THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
It is noteworthy that there has never been a problem of good, but
always a problem of evil. Man takes the good in his life for granted,
while he bewails the presence of evil in all its forms. The Greeks had
the myth of Pandora's box to account for the sorrows and ills which
afflict the human race; the Hebrews told of the Fall of man from his
original state of bliss to a life of toil and sin through the weakness
of our first parents and the wiles of the Serpent; the Scandinavians
sang of Loki, the Spirit of Deception, whose artful malice led to the
death of Balder, the Beautiful. And Christianity has been accustomed
to connect evil with a personal devil "who rushes about like a roaring
lion seeking whom he may devour." At his door, popular thought has
lain those temptations and backslidings that bewilder poor humanity.
Even the more physical evils, such as famine, sickness and bodily
injury, have been ascribed to his agency.
Is it necessary to say that primitive man thought of all evils as due
to mysterious potencies which surrounded him on every hand? His ritual
of purification corresponds to the signs which now surround electrical
machinery. Irrational as many of these taboos were, they yet implied
that the actual world was a strange mixture of favorable and
unfavorable potencies to {154} which man had to adapt himself. "To the
primitive mind nothing was more uncanny than blood, and there are
people still who faint at the sight of it: for 'the blood is the life,'
life and death are the great primeval mysteries, and all the physical
substances that are associated with the inner principle of either
partake of this mysteriousness." This early idea of a miasmic
contagion slowly unites itself with the belief in demons, as animistic
religion evolves. Bad demons work havoc, while favorable spirits bring
blessings to the needy worshiper.
But, as religion developed a more distinctly ethical and personal
character, the existence of evil in the world became a problem. In the
early days, it was not so much a problem as a fact. But a Jew who
believed that Yahweh controlled everything that occurred in the Kingdom
had to account for personal and social disasters in a rational way.
What was more natural than the hypothesis that those whom disasters
overtook had been guilty of some secret wrong? And it was this point
of view which was adopted. The Book of Job represents the puzzled
reflection of a late period over the difficulty of squaring the
hypothesis with the facts. And, so far as I can see, the puzzle is
handled as well as it could be within the accepted setting. The whole
treatment is deductive rather than inductive. Assume an omnipotent,
omniscient and ethically perfect deity, and it follows that, when facts
do not square with your sense of justice, you must either suspect the
individual of secret sins or proclaim that God's ways are past finding
out. In other words, the search for a theodicy leads to agnosticism.
Since you don't really know anything about the world, one hypothesis is
as good as {155} another. But agnosticism is a cheap way of
establishing a position, and is likely to suggest to the reflective
that the whole setting of theodicy is at fault. If the religious view
of the world leads to this _impasse_, may it not be better to take a
more inductive way of approach to what we call evil? May not reality
be of such a character that evil is as natural as good?
When we glance a little more closely at the Christian tradition, we
find that the popular answer to the problem of evil is by no means
unambiguous. To explain the existence of evil by the agency of the
devil (Satan, Ahriman) is a straightforward answer, quite in accordance
with the appeal to personal agency so characteristic of religion, but
it does not harmonize with the ethical monotheism which Christianity
inherited. The query will not down, Why does this omnipotent and
ethically perfect deity permit such a being to exist to work havoc
amongst his children? Even upon a casual examination, it becomes
evident that there are many strands of tradition and doctrine in
Christianity. There is the classic monotheism of the prophets, and the
more polytheistic tendencies of later times, a contrast parallel to the
sanity of classic Greece as compared with the flabbiness of Hellenistic
times.
In the New Testament, itself, there are many evidences of the
acceptance of a dualistic view of the world. Satan is the Prince of
this World. We have already pointed out that the writers of the
gospels think of Jesus as casting out demons which have infested the
bodies of men and women and made them sick. Yet, strange to say, we
are told that not a sparrow falls to the ground without God's consent.
This dualistic strand of thinking dominated during {156} the Middle
Ages. The world is given over to the devil for him to work his will
upon it. Here we have both a cause and an effect of the pessimism of
the times. For the early Christians, society was corrupt and filled
with abominations; the only sure way to achieve salvation was to flee
from its lure to deserts and monasteries, there to purge the soul of
fleshly desires. No one has painted the situation more keenly and
unflinchingly than Anatole France in _Thais_. Humanity was sick. A
strong wave of asceticism spread from the East to the West and carried
with it doctrines based on the metaphysical extension of the contrast
between light and darkness, good and evil. Matter is evil in its very
nature and leagues itself with those instincts in the soul which come
from its contamination with flesh. The taint of original sin is
deepened by the grossness of the material out of which man's earthly
tabernacle is made. The body with its passions plays double traitor to
the soul. Only by prayer, purification, fasting, and the grace of God
can the son of corruption save his soul alive for the heavenly kingdom
among the stars.
The number of mythical elements woven into this ascetic dualism is
striking. Woman was the temptress most to be feared; the daughters of
Eve were considered the most powerful instruments Satan had at his
command. It was even debated whether she had a soul. It was even
whispered that a woman guarded the gates of Hell. Again, Satan was
pictured as a demon leading the unwary astray by the desires of this
world. Ethics was an affair of external fighting for the souls of men.
The whole setting was mythical and supernaturalistic and full of
picture-thinking.
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We have already referred to the doctrine of original sin. This
doctrine was taken up by St. Augustine who had been a Manichean.
Pauline theology, Augustinianism, and Manicheism have much in common.
They are all instances of what may be called mythological metaphysics.
The dogma is, that, left to his own devices, man tends to take the path
of sin. He is, moreover, alienated from God, who, because of his
perfection, cannot condone imperfection and demands an atonement which
cannot be made by man himself. Hence, the need arises for a savior to
mediate between man and God. What a construction is this in which
myth, rabbinical theology and pagan dualistic cosmologies are drawn
together to furnish the setting for a juridical drama! How can those
who accept the teaching of modern science and realize the more
subjective and personal spirit of modern ethics conserve any portion of
this strange creation of past ages? The idea of evolution, as applied
to both nature and man, undermines the whole fantastic drama. Man has
arisen painfully from a brutish condition, instead of falling from a
perfect state. The contrast between flesh and spirit can no longer be
taken literally as corresponding to a sort of physical division of the
universe into spheres of good and evil which can have no commerce with
one another. This is ethical poetry which is not sufficiently aware
that it is poetry. Instead of seeking to re-interpret the belief in an
external, sacrificial savior, mediating between God and man in vague,
mystically symbolic language which suggests a depth it does not
possess, the sensible thing is to drop the whole outlook frankly, as
outgrown, and as having essentially lost its meaning. We saw that
Jesus, himself, would probably {158} not have comprehended its
intricacies, and certainly would not have accepted it as true of his
own mission. Instead, it represents the theosophic speculations of the
Ancient World. So long as the thinker toys with these imaginative
speculations which have no direct foundation in the knowledge and
experience of to-day, so long will he live in a mental fog unable to
see the really pressing social and ethical problems of the present.
When we once shake ourselves loose from these mythical, gnostic and
rabbinical ideas, with their legal and poetical conceptions of ethics,
and their naive picture of the world as the seat of ethical forces
struggling in a physical way against one another; when we once realize
that it is meaningless to apply ethical distinctions to matter, we are
led to press past these Hellenistic accretions to the simpler and
nobler traditions which Christianity inherited from Jesus and the
greater Hebrew prophets. Here, if anywhere, religion is in a position
to solve the problem of evil. There are passages in the New Testament
which breathe the same faith as that held by Deutero-Isaiah, a sort of
sublime religious optimism or will to believe. For the Hebrew prophet
of the exile, God is the creator and righteous ruler of the earth. "I
am the Lord and there is none else. I form the light and create
darkness; I make peace and _create evil_; I am the Lord that doeth all
these things." Such is monotheism of the creationalistic type in all
its vigor and challenging fervor. Yet the prophet speaks and thinks in
terms of world-movements and the fate of nations, and his thoughts
scarcely drop from this vast setting to consider the fates of
individuals. We should note further the absence of the poly-demonism
{159} of later Judaism and the evident impatience with the ancient
myths and the belief in a Satan or Spirit of Evil. Had Christianity
taken its departure from this high altitude, it would have been more
truly monotheistic, but it would not have been the child of its age,
and would not have been assimilated by the Mediterranean peoples. Let
us examine the implications of this bolder and simpler faith.
There can be little doubt that the position adopted by the second
Isaiah is the logical terminus of monotheism. If God be omnipotent, he
must be responsible for all the evil in the world as well as for the
good. In other words, this must be the best of all possible worlds.
He who is a king, and not a marionette, cannot beg off from the duties
of his station. To introduce Sin as a sort of hellish entity, as did
Saint Augustine, is to mar our conception of deity. We no longer have
that old Roman's courtier-like sycophancy, nor his nonchalance when
others are condemned by divine caprice to the eternal flames. What was
to him a means of manifesting God's greater glory is to us a crime
which would sully our ideal of goodness. The educated world of to-day
has at least come up to the level of the peasant-poet's indictment of
the Calvinism of two centuries ago.
Christianity is on the horns of a terrible dilemma. It has long
wavered between the bold attitude of Isaiah, softened by such devices
as apologetic ingenuity could invent, and the mythological dualism
current at the time of its birth. God must be totally responsible for
all physical evils, at least; or else he must be thwarted by something
independent of himself, whether this be an evil spirit or matter. Now
scholars have pointed out that the idea of a prolonged conflict between
a {160} good and an evil power was characteristic of the Persian
religion, and that this view tinged later Judaism and passed over into
Christianity. Here it was met and reenforced by Neo-Platonism in the
form usually called Gnosticism and Manicheism. At present, the tide
has turned in favor of monotheism and against the coexistence of an
evil power. We are inclined to smile at a personal devil, perhaps
because superstition has made him humorous, perhaps because we know
better the seat and cause of what we call evil. Science has helped to
do away with the devil; but, in so doing, has it not also undermined
the idea of Providence? Must not the same arrow transfix an effective
God that does away with an effective Devil?
The God of the past was a realistic God; he counted for everything in
the governance of the universe. The God of modern theology is fast
becoming an ideal of personality. When God is thought of as a
tender-hearted and perfect gentleman, the question of evil takes the
following form: Can we harmonize this conception with the facts of
life? _Is God an agent or an ideal_? We must bear in mind the fact
that God is an hypothesis characteristic of the religious view of the
world, and that, like every other hypothesis, it should help to explain
the facts to which it is relevant. But does it do this? Is it
fruitful?
I am free to confess that theodicies of all sorts strike me as proofs
of the inapplicability of the religious view of the world. Yet immense
dialectical ability has been displayed in the tireless search for some
satisfactory theory of God's relation to the universe. A glance at
these theories reveals the working of the time-spirit. When man is
harsh, his god is harsh and cruel. When {161} man is tender, his god
is benevolent. And this correspondence does not complete the story.
In past ages, the political organization was autocratic and unyielding.
The subjects of the monarch did not dream of questioning the justice of
his rule. It was not right for common men to think of such matters; it
was out of their sphere of control and understanding. Besides, is not
might the sanction of right? During these monarchial periods, God was
thought of as a heavenly king whose power and glory and dominion was
without end. This correspondence between the political organization
and the theological picture betrays the sociological side of theology.
All of man's ideas are human ideas, and so his idea of his God and the
very personality and moral outlook of that God reflect the social
standards which are in force around the individual. If human justice
is cruel, God's justice is strict and unyielding. What could be more
natural than this parallelism? But as punitive justice yields to ideas
of mercy and sympathy, a change comes over man's conception of this
heavenly replica of his own sentiments and institutions. Irrational
punishment with its brutal terrors gives way to thoughts of
lovingkindness.
But it is this very evolution of human morality which brings out the
problem of evil in all its distinctness. Yahweh could command whole
tribes to be slaughtered, and no one felt the least religious
discomfort. But the man of to-day, when he allows himself to think,
revolts against such heartlessness. God must be at least as merciful
as man--and man would not do these things. Yet our experience tells us
that pain and disaster are everywhere rampant in the world. How is it
that an omnipotent and noble God permits these {162} things to be? The
line of reasoning which leads to the demand for a theodicy is simple
and direct. God is a moral agent who has this peculiarity, that he can
do what he wills and is therefore responsible for all that happens.
But tragic things happen. Why did he permit them?
The various formulations of God's relation to the world turn about this
problem. The inherent possibilities are few in number and are soon
grasped and developed. If God is a limited deity, then evil can be
assigned to something else. If God is unlimited, then whatever is, is
somehow right. Let us glance at typical developments of these two main
lines of approach.
Mr. H. G. Wells has recently startled the general public by his
advocacy of a struggling deity. It is not in accordance with Christian
tradition, he admits, but it is truer to the facts as we know them.
But he might well have told the public that this view of his was not a
new one. Long before the Christian era, the Zoroastrian Persians held
just such a theory of a struggling deity combating the evil
machinations of Ahriman. The faithful were exhorted to do all in their
power to assist Ahura Mazda in his stern fight with darkness and
contamination. This dualistic view found its way West and appears in
Manicheism. It may not be well known, but it was this Manichean
conception of the world that Saint Augustine gave up at his conversion
to Christianity. Again and again, it found its way to the surface of
Western society. Who has not heard of the Cathars or Albigenses of the
Middle Ages? These people were believers in a struggling deity engaged
with the powers of evil. Some of them identified the Jehovah of the
Old Testament with this cruel {163} and malignant spirit. In so doing,
they showed an absence of all historical perspective, but, also, a keen
ethical judgment. This tribal god of the early Jews did not harmonize
with their ideals of goodness and mercy. While theirs was a darker and
more superstitious outlook than an educated man of to-day would adopt,
the logical basis of the system is essentially the same as the one
which seems to be rising to the surface in our own times as a revolt
against the smugness of traditional Christianity. The atmosphere of
religion was more somber in the past; and these Cathars would have been
shocked by the fine, careless rapture of the modern novelist; but they
would have recognized that his view was akin to their own.
It may not be amiss to mention the fact that John Stuart Mill, the
famous English philosopher of the middle of the nineteenth century,
suggested that it would be truer to the experience of human beings to
assume a God limited in power, though perfect in other respects. It is
impossible, he thought, to harmonize the attributes of omnipotence and
goodness in a divine agent, with the world as it is. This protest
against the high, deductive faith of Christian monotheism was due to
Mill's frank empiricism. Life must speak for itself, he held; it must
justify hypotheses by their agreement with it. The traditional
Christian method has been too dictatorial and too little inductive. It
has started from a set of dogmas in regard to God and spun out their
consequences, refusing to qualify these dogmas when the consequences
did not fit the tragic character of life.
The treatment of the second logical possibility is familiar ground.
Christian ethical monotheism followed {164} Hebrew religious thought in
its essentials. God is held to be an omnipotent agent who is also
morally perfect. Theology knows two forms of this dogma, the
Calvinistic or Augustinian, and the Arminian. Calvinism stands flatly
on the thesis that God is just and that, therefore, what is done is
just. Within this setting with its easy appeal to ignorance, it makes
little difference whether events are right because God does them or
whether God does them because they are right. Arminianism turns out,
when examined, to be largely an attempt to soften the absolutism of
Calvinism along certain lines. But these endless and, in the main,
sterile theological controversies reveal the artificiality of the
dogmas within which they are carried on. They are, when all is said,
only ingenious modifications and redressings of the primary assumptions
of the religious view of the world. I challenge any one to develop a
really tenable system of theology, a system which is self-consistent
and relevant to the world as we know it. I am certain that it cannot
be done. As a student of ethics, my growing conviction has for some
time been that these traditional controversies and modes of approach to
human life are barren and irrelevant, because they cast absolutely no
light upon human problems, social or personal. Modern ethics and
theology have ceased to have any genuine commerce. The one is in touch
with the sciences of biology, sociology, psychology and criminology;
the other, by its very nature, can gain nothing from these sciences.
Ethics is concrete and inductive. Theology is abstract and deductive.
I have not tried to state and criticize the numerous theodicies which
man's restless intellect has constructed. Mystics have taught that
evil is an {165} illusion. But illusions have a way of being very
real; and a derogatory term does not alter facts. Idealists have
declared that what we call evil only increases the divine harmony, as a
judicious discord heightens the effect of symphonic combinations. But
this aesthetic argument conflicts with moral relations. Surely God
would not be so self-centered. Thus there are weighty objections to
all the ingenious and profound apologies for the course of events. But
why are such apologies felt to be necessary? Simply and solely because
events are assumed to be under the control of an intelligent, moral
agent. Withdraw this assumption, and the problem vanishes.
When we turn from the religious view of the world to the scientific and
philosophical, we are immediately impressed by the different
perspective. What were theoretical problems of the most absolute and
inescapable kind cease to exist. While the religious view of the world
culminates in an attempted justification of the ways of God to man, the
scientific studies the system of things as a given whole to which all
questions of justification are irrelevant. The world is as it is, and
the category of responsibility is inapplicable. Evil becomes a
practical and relative problem. There is no thought of trying to fix
responsibility upon some personal agent who could have done otherwise
and did not. Man is a part of nature, although a self-directive
organism adapted more or less adequately to his environment. And just
because he is an organism, he must maintain himself in the face of
attacks and fluctuating changes. He is not able to claim exemption
from the consequences of cataclysms, such as earthquakes and tornadoes,
which result from the unstable balance of physical {166} energies. He
perishes in the same way that beasts and plants do, when his
intelligence is not able to find a way of escape from a sudden danger.
In other words, physical evil is evil only because it hurts man, who
does not want to be hurt. From the objective standpoint, evil and good
differ not a jot from one another. They are both causal events
baptised by man in accordance with his sympathies and antipathies.
Events are good to him or bad to him; in themselves, they are neither
good nor bad. Rain does not fall in summer in order to nourish the
plants; instead, the plants are nourished and continue to exist because
the rain falls. Once, it was hard for man to admit this impersonalism.
He wanted to find an objective purpose focusing upon his career. But
he is at last beginning to realize that his will to live and create is
the source of all values. Nature is a thing to be used for his own
desired ends.
There are no problems harder than false problems. The great
achievement is to see that they are false because they flow from a
false assumption. Remove this assumption, and the problem which
tortured the greatest thinkers vanishes into thin air. The problem of
evil becomes the problem of lessening evil by conquering nature and
rendering her subservient to man. It is a problem of engineering, of
applied chemistry, of preventive medicine, of social planning. Man
must become the master of his destiny through the instrumentality of
his intelligence. But what a different setting this presents from the
one in which primitive man existed! Then man was needy and fearful and
ignorant and helpless. Now he is wealthy, ingenious, sure of himself.
It is coming to be that man is less hurt by {167} physical agencies
than by himself. He has freed himself from his environment; he must
now free himself from his own passions and hatreds. He must love
righteousness and peace, and flee from dissension and all forms of
injustice. The problem of evil has become a social problem. It is the
task of amelioration by intelligent control.
But science, alone, will never be sufficient to meet the fact of evil.
The most optimistic believer in the possibilities of intelligent
planning and control does not deny that tragedies of all sorts will
still be only too common. Let us hope that there will be less of
tuberculosis, less of grinding poverty, less of avoidable accidents.
But will there be less of secret disappointment with life, less of
wounded affection? More will live happy and noble lives in the
healthier society which is within our power than was possible in the
past; but there will be mal-adjustments of various kinds. Individuals
will seek to control the lives of others, and this control will be
resented; friends will fall out over fancied or real wrongs; lovers
will quarrel; misunderstandings will arise. None of Shakespeare's
great tragedies turn about sickness and natural calamities. The
motives are social and personal in character, the quarrels of rival
houses, the senile pride of an old man, the ambition of princes, the
adulterous love which leads to murder. Men will need strength of
spirit and broad sympathy to meet the situations which confront them.
And many will fail hopelessly in the struggle, in the future as they
have in the past. But, on the other hand, the rank and file will lead
vigorous, active lives with a fair measure of those rewards of success
and companionship which {168} sweeten endeavor. What more is there to
say? Life is a hazard, and men must take their risk bravely. Courage
on the part of the actor will do much; sympathy on the part of those
near him will also do much; but risk there will be always.
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