Cruelty in Nature and the Problem of Evil
I (along with millions of others over the
centuries) have often wondered how a Creator who is pure, absolute goodness and
wisdom could create the system of nature as we know it – some species
(predators, agriculturalists) live by killing others. To me, such things as the
dinosaurs or lions devouring a gazelle while it is still alive are powerful
evidence in favor of seeing the universe as a cold, indifferent, violent,
meaningless mistake, quite apart from the permanent problem of evil. Most of
our sufferings are perhaps self-inflicted – from war to diseases caused by
industrial food and unnatural industrial life. A just society has never
existed, or at least never existed since the advent of agriculture. Of course,
innocents are victims of our self-made disasters. God here can at best be only
indirectly responsible, freely creating us in the knowledge – if God had such
knowledge or allowed Himself to have it – that such an outcome was possible or
certain. But even subtracting suffering due to human fallibility and structural
injustice, the Creation seems flawed. For example:
•
The
dog-eat-dog aspect of survival in nature.
•
Mosquitoes.
•
Incurable
disease – especially when children suffer and die.
•
Incurable
mental illness.
•
The
worst birth defects.
•
Natural
disasters.
•
Infant
mortality and the perils of childbirth for the mother.
•
Orphaned
children.
•
The
possibility of despair.
•
For
many, mortality itself.
David
Hume's reductio ad absurdum argument against the idea of a Creator-God.
Summarized and condensed, Hume argued that an imperfect world – as this one
clearly is – must have had an imperfect Creator, assuming it was created.
Therefore, either God is imperfect, which is a logical contradiction; or God
did not create the world. The logical problem of evil claims that God's
omnipotence, omniscience and supreme goodness would completely rule out the
possibility of evil and that the existence of evil would do the same for the
existence of a supreme being.
This problem doesn't exist for a
naturalist worldview. Naturalists have other, no less intractable problems. I
will deal with naturalism at the end of this writing. First, I am to examine my
own reaction to different responses to the problem of evil.
A.
The
Origin of Predators in Watership Down
I like the myth offered by Richard Adams in
Watership Down about the origin of
meat eating, of hunter and prey, made sense to me, but I am not sure how
Christian it is. Here it is in summary.
El-ahrairah is a rabbit who lived long before Hazel and the
rest of the Watership Down Warren were born. He was the Prince of the Rabbits.
He lived with his trusted sidekick and captain of the Owsla Rabscuttle, and his
people, in a state of peace with the rest of the animals of the World. Until
one day, when the rabbits' reproduction increased out of control, Lord Frith
told El-ahrairah to maintain their numbers steadily, but El-ahrairah told Frith
that his people are the strongest in the world. Lord Frith saw this as
arrogance and told El-ahrairah that if he didn't control his people, that he
would do it. So, he gave a gift to every animal in the forest. However, with
these gifts came predators such as the dog, the cat, the wolf, the hawk, the
fox and the weasel. To each of them, Frith gave them the desire to hunt and
kill El-ahrairah`s people. Then Lord Frith bestowed a gift upon El-ahrairah and
his people. El-ahrairah was running when Frith came to see him, for he knew
that Frith was upset with him. However, Frith gave him the gifts of speed,
cunning, digging, and a good sense of hearing, and he told him that his people
no longer cover the world, but as long as they used the gifts he gave to them,
they will never perish.
The
idea is this: nature depends – like a beautiful melody – on harmony. If some
element disturbs that harmony, turning the melody into a cacophony, endangering
not only the song but its down voice in it, then there is a force that will
always strive to bring get every member of the choir back into harmony. Of course, we think that those who engineer
and control technology – with the support or compliance of the masses – we can
make our own modernist composition to replace nature’s song, and those who control
the technology will replace the force of nature. Thus those who control
technology become no only the conquerors and masters of nature; they replace
nature altogether. Now if you experience
nature as Creation, as proceeding forth from the mind and imagination of a
Creator who is altogether good – “God is love” – then this project is by
definition Satanic. The project is to limit technology and live in harmony with
nature, your fellow human beings, your soul, and the God of love. Your economy
may not look exactly like the Amish or the Shaker economies, but their
economies were serious attempts to live according to a theology of the
Creation. However, if you experience nature as a war of all against all, and
life in nature as “nasty, brutish, and short,” then that project makes sense.
Whatever people might profess, it is
clear that long ago our culture ‘voted’ for the latter – and not without
reason, I must add. The human body is perhaps the part of nature that is most
seen as raw material to be constructed according to some anti-natural model.
It’s not just sickness and death – think of all the deaths of mothers and
babies during childbirth over the centuries – but (some kinds of) feminists
hating female biology, men hating male biology, those who don’t correspond to
some physical model of beauty hating and reconstructing their bodies. The war
against aging has already been declared. We are fast approaching a threshold
where the genetic qualities of babies can be engineered and sold. Our bodies
are no different in kind from the mountaintop forest removed by the strip miner
for the coal inside. Etc.
The origin of evil was due to rabbit
hubris, to their refusal to embrace their place in nature, to recognize the
natural limits to their lives, to recognize the claims of other life forms to
exist. Frith (God) was put into a position where he could only mitigate the
disaster – a communal disaster such that the consequences fell on the guilty
and innocent alike without distinction. He mitigates it by giving the rabbits
gifts that allow them to confront their new tragic situation. Their lives take
on a tragic, heroic quality at its best. Their joys tempered but also
intensified by the evils to which they are fated to confront. Life becomes
bittersweet, the sense of life as a gift mingled with the fear that life itself
can become a living hell. I do not think this way of making sense of things
does the dirt on life.
B.
Consider this conversation from the novel
by Jostein Gaardner, Through a Glass,
Darkly, between the angel Ariel and a young girl, Cecilia, herself in the
end stage of terminal cancer and wondering why:
Ariel: ‘When you complain that God is stupid, it may be that
God is accusing himself. Or have you forgotten what he said as he hung on the
cross?’
Cecilia nodded.
Grandma had read a great deal to her from the Bible recently, but she had
forgotten that bit.
‘Tell me then!’
‘He said, “My God,
my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”’
An idea dawned on
Cecilia. She had never thought of this. For if Jesus was God, then God had
talked to himself as he hung on the cross. Perhaps he was talking to himself
when he spoke to the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane too. They hadn’t
even bothered to stay awake when he was taken prisoner.
‘”My God, my God,
why hast Thou forsaken me?”’ she repeated.
Ariel hovered a
little closer. He looked into her eyes with his sapphire blue gaze and said,
‘Just say it, Cecilia! Just say it over and over again. For there is something in the firmament that’s not
right. Something has gone wrong with
the whole of the great design.’
Earlier, this exchange had taken place, the angel Ariel
speaking first:
‘…Even though you understand only in part, I’m sure you
realise that it’s too late to alter the system of creation now.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Shall I tell you a secret?’
‘Yes, please!’
‘Sometimes when we talk about how everything is and how everything
might have been, God throws up his arms in despair and says, “I know that
plenty of things might have been a little different, but what’s done is done,
and I’m not almighty, after all.”’
Cecilia’s jaw dropped. ‘You won’t find a single priest to
agree with you about that.’
‘In either case, either the priests or God are mistaken.’
I
have had this thought long before I read this, though it is beautifully
expressed here. The cross is God’s answer to the problem of evil and the
cruelty of nature – to David Hume's reductio ad absurdum of God as the
Creator is a powerful. The angel Ariel
is telling us what for traditional theology is a contradiction: that God is not all-powerful or perfect. Perhaps God
is 99.999% of all-powerful and perfect; perhaps that .001% possibility of error
or fault is necessary for God’s freedom. Perhaps God’s nature – love – required
an open-ended outcome, not a machine. While there is a force for good (such as
nature is a force that tends to restore harmony), the Creator cannot know in
advance that his creatures will be glad of his choice to bring them into being.
They were not consulted. Life is a gift – unless it is not. He thus – like all
of us who have become parents – took on the responsibility of bringing new life
into being without any guarantee that the new life will thrive and affirm its
own existence. I am responsibility for the lives of my children in the obvious
sense that without my actions they would not exist. I am a sub-creator, so to
speak. For the angel, the thought of
choosing whether you were created makes no sense:
Neither you nor I have had such a choice, so it’s not worth
talking about. Besides, it must be better to look over the firmament one single
time than not to experience anything at all. Those who are not yet created have
no claim to be created either.
To
which Cecilia – dying as a young girl of cancer – replies:
But maybe they’d prefer not to be created than to live for
only a short while. If they hadn’t been created, they wouldn’t know what they
were missing, you see.
But unlike human parents, God is
responsible not only for individual children but ultimately for the world
itself. This puts God on the dock, a thought perhaps even more out of tune with
how traditional theology imagines God than the idea that God is less than
absolutely all-powerful and perfect. For me the most powerful expression of
this thought is found in Dostoyevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov, spoken by Ivan. He does not wish to doubt God’s
existence; he even is willing to accept whatever divine plans there are for
punishing evil and comforting those adults who suffer. Adults. He accuses and
rejects God the Creator on behalf of all the evil done to children.
“But then there are the children, and what am I to do about
them? That’s a question I can’t answer. For the hundredth time I repeat, there
are numbers of questions, but I’ve only taken the children, because in their
case what I mean is so unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay
for eternal harmony, what have children to do with it? Tell me, please. It’s
beyond all comprehension why they should suffer and why they should pay for the
harmony. . . . It’s (i.e. the Creation of the world) not worth the tears of
that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and
prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its tears to ‘dear kind God’!
Ivan
is right. For myself, I can only see my life as a gift, however poorly I have
used it. I have in rare, precious moments felt the joy and wonder over life and
the Creation. But if someone asked me ‘Is your wonderful life worth the price
of even one tortured child?’, I would have to answer in the negative. Even if
the tortured child – of the child dying of cancer – ends up in Heaven, to
create a world in which such a horror even happened to one child in order that
others may have life. I also recall a scene from Ellis Peters’ Cadfael
mysteries, where a young nun and tutor was raped and brutally murder. Gazing at
her corpse, her friend and student asked where God was while she was being
raped and murder. Cadfael gave the only answer he could: he was noting all and
making a place for her beside him. But for Ivan, God created a universe in
which an innocent young woman was brutally raped and murdered. Punishing the
murderer-rapist and comforting the nun with Heaven don’t erase what happened.
And of course, it is not only one child.
It’s like a sacrifice: Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter so that the Greek
army could sail to make war on Troy. Or like a military commander, having to
send some soldiers to a gruesome death to save others. Military commanders are
in the situation they are in; they can’t help it and must act. God the Creator
determined whether – or not – the whole universe would exist: to be or not to be, that was the
question. To return to Through a Glass,
Darkly, this is how Cecilia and Ariel understand it:
‘I don’t know whether I want to talk any more at all.’
Instantly Ariel stopped swinging his legs. He said, ‘You are bitter, Cecilia.’
‘What if I am?’
‘That’s why I am here.’
She stared down at the floor. ‘It’s just that I can’t
understand why the world couldn’t have been created a little differently.’
‘We’ve talked about that already. I’m sure you’ve tried to
draw something well many times, but then it turned out slightly different from
what you had in mind.’
‘That happens nearly every time. That’s what’s exciting about
it – you don’t know exactly what it’ll turn into to.’
‘But then, you haven’t complete power over what you draw.’
Cecilia didn’t answer. After a long silence she said, ‘If I
were to draw something, and I knew that what I was drawing would come alive, I
wouldn’t have dared to draw anything at all. I’d never have dared to give life
to something that couldn’t defend itself against all those ambitious coloured
pencils.
The angel shrugged
his shoulders. ‘In any case, the figures you drew would have understood only in
part. They would not have seen fact to face.’
She gave a deep
sigh. ‘All these mysteries of yours are beginning to get on my nerves.’
‘Pity. Because
they’re not meant to.’
Again,
God in the dock. Was it responsible to give being to creatures capable of
terrible evil and terrible suffering without being able to take responsibility?
Without being able to ensure they would thrive as you wished and intended?
(Again, the parallel to the question faced by lovers: do we wish to pass on the
gift of life though we know we cannot be certain and can do little to prevent
the possibility that our child will end up cursing the day it was born?)
Indeed, appealing to the mystery of it all can seem a weak answer to a child
dying of cancer.
The most extreme expression of this
theology is found in James Miles reading of the Bible (in Christ, A Crisis in the Life of God), taking ‘God’ to be one
character from Genesis to the passion
and resurrection of Christ. The cross
was God’s answer to these accusations: he found himself guilty as charged and
suffered the worst punishment that mankind could imagine as penance. The
crucifixion was, in effect, the suicide of God, his taking the sins of the
world on himself, taking responsibility for them. This is God’s answer to
Cecilia, Ivan, and the friend of the murdered nun in Cadfael.
I said Ivan was right. I acknowledged that
this theology has a powerful hold on me. But something in me cannot yield to
it. Any world version that does the dirt on life – as this one arguably seems
to – is not really nourishment for the soul, not the bread of life. I have no
answer: the ‘mystery’ is indeed a mystery, if you accept the idea of a Creator,
but I feel sympathy for Cecilia’s attitude toward such mysteries. Still, the
cross as God’s atonement for the Creation – that borders on a nihilism, a becoming conscious of the thought that it
would have been better had the Creation never happened. If God despairs, what
should we do?
From a different perspective, if God had
not at least denied himself the fore-knowledge of how men would act in their
freedom – if sense can be made of that – then perhaps nothing could have been
created, nothing free at least. And for the worst case – like Frith in the
Watership Down account – seems to have built in a bottom to the universe beyond
which fallen man cannot fall. Spiritual laws as rigid as any law of gravity.
Here are examples of negative ones.
•
Condemn
another soul and you condemn your own soul.
•
Evil
always sows the seeds of its own destruction.
•
When you
give alms, let not the right hand know what the left is doing.
•
Laws are for man; not man from the law.
•
And violation of the dignity of another human
being harms your own soul.
•
To
refuse to care about truth condemns you to live an illusion and miss the
purpose of your life.
•
Feed the
hungry or be cursed in your own life.
•
To it
easier to thread a needle with a camel than for the rich to love justice,
truth, nature, man, their own souls, God. You cannot serve two masters.
•
The
coward dies many times before his death.
•
Those
who enslave another person take half their soul away, and thereby lose their
own.
Like
the rabbits in Watership Down, we have not been abandoned. Like the
rabbits in Watership Down, our lives win in intensity – become
quest-like – precisely because of the possibility of hell on earth. But if God
had perfect knowledge of what he was doing when he created man (i.e. man and
woman) capable of falling into a form of consciousness that cut them off from
nature, each other, truth, justice, love, their own souls, and God, then the
only reply to Ivan and indeed Cecelia is that 'He judged it good', and we
either have faith in this judgment in spite of the worst, or not.
C.
The Dualistic Solution
There a very many religions and
philosophies based on dualism: from the Christian Gnostic heresy to
Manicheanism to Cartesian metaphysics. What they all have in common is: the
division of reality into material nature (including the body) and a spiritual
realm.
i.
Gnostic
/ Manichean religion and philosophy. God is radically opposite matter or matter is even evil,
only the spirit being good. So one way
to get God out of the dock is simply to maintain that God has nothing to do
with nature; is just to label nature –
material nature – evil, for example, the work of a lesser, evil god, a realm of
darkness and sin. Perhaps the beauty of nature would be like the seductive
façade of a seductress. Nature is the realm of death and decay. It is a realm
of illusion, lacking full reality. It is a shadow of the spiritual world. Thus
in every human being the war between matter and spirit, light and darkness, is
enacted: “alas, two spirits live inside my breast” as Goethe’s Faust puts it.
To the extent to follow the body – craving the pleasure of the table or sex –
we lose our souls, become pure bodily ego. Sex in particular is evil because
through it the soul is farthest removed from its spiritual nature becoming pure
material. And because through it new souls come to be imprisoned in a body. The
real self, the soul, is not only radically separate from the material body that
imprisons it. We see this war between flesh and soul expressed in Shakespeare’s
sonnet 146:
j.
poor soul, the centre of my sinful
earth,
[......] these rebel powers that thee
array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer
dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly
gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a
lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion
spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this
excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's
end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy
servant's loss
And let that pine to aggravate thy
store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of
dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no
more.
So
shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And,
Death once dead, there's no more dying then.
The soul and the body are in a zero sum conflict. The body –
the bodily life in the world – can only flourish at the expense of the soul;
the soul can only flourish at the expense of the body (and by extension,
nature). There is no compromise, no possible harmony. Some Christians even
wrongly see this as an aspect of their religious belief system – 'my kingdom is
not of this world,' Jesus said. Birth is the imprisoning of the soul in the
body as a fall. The point of life is to escape the body and the material world
– the cycle of birth and death. That is not a Christian idea.
This world
version gets God off the hook, either by making a demon the author of nature or
simply cutting any ties between God and the material universe. But again, it
does the dirt on life. Our lives are bodily, a part of a vast material and
biological matrix. And my soul is not independent of my body; the thought that
it is seems nothing but the expression of a hatred for my body. The idea of my
soul as imprisoned in this body, which itself is imprisoned in the
concentration camp of nature – terrifying to me. It seems a betrayal of nature
and body to see their beauty (in health) as seductive mask. Dualism is often
associated with women hating, because it is sex-hating and the beauty of a
woman (especially when it comes with goodness) gives rise to erotic feelings.
To see nature as the gnostic sees it is to see a whore in every woman. It is to
see nature without a trace of love, as an enemy to be conquered, as a woman to
be raped, as a dungeon to be liberated from. The earth as sinful – that thought
is sinful. Surely it is a theology of the devil. Within the Creation, as
Goethe’s Mephistopheles says it:
Ich bin der Geist,
der stets verneint,
Denn alles, was besteht,
ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht;
Drum besser wär's, dass nichts
entstünde.
I am the spirit that negates.
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly;
'Twere better nothing would begin.
ii)
Platonism. Dualism attracted Plato. He portrayed Socrates as being
completely without fear of death, of regarding the fear of death almost as a
form of ignorance, bordering on superstition. Death, on the contrary, may be
one of the greatest blessings of the soul, a liberation from the body that
would drag it down to death and darkness. Socrates' last words on earth also
express a Gnostic attitude toward the life of the body. “Crito, we owe a cock to Asklepios - Pay it and do not
neglect it” Asklepios was the God of
healing. Socrates wants to thank the God because in his mind he is being healed
of a disease by dying, the disease being life in the material world. The
point of philosophy, for this version of Socrates, is to prepare the soul to
leave the body and cut the bodily chains that attach it to this world. This is
the true source of Socrates' famous irony. Nothing that happens in the cave of
the world with its shadows on the wall matters except the philosophical journey
that increasingly detaches the soul from it. From Socrates' position outside
the cave and its illusion, he sees what happens in the world – apart from his
attempts to separate people from it through philosophy – as though a spectator
at a bad play, the actors not realizing that they are acting. They do no know
themselves. Platonism is not Stoicism, but they are related in this: nothing
that happens in the interpreted world can harm the soul of an enlightened man,
for the soul is not of the world.
iii)
Cartesianism. Alternatively it is a soulless, inorganic, mechanism
completely indifferent to human aspirations and void of intrinsic value. Human
beings are part nature – the body – and part soul. The material world being
nothing but science shows it to be (i.e. a soulless play of matter and force)
but the mind being autonomous, much as Milton’s Satan depicted it:
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of
hell, a hell of heav’n. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I
should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free: th’Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive
us hence: Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth
ambition, though in hell; Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n.
Whether angelic or
satanically autonomous, the spirit, the soul, your essential self, is radically
different from the body. If nature with all its sufferings – including
especially human nature with its much greater sufferings and evils – is not of
God, if God is rather like a savior from the natural realm of suffering and
death, then the problem of evil simply does not exist. It has been explained
away.
Cartesian dualism
leads straight to the project of conquering nature through technology. Nature
de-meaned is nothing but raw material obeying physical-mechanical laws that
reason can understand and then use in devising machines to harness its energies
and transform its matter into whatever serves some human objective: “And
thereby make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.” We – some
of us anyway – will make nature server our wishes like a slave – not wishes
informed by deepest wisdom, but natural, everyday wishes from having plenty to
eat and treating diseases to accumulating wealth to eliminating the
enfeeblement of old age.
The problem with
this world version – the world version that most dominates our lives – is what
“man's conquest of nature” really means. In practice it always means the power
of some men over nature, and thus over other men and future generations. In
this world, the control of technology means enormous wealth for those who
control it, and the primary motivation to develop and implement technology –
and a limiting influence on what technologies are developed and implemented
(and how) – is the desire for enormous wealth: greed, in other words. And this
means: it is not motivated by – not limited by – any idea of the
human good. More powerful, faster, more profitable – these are the only Good in
those who have become lords and masters of nature.
What is the end
goal of this world version? Here C. S. Lewis, whose book The Abolition of
Man, is still the clearest understanding of the matter:
The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal
conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied
psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the
last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall
have ‘taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho’ and be henceforth
free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be
won. But who, precisely, will have won it? For the power of Man to make himself
what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men
what they please.
Again, the world version results is a kind of Satanic vision
of power: there is no good and evil; only power and those who are strong enough
to wield it.
Dualism had a powerful appeal to me until
I began reading Wendell Berry, whose writings over time led to a study of the
Christian theology of the body. Today dualism has practically vanished in me as
a serious alternative. I think all forms
of dualism do the dirt on our lives here on earth, and despite their power to
make sense of the negative aspects of earthly life, they can only imply a
contempt for what is at bottom lovable. [Note: rejecting this world version
does not mean I have to reject every result of technology, from toilet paper to
good dentistry. It means rejecting the stupid idea that anything goes in
technology, as long as it brings profit and power to investors and managers. It
means subordinating technological develop to the Good of human beings and the
nature they must live in relationship with. Slavery is the denial of
relationship.]
D.
The Ransom Theory and Original Sin
For perhaps most Christians – Catholic,
Orthodox, Eastern, and Protestant – what has come to be known as the teaching
of ‘original sin’ and atonement (at-one-ment) is central to their world
version. These doctrines allow an understanding of the problem of evil and a
solution to that problem that saves God’s pure goodness, justice, omniscience,
and absolute power of will.
The teaching goes like this. God created
the world “good, very good.” God created the world as a garden, a paradise.
Adam and Eve sinned. How? They disobeyed God’s command; they ate of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil. Somehow their conscious underwent a radical
inversion. No longer an angelic conscious that experiences the world as God
might, only from a finite point of view, their conscious, their filter of
experience, becomes satanic or ego-driven. Man through sin belonged in
consciousness no longer to the Creator, but to the autonomy-loving Satan. I
find the classical interpretation that the original sin consisted in this,
expressed perfectly by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in a ruling that
upheld a right to abortion (Casey vs. Planned Parenthood, 1992): "At the
heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of
meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."
Goodness itself is God, reflected in
the goodness of the Creation, including especially the goodness of man and
woman. We were made to thrive and be happy, allowed to eat the fruit of every
other tree – metaphors for the fruits of art, literature, science, craft,
gardening, philosophy, politics, music, etc. Everything humanly good. Only one
thing we could not do without losing paradise: arrogate to ourselves to
determine according to our own will what is good, true, or real – to seek to
become a god ourselves. For our nature is that of a creature, not creators
except in a secondary sense. Our task – natural in the garden – was to conform
our minds and wills to the good that surrounded us in the objective world. The
deep blue of the sky on certain days is not wonderful because me made it and
defined it as wonderful. It is just wonderful, a gift. The realistic
relationship to a gift is gratitude. Eating the forbidden fruit amounts to
becoming like Milton’s Satan:
What could be less than to afford him praise, The easiest
recompense, and pay him thanks, How due; yet all his good prov’d ill in me, And
wrought but malice; lifted up so high I ‘sdain’d subjection, and thought one
step higher Would set me highest, and in a moment quit The debt immense of
endless gratitude, So burdensome still paying, still to owe; Forgetful what
from him I still receiv’d, And understood not that a grateful mind By owing
owes not, but still pays, at once Indebted and discharg’d
Satan’s
goal was our culture's goal: autonomy. Here is the way he expressed the
philosophy that underpins Justice Kennedy’s thought:
The mind is its own place, and in itself can
make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
When man and woman took it upon
themselves to create their own reality, they became uncomfortably
self-conscious of each other’s nakedness and ashamed of it. They turned away
from and broke with the reality of the garden, and turned inward. The forbidden
knowledge of good and evil alienated man and woman from nature, from the
Creation. It made their own nature something alien, indeed shameful to them. In
consequence, all of the Creation became alien to them. And this had
consequences for all of nature. The fall of Man was at the same time the fall
of nature, of Creation. The gates to Paradise were closed. All the world was
east of Eden. Childbirth became painful and dangerous. Labor and toil become to
condition of sustaining life. Even animals began to prey on one another. All
the cruelties of nature as well as all the evil to which we are subject has its
origin the original sin. Every child born into the world is tainted with it. We
are predisposed to evil and to a hostile relationship with our own nature and
nature as such.
On the surface, this is not God’s fault.
He made us free – for God is love and only a free, self-conscious creature is
capable of love: of having God image imprinted on the soul. The first human
beings abused that freedom and all of nature paid the price. As St. Paul
memorably wrote: “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth
in pain together until now (Romans 8:22).” Disagreement as to how fallen from
grace nature is does exist. Catholics tend to see Creation still as
fundamentally good. Nature is still vibrant, wondrous, and positive. Evil is
fundamentally negative, a parasite that feeds off what is good and healthy
(whole). It is a life-denying disfiguration of what is good. We are partly
blind to the goodness of nature – we see also nature through a glass, darkly.
For many Protestants, original sin has corrupted nature and human nature. Our
will are completely unfree, prisoners of selfish and bestial desires. As St.
Paul wrote: “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak (Matthew
26:41).” In this version, nature has been made into a negative principle – as
in dualism – not by a demon or God, but by sinful mankind. By being born into
the world in bodily form, we are all by nature sinners – alienated from nature,
human nature, other human beings, and from our Creator. The point of existence
is – like dualism – to escape from this vale of tears and enter the kingdom of
Heaven. Thus many Christians understand Jesus’ words to Pontius Pilates: “my
kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).”
Yet such views exist alongside the hope
in a renewal of the Creation and human nature. And if we posit that God – as
omniscient – knew that man would face Satan and fall and yet created anyway, he
does seem to bear some responsibility. But how can evil be undone? How can man
– and the Creation itself – be liberated from the power of discordant autonomy,
of each man for himself, defining for himself what is good, true, and beautiful
by the criterion of what elevates his ego? Early Christian thinkers such as
Origen of Alexandria (185-254 A. D.) believed that human beings come under the
bondage of Satan, that spirit of negation. Sin, evil, and death are our lot
east of Eden. To liberate us, God offered Christ as ransom. Christ switches
places with us, who are held hostage by Satan through original sin.
C. S. Lewis, in my opinion, gives the
best description of this view in his fantasy novel The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe. The boy Edmund has betrayed his brother and sisters, driven at first
by resentment and then an addiction to the witches Turkish delight. When he
sees what he has done, he repents, but lacks the power to undo his betrayal.
The Christ-like lion, Aslan, offers himself in a trade, allowing the witch to
kill him. As readers of the book know, Aslan dies and then returns to life. He
gives this account of how he defeated the witch’s plan:
Though the Witch [the Satan figure] knew the Deep Magic,
there is a magic deeper still which she did not know…. If she could have
looked. . . into the stillness and darkness before Time dawned, she would have
known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a
traitor’s stead, the Stone Table would crack and Death itself would start
working backwards.
Through
the sacrifice of Jesus – part of God’s own self – the Creation can heal: first
human nature, and then the whole of Creation when Christ returns in glory.
Different churches disagree about the details of this, but the idea is that
only God himself, through the sacrifice of his son, could undo the cruelty and
evil of nature (including human nature). Indeed, the whole of nature will
change. Predatory behavior even among the animals will cease. As William Blake
put in his poem about the angels doings, Night,
drawing on an image from the prophet Isiah - "The
wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the
calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them
(Isiah 11:6)."
When wolves and tigers howl for prey,
They
[angels] pitying stand and weep,
Seeking to drive their thirst away
And
keep them from the sheep.
But, if they rush dreadful,
The angels, most heedful,
Receive each mild spirit,
New worlds to inherit.
And there the lion's ruddy eyes
Shall
flow with tears of gold:
And pitying the tender cries,
And
walking round the fold:
Saying, 'Wrath, by His meekness,
And, by His health, sickness,
Are driven away
From our immortal day.
'And now beside thee, bleating lamb,
I can
lie down and sleep,
Or think on Him who bore thy name,
Graze
after thee, and weep.
For, wash'd in life's river,
My bright mane for ever
Shall shine like the gold
As I guard o'er the fold.'
The
angel Ariel reports that something has gone wrong with the grand design. But
here that is not a function of God’s lack of perfect knowledge and goodness,
but original sin. Thus, God is not
responsible for the evils and cruelties of nature, but sacrificed himself so
that in time the original beauty of the Creation may be restored, either in a
natural or spiritual form.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten
Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting
life (John 3:16).
Still, I have my problems with this
so-called ransom theory. If, as I mentioned, God is all-powerful and
omniscient, then He must have known that man and woman would abuse their
freedom and opt for autonomy. He decided to create anyway. He must have also
foreseen the advent of Jesus and the cross. At this point, human reason simply
fails. Still, Ivan Karamazov’s question remains. Moreover, to have to see every
baby as tainted with sin – “the evil seed of Adam” as Dante expressed it in the
Inferno – does the dirt on life. Indeed, for most of the history of the
church unbaptized infants were condemned though
their very nature to Hell – not of course through their own will or any
sins they committed. This is one of the most evil theological tenants that I
know. The idea of original sin makes sense of some aspects of adult experience,
but not children, even if they are unruly at times by nature.
Finally, the idea that God would have
to suffer to cross to change our corrupt nature – to ransom us from evil –
makes little sense to me. If a son of mine commits a crime, my suffering the
punishment for him may indeed initiate changes in him. But the point is not to
satisfy some “deep magic” by finding a substitute to take the punishment for
another; the point is to enlighten the son who committed the crime, allowing
him to understand the true meaning and significance of what he has done and do
what he can to make up for it and change his life. Perhaps under circumstances
an innocent sacrifice is the only way to do that – perhaps it was the only way
to save humanity. The cross was the price God paid to be among us and reveal
his essence to us – to enlighten us. In that sense, God did sacrifice himself
out of love for us, though not because payment of an innocent life to the devil
required it. God doesn’t owe the devil anything, if indeed the devil exists (no
credo requires belief in the reality of the devil, who may also be understood
as a personification of evil. I do believe in demons, but it is not central).
In the end, though God has given us the
love and the knowledge – and the grace – to overcome evil, the fact that
cruelty and evil remain in the world still leaves us with the problem.
E.
Tolkien’s Simarillion.
Tolkien's creation myth is not man- but
elf-centered. It starts, as all creation myths must, with God, the One (Eru),
the Original father (Illuvater). God is outside of space and time, conscious in
an absolute sense (whatever that means), the personified Good, the source of
all holiness. This first creations are archangel-like beings known as the
Ainur: in Tolkien's words “rational spirits or minds without incarnation,
created before the physical world.” The Ainur took part in the creation of the
world not as primary creators but as sub-creators. Here is how Tolkien
understood their role, according to a letter draft:
They
interpreted according to their powers, and completed in detail, the Design
propounded to them by the One. This was
propounded in musical or abstract form, and then in an historical vision. In
the first interpretation, the vast Music of the Ainur, Melkor (an Ainur
relation of Lucifer) introduced alterations, not interpretations of the mind of
the One, and great discord arose. The One then presented this 'Music,'
including the apparent discords, as a visible history.
It
was as though God sounded a music theme, like the beginning of a Bach fugue,
and the Ainur proceeded to continue and vary it in simultaneous voices that all
together produced a great, complex harmony. Only Melkor, like Lucifer, desired
to be autonomous and make his own competing themes, which clashed with
the original harmonies. Then God translated music into pictures and then living
history – such that part of the whole is the discordant contributions of
Melkor. Or, to change the metaphor, it is as though God made a sketch or a
blueprint, and the Ainur made it real, including the thoughts of Melkor that
were in conflict with the original because they emanated from a center of
consciousness that had become 'ego-driven' and separated itself from the mind
of the Creator and the Ainur whose consciousness were in harmony with that of
the Creator. In any case, it is to this sub-creator that the ills and cruelties
of existence can be traced and not to the Creator.
But God is not entirely free of
responsibility. Eru and Eru alone decided to translate the great Music – all a
metaphor as it had to be make intelligible to the Elves and this is how they
were given to understand it – into the reality of history. And he did so
because He perceived that Melkor had not imposed his own will onto the Creation
but had only succeeded in making it more lovable, more beautiful through the
tragic dimension that could only have originated outside the One. The dimension
of tragedy brought out a goodness that can only be cherished by finite creators
in the face of its privation – much as we only really understand how we loved a
person or a place when they are gone. The light becomes more precious in the
face of the darkness. Life more precious in the face of death. Goodness in the
face of the absence of Goodness (evil). Being in the face of the Nothing. Thus
the world is affirmed in spite of and ironically in a sense because of
the contributions of that which would either pervert it (by molding it
according to its own autonomous – godless – will) or, failing that, destroy it.
Against his will Melkor's attempt to subvert and wrest away the design of
Creation – putting him at the center of it; making him its author and God – has
been turned back on him, has been transcended (aufgehoben in Hegel's
sense) into something more deeply good and beautiful, more affirming. A
dimension of goodness has been revealed through love and loss. “Oh death, where
is your sting?” The forces of autonomy don't create anything, but in their very
act of negating that which is real deepen its preciousness. Goethe's devil's
tone is off key, but in effect has it right:
[Ich bin] ein Teil von jener Kraft,
Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.
Part of that force
that always wills the evil and always produces the good
Paraphrased:
...that always wills either to make the world according to my will, to redefine
reality and the good as that which accords with my will; but nevertheless in
the very attempt to translate that project into reality more deeply make God's
world more precious, more lovable. That bad is thus in a sense not part of
Creation at all, that which would negate it and succeeds only in deepening love
making heroism and self-sacrifice possible. Grief itself is a profound
affirmation of the goodness of the life of the beloved person. The loving grief
of Cecilia's family in Through a Glass, Darkly is a poignant testimony
to the preciousness of her life, and by extension, of the world.
Meaning comes from loving. Love is so
beautiful because to love means to be vulnerable. To give your heart means to
risk having it broken or lost, means it will suffer grief at some point. This
fact makes loving almost sublime. To creatures of the world, a dimension
(“Heaven” in some meanings) without the possibility of loss is a dimension
without meaning. So we can return to
Ivan Karamazov’s attitude: given the torture and murder of even one child, he
refused to affirm the Creation and thus the Creator. Or less extreme, to
Gaardner's Cecilia dying of cancer. Does the knowledge that Tolkien's myth
gives us change the light in which we can think about them?
