The Ontology of Evil
It has to be something else, maybe more metaphysical. Thomas, can you help me with this?
Hi Chris — here's a stab at an answer ...
Aristotle's inquiry into the nature of causes
aitia gives a good key by which to unlock the Christian idea of sin.
'Cause' in modernity is limited to the understanding of cause and effect, whereas for Aristotle, cause might be better understood to mean 'the explanation of a thing'.
The 'four causes' provide answers to the questions one might ask about something, no less than four will suffice, no more than four are necessary. For example, take a table:
Formal Cause: What is it?
by what qualities do we recognise something as a table?
Material Cause: what is it made of?
what are its constituents?
Efficient Cause: Who (what) made it?
what brought about its existence?
Final Cause What is it for?
why does it exist?
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From the perspective of an Abrahamic monotheist ontology, God is the Efficient Cause and Final Cause of all things — that is, everything starts in God, and proceeds from God, and everything ends in God, and thus proceeds towards God.
"I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end" Revelations 1:8.
"For in him were all things created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones, or dominations, or principalities, or powers. All things were created by him and in him."
Colossians 1:16
This explains cycles, ages, domains, orders, etc. The idea of a purely linear progress is a determination of the western secular mentality — in effect the Enlightenment denies the necessity of a Final Cause, and secular science - its handmaid - denies any Efficient Cause other than that which is accessible to physics (thus meta-physics is axiomatically dismissed). Aristotle is reduced to cause-and-effect, and the 'first cause' traces its way to the Big Bang ...
Interestingly, Final Cause is creeping back into Quantum theory.
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"In the beginning God created heaven, and earth" (Gen 1:1) — Efficient Cause, "And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness" (1:26) — Formal Cause, "And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth: and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul" (2:7) — Material Cause, "And the Lord God took man, and put him into the paradise of pleasure, to dress it, and to keep it" (2:15) Final Cause.
These causes, or explanations, then encompass the idea of 'The Good' — as there must be a correlate between the good of a thing, and its cause ... something cannot be a good of a thing if it lies inescapably beyond its nature, any more than, to quote a phrase, 'a fish needs a bicycle'.
So God, who is the Cause of All, thus determines the good of all, and the good of any thing is its perfection according to its purpose (efficient cause), its act (formal cause), its being (material cause) and its end (final cause). 'Fullness of being' is the perfection of everything.
Platonism sees the Good as a transcendental, higher than the gods, whereas the Jews sees the Good as a phenomena of God, not as a quality to which it adheres (as the Greeks might see it), but as its very nature. God cannot be not-Good, or other-than-Good, although He can certainly will things which appear to be 'less than good' to us, but then we are not omniscient — we do not know towards what end we and the Kosmos are being directed.
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Made in His image and likeness, man was created to know God — not as the sum of all material data, a body of knowledge, the 'gnosis so called' (1 Timothy 6:20) but in being, a Union that transcends knowledge, transcends light, and enters into the 'Divine Darkness' of the deity.
This was the paradisical state enjoyed by the Primordial Couple, living and breathing within the Immanent Presence of God, a primordial simplicity.
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"the tree of life also in the midst of paradise: and the tree of knowledge of good and evil ... But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat. For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death." (Gen 2:9, 17)
The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge
are the same tree — Death is therefore tied to the knowledge of good and evil ... but how?
If we accept that the good of a thing is determined by its cause, then the good of everything is determined by God, and the task in life allotted to man is to 'dress and keep' the Kosmos according to the Divine Will. He is a servant of the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Life is God.
Man is thus allowed to be creative, but with a small 'c'. He can name the animals (2:9), but he cannot make them. If there are two cherries on the tree, he can choose to eat this one, that one, both of them, or neither of them ... he is free within the confines of his nature, and his nature is open to God, and thus to the Infinite, the Absolute, and the All-Possible, which means he knows more than he is, and herein is the great seduction, the serpent of his own lower nature ... because he is subject to his appetites, both of the intellective and the volitive, and because his nature is free, and therefore not fixed, he can choose wisely and well, or not so wisely nor well ... and he has the choice of which to choose, and knows enough to know the better part ...
but the lower appetite always wants more ... more of whatever it can get ... it's a quantitative distinction, not a qualitative one.
(The 7 Deadly Sins are all sins of quantity over quality)
He can enjoy all the goods God chooses to bestow upon him, but he cannot determine what is good as such — that is God's prerogative.
But man cannot determine something as 'good' unless it exists in the Good as such, that is, unless it is in God, because God is Absolute Good, and God is Infinite Good, and God is All Possible Goods.
So anything that man wills, that God does
not will for him (or for the object of his actions) must therefore be not only a 'not good' — because if it was a good, it would be willed by God who is the Good as such —
but must therefore entail a privation of good that would be realised if man had not chosen to act.
(Aristotle and Aquinas both reasoned that things tend naturally towards their own good — they tend to try to be fully what they are, only man tries to be something other than himself, to invent himself, as we say, and this is another pointer — for it is his appetites that lead him astray.)
So anything that man wills that is not willed by God is
a priori a privation of the Good, and as such is a privation, by degree, of all that is good, therefore a privation of the good, of beauty, of truth, of reality and ... ontologically ... of being, of existence...
"... thou shalt die the death... "
Death is the logical, ontological conclusion of the debate, it is a privation of the Ultimate Good, which is Being. So, ontologically, death is not simply the end of a certain mode of existence, the corporeal state, but also points to the end of being as such, that which was can, actually cease to exist ... not even the soul is immortal.
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How could man, knowing what he knows, make such a catastrophic blunder?
Genesis 3:4-5:
"And the serpent said to the woman: No, you shall not die the death. For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil."
The serpent, in symbology, is connected to the egoic intellect, in the same way that the worm oroborus signifies the cyclical, or infinite
on a flat plane — it goes on and on, but goes nowhere qualitatively (neither higher nor lower — the phoenix represents breaking out of this repetitive cycle) and here we can image the question going round and round in one's head ... Jung reads the serpent as signifying the human psyche.
Genesis 3:6-7:
"And the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold: and she took of the fruit thereof ... And the eyes of them both were opened: and when they perceived themselves to be naked ..."
Human nature became enamoured
of itself — Eve saw the tree as 'good' and 'fair' and 'delightful' because of its promise ... the ability to discriminate ...
knowledge according to the self ... so they ate the fruit of self-knowledge, which is discrimination, distinction, separation, individuation ... and their eyes were opened
which meant the eye of the soul, which sees all as one, was occluded. The gained external sight, and lost insight into the heart, into the essence, of things ... they saw only the material form, stripped of its grace and inherent beauty, stripped of truth and goodness ...
devoid of all meaning ... they saw nothing but evil, for they saw nothing but everything with the good stripped out of it, even themselves, and they covered themselves in their shame.
They were at a loss ...
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Once something is seen, it cannot be unseen ... and sometimes we do things which effect the fabric of our being ... once the savour of good and not-so-good was lodged in the human psyche, it is very difficult to dislodge (try suppressing an appetite). This tragic state is not what God did to them, it's what they did to themselves, and as such it is the heritage they pass on to us all.
This act did not just effect man, it effected the world, the Kosmos, its ramification has shot through all creation ... we are not so much born in sin, as born into a world blighted by sin ... when we withdrew from God, God withdrew from us ... and yet remains Immanently close ... and yet remains invisible, just beyond our ken ...
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SPECULATION:
I am open to the evolutionary idea that maybe there was not an Adam and Eve, and that maybe there was never a primordial perfect being, from whom we have descended because of some calamitous event ... that maybe the being that is uniquely called 'human' is the attainment of life struggling up through the mud of ages, trying ever and ever to arrive at the right combination to house the Spirit of God — I am open to this speculation, as long as we allow that God is not the God of the Deists (a God which set the ball in motion, as it were, and then walked away) — and that the Spirit of God is leading all life towards that Union.
But I will also state thereby that God never intended man to be ignorant of His presence, nor of His will, and that He intended man to fall, or that He created man in a fallen state ...
... Philosophy holds that it is in the nature of the good to communicate itself
bonum diffusivum sui and therefore if man cannot perceive the good, it is not the fault of the good as such, but man ... always the point comes back to man as the source of his troubles, if not then God ceases to mean anything in the sense of Absolute, God becomes relative, contingent, subject to accident, chance and change.
... in my wildest speculations I will allow that the 'first' being that we can call human was, if even for just a nonosecond, perfect ... and fell ... (in this sense even an ape can commit a sin, if it performs an act of pure selfishness, but I think the argument is that primates do not make moral and ethical decisions, but rather follow the will to survive, even if that involves killing the children of its neighbours to advantage its own offspring in the mating game...)
... but we must not forget one thing: sin is not an accident of ignorance, it is and always has been understood as a freely-chosen and informed moral decision to do other than the good (sentimental and volitive humanity has defined sin way beyond its philosophical remit, in that regard) and so this opens if not alters the debate somewhat.
Thomas
