The Right Revd. Dominic Walker
Bishop of Reading & Member of the Church of England Working
Party on the Ministry of Healing
Download this article as a PDF
file
Information about viewing PDF documents
with Adobe Acrobat
Introduction
In Jewish mystical writings, evil is viewed as a necessity
because without it, there would be no free will for choosing
goodness rather than evil, and from earliest times in the Christian
church, the victory over evil through the resurrection has been
proclaimed by the deacon at the Holy Saturday liturgy. It probably
dates from the middle Ages and is sung to one of the finest chants
in the Latin liturgy. It contains the words:
O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, Which gained for us
so great a Redeemer! The power of this holy night Dispels all evil,
washes guilt away, Restores lost innocence, brings mourners joy.
Night truly blessed when heaven is wedded to earth And man is
reconciled with God.
O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam. It would seem
that Christians have often regarded evil as necessary because it
allows the goodness, forgiveness and redeeming love of God to be
demonstrated. St. Paul takes a similar line in his letter to the
Romans (6:1). He sees the free gift of forgiveness and
justification as the way in which God shows us his glory. The logic
is, of course, that we should go on sinning in order to continue to
receive God's amazing grace! But Paul spots this and writes,
'what then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order
that grace may abound?' 'By no means', he answers; and yet
many have come to know God through evil done by them or to them.
Early preaching about Mary Magdalene taught that she could not have
loved her Lord so much if she had not been forgiven so much, but
she could not have been forgiven so much if she had not sinned so
much.
At a somewhat cynical level, we know that if we lived in a
perfect world without evil or pain, we would be in heaven and not
on earth, or if we were on earth without any evil, we would all be
out of jobs! Whether evil is necessary or not, people have come to
accept it as part of living in the real world; but it does present
problems for those who accept some sort of metaphysics which finds
supreme goodness at the heart of all things.
The Problem of Evil
Evil, is of course a problem for all people, religious and
agnostic alike, in that it touches us all. People have been led to
try to define it, investigate its source, view it as a problem or
as a mystery, and to find ways of avoiding it and dealing with
it.
One way of dealing with the problem is to think of God as a
finite or limited Being, so that God is known to be good in his
nature and intent but limited in what he is able to achieve.
The absentee landlord God is another solution. He has arranged
the world and its laws, provided the solutions for us to discover,
and waits in heaven for those pilgrims who have made satisfactory
progress. Until then, you're on your own. But neither of these fits
well with the Christian revelation of a personal God.
Plato and Thomas Aquinas shared similar views of evil as
non-being. They saw God as all-perfection and complete Being and
below him there is a scale of things that are less real and
therefore less perfect (shades of Aristotle's gradation from Form
to Matter). At one end of the scale there is God who is absolute
reality and perfection and at the other end is evil and non-being.
Evil is thus an absence of good and is either an illusion or simply
necessary in order that good may be seen by way of contrast. There
are variations on this theme of tackling the problem of theodicy
and saying, for example, that you have to have dark colours in a
painting or you wouldn't be able to appreciate the bright colours,
so life has to have both evil and good to appreciate the good.
Augustine dealt with the problem by means of a metaphysical
dualism. He said there were two primal and opposing principles of
good and evil, with roughly the same ontological status. He
believed that God is necessarily good, so the search for the cause
of evil must begin elsewhere and he located it in the freewill of
human beings. And he defined evil as a corruption of the good and
developed a controversial metaphysical doctrine of privation.
Although he saw evil as a privation, he nevertheless saw it as
real. He believed that even so, a good God can use that evil for
his own ends that are always good.
St. Thomas Aquinas built on the theodicy of Augustine although
for Aquinas, the arguments for the existence of God were separate
from the problem of evil. He believed that the proofs for the
existence of God were convincing and that evil was not consistent
with such a God; there had to be a solution to the problem, though
he couldn't provide it.
Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Scientists, had a
scale with God and Truth at one end and Evil and Falsehood at the
other. She wrote, 'both sin and sickness are error, and Truth
is their remedy' (Bowker 1997:218). For her, health, happiness
and holiness are restored not by going to doctors or psychiatrists
but by applying the rules of divine harmony. She wrote, 'all
reality is in God and his creation, harmonious and eternal. That
which he creates is good, and he makes all that is made. Therefore
the only reality of sin, sickness or death is the awful fact that
unrealities seem real to human, erring belief, until God strips off
their disguise'. Truth is thus the remedy for evil because
evil isn't real; it's an illusion.
John Hick, who wrote Evil and the God of Love (1968)
sees Christianity as being 'mythologically true', by which I assume
that he does not believe it as an historical truth but as a means
of what he calls 'soul-making'. He sees humans as having an
autonomy and independence from God so that they are able to enter
into a relationship with him. He says it is this independence and
free will that can get us into trouble and evil but by so doing, we
show moral effort, which directs us back to God and his ultimate
good purposes. If there were no evil we would not be able to make
moral choices and would therefore be incapable of moral growth and
development. In other words, Hick sees life as a 'vale of
soul-making' because there is some future good that makes
acceptable all the pain and evil that has been necessary to achieve
it. In other words there must be some ultimate meaning in the evil
we encounter but we cannot know it yet.
Dualism, monism and despotism are the Eastern ways of coping
with evil and certain of these beliefs are reflected in some Jewish
and Christian cosmologies and theologies. Whilst Zoroastrianism has
a dualistic world-view, it nevertheless believes that good will
triumph over evil. Monism believes that the world is composed of
one sort of stuff, the fundamental nature of which is neither
mental nor physical. Monistic religions, such as Advaita Vedanta,
teach that there is only one underlying substance, so that despite
the multiplicity of appearances, good and evil are in effect one.
Some religions seek to achieve this as a spiritual reality. For
example, in Zen the ultimate aim is to experience the ordinary
objects and events of this world with similar wonder and delight so
that all distinctions, good and evil, pleasure and pain, life and
death are transcended in an all-embracing oneness.
Some Christians would see this as pure escapism, a desperate
attempt to find oblivion by which heart and mind are spared the
reality of evil. But for psychologists of religion, Zen has a
particular interest. The state of satori represents an
intensification of consciousness, that is a deeper self-realisation
and a search for self-redemption. In other words, this not an
escape from pain but an entering into it.
The events of 11th September have led many to have
another look at the nature of evil, particularly when carried out
by religious adherents who are prepared to die for what they
believe is a fight against evil. The inevitable backlash in the
media is to try and exclude religious belief from civil life,
whether politics or education. The result is to push religion to
the margins where it is in danger of becoming even more extreme and
dangerous, rather than trying to integrate it, and its mainstream
humanitarian and spiritual values into civil life.
Evil is a particular problem for those who belong to a
monotheistic religion. How can there be evil in the world if there
is a good and loving God? Or as people ask, 'why does God allow
it?' If God is omnipotent (that is, able to do anything
logically possible) and omniscient (that is, able to know
everything logically possible to know) and perfectly good, then
could he not, if he chose, prevent evil, because an omniscient God
would know how to and a good God would choose to do so. These are
clearly serious objections to belief in a loving God and many have
rejected faith after finding no satisfactory answer to the problem;
others have wrestled with theodicy and Christians in particular
have found something of the answer in the cross and a suffering
God.
I now want to move from the philosophers to the psychologists.
Eduard Spranger (1882-1963)
The German psychologist and educationalist Eduard Spranger
attempted to discern certain patterns in the way in which young
people grow in religious faith (Spranger 1924). Looking at those
from a moderate religious background, he observed that it is in the
second decade of life that an inner life begins to emerge. Spranger
saw three stages of development.
- The first stage is marked by newness, when long-familiar
objects and ideas seem to take on a new depth of meaning and
significance. This usually comes about through the discovery
of a truly, living religious tradition.
- This stage is followed by the second when this newfound
experience is often followed by denial and unease. It may
result in a rejection of the family's religious tradition in an
attempt to be faithful to the new personal religious
experience.
-
This new found religious experience may also be followed by
disappointment with the deeply moving transforming experience not
being sustained. Carl Jung describes this in his autobiography,
Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. He is tortured by the
thought that he had committed some terrible sin - possibly the
unforgivable sin against the Holy Ghost, following his
disappointment with his confirmation. In others, the inner turmoil
is between heart and heart, when the newfound personal experience
is in conflict with scientific and positivistic values, as with
miracles and the contradictions in the faith. Finally, there is the
problem of theodicy; how can we live with the paradox of a personal
God and the experience of evil? It becomes a crossroads, and may
lead to disassociation or the ability to live with the paradox.
- Spranger saw the second stage as essential preparation for the
third stage, the establishment of a personal and relatively
enduring perspective. The Christian youths who were Spranger's
subjects ended up in different places. Some became indifferent to
religion (although Spranger suspected that there was an underlying
faith of some sort); others broke from traditional Christianity
into a personal religiosity of an entirely different kind and
others into a reconstructed Christian faith by either returning to
the faith of their youth or combining it with their own selections
and reinterpretations. In all three groups, Spranger found a
conviction that they had found the truth for themselves.
Unfortunately, Spranger doesn't look much at his fourth
stage of maturity and how those who have embraced the
Christian faith manage to live with the problem of evil. He does
say, however, that while new themes that challenge faith are rare,
new depths are discovered, although 'in the religious realm, a
final state of equilibrium is almost never reached'.
William James (1842-1910)
William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, took
the view that the way we deal with evil depends on our
temperamental disposition. Like those who believe you can divide
the world into two types - those who would like to be millionaires
and those who are - James saw people as either healthy-minded or as
sick souls. The healthy-minded, he said, saw the world as
fundamentally good and in the religious sphere they respond with
grateful admiration and a desire for union with the divine. In
contrast, the sick souls are peculiarly sensitive to life's' ills.
Struck by the precariousness of existence, the problem of suffering
and the inevitability of death, they actually find evil to be a
dimly lit clue to the meaning of life. What James says, is that for
people of that kind who are purely naturalistic, life is bound to
end in sadness if not also anxious trembling; but when suffering is
seen to have an immortal significance, the soul beaks through its
melancholy with new found zest or even ecstatic rapture.
Of the healthy-minded, James that they have an incapacity for
suffering and therefore deal with evil by ignoring it. He says that
we all do this to some extent, because if we could really grasp the
scale of the world's suffering or even think of the pain of the
slaughterhouse we would not be able to eat and live.
James has a soft spot for the sick souls; although they may be
neurotic to a degree, they are able to embrace the broader range of
experience, incorporating the genuinely evil aspects of reality and
thereby being open to the deepest levels of truth. James cites St
Augustine, John Bunyan and Tolstoy as examples of sick-souls.
James saw the healthy-minded and the sick souls as being on
either side of the pain threshold, the healthy-minded 'on the
sunny side of their misery line' (James 1902:115) and the sick
souls 'in darkness and apprehension'. He went on to
suggest that they needed different kinds of religion. Adapting a
term used by Cardinal Newman's younger brother Francis, William
James describes the healthy-minded as 'once-born', for whom the
world has one story only. The sick souls he describes as
'twice-born' because the world is a 'double-sided
mystery'. For them, life appears a deception and a cheat until
there is a conversion or realisation of new truths and the
gloriousness of God, so that evil is no longer a stumbling block,
since they have overcome the pain within themselves and found
joy.
Carl Jung (1875-1961)
Jung (1956) deals not so much with cosmic evil but with personal
evil that may be represented as negative experiences in childhood,
qualities we wish to deny, animal tendencies inherited from our
infrahuman ancestors and shielded from view by the persona we are
expected to present to others.
For Jung, the first step towards self-realisation or
individuation consists in acknowledging and integrating the shadow,
which consists not just of all the reprehensible qualities that the
person wishes to deny but also qualities that have not been
developed and which may indeed turn out to be good. The shadow
begins at our feet but we have to recognise it because the more
that it is disassociated from conscious life, the more it will
display a compensatory demonic dynamism to be projected upon
others. The image of the devil and the serpent, as well as the
doctrine of original sin, represents variants of the shadow
archetype.
In Jung's other archetypes there are religious symbols of
darkness or evil. The anima has occult connections with mysteries,
with the world of darkness and can appear as a serpent. The mother
archetype can be symbolised as the witch or the dragon and the Wise
Old Man is capable of working for evil as well as good. Jung
rejects the orthodox teaching about the Trinity because it lacks
evil and the feminine (although theologians have suggested that the
Holy Spirit is feminine). He says that the church has cast out
Satan and so there is no opposition to be confronted from the
shadow within.
Although Jung tends to go beyond the interface to cross the
boundaries of psychology and theology (to the annoyance of both
psychologists and theologians), he does provide us with valuable
insights in confronting and integrating evil. The concept of the
shadow enables the individual to face the darker side of themselves
and it has wider implications. The idea of the collective shadow
gives us insights into how groups and societies can work and affect
our political and social lives. For Jung, evil is a matter of
imbalance and not privatio boni (the privation of good)
because good can only have meaning when it can be contrasted with
its opposite. Jung believed that evil distorts the process of
individuation and that whilst it is a relative thing, it is still
very real.
Gordon Allport (1897-1967)
Allport represents the American humanistic tradition in the
psychology of religion and owes much to the work of William James
and to a lesser degree to Eduard Spranger (Allport 1978). He
criticised his fellow psychologists for the shallowness and
youthful arrogance that he said was evident in their neglect of
religion and in his own writings tried to demonstrate, 'the
autonomous and unifying character of the religious sentiment in
personality and the essential dependence of all human life upon
faith'.
Most of Allport's research involved Harvard or other university
students as subjects and he uses the term sentiment and
defines it as 'a comprehensive attitude whose function is to
relate the individual meaningfully to the whole of Being'.
Although his subjects were mainly young adults he recognises that
religious maturity is rarely found in adults of any age. According
to his analysis, Allport sees the mature sentiment as well
differentiated, dynamic, directive, comprehensive, integral and
fundamentally heuristic (searching).
He sees the need to cope with evil as part of achieving
integration. For the mature religious person, there is the need to
be differentiated and comprehensive, that is, to be able to embrace
a variety of experiences, objects and interests with a tolerance
that seeks truth from a variety of sources. At the same time the
mature person needs to be well integrated, holding all these things
in a harmonious whole. Allport describes this sentiment as the most
comprehensive because it 'holds everything in place at once,
and gives equal meaning to suffering and to joy, to death and to
life'. This is not to say that all are experienced equally but
that all are given equal meaning, and are experienced and not
denied.
Erik Erikson (1902-1988)
Erik Erikson (1963) sees evil as necessary for human
development. For the infant, the first real experience of pain is
teething. The mouth, until then a source of pleasure, becomes the
locus of pain. The nursing child may even bite the mother to
alleviate the pain, only to be quickly withdrawn and rejected.
Erikson likens this experience to the expulsion of Adam and Eve
from Eden. He writes, 'this earliest catastrophe is probably
the ontogenetic contribution to the biblical saga of paradise,
where the first people on earth forfeited forever the right to
pluck without effort what had been put at their disposal; they bit
into the forbidden apple, and made God angry'.
Erickson says that this early experience of evil and rejection
can be survived without too much psychological damage providing
that the earlier bonding experiences have been good and any change
is made gradually. This stage of infancy he sees as being resolved
through hope, which he says is not just the first of the vital ego
strengths but also the most basic and everlasting. Hope and its
mature derivative, he acknowledges, comes from faith, which is
often fostered by religion.
Later in adolescence, Erikson describes the conflict that arises
in the formation of identity whose cornerstone is the virtue of
fidelity, 'the ability to sustain loyalties freely pledged in
spite of the inevitable contradictions of value systems'.
Fidelity is sustained by an ideology and the need to be a ritually
confirmed member of a tribe or tradition that represents a larger
family with coherence, a creed and a definition of what is evil.
The adolescent British Muslim is easy prey for extreme groups who
will confirm their identity and win their fidelity for an ideology
that states forcefully what is good and what is evil.
The Religious Traditions
Religions with a linear concept of time tend to see the defeat
of evil as taking place at the end of time; religions with a
cyclical concept of time tend to see evil as inevitable at the end
of each cycle. So for example, in Hinduism we are in
kali-yuga the fourth and final age in the present world
cycle when disease, despair and conflict dominate, while in
Buddhism, mappo describes the period of decadence and
decline at the end of a cycle. All religions hold that good
eventually triumphs over evil.
The implication of God in suffering varies from religion to
religion. For example, in Jainism and Buddhism, there is not a God
who is responsible for creation and in Hinduism, whilst there is a
deity involved in the conquest of evil (Krishna in the
Bhagavad-Gita) there is also the doctrine of karma and the caste
system that gives further rationalisation to the problem of
suffering. However, in Islam, the control of God in creation is
strongly affirmed and in the Koran, suffering is viewed as a
punishment for sin and a test of faith and is therefore part of the
purpose of God.
In Judaism, the opening chapters of the Hebrew Scriptures recall
the myth of Adam and Eve and the punishment they receive for their
disobedience. Nevertheless, both Abraham and Job question God about
the injustice of undeserved suffering. The Jewish understanding is
to see such suffering as a means of purification, or as receiving a
reward in the next life, or else simply to accept it as part of
life being bittersweet. A rabbi friend of mine told me the story of
a group of Jewish lawyers who were in a concentration camp and they
decided to put God on trial. They found God guilty and sentenced
him to death. When they had realised what they had done, they were
silent. Silent, that is, until it came the time to pray and one of
them began to chant in Hebrew and the others joined in. My rabbi
friend said that is the Jewish understanding of suffering.
Christians, like Jews and Muslims, see evil as the result of
human sin though not entirely, because of the distinction between
moral and natural evil. The New Testament writers portray the
ministry of Jesus as bringing him into conflict with the powers of
evil and he faces evil in various ways. The biblical teaching about
evil could be summed up as follows: evil is to be hated, but it
must not be repaid or avenged personally, that it is to be
punished, and that it is to be overcome with good. Sometimes, as in
the wilderness temptations, Jesus resists evil; sometimes, he names
it for what it is and even exorcises it and sometimes he suffers it
and integrates it, as we see in the passion narratives. The
Christian understanding is centred on the cross and a loving God
who suffers with and for his people. It does not answer the
question of evil, but it offers an invitation to enter into the
mystery of death and resurrection.
Moral and Natural Evil
In Christianity, modern treatments of the problem of evil tend
to distinguish between moral and natural (or physical evil). Moral
evil is something for which reasoning human beings have to be
responsible and accountable. The argument goes that if God created
us and gave us freedom, and bestowed upon us the maturity and
dignity of choice, then he also had to allow us to commit evil. It
is not contrary to his omnipotence to encompass the contradictory.
God could not make us free and then guarantee that we would not use
that freedom. Thus the facts of moral evil are reconcilable with
the goodness and power of God. Moral evil can be the result of
deliberate acts of wrong but some is also due to ignorance,
selfishness and folly.
Then there is the difficult question of natural evil. It is
argued that evil can ennoble the character and allows people to
exercise charity. It enables us to become more human by sharing one
another's burdens. We all know that evil and pain can also destroy
people's lives. Theologians like Austin Farrer (1966), tackling the
problem of theodicy, have suggested that the pain and suffering of
this life will be taken into the next and transformed.
Response to Evil
In his book Suffering Man: Loving God, James Martin
(1969) wrote, 'the real problem of suffering is not the why,
but the how of it, not the finding of a satisfactory explanation
but the finding of the means to meet it without being
crushed'. Victor Frankl (1964) said something similar: 'it
is not that we have a problem with suffering; we have a problem
about suffering without meaning. People strive for meaning in the
evil they have done or the evil they have suffered. We all -
priests and psychiatrists - deal with those who ask 'why me?' and
the paranoid personality who says, 'It has to be me' and those who
say, 'It must be my fault'. We deal with people who have
endured terrible evil and are at peace in themselves, who have
forgiven earth for not being heaven and through their suffering
have found joy. Equally, we have met those who are bitter, angry,
vengeful and destroyed. Perhaps it is not so much that we have to
find meaning in suffering but that we have to find a way of facing
it.
When a priest reaches out to someone in pain and tells him that
God suffers with him, it may bring comfort, or he may be told that
when you fall down a well, you don't want someone to come down and
sit with you, you want someone who will pull you out! If we tell
people to read the psalms, it is because they express every form of
human emotion. The result of pain may be to reject God or to
recognise that there is nowhere else to go.
Jurgen Moltmann (1974) said, 'anyone who suffers without
cause first thinks that he has been forsaken by God. God seems to
be the mysterious, incomprehensible God who destroys the good
fortune that he gave. But anyone who cries out to God in his
suffering echoes the death-cry of the dying Christ, the Son of God.
In that case, God is not a hidden someone set over against him, to
whom he cries, but in a profound sense the human God, who cries
with him and intercedes for him with his cross, where man in his
torment is silent.'
Different religions will approach evil in different ways - in
meditation before the Buddha, crossed legged with his eyes closed
and contemplating release from the wheel of life, or before the
figure of Christ on the cross of a suffering God. When we wrote the
'A Time to Heal Report' (Chelmsford 2000), we were
criticised for not having attempted to solve the problem of
suffering and it was true that we didn't. We were aware that the
great Christian philosophers had tried but had not been totally
convincing. If we could solve the problem of suffering, we would
have solved the riddle of life itself. For Christians, suffering
remains a mystery, but a mystery into which God has also entered
and in which we can find God.
References
Allport, G.W., (1978) Waiting for the Lord; 33 Meditations
on God and Man, Edited by Bertocci, P.A. Macmillan, New York,
1978.
Bowker, J. (ed.) (1997). Oxford Dictionary of World
Religions Oxford University Press
Chelmsford, J. et al. (2000) A Time to Heal. A Report
for the House of Bishops on the Healing Ministry, Church House
Publishing, London
Erikson, E.H., (1963) Childhood and Society,
W.W.Norton, New York
Farrer, A. (1966) Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited.
Collins, London.
Frankl, V.E., (1964) Man's Search for Meaning. Hodder
& Stoughton, London
Hick, J. (1968) Evil and the God of Love. Fontana
Library, Collins, London
Jung C.G., (1956) 'Answer to Job'. In 'Psychology and Religion:
West and East. Collected Works, Vol. 11 Routledge and
Kegan Paul 1958
Martin, J. (1969) Suffering Man: Loving God, St
Andrew's Press, Edinburgh
Moltmann, J. (1974) The Crucified God, SCM Press,
London
Spranger, E. (1924) Psychologie des Jugendalters,
Quelle und Meyer, Leipzig
James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience; A
Study in Human Nature, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Mass. 1985
© Dominic Walker 2002