By Marina Luptakova,
Sitting in a stuffy and filthy inn, Ivan
Karamazoff hurls into the face of his younger brother, the novice Alyosha – who
according to Dostoyevsky’s intentions (not fully accomplished, needful to say)
should embody in himself the Christian love and humility – words filled with
ultimate pain and cruelness, which reject the world created by God:
“Yet would you believe it, in the final result
I don’t accept this world of God’s, and, although I know it exists, I don’t
accept it at all… I believe like a child that… in the world’s finale, at the
moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will
suffice… for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood
they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive, but to justify
all that has happened with men – yet though all that may come to pass, I don't
accept it. I won't accept it.”
In Ivan’s confession, filled to the top with
bitterness of aversion to the suffering and poor world, and in Alyosha’s
subsequent silence, reinforcing and somehow authenticating the truth and tragic
of this revelation, indeed consists with great force the problem of “theodicy”
(literally “justification of God”), the question of justifying God, who allows
evil that – and this should be acknowledged – prevails in this world, in face
man’s reason. Long before Leibniz devised the term “theodicy” and used it in
the title of his Essais de Théodicée sur
la bonte de Dieu, published in 1710, affirming that “all is for the best in
the best of all possible worlds” (a so-called “optimistic, rationalistic
theodicy”, according to which the will of God and of man coincide, so to speak,
“naturally and spontaneously” – Thomas Aquinas and Hegel held the same view),
Job of the Old Testament had challenged the very God, refusing to blindly and
slavishly accept his – undeserved – suffering, demanding an answer to the
question of its sense, only then to be able and willing to accept it voluntarily.
This is an expression of a “tragic theodicy”, the ultimate strain of the Godman
tragedy; after all Jesus himself prayed “let this cup pass from me” (Matthew,
26:39), and was not far from abandoning the God. From Job abandoning the God
(“Oh that I knew where I might find him! That I might come even to his seat! I
would order my cause before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would know
the words which he would answer me, and understand what he would say unto me.”
“Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive
him: On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth
himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him.” Job, 23:3-5, 23:8-9), to
Christ abandoning the God in the moment of crucifixion (“Eli, Eli, lama
sabachthani?” “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Matthew, 27:46).
Here lies a boundary, which – using the words of a Russian philosopher B.
Vysheslavtsev – “makes seem pale our dramatic situations and convicts decidedly
any non-tragic theodicy as false. The tragedy lies in the fact, that ‘heavens
keep silence’ just when they ought to speak up the most!”.
The problem of evil is a Christian one by
nature, and in a truly Christian perspective, it comes down to a problem of
“the malicious” (lukavyi). (Vladimir
Lossky rightly observed that only from a philosophical standpoint can the last
petition of Lord’s prayer be interpreted as “deliver us from evil”; our real
fear and our genuine unease is, after all, expressed in the plea of “delivers
us from the evil one” – from “the malicious”.) The philosophers, however, were
not able to sufficiently explain the problem of evil, they only made it more
complicated and confused. For Fathers of the Church, on the contrary, evil has
never presented a “theoretical problem”. They didn’t speculate on it, but
struggled with it. One of the saints prayed: “Save us, Lord, from vain
discussions on evil, and deliver us from the malicious”.
All the manifold (mnogorazlichnyi or raznoobraznyi
– words often used by Eastern Christian thinkers; polipoikolos in Greek, it means rather “varicoloured” or
“multifarious”) efforts to solve the problem of origin of evil – outside of the
Christian Weltanschauung – break down
to dualistic and monistic, and to attempts to reconcile the two of them.
The dualistic solution (the ancient Persian
philosophy or Manichaeism) assumes the existence of two equivalent and absolute
principles, a god of the good and a god of the evil, Ormuzd and Ahriman. They
engage in an endless and undoubtedly a tie-destined battle, and the entire
world constitutes some kind of a “zone of indecision” between the two eternal
adversaries, the manifoldness of which appears to be but a “side effect” of the
battle of the two principles.
The monistic doctrines – religious and
philosophic (the ancient Greek Eleatic school, the Brahmanism) – assumed that
evil persistently and unalterably accompanied all creation as something
detached from God; God is one and true, and all that is separated from him,
exists not (a mirage, an illusion, a maya).
Evil and suffering – the entire sensual world in general – is but a deceit, a
delusion, a phantasm.
The inner contradiction of dualism, its logical
inconsistency, dwells in the fact that the two principles that perpetually
struggle with each other, are subordinate to a third principle substantiating
the former two, in the force of which neither of them can defeat the other. The
latent, importunate presence of a third principle above the eternally opposed,
as well as the invincible striving of each of them to seize the “other’s vital
space” and become an absolute, sole principle in the world, only affirms the
presence of the very Absolute, which is primordially rejected by dualistic
systems.
Monistic doctrines, acknowledging the One and
discarding the plurality and manifoldness of the world with all its sorrow and suffering, prove as perfectly impotent when faced with the
facticity of evil, which is present and effective in the world and experienced
by all of us to such an extent.
The prevailing view of religious thinkers of
the Eastern Church on the nature of evil, is that evil
is regarded as a deficiency, flaw, imperfection; as something that by its very
nature cannot achieve the state perfection, as a negation or loss of good. As far
as existence is concerned, the Fathers are convinced that evil does not exist,
that it isn’t but a privation of being. A tenacious accentuation of the fact
that evil lacks substance, or – that it’s non-existent, is reflected in tales,
where the devil or demon possesses no face and is therefore capable of taking
on a thousand of appearances (as in Slavic tales), or has no back and name (as
in German tales). It is then further related to the time when Christian
doctrine, the monastic life in particular, began to pick up elements of
Manichaeism, and it became essential to prove the fallacy of the notion that a
nature did exist which was alien to God.
The theory of evil that lacked an independent
substance has found its most developed and deepened form in work of Dionysius
the Pseudo-Areopagite, an enigmatic author of the 5th century, the
father of negative theology and mysticism. Yet, as early as in 2nd
century, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and later in 4th century,
Fathers like Athanasius the Great, Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, they
all perceived evil as non-existent.
“Evil qua evil makes no single essence or
birth, but only, as far as it can, pollutes and destroys the subsistence of
things existing… [F]or neither will the same by itself be both good and evil,
nor the self-same power be of itself destruction and birth… [A]ll things which
are, in so far as they are, both are good, and from the Good; but, in so far as
they are deprived of the Good, are neither good, nor do they exist… So that the
fact, that birth is born from destruction, is not a power of evil, but a
presence of a lesser good, even as disease is a defect of order…” (Dionysius
the Areopagite, De Divinis Nominibus, IV, 20 – Migne, Vol. 4, Col. 273).
St. Maximus the Confessor said, that evil is a
perfect nothing, which as such exists at no time and in no way (S. Maximi in
Librum de Divinis Nominibus Scholia – Migne, IV, c. 73).
St. Athanasius the Great: “[B]y what is, then,
I mean what is good, inasmuch as it has its pattern in
God Who is. But by what is not I mean what is evil…” (Athanasius,
Against the Heathen, Part I, §4).
St. Basil the Great: “Evil is not a living
animated essence; it is the condition of the soul opposed to virtue, developed
in the careless on account of their falling away from good. Do not then go
beyond yourself to seek for evil, and imagine that there is an original nature
of wickedness.” (St. Basil, Hexaemeron,
Homily II., §4-5).
That evil is not a being, but a negation of
being, was also confirmed by St. Gregory of Nyssa.
And finally, according to the definition of St.
Maximus the Confessor, “evil never was and never will be on its own, for it has
exactly neither substance nor nature nor hypostasis nor power nor energy in
beings; it is neither quality nor quantity; neither relation nor replace;
neither time nor position; neither creation nor movement nor habit nor passion,
so that it contemplated anything existent… it is neither the beginning (arche), nor the middle (mesotes), nor the end (telos)… Evil is the absence of the
energy inherent in all natural power toward the end and nothing else. In other
words, evil is the irrational movement of natural powers based on a fallacious
judgement, toward other things than the end. I call the end the cause of
beings, toward which everything is naturally born.” (Migne, Vol. 90, Col.
253B).
Thus evil is not, the verb “to be” does not
apply to it; the evil is not a nature, not a state of nature; as if a disease,
parasite of being. Evil has no place amongst the existent: it only is at the
very moment of its commitment (Diadochus of Photice). The paradoxicality of
such condition is then reflected in the well-known saying of Gregory of Nyssa:
whoever submits to evil, exists in non-existent.
Yet if evil does not exist – lacking existence,
as the Fathers had claimed – then how is its activity to be explained? This
apparent contradiction arises because the very question of “What is evil?” is
not composed correctly: evil is not “something”, but “someone”. (For the sake
of correctness we should note that neither Pilate’s question – “What is the
truth?” – can be answered: Christ kept silent, for truth is not a “what”, but a
“Who” – the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ.)
And “someone” – that’s “the malicious”, a
personality. In other words, “the malicious” is not a substance, not a lack of
being or its insufficiency. He possesses a nature, but his nature is created by
God and thus a good one.
It is most appropriate to briefly expound here
the theory maintained in the Eastern Christian religion, on the distinction
between the concepts of “person” or “personality” (lichnost’) and “nature” or “character” (priroda); for details cf. V. Lossky, Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Eglise d’Orient. To perceive
the difference between personality and nature in man,
is no less difficult than the distinction of the single nature and the
threesome of persons in God. We usually intermix the
concepts of “person” and “individual” and use them as synonyms – this confusion
reveals in the area of psychology in particular. Yet in a certain sense,
“individual” and “person” bear contradictory meanings; an individual denotes an
ancient blend of personality and the elements, which pertain to the nature
common to all people (meaning mental and bodily qualities, peculiar to all
mankind). A person to the contrary, refers to that, which is alien to nature:
individual properties, “features of character”, temperament
etc. all belong to common nature and never appear entirely personal. A
man, acting on the grounds of his natural properties, his “character”, his
inheritance, and entirely determined by his sociopsychologic and/or cosmic
environment, i. e. by his “nature”, becomes a person the least, for a
personality constitutes that which is irreproducible and unique in man. Hence a
personality is being free with regard to nature – to all inherited and acquired
in man. In other words: person’s thoughts, moves and deeds are not necessarily
determined by the presence or absence of the respective properties of its
nature, they do not seem to be an imposed experiment, peculiar to it. We dare
to say that conduct, reactions – all the “arrangements” of personality – always
turn out as “inadequate” (not in its clinical, psychological meaning, of
course) with respect to circumstances of any sort, which we study, so that we
may justify ourselves or the other, or to further intensify our or his guilt. A
person is always free, with no need to blame or justify itself – and once free,
it is responsible for all its deeds.
As St. Gregory of Nyssa used to say,
personality delivers from the laws of necessity and from submission to the
rules of nature, and brings the capacity to decide for oneself freely. The
veracity of man dwells outside of any conditionality, and his dignity consists
in the ability to free himself from his nature: “not to destroy it or to leave
it to its own, after an Eastern sage, but to transfigure it at God.” (V.
Lossky).
Thus there is no evil in nature – evil relates
not to the substantial aspect, but to a personal, individual one. More
precisely, evil is a certain state of the nature’s will – a will, which is
false with respect to God; evil is a revolt against God, i. e. a personal
attitude. It means that evil originates in the freedom of creation. Therefore
it cannot be justified, i. e. it’s not possible to plead adverse conditions,
external constraint – whencesoever it may have its origin – or bad examples –
indubitably contagious (yet unlike plain infection, which an organism may be
overcome with, a person has no right to “fall ill”) etc. Evil only arises from
the freedom of being, which creates it and approves to give the evil, this
parasite, “a table and a roof”, i. e. to nourish the evil with the nature’s
juices, give the evil its energy to unlimited use and provide the evil with
“favourable conditions” for survival. Evil is an “ontological dependant”.
In Greek, the words “devil” and “symbol” stem
from the same root of ballo – “to
throw”. Yet while the word symballo
means “to pile up, to unite”, diabollos
stands for “slanderous, schismatic”. The devil – the malicious – divides,
severs, destroys any togetherness, brings down and reduces every being to the
outermost solitude. And to divide means to lie, to slander God’s creation,
which originated in a unity and is called for to unite – with God, and with
each other.
A contemporary orthodox theologian Paul
Evdokimov writes in his beautiful work called Les âges de la vie spirituelle, that in defiance of all diversity
of manifestations of evil, it is nevertheless possible to distinguish three
aspects, which apply to it the most: parasitism, deceit and imitation. The
devil that parasitizes on God’s creation, produces –
as Evdokimov puts it – “an abominable swell, a kind of demonic turgescence”. A
liar and a deceiver, longing for the divine attributes, in place of the
creative and arduous task of becoming similar to God (man was created in God’s
image and is bid to strive for God’s likeness), he palms on man the vulgar
equality: “You shall be as gods.” Ultimately, this envious imitator (the devil
was called “the ape of God”) establishes his own God-less realm, a caricature
with an inverse omen – the hell. The hell indeed represents an ultimate
severance, a self-immurement, a total solitude, “an extreme misery of devilish
solipsism”. Such loneliness is depicted in the Coptic Apophthegmata of Macarius the Elder. The prisoners are bound
together back to back, and following an ardent prayer for the living, their
bonds loosen for a moment: “Let us but for an instant glimpse the face of the
other…” The renowned words of Sartre – “Hell is other people” – in fact testify
to the same experience.
Evdokimov writes that hell can be conceived as
a cage surrounded by mirrors; nobody and nothing is reflected in these mirrors
but the image of one’s self multiplied ad infinitum – and no other appearance
is to be encountered. (These conditions of infernal solitude are well known to
us all: the forced and prolonged presence of the others without a chance to
establish personal relations and contacts with them – a condition inverse to
the one of seclusion – or the no less excruciating state of stunning the world
and the others by ourselves, projecting ourselves on them and displacing and
obscuring them with ourselves. Torments aroused by not being able to turn others
into a function of our “self” do indeed constitute the substance of hell. After
a moving remark of
Thus according to the opinion of the Fathers,
the root and matter of evil consists in deceits and mistakes. Evil “has no
substance” (St. Gregory of Nyssa); according to John Damascus, evil is
non-substantial (anousion). Devil is
“an inciter of evil” – he knows that as a spirit he exists not by himself, that
on his own he is not capable of anything. As Pope Gregory the Great said, “One
must know that Satan’s will is always evil, but his power lies outside of law.
For he has his will from himself, but his power comes from God.” Evil in the
world only happens inasmuch man gives his free consent and accepts it inwardly
– and this consent is always of his own will. Evil ravages, distorts and
mutilates the being, to which it sticks as a loathsome tumour – but an
annihilation of being, its total suppression, evil cannot secure (hence it
“gnashes its teeth”): “it is impossible to ascribe to evil such anticreative
power which would overcome the creative power of God.” (G.
Florovsky, The Collected Works of Georges
Florovsky, Vol. 3, Creation and Creaturehood, p. 50). As St.
Augustin said, being and life do not coincide in creation. This idea is furthed
elaborated by G. Florovsky: “[C]reatures can and may lose themselves, are
capable, as it were, of ‘metaphysical suicide’. In her primordial and ultimate
vocation, creation is destined for union with God… But even without realizing
her true vocation, and even opposing it, thus undoing and losing herself,
creation does not cease to exist. The possibility of metaphysical suicide is
open to her. But the power of self-annihilation is not given. Creation is
indestructible and not only that creation which is rooted in God as in the
source of true being and eternal life, but also that creation which has set herself
against God… And immutable above all is the microcosm man, and immutable are
men’s hypostases, sealed as they are
and brought out of nothing by the creative will of God. Indeed, the way of
rebellion and apostasy is the way of destruction and perdition. But it leads
not towards non-being, but to death; and death is not the end of existence, but
the separation of soul and body, the
separation of creation from God.” (ibid., p. 50-51).
The Fathers taught about the “Divine risk”, the
risk that was encountered by God when creating beings in his image and
likeness, for henceforth the perfection of the world created by God was to
depend continually upon the free will of those, who themselves were summoned to
become the height of perfection. We know that the God of Bible and of
Christians is a personal God, the One who loves, risking to be spurned by His
own creation. And He expects of His creation to turn to Him freely and utterly,
He seeks Himself a friend.
And indeed does God justify Job, who disputes
with Him, accuses Him and refuses to accept His reign that excludes any
dialogue. Job’s friends, however, who hypocritically advocate this very same
“tyranny”, an abstract notion of God’s dominion, get to taste the wrath of God:
“[Y] e have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.”
(Job, 42:7). God responds to Job’s “words without wisdom” – and his response is
above every theodicy of ancient and contemporary philosophers.