Dr Evil

 

Last night two friends got into a discussion of evil. I refrained and just listened. I did notice this, that they restricted themselves to human behavior and human motivation, freedom, responsibility, etc. This focus provokes my Gnostic side, which sees humans as much the victims of the cosmos as perpetrators of evil within it.

One of the typologies of human beings in Gnosticism is the triad: hylic, psychic and pneumatic, or the materialists, the ensouled, and the spirited. Hylic humans live in an entirely material world, dominated by "the iron law of death." Survival is their driving motive and they share a great deal with animals. Psychic humans concern themselves with morality, seeking meaning and salvation in forms of goodness. The classical Christian tension between faith and works is typical of these folks. The spirited humans, who are capable of Gnosis, transcend domination by either death or the law because they come to know who they most deeply are.

Be that as it may (!), one of the assumptions here is that humans find themselves already "thrown" into a cosmos, a planet, an ecosystem which, IMHO, makes evil unavoidable. Whatever species or individual within a species survives does so by struggle and competition. This includes battles both within and without the species or group for food and mating. Winning and losing are inherent. Food alone means that organisms must eat one another...very often alive. From the point of view of the ingested species, this is probably "evil".

Almost all Gnosticism is Adamic, that is, it arises within religions whose creation myth concerns the creation of Adam by a single Creator God. (There is a kind of gnostic tradition that is Hermetic.) Dualisms, like Zoroastrianism, or polytheisms, where the ruling deities are themselves subject to a higher impersonal force, or any of the monist and dharmic traditions coming from India do not develop gnosticism. This is because the problem of evil which provokes it only arises in the tension between a unitary creator of ultimate goodness, knowledge and power and a fragmented creation combining both ordered beauty and enforced misery.


Orthodox Christianity itself makes a token nod to the birth of evil beyond and before the human world. The backstory of Lucifer's rebellion and fall shows a sense that a transhuman spiritual power was already in existence when Adam was made.

 In Isaiah 14

 ¹²How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
 ¹³For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
 ¹⁴I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
 ¹⁵Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

Who, after all, was that serpent in the Garden and what made him a spoiler?

Gnosticism pushes the issue both farther back and further up, so to speak, by situating the primal Fall within the Godhead itself, prior to creation. It makes creation a direct result of that intradivine Fall. In a way, the Gnostic does not have to solve the problem of evil, but the problem of good! Why, in a world which is originally a kind of unplanned catastrophe, does good exist?

(If I may be overtly narcissistic for a moment, I am amused by the tension --some might uncharitably call it contradiction-- between my championing (for others!) classical Christian orthodoxy of the Roman and Byzantine kind while more than dabbling in what may be Christianity's oldest heretical challenger, Gnosticism. But what can you expect from a blogger who derides friendly liberals because they resent a more sacral translation of the liturgy and then follows it up with pictures of the male of the species in flagrante delicto with each other?



As a matter of fact, my interests may be internally incongruent, but I am not at all the first homoerotically inclined traditionalist. More on that another time.)

Back to evil. Just to say, with a nod to philosopher John Kekes, who made it clear for me, that human life always takes place within a context of scarcity, contingency and struggle. No choice about that. The occasional messy outcome would hardly be a surprise.