Everywhere we turn these days we see evil in action. It
was always thus, but in the current social, political,
and medical environment it seems especially prominent.
We observe a pandemic that has caused global and historically
immense damage and devastation, a cataclysm of biblical
proportions. We see governments, official agencies, and
corporate consortiums that have fed the public with lies
and misinformation as to the origins, causes, and cures
of the plague. We witness elections that have been rigged
and stolen and note corruption in high places that seems
unprecedented. We see wars that have been fought for no
useful purposes and thoughtless surrenders that only accentuated
their stupidity. We experience legislation in democratic
countries that remind one of the practices of totalitarian
regimes. We see honest people and reputable professionals
censored by monopoly media and digital platforms and deprived
of their livelihoods. We face mobs of co-opted citizens,
fearful and manic, who resemble the brainwashed masses
in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and the
film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Every day
there are a plethora of new reports of dissimulation,
atrocity, depravity, crime, and social breakdown that
have become standard fare. The News changes from day to
day and even within the same day, and yet it is almost
always the same. “Hot button” is cold coffee
and “topical” differs only in particulars,
remaining generic and fundamentally indistinguishable,
part of a ditto realm. We are captive, as Canada’s
premier columnist Rex Murphy writes, to “the morbid
isms of our time” of “confected scandal and
demonstrations” that characterize “the imperial
reach of this timid and repressive age.”
In a world
torn asunder by violence, cruelty, and corruption, the
question of evil, addressed by philosophers and theologians
for millennia, is unavoidable. We tend to use the word
indiscriminately, as a catch-all phrase and verbal convenience
devoid of substantive content and analytic rigor. Is what
we call “evil” a concept of the human mind,
a descriptive term that applies to impulses, acts, and
events that issue in various forms of suffering in both
the world of man and the world of nature? Life in nature,
including predatory disease, is essentially predicated
on the digestive tract—“this munching universe,”
as Lawrence Durrell called it. Death is the operative
principle. Life in the human world is a theater of greed,
deception, hatred, and murder recognized by the Ten Commandments,
a list of axioms that have proven largely unable to counteract
the bloodbath of history and the pathological compulsions
of the individual psyche.
In this sense,
what we call “evil” is inherent in the Creation,
as it were, accidentally. But the selective panorama of
existence as a sphere of menace is not “evil”
in the metaphysical or canonical sense. The word is a
function of language in extremity, a way of designating
what we abhor, fail to understand, and wish were otherwise,
a subjective response to things we find unacceptable.
Or is evil
something objective, a pure yet tangible absence, “a
deviation from some absolute standard of goodness,”
as John G. Stackhouse Jr. puts it in his fascinating study,
Can God Be Trusted: Faith and the Challenge of Evil?
The early Christian Gnostics, of whatever stripe, believed
that the universe had been created by the Devil masquerading
as a paternal god, or that the Throne of Heaven had been
usurped by the Prince of Darkness in that infinitesimal
moment when God blinked. The Demiurge then proceeded to
feast upon the fear and agony of every living thing, and
especially on the confusion and terror inherent in human
consciousness.
For those
who believe that evil is not merely a descriptive term
but an actual reified entity or material force, like magnetism
or gravity, who are convinced that the Devil really exists,
that there was a “war in heaven,” as John
portrays it in Revelation 12, and that the great dragon,
“that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan,
which deceiveth the whole world” was cast out upon
the earth to persecute the spirit of life, fertility,
and hope—for such people the question of theodicy,
“the vindication of divine goodness and providence
in view of the existence of evil,” arises to trouble
the mind.
Such is the
core issue for Christians. If God has foreknowledge of
all that is to come, “for a time, and times, and
half a time,” He knows in advance that Adam and
Eve, free will notwithstanding, would inevitably sin,
that Cain would kill his brother, and that human history
would unfold upon a path of physical and moral destitution.
And if He knows all that impends before the event and
if His knowledge is intrinsic to His Creation, then man
is not free and the dilemma is unanswerable. Alternatively,
if God is the “ground of being,” a source
and power the precedes being itself, as Paul Tillich asserts,
this is not a comforting possibility since it absolves
God of moral responsibility for what occurs within being
itself, like an artist, as James Joyce wrote, who remains
“invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent,
paring his fingernails.” (One thinks of the Enlightenment
philosopher Baruch Spinoza who believed that human values
and moral norms could not be derived from an impersonal
God who is the universe itself.) Finally, the ostensibly
consoling thesis that suffering, pain, and death are a
kind of redemptive gift, the means by which the human
spirit educates itself toward goodness and moral triumph,
seems an indulgent attempt to extricate oneself from the
paradox.
For many Jews,
God died in the Holocaust. How can one revere and worship
a Divine Father who watched six million of his innocent
people, infants, children, the young and the elder, turned
into ash, soap, and lampshades? “How can Jews believe
in an omnipotent, beneficent God after Auschwitz?”
wrote Richard Rubenstein in After Auschwitz; “The
idea is simply too obscene for me to accept.” Elie
Wiesel in Night presents a more nuanced view.
“Never shall I forget those moments which murdered
my god and my soul and turned my dreams to dust,”
he laments; yet, “I did not deny god’s existence,
but I doubted his absolute justice.” Theodicy fails.
Theologians
have labored mightily to unravel the mystery of evil,
but without much success. Is God then responsible for
human suffering, or merely indifferent to it? Is God,
as Nietzsche proclaimed, dead, that is, as an object of
belief and naïve confidence or as a guiding principle
in human history? Or is He merely absconditus, as we read
in the Vulgate version of Isaiah 45:15 (Vere
tu es Deus absconditus—“Truly, You are a God
who hides Yourself”), and taken up by Aquinas and
Luther to account for God having grown bored with the
travails of nature and the absurd and dispiriting antics
of man? Is Luther’s reconsidered “theology
of glory,” the rediscovery of an estranged God,
even plausible? Is the Devil actually among us, determining
the course of events? Is evil real? Is Henri Blocher right
in Evil and the Cross when he lays it down that
“Evil is not to be understood, but to be fought.”
But how is evil to be vanquished when the combat is ultimately
asymmetrical?
There can
be little doubt that evil is afoot in the world, but what
is it? How do we come to terms with the nature of evil,
the basic structure of a feral universe, which escapes
our conceptual nets and leaves only a shadow behind? We
are properly concerned with specifics, with the traumatic
issues of the day, but these are only aspects of the Big
Picture. The question persists. Is “evil”
merely a linguistic abstraction for what we find malefic
and incomprehensible? Or is evil a concrete fact, like
a virus that has been released into the Creation and into
the soul of man, the ultimate “gain-of-function”
pathogen? Absolute faith in God and endless moral striving
appear to be the only vaccines, yet their effect is problematic
and, for many, unworkable.
What I am
doing here is advancing a set of humble observations and
thoughts. The subject is perennial and has been plumbed
by minds far superior to mine in a vast library of deep
and magisterial tomes. Yet it is a subject that defeats
resolution and continues to assault every waking sensibility,
insinuating itself into all our confrontations with ourselves,
with the disruptive world of men and the killing fields
of nature, and ensuring that every minor victory of presumed
understanding or resistance is always pyrrhic and recessive.
And yet we
struggle on, a mystery equal to any other.
