Obviously, coronavirus is a plague from God.
God’s justice is always poetic justice, for the simple reason that men like poetry and tend to remember it better than prose. Onan, who contracepts life, loses his own. Adam, who idolizes a tree, ends up wearing its leaves. Remembering Adam and Onan edifies the wayward — or at least it should.
Modern judges are banned from imitating the Just Judge insofar as they are banned from judging poetically. The license God gives his Great Flood is a poetic license: “[T]he earth is full of lawlessness because of [man]. So I am going to destroy them with the earth.” If the God of Genesis had been a contemporary judge, he would have justified himself with an appeal to System and science, and wiped men off the face of the earth with a syringe in every vein. This would have taken rather less than forty days and nights, but taught nothing about the nature of sin — that it shakes the very foundations of the earth; that it troubles not just this or that individual, but the waters above the heavens; that the world belongs to man, and man to it, and that lawlessness in the gardener turns the very garden against him.
Like everything else in a technocratic state, punishment is reduced to the quantifiable—to extractions of time and money from criminals. This “retributive justice” is enacted in the name of fairness. By homogenizing punishment to Time and Fine, all are supposed to be treated alike—but these liberal tales of fairness are all fairy tales, liberally told. If they are indicted at all, the quantitative punishment of the wealthy amounts to asking them if they would be so good as to inconvenience themselves, employ a score of lawyers, pay bail, or write a check to pay the fine and be done with the matter. For the poor man, an unpayable traffic fine leads to the loss of a driver’s license; driving without a license leads to a larger fine; failure to pay the larger fine leads to jail, where there is no release unless he is willing to take a commercial bail bond.
By scooping all positive, pedagogical poetry from punishment, we have turned punishment into exchangeable commodity, which favors those geniuses of exchange — the wealthy — over the poor. For this dubious gain, we have lost the chance to punish as God punishes, with punishments fit to the crime.
But there is a great difference between God’s poetry and man’s. A good judge may order a man charged with a D.U.I. to take a long, painful walk to a distant bar. God does not just slap us with fitting reprimands—though he may. The Creator of all things inscribes Creation with punishment. He made the moon, and the stars, and one’s neighbors as particular things with particular natures. To do violence to them — acting contrary to what they are — ends in a painful relationship between gardener and garden, person and world. To treat the earth as a consumable commodity ends in environmental disaster; to treat a wife as any other woman ends in the grave punishment of familial disorder; to treat money as divinity destroys the social order in which one lives.
In the Scriptures, it is obvious that plagues are a preferable gun in the divine holster. We understand that plagues are very bad, but we seem to have lost our feeling for plagues as divine punishment, as pedagogical warnings that we are not being good co-creators of the world but have, in fact, become sodden with violence—that is, with the habit of treating people, places, and things without reference to the manner in which God created them. There is an odd, modern prejudice that, because plagues are curable by medicine, that they cannot really be plagues, but must be “neutral” outbreaks of disease, things that “just happen,” quite apart from providential intent.
This is not so much a misunderstanding of disease as it is of medicine, which is an art devoted to restoring bodies to their proper nature — to good health. If we are able to restore the plague-ridden body to its proper nature, it is more evidence, and not less, that the illness in question is the result of people, places, and things being treated violently, against their nature, somewhere within the great web of our world, resulting in the punishment God has inscribed in all things. The efficacy of doctors should lead us closer to concluding that disease is the result of sin. But while this might be obscure in the case of this or that disease, it seems to me rather obvious in the case of the coronavirus, our current plague.
I recently wrote a thing for First Things arguing for an intrinsic connection between biblical condemnation of counting people in a census and the punishment of plague. I said:
There is an intrinsic connection between mass devastation and the crime of counting the mass: The latter organizes unique men into a manageable unit operated by the kings of the earth; the former destroys the mass. This is the logic of a saying repeated throughout the Old Testament: “A thousand shall flee at the threat of one” (Isa. 30:17). The ascription is always given to foolish nations who organize into technological masses; to Israel whenever it imitates the militaristic ways of the neighboring nations and becomes another slave-state like Egypt under its Pharaoh. “How,” the book of Deuteronomy asks, rhetorically, “could one have routed a thousand, and two put a myriad to flight, unless their Rock had sold them, the Lord had given them up?” (32:28–31). By giving up their covenantal relationship to the King of all the Earth, the sons of Israel become a mass counted and ruled by an earthly king, a machine that one man operates—and that two men can destroy.
As we stare down the hype and horror of the coronavirus, it’s worth repeating the argument. It is not just the bodily symptoms and death rate of the disease that has the world anxiously scanning the news. It is the trembling of the global economy; the wavering of the stock market; the standstill of the airports; the emptiness of the cities; the fearful fact that we have built up a kind of world in which we are mightily susceptible to disease—and not merely to its physical spread.
The effect of disease is magnified by the increasing dependence of the entire globe on amassed wealth and singular institutions owned by very few men. A sick day in China slows down the market in America because they are united in the wealth of those who own both Chinese factories and American markets. Considered as a plague, coronavirus reminds us that we have sorely neglected the establishment of sustainable, charitable communities in favor of masses of people grouped, counted, and fed by global supply chains. It teaches us that we have treated people, places and things as fungible commodities, consumable by placeless denizens who live by hopping about the globe on airplanes. To say that local independence is the best protection against global disease is simply a truism. Globalists treat the world as one dish; they should not be surprised when it becomes a petri-dish. We ignore the slavery and theft that makes it possible for consumers to enjoy all the goods of the earth; plague reminds us that the goods of the earth have been made available by the construction of global systems operated by the wealthy and at the expense of local diversity and subsidiarity. Rather than the Church, we have made money and market, so susceptible to human sickness, the unifying principle of the entire globe. Plagues like the coronavirus reveal that such constructions are violent, operating against the nature of the garden we have been given to tend.
We have become rather like the army of Midian, laying the land to waste, numerous as locusts, whom the tiny force of Gideon could strike “as one man.” No one likes the poetic justice of God, especially not while on the receiving end of it. But we should not be so thick as to ignore the pedagogy present in his floods, his fire from heaven, and his plagues which follow on the amassing of people into a slave state operated by the kings of this earth. If we would not fall as one man, we should not build up a world in which we live as a mass of wage-laborers within a global economy owned and operated by an increasingly shrinking number of wealthy men. We should practice the social teaching of the Catholic Church, which alone resists building up nations set aside for destruction by plague. Thankfully, this has occurred in Lent, a blessed and opportune time for conversion.