The French writer Albert Camus struggled with these questions. His most famous book, The Plague, suggested the possibility of a saint without God; in this case, the narrator, Doctor Rieux, gives himself heroically to the plague victims while putting aside the question of God. He is an agnostic saint who concentrates on good works.

But in a later book by Camus, La Chute (The Fall – the title is significant), no matter how much good the hero does, his pride in the good he is doing inevitably brings him down. He is fallen and will never get up on his own. Camus, it seems, even without faith had come to see that something like faith was needed for salvation.

Interestingly enough, this insight from Camus is echoed by Pope Benedict in his recent book Jesus of Nazareth. The Pope argues that Jesus did not come to bring us peace, universal prosperity, and a better world. No. Jesus came to bring us God.

Without God we can neither save the world nor save ourselves. According to Benedict, we must be like the humble tax collector in the Gospel parable, who acknowledges his own sinfulness and asks God for forgiveness.

The pope wrote, “The tax collector, by contrast, sees himself in the light of God. He has looked toward God, and in the process his eyes have been opened to see himself. … He needs God, and because he recognizes that, he begins through God’s goodness to become good himself. Ethics is not denied; it is freed from the constraints of moralism and is set in the context of a relationship of love – of relationship to God.”