Tarrou is definite about the path he must follow to reach the peace assuring meaning to life. It is the "path of sympathy," the way of charity. "But you don't believe in God," his friend, Dr. Rieux charges. Tarrou's rejoinder is to the point: "Exactly! Can one be a saint without God?—that's the problem, in fact, the only problem, I'm up against today."…

Camus' ethic of fraternal charity bestowing meaning and securing sanctity in human living is, in reality, a theistic ethic—the Gospel law of charity…. Camus, in refusing the pseudo-God of an unkind Christianity is in reality opting for the true God of authentic Christianity and … his indorsement of fraternal charity as man's way to peace and meaning in life is radically, though unwittingly, a call for man to love the God who has identified himself with the least of his brethren. (p. 76)

From his earliest appearance in print, Camus was haunted with the notion that our world is a universe which has no place for us, in which our life makes no sense…. His early experience told Camus of man's isolation:

In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

                                             (p. 77)

The absurdity of death, reducing man's activity to a matter of indifference, becomes the basis of man's "inner freedom" from all restraints. (p. 78)

[However, there is a certainty] that there are values in life, even in the face of the absurd. Consequently, there are corresponding limits to the exercise of human freedom….

The limits to his freedom in man's rebellion against the absurd situation in life are set by the "value" revealed in the "movement of revolt."

In the absurd experience, the tragedy is individual; with the movement of revolt it is conscious of being collective. It is the adventure of all. The first progress of a mind struck by this estrangement is to recognize that he shares this estranged condition with all men and that human reality in its totality suffers from this distance in the relation of oneself and the world.

                                              (p. 79)

This solidarity with all men is the value—so important for Camus—that is revealed by the movement of revolt and that forms the basis of his ethic of fraternal charity….

We have, then, the right to say that any revolt that claims the right to deny or destroy this solidarity loses simultaneously its right to be called revolt and in reality becomes an acquiescence in murder. In the same way, this solidarity, except in so far as religion is concerned, comes to life only on the level of revolt. And so the real drama of revolutionary thought is announced. In order to exist, man must rebel, but revolt must respect the limit it discovers in itself—a limit where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to exist.

                                           (pp. 79-80)

Paradoxically, Camus' ethic of revolt implies the ethic of fraternal charity that came to be dominant in his later drama and fiction. (p. 80)

But the deeds of charity must flow from a kind heart. When Camus acknowledges in L'Envers et L'Endroit, "I am linked to the world by all my acts, to men by all my pity and gratitude," he is emphasizing the interior, the affective side of charity. It is the kindness that refuses to pass the absolute judgment that excludes man from the company of his fellows; it is the merciful kindness that, upon seeing a stranger, takes him to heart.

Two of Camus' most impressive characters were "strangers"—Meursault in The Stranger and Tarrou in The Plague, the former the stranger-victim of man's unkind judgment, the latter the stranger-saint with the kind heart…. Neither jury nor prosecutor had the resources in kindness of heart to reach the person of Meursault as he was in himself. Camus draws "the absurd contrast between what we know Meursault to be and what the court decides he is." (pp. 82-3)

In contrast with Meursault, Tarrou had experienced family affection…. Having known kindness, Tarrou had the power to show kindness. Furthermore, seeing a man sentenced to execution had worked upon his heart in such a way that he could never acquiesce in any man's being sent to his death and led him to "take, in every predicament, the victim's side," as he followed his "path of sympathy" to the end. (p. 83)

For Camus charity shows itself effectively as completely generous and all-embracing only because it springs from a kind heart, a merciful heart that will not judge the brother nor treat any man as a stranger, a sincere heart from which all selfishness has been purged. Tarrou had realized that man's "inhumanity to man" had come from unpurged hearts, "that each of us has the plague within him." For Tarrou purgation released the power of sympathy; it involved metanoia, the change of heart from "être solitaire" to "être solidaire," to invoke Camus's favorite catchwords. (p. 84)

What Camus has portrayed as the ultimate human quality throughout his writing is in essence the agape of the Gospels: "Agape will be able to minister openly and unreservedly to a neighbor, but only from an utterly selfless heart."…

Camus sharply diverges from the Christian position when he refuses to set the roots of neighborly love in any love for God. Camus' is the conviction that the charity wherein man finds his perfection as man is not consistent with belief in the Christian God…. (p. 87)

The scandal of indifference to a brother in need is overshadowed by an even greater scandal in Camus's eyes: "C'est toujours l'Eglise en tant que compromise par l'Inquisition et ses variantes, passées et présentes, qui constitue la pierre d'achoppement de Camus devant le christianisme." ["It is always the Church as compromised by the Inquisition and its variants, past and present, that constitutes the stumbling-block of Camus before Christianity."] Camus is turned away by Christianity's being, in any way, a party to a judicial process that commits the supreme unkindness of turning a man out of society in rendering absolute judgment against him. Camus sees the court that condemned Meursault, with its Christian prosecutor and its Christian jury, as a modern counterpart to the Inquisition in its harshness. In the name of Christianity, this court severs the last, weak tie to community that the unfortunate Meursault has with his fellow man…. (p. 88)

[The scandal of the] unkind Christianity that Camus rejects is equally disavowed by Christ and His late vicar. The Christianity, then, that Camus dismisses is a pseudo-Christianity; the God he refuses a pseudo-God….

Camus has averred that "if a rebel blasphemes, it is in the hope of finding a new God." Camus' search for meaning, for some principle by which the happiness and misery of man can be explained is a quest for the good who is in reality the hidden God. (p. 89)