Assagioli gives an answer to , “How can the existence of evil be reconciled with divine participation, goodness and omnipresence?”
By Considerator (Roberto Assagioli), (Assagioli Archives – Florence) from psicoenergetica.com. Original Title: Il Problema del Male. Translated and Edited With Notes by Jan Kuniholm
Abstract: The text discusses the problem of evil and offers a unitary conception of evil that is both rational and in line with strict morality. It emphasizes that the unitary conception does not justify laxity or indulgence in the moral realm. It argues that evil does not have a separate and real existence, but is rather the absence of good. From a higher and universal perspective, all evils are seen as partial, transitory, and productive of good. The text provides examples of how evil can be transformed into good, such as illness leading to healing and death leading to new and perfect forms. It also explores the function of moral evil and argues that the experience of pain, limitation, and rebellion is necessary for the evolution of free and self-conscious spiritual beings. The text quotes various thinkers and spiritual traditions to support its arguments, including Victor Hugo, Wolfgang Goethe, St. Anthony, and Rabindranath Tagore. Overall, the unitary conception of evil offers an explanation that satisfies reason, feeling, and strict morality, providing a solution to the problem of evil.
What Ms. Calvari[1] said about evil, about how to consider and justify it from a unitary point of view, surprised and even upset some of you.
I think this was very helpful, because it provides an opportunity to clarify our attitude on this truly fundamental and paramount issue, both from the cognitive and practical side.
The first point to be made clear is that the unitary conception of evil does not imply and does not justify any laxity, license or indulgence in the moral realm. This statement is not superfluous, for there has been no shortage of cases in which these unwarranted consequences have been drawn instead. Our lower nature continually attempts to delude and deceive us, and often does so with great skill, with specious and ingenious sophistry, trying to turn every higher principle, every good thing to its own personal and selfish ends. Everyone knows how every virtue that is misunderstood or badly practiced can become an imperfection and even a vice: thus goodness can become weakness and guilty indulgence, firmness can become hardness and obstinacy, humility can be the mask of subtle spiritual pride, and so on.
Likewise, the grand unified conception of the universe, when misunderstood and misapplied, has created confusion and errors in some people; and among other things it has given rise to erroneous teachings and morally pernicious practices.
This is precisely the reason why the Independent Theosophical League,[2] while on the one hand proposing as its essential task the realization of the unitary ideal in its full integrity and purity, on the other hand has wished to reaffirm with great force and in the most explicit manner the need to practice the strictest morality.
Indeed, you will recall how among the special purposes of the League is the following:
To insistently proclaim and uphold that:
- True spiritual progress is inseparable from morality.
- Any teaching that violates the moral code common to all civilized nations, under the guise of higher and occult knowledge, is contrary to the laws of true spiritual life.
* * *
But there is more. According to our conceptions, one who is more spiritually developed not only must abide by ordinary morality, but also must have a much stricter and, I would say, comprehensive morality. He takes on new duties and new responsibilities. Not only his external conduct, but his whole inner life, his thoughts and feelings, must conform to the highest ideal of perfection that is set before us.
Such a person recognizes that the more his wisdom and powers increase, the more the great divine law of justice and love becomes exacting and strict toward him in the matter of elevation and moral purity. He therefore takes as his own the stern admonition of the Imitation of Christ:
“Quanto plus et melius scis, tanto gravius inde iudicaberis nisi sanctius vixeris.” [3]
I think I have been clear enough and there is no need to elaborate further on all this.
Let us now come to a closer consideration of the unitary conception of evil — which Ms. Calvari has mentioned — and we shall see how it gives us an explanation of the existence and functions of evil that fully satisfies both our reason and our feeling, while being in full harmony with the most rigorous morality — thus eliminating the anguished doubts, bitter inner conflicts and unnecessary suffering to which dualistic conceptions have so often given rise.
In fact, many people have been tortured by the problem, “How can the existence of evil be reconciled with divine participation, goodness and omnipresence?”
Dualistic philosophical or religious conceptions have not given and cannot give a satisfying answer to this grave problem, “due to the contradiction which does not allow it.” For the existence of a real, objective and permanent principle of evil (whether personified in one or many beings, or conceived impersonally) is truly irreconcilable with the omnipotence, omnipresence and infinite goodness that are essential aspects of divinity.
The failure to receive a satisfactory answer to this anguished doubt, to this just demand of reason, has brought many people to the loss of all faith, to atheism, to pessimism, and to rebellion against the world and life.
Instead, we can say with joy that many skeptics, many doubters and discouraged people have been consoled, fulfilled, and sometimes truly saved by the unitary conception of the world and life, in which evil is understood, explained and redeemed.
The unitary conception fully recognizes the existence of innumerable and grave individual sorrows, imperfections and evils, but it absolutely denies that there is a stable, permanent and irreducible principle of evil.
All evils, even those which seem to us the most terrible, the most unjustified and the most enduring, if they are considered from a sufficiently high, comprehensive and universal point of view, reveal themselves to be partial, transitory and productive of good.
From that high vantage point we discover with happy wonder how evil has no separate and real existence, but how it is only the absence of good — deficiency, imbalance and disharmony. We see how the great universal flow of life always tends to fill those deficiencies, to eliminate those imbalances, to resolve those dissonances into higher and more wonderful harmonies.
We thus discern how every evil represents only a moment in evolutionary development, a necessary passing stage; an occasion, a stimulus, a call to the healing and regenerative action of the forces of good.
Life — the common life that takes place in us and around us, if only we know how to observe and penetrate it in a truly spiritual way — offers us endless evidence of this. Sometimes indeed, the transformation of evil into good is at work with such clarity before our eyes that it is evident even to the most myopic eye, to the most skeptical soul.
I will mention only a few among countless possible examples.
Beginning with the plane of matter and the physical body, I shall mention the many cases in which an illness constitutes a beneficial crisis of elimination and reconstitution for the organism; how indeed on the basis of these cases a change in the way of considering, and thus of treating illnesses, has begun in medical science. Indeed, they are increasingly regarded as opportune and beneficial defense reactions of the vital forces against pathogens, and thus a wise and prudent therapy, instead of violently fighting the symptoms, tends rather to foster and help the vis medicatrix naturae, the healing power of nature.
But this is not enough: an evil far worse than disease, that which for many is the greatest or most terrible of evils — namely death itself — finds from the unitary spiritual point of view its most complete explanation. Even in the animal kingdom, visible nature gives us an admirable demonstration of it. The fate of the humble and miserable caterpillar, forced to crawl painfully on the earth, is the necessary condition for the birth of the winged butterfly, which freely and lightly sucks the sweet nectar of flowers in the glory of the sun. If the caterpillar were aware of this providential law, would it not go happily to a death, albeit a painful one, but a harbinger of such wondrous resurrection? But the caterpillar does not know, and perhaps dies in dark terror. We too are caterpillars and blindly fear the good liberating death.
Yet we see again and again that the destruction of old forms, which have become too rigid and cramped, is the necessary condition for the construction of new and more perfect forms. In reality nothing dies, neither matter nor spirit — only limitation, resistance and obstacles to the triumphant march of life disappear.
Less obvious perhaps is the recognition of the function of moral evil. Many object in this regard, “Why did God make imperfect souls, capable of rebellion and sin?” Now, on this occasion I will not pause to point out the overly anthropomorphic and narrow approach of the question, but agree to respond in language that corresponds to the question. I will say that the deity could certainly very easily have created skillful and perfect automatons (it may be that he even actually created some, for certain of his purposes and works). But the evolution of free and self-conscious spiritual beings, true children of God, willing yet autonomous and independent collaborators in his sublime works, necessarily required the experience of pain and limitation, and the capacity for rebellion and moral evil.
Consciousness, with all its powers — as has been demonstrated recently even by positive and scientific psychology — can arise only from contrast, from the negative experience of opposition. This may indeed be — as far as we may dare to look at such mysteries, at our still limited and imperfect stage — precisely the supreme purpose, or at least one of the most important purposes, of the great drama of manifestation, the key that gives us the reason for the existence of the visible universe.
* * *
Many great spirits of the past and present have intuited and expressed more explicitly and fully this conception of the essential unreality of evil. I will limit myself here to a few brief quotations. I shall first read a graceful apologue by Victor Hugo, in which the noble French poet — whose highly inspired work is not yet known and valued as it deserves to be by spiritualists — subtly caricatures rigid dualistic conceptions. As a prototype of these he takes the doctrine of Manichaeism that admits two coexisting and eternal principles: one of good called Ormus, the other of evil called Arimane:
from Religions et religion (des Voix), p. 112. byVictor Hugo
… Le cheval doit être manichéen.
Arimane lui fait du mal, Ormus du bien;
Tout le jour, sous le fouet il est comme un cible,
Il sent derrière lui l’affreux maître invisible,
Le démon inconnu qui l’accable de coups;
Le soir, il voit un être empressé, bon et doux,
Qui lui donne à manger et qui lui donne à boire,
Met de le paille fraîche en sa litière noire,
Et tâche d’effacer le mal par le calmant,
Et le rude travail par le repos clément;
Quelqu’un le persécute, hélas! mais quelqu’un l’aime.
Et le cheval se dit: “Ils sont deux”. C’est le même.
from Religions et religion (des Voix), p. 112. byVictor Hugo[4]
The horse must be Manichean;
Ahriman harms him, Ormuzd does him good.
All day long, under the whip, he is like a target;
He feels behind him the awful invisible master,
The unknown demon who pummels him with blows;
In the evening, he sees an eager being, kind and gentle,
Who gives him food and drink,
Puts fresh straw in his black litter,
And tries to erase the pain by soothing,
And hard work by merciful rest;
Someone persecutes him, alas! but someone loves him.
And the horse says to himself,
“There are two of them. They’re one and the same.”
Better known, but perhaps not well understood in its deeper meaning and its great spiritual scope, is the sentence that Wolfgang Goethe — in his Faust,[5]that is so full of occultism — has Mephistopheles say:
Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint! – Ich bin der Geist der stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.
I am the Spirit who always denies! – I am the Spirit who always wants evil and always creates good.
Expressed here in admirable synthesis is the fact that evil lies only in the ill-will and rebellion of the individual, but that even this ill-will and rebellion, in the marvelous economy of cosmic evolution, cannot fail to collaborate with the divine plan in spite of themselves. They cannot fail to be instruments of good, offering other beings the resistance and opposition necessary for their experiences. In this connection I will quote a passage in which a very similar concept is expressed, a passage I came across just this morning (by one of those so-called co-incidences), in a book where less than in any other I would have expected to find something similar: in the collection of the Lives of the Holy Fathers, specifically in the life of St. Anthony. (I quote Fra Domenico Cavalca’s fresh and naive vulgarization.[6] It is St. Anthony himself who speaks to the monks and tells them about various apparitions of the devil):
Another time someone pounded at my door, and when I went out to find out who was knocking, I saw a very, very large man. And when I asked him who he was, he said, “I am Satan.” And asking him who he sought or wanted, he said to me, “Tell me, why do all the Christians curse me, and wish me so much evil?” I replied that he was rightly cursed and hated by Christians, because he harassed them and tempted them. He answered me thus, “I do them no evil and I could not; for they themselves are the ones that do evil to themselves, and are troubled together.”[7]
And since we are in the field of Christianity, it becomes appropriate to mention — albeit in passing — that even if Christian Theology and Scholasticism are distinctly dualistic, the highest and most essential spirit of Christianity is not at all. As Ms. Calvari mentioned, St. Francis had the unitary spirit to a high degree. And such a spirit is revealed in various passages of the Gospel as well. I will only recall how the explanation of pain and death is found in the famous parable of the seed that must die in order then to sprout. [8]
I have not yet spoken of the East; this will be done more adequately on another occasion. For now I will only mention that the Eastern spirit is essentially synthetic, universal and unitary, and that therefore in it the problem of evil naturally and easily finds the solution that I have outlined so far. Without mentioning the very ancient Upanishads, the grand conceptions of Vedanta spiritualism, or the incisive and definitive critique made by Buddhism of all that is relative, transitory and unreal, I shall read only a few passages from Rabindranath Tagore, the modern philosopher-poet and mystic who so nobly, loftily and harmoniously embodies the soul of India.[9]
In his volume Sadhana there is an essay[10] in which he deals precisely with “the problem of evil;” an essay — like the others — that is profound and enlightening, and which I very much recommend reading and meditating on. And to entice you I will quote a few passages from it.
The question why there is evil in existence is the same as why there is imperfection, or, in other words, why there is creation at all. We must take it for granted that it could not be otherwise; that creation must be imperfect, must be gradual, and that it is futile to ask the question, Why we are?
But this is the real question we ought to ask: Is this imperfection the final truth, is evil absolute and ultimate? The river has its boundaries, its banks, but is a river all banks? Or are the banks the final facts about the river? Do not these obstructions themselves give its water an onward motion? The towing rope binds a boat, but is the bondage its meaning? Does it not at the same time draw the boat forward?
The current of the world has its boundaries, otherwise it could have no existence, but its purpose is not shown in the boundaries which restrain it, but in its movement, which is towards perfection. The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love. The idea of God that man has in his being is the wonder of all wonders. He has felt in the depths of his life that what appears as imperfect is the manifestation of the perfect; just as a man who has an ear for music realises the perfection of a song, while in fact he is only listening to a succession of notes. Man has found out the great paradox that what is limited is not imprisoned within its limits; it is ever moving, and therewith shedding its finitude every moment. In fact, imperfection is not a negation of perfectness; finitude is not contradictory to infinity: they are but completeness manifested in parts, infinity revealed within bounds.
Pain, which is the feeling of our finiteness, is not a fixture in our life. It is not an end in itself, as joy is. To meet with it is to know that it has no part in the true permanence of creation. It is what error is in our intellectual life. To go through the history of the development of science is to go through the maze of mistakes it made current at different times. Yet no one really believes that science is the one perfect mode of disseminating mistakes. The progressive ascertainment of truth is the important thing to remember in the history of science, not its innumerable mistakes. Error, by its nature, cannot be stationary; it cannot remain with truth; like a tramp, it must quit its lodging as soon as it fails to pay its score to the full. [11]
When we watch a child trying to walk, we see its countless failures; its successes are but few. If we had to limit our observation within a narrow space of time, the sight would be cruel. But we find that in spite of its repeated failures there is an impetus of joy in the child which sustains it in its seemingly impossible task. We see it does not think of its falls so much as of its power to keep its balance though for only a moment.
Like these accidents in a child’s attempts to walk, we meet with sufferings in various forms in our life every day, showing the imperfections in our knowledge and our available power, and in the application of our will. But if these revealed our weakness to us only, we should die of utter depression. When we select for observation a limited area of our activities, our individual failures and miseries loom large in our minds; but our life leads us instinctively to take a wider view. It gives us an ideal of perfection which ever carries us beyond our present limitations. Within us we have a hope which always walks in front of our present narrow experience; it is the undying faith in the infinite in us; it will never accept any of our disabilities as a permanent fact; it sets no limit to its own scope; it dares to assert that man has oneness with God; and its wild dreams become true every day. [12]
The most important lesson that man can learn from his life is not that there is pain in this world, but that it depends upon him to turn it into good account, that it is possible for him to transmute it into joy. The lesson has not been lost altogether to us, and there is no man living who would willingly be deprived of his right to suffer pain, for that is his right to be a man. One day the wife of a poor labourer complained bitterly to me that her eldest boy was going to be sent away to a rich relative’s house for part of the year. It was the implied kind intention of trying to relieve her of her trouble that gave her the shock, for a mother’s trouble is a mother’s own by her inalienable right of love, and she was not going to surrender it to any dictates of expediency. Man’s freedom is never in being saved troubles, but it is the freedom to take trouble for his own good, to make the trouble an element in his joy. It can be made so only when we realise that our individual self is not the highest meaning of our being, that in us we have the world-man who is immortal, who is not afraid of death or sufferings, and who looks upon pain as only the other side of joy. He who has realised this knows that it is pain which is our true wealth as imperfect beings, and has made us great and worthy to take our seat with the perfect. He knows that we are not beggars; that it is the hard coin which must be paid for everything valuable in this life, for our power, our wisdom, our love; that in pain is symbolised the infinite possibility of perfection, the eternal unfolding of joy; and the man who loses all pleasure in accepting pain sinks down and down to the lowest depth of penury and degradation. It is only when we invoke the aid of pain for our self-gratification that she becomes evil and takes her vengeance for the insult done to her by hurling us into misery. For she is the vestal virgin consecrated to the service of the immortal perfection, and when she takes her true place before the altar of the infinite she casts off her dark veil and bares her face to the beholder as a revelation of supreme joy. [13]
Notes:
[1] Olga Calvari Giaccone, a.k.a. Olga Calvari, was an associate of both Roberto Assagioli and Nella Ciapetti Assagioli, who wrote many article for the magazine Ultra and other publications. She was a member of the Italian Theosophical Society and was the author of several books, including on on the topics of karma and reincarnation, another on Wagner’s opera Parsifal. The talk or essay by Ms. Calvari mentioned here is not known by this editor. —Ed.
[2] The Independent Theosophical League (ITL) in Italy, founded in part by Decio Calvari, former General Secretary of the Theosophical Society (New York, Adyar, India), was affiliated with the international Independent Theosophical League, which separated from the Theosophical Society in 1909. The Italian ITL dissolved in 1938 after the passage of racial laws by the Italian fascist government. —Ed.
[3] Latin: “the greater your depth of knowledge, the more severely you will be judged as a result unless you lead a holier life” —Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 7:25-7.
[4] My translation (my apologies for its quality, but I wanted to give the reader an idea of the original) —Tr.
[5] Goethe, Faust, Part I. —Ed.
[6] Domenico Cavalca (c.1270-1342) was a Dominican friar and writer. His works are partly original and partly derived from Latin texts. His Vite dei santi Padri was a translation of Vitae Patrum into Italian vernacular. —Ed.
[7] Volgarizzamento degli atti degli apostoli ed altre prose di Fr. Domenico Cavalca (Popularization of the Acts of the Apostles and other prose by Br. Domenico Cavalca). Turin 1858. My translation. —Tr.
[8] John 12:24 – “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (RSV) —Ed.
[9] Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, painter, and educator. In 1913 he was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sadhana (1915) is a collection of eight of his lectures in which he addresses some of the most profound questions of life.—Ed.
[10] Chapter III. —Ed.
[11] Tagore, Rabindranath, Sadhana: The Realization of Life. Original English from a reproduction of the 1915 Macmillan Co. edition, at www.spiritualbee.com, pp. 30-31.
[12] Ibid. p.32
[13] Ibid. p. 39.
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