The Sovereign Will

Talking of the spiral (last post) reminds me that the “problem of evil” has another dimension beyond theodicy (see Label Cloud for posts on that). I’m all too familiar with the philosophical solution that evil is “the absence of good.” We encounter it stated and restated in the great traditions. The problem with that view is that it doesn’t viscerally satisfy—an emphatic way of saying that something in the intuition rejects that answer. No, dammit, there’s more to it than that! Certain kinds of evil arising from passivity—like laziness—may be explained that way. People who are lazy certainly don’t move up the spiral toward the greater good; indeed they probably slowly sink. Laziness is a kind of balanced state: the will is lacking to do anything, good or evil; hence it is an absence of good. But we do encounter active evil in the world—the kind of actions where I, for one, find it almost impossible to believe that the deed springs entirely from ignorance. Positive, willful disregard of good must be present in it. I’ve experienced that. And if I have, so have others.

To focus on this a little more sharply, I would propose that good and evil deeds both require active willing. It is only our ability to form habits that deceives us into thinking that we “slip” into evil or do good because we’re “programmed” to do so. We forget that habits are formed out of voluntary activities. I type like a bandit, but I didn’t always. I began by concentrating. Thus even laziness is active—but it is habit, hence I can use it, as I do above, as an example of a neither-nor state of balance.

The very presence of a “sovereign will” automatically produces a polarized reality—because the will, to be real, has to have choices. Mazdaism, to give an example, is one of the most uncompromisingly polarized cosmologies. It projects an image of an infinite column of light in the “upward” direction, an infinite column of darkness in the “downward.” We’re in the mixing zone, as it were; maybe we're created here. The symbol of the spiral is an elaboration of that polarity, a rather creative intensification of it: the spiral suggests resistance to the vector, be it up or down. In ascent the spiral’s curvature is produced by our resistance, our selfishness; in its descent, the same curving is produced by our longing for the good; it brakes our rush to please ourselves.

Conceptualizations like heaven, purgatory, and hell correspond to real states—but they are too simple. We choose to be in these realms. They aren’t granted us, we’re not assigned to them, we’re not condemned to them. What we receive without any merit on our part is being, being of the highest order: with consciousness and with will.

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Illustration courtesy of Wikipedia, available here.

Passion or The Human Problem

The problem of evil arises in the context of theodicy. In certain times and under certain circumstances, theodicy is necessary and laudable. Those with a simple but ardent faith do not perceive the problem of evil and never think of blaming God; the mystics, who are at the other end of the spectrum, arrive at the same conclusion but by much experience. Neither of these polar stands rests on analysis. Intellectual approaches, focused on the real world, produce the problem in the first place; hence theodicy, which is an intellectual tool, is applicable in order to deal with the seeming contradiction of a good and all-powerful God and a world bristling with evil. Another kind of problem, however, remains after theodicy has done its work. It is the human problem. How to explain suffering?

Passion is one of those wonderfully ambiguous words. Its basic meaning is “suffering”; this becomes obvious when we consider that “passivity” comes from the same root. The common understanding of passion today is that it is a powerful sexual attraction and, by extension, attraction to anything else (“a passionate stamp collector.”) According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the sexual passion is a relatively new use of the root, dating to the sixteenth century. In Roman times passion was plain suffering, hence in Catholicism people speak of the “passion of Jesus,” meaning his crucifixion. Behind the Latin stands the Greek equivalent, pathos, with the same meaning.

Ponder for a moment the interestingly problematical relationships between freedom, evil, and suffering. Suffering is linked with evil (is evil) in that it is bad; suffering is involuntary when physical evil is its cause (to use Leibniz’s categories of kinds of evil); it arises from injury, disease, or the destruction of valuable properties by natural disasters; but passion in the sexual sense is also physical: we suffer our hormones. Sin is evil because it is the free choice of a lesser good; this is what Leibniz calls moral evil. The problem is especially visible in this category. We suffer whether we sin or we restrain ourselves. If we use our will to overcome temptation, we suffer the loss of something we desire; if we yield, we may achieve a lesser good but lose a higher, and suffering will be a consequence. We suffer physical evil without using choice; we suffer when we do use choice. We can’t win!

The problematical character of our state is made even more plain when we consider that gladly willing what is good is painless; the only time free will actually raises its ugly head is when we want something we shouldn’t. At that point, and only at that point, does the freedom of the will actually matter, and when we then exercise it rightly, we will suffer the loss of something we want—even if it’s nothing more than simple peace and quiet. Real decision-making is always painful—because it only matters when it is!

The human problem is that we find ourselves between the rock and the hard place. But this paradoxical situation actually has a catch. When we suffer gladly, whether it is involuntary pain or the pain imposed by our own right choices, a transformation takes place within us that is very difficult to describe but quite real. It is also cumulative. We change. Something takes place within us. We grow. The converse is also true. If, on the whole, we avoid pain at any cost and live for the moment, if we harden our conscience so that the echoes of the collateral damage we cause are less obvious and audible, we also diminish. That process is also cumulative. Here I’m talking about obvious truths readily observable in every possible category of activity, be it the neglect of body, maintenance, relationships, economies, you name it.

One interesting upshot of such a contemplation is that it produces an alternative model of reality as well. One that I’ve suggested a number of times before is that an order of the soul may have become voluntarily entangled in matter, drawn by its appetite for new experience. But another one is that the dimension in which we find ourselves is meant to serve development—the development of a higher form of that which we are. This is the model of life on earth as a school of hard knocks. The hard knocks will temper us and raise us to a higher level in a spiraling course of development—or, conversely, cause us to slide downward. We may be participating in this process voluntarily, as the Mazdean religion teaches, for example; or we may be here for correction, which is compatible with the Christian view. But, in any case, we must be prepared for the assaults of passion—be they pleasurable or just plain suffering.

What's the Problem?

Why is “the problem of evil” such common currency in Western thought? We find it in theology and also in popular outcries: “How could a just God permit something like this?” There is even a highly developed branch of philosophy specifically devoted to the subject, theodicy, a defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in light of the existence of evil.

I’m somewhat addicted to looking up etymologies because they help me understand what people once meant when they first coined words. Theodicy comes from the Greek words for God (theos) and for right or justice (dike), hence god-justification or god-defense. But let’s move on. The need for theodicy arises because Christian theology developed an elaborate specification of God’s attributes over the medieval centuries; these attributes included omniscience, omnipotence, and absolute goodness. Based on the Judaic transmission, viewed as divine revelation—thus God’s own self-disclosure—Christian theology also pictures God as the sources and creator of everything by a conscious and deliberate act. The problem of evil develops out of this definitional enterprise. When we apply our reasoning here, it becomes very easy to see that a Being of such overwhelming power and superiority must be responsible for evil in the world. And here arises the problem.

Aristotle suggested that unless we begin with a law of non-contradiction, we cannot know anything. That principle, in Aristotle’s words is that “It is impossible for the same thing to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect.”† The presence of evil in the world contradicts God’s overwhelming and original power and goodness. This then sets out the issues that theodicy then proceeds to explain so that the contradiction is removed.

In the West the name most closely associated with theodicy is that of Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). He wrote Théodicée, evidently coining the word. In the manner of that time a one-word title was rarely used. The full version is Essays of theodicy on the goodness of God, the freedom of man and the origin of evil. The essence is already in the title, and the theme, crassly summarized, is that God created the best of all possible worlds; in that world freedom is present as a perfection—without it, after all, the world would be a mere deterministic machine. But once you make room for freedom—all hell breaks out. Not Leibniz’s actual words, I hasten to add, but a phrase that sticks in the mind. Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), the Sufi philosopher, is sometimes credited with having said the same thing; Ghazali said something like that, but his context was different. Speaking of the world he said: “It is not possible that there is something better, more perfect, more complete.” He was not philosophizing but commenting on God’s transcendence. One source is here.

Deriving evil, particularly moral evil, from the presence of freedom is a potent argument. It serves as theodicy in that God gave created agencies freedom, which is a good. The evil arises from its abuse. That an omniscient God would know in advance that freedom will be abused and will thus produce suffering and pain—that God should therefore have denied his creatures freedom—represents more of the same presumption that those indulged in who began giving God all kinds of attributes in the first place. My personal inclination is to adhere to another western tradition, negative theology. This formulation has its roots in Neoplatonism, ultimately pointing back to Plato and his school. Augustine, within the Christian fold, leaned in this direction too. The Kabbalists also share this view. It is that the reality of God really is transcending. You cannot know anything about it. For people like us there is just as much evil as for the other side, but there is no problem of evil because it is pure presumption in us to try to pin it on the Absolute.

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†Metaphysics, IV 3 1005b19–20.