This text is work in progress. English is in
need of correction
Theology
and the Active Non-Existence of Evil
We have
lost Satan! Thats one of the main reasons why Western culture is in a crisis
right now, a moral crisis of society, as well as a moral and mental crisis in
many modern individuals!
Thats the message of a
thought-provoking and remarkable book, published in 1995 by Andrew Delbanco,
Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University: The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil.[1]
Remarkable, because this message was not delivered by a conservative, Christian
type of critic of our culture. Delbanco is not the type of critic like for
instance Pope John Paul II who believes that the skill of a definitely
existing Satan is that of inducing men to deny his existence and his
activities. No, Delbanco is a secular, liberal humanist.
In his book he delineates convincingly how,
from the so called Age of Reason on, the devil gradually fades away from the imagination
and the symbolic constructions of social and psychic reality. And now weve
lost the devil almost completely. The devil seems only present in the
entertainment industry. But he has lost his Gestalt, has lost his mystery,
which once was that he was a corporeal figure, who stands opposite a person
while simultaneously contaminating the inner world of that person. For
according to Delbanco, ours is a culture of irony now, grounded in a discourse
of disbelief, which makes the assumption of the existence of such a figure
impossible. Thats a first line in his argument.
The second line is that nonetheless the work of
the devil is real and evident; not the devil as mysterious Gestalt, but his
activities. Or, more adequate to say: the repertoire of evil has never been
richer in the past century and in our time. However, and this is Delbancos
main point, we also lost the words and the symbols with which we could deal
with evil.
Thats why our culture is in crisis, the third
line of Delbancos argument. We, modern men in the Western world, confronted
with workings of an absent Satan, are arrived at an unprecedented condition of
inarticulate dread. By our culturally acquired inability to identify evil, we
should have lost our ability to decide what is good and what is evil. Delbanco
advances the thesis, that if the language of evil is eliminated, we are left in
a kind of moral dumbness.
Trying to express his intention in bringing
forward this thesis, he cites words of the serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter from
Thomas Harriss horror novel (and Jonathan Demmes movie picture) The Silence of the Lambs. When Lecter,
locked up in a prison cage but he shall soon come out addresses a young
female FBI agent, he says: Look at me, Officer Starling, Can you stand to say
Im evil?[2]
In an interview Delbanco points to his driving motive in pointing to that type
of question: when we are not able to identify evil, not able to say that this person or that act is evil, because it escapes the reach of our imagination,
it will establish dominion over us. Now we can understand what he is yearning
for: for the infusion of our culture with forms, symbols, signs, images, which
can help us to identify evil.
1. An
Opportunity for Theology?
Many
theologians will have sympathy for Delbancos yearning. In particular when they
realize the richness of Christian tradition. It seems so obvious for them:
where day by day we hear of the manifest excesses of radical evil, but where we
also are beginning to realize the human inabilities to identify evil, lets
make use of the Christian tradition, lets for instance refer to original sin
according to i.a. Chesterton pre-eminently the Christian doctrine that is
empirically verifiable and to Christian demonology, and to rites and behaviour
with which one may be able to point to evil.
However, we have to hold back with
our wish to identify evil. In this essay I want to bring forward in the first
place the allegation, that there are several good reasons for theologians to be
reluctant in identifying evil. In the second place, I shall argue that one of
the major tasks of theology will be the development of a discourse, in which
evil can be intimated as unimaginable, even non-existent, and simultaneously as
something which nevertheless works, that is to say, which has real, but
excessive negative consequences. The overall idea actually a very old one
is that theology has to work on a way of speaking and writing, in which at the
one hand evil is not identified as for instance a basically unknowable force
that is beyond our means of understanding. While on the other hand theology
should have to point to evil as, metaphorically spoken, the black hole in our
reality, a black hole that is a negative, but also real mystery, not a mystery
that stops our attempts to understand the black hole, i.e. to act against evil.
Lets ask this question: what actually are we doing, when we are striving for
the identification of evil? I suspect the answer is, that one wishes to mend
his or hers very own worldview, viz. by bringing together the observance of
evidential excessive evil and a possible, albeit un-comprehensible evil. It is
more adequate to the current situation and to the Christian tradition! not
to mend the own worldview, but to keep open the gap between the manifestations
of evil and our inability to identify it. In other words, the point in this
essay will be, that theology should not focus on developing a
religious-cultural repertoire with which one can identify evil, but theology
always an intellectual activity en route: theologia viatorum should clear up
the human inabilities to identify and designate evil, in a world in which
people experience the effects of evil.
2.
Non-Existent and Effective
Lets first
try to understand why one may consider evil as non-existent and simultaneously
as something which only can be alluded to as yet effective.
In philosophy of religion one can discern at
least three main roads to allusions, even definitions of evil. One possible
road is the metaphysical or onto-theological one. When one follows this road,
one either comes to a definition of evil as no-thing, as privatio in a more
monistic worldview, or, if one leans to a more dualistic worldview, one comes
to envision evil as a separate force: evil as a countervailing force of the
good, or as that negative entity which makes a perverting use of the good
(Ill come back to onto-theology later in this essay). Another road is followed
by those who stress human will or human behaviour, in order to account for a
moral allusion to evil: the ethical road. We can think here of a definition of
evil as that which harms (Augustines Id
quod nocet). Also possible is the indication of evil as Kant has given in
his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793): evil as
radical, as lying at the root, the radix of human existence, being on the one
hand a corruption of the (choices of) the human will, as well as of the maxims
that govern these choices, even being a natural propensity, while on the other
hand human beings are not supposed to be determined by evil, for we cannot do
otherwise than considering ourselves and all other human beings as free moral
actors. So, although radical evil is at the heart of human beings, we are
responsible when we let our moral maxims pervert by evil. Kants view functions
to indicate in the first place why there is evil anyway in the world, in the
second place why human beings as free moral actors are yet responsible for the
evil acts they perpetrate.[3]
Although both roads lead to valuable insights,
its not wise to stick to one of them, that is to say, if we start thinking
on evil. Not the metaphysical or ontological road, because this road can allure
us to consider evil as a theoretical problem, not as a problem which defies
practical reasoning and practical actions. And when one sticks to the ethical
road, one may be allured to consider evil as a purely moral problem; as if evil
should be only a special kind of qualification of what one considers to be
bad behaviour. In common language and in common experience however, the use of the concept of evil expresses the
recognition, that certain actions or states of affairs or persons are
distinctive, just because they seem to be beyond moral censure.[4]
Which leads us now to a conclusion: it seems to be better to approach evil
along another road, the one of detecting human experience. In our
individualized and de-traditionalized culture, we are disciplined to fall back
on our own subjectivity, not on external authority (that is to say, where it
concerns our worldview, our view on our selves and the fundamentals of our
discourse on moral behaviour). Which means that we not only want to
trust on and to reflect upon each own feelings and actions (reflexive
modernity), but also that we have to do that. In that kind of culture,
it almost goes without saying, that evil first and foremost has to be
approached as an experiential reality, before we approach it as a
ontological, a theological or a moral problem,
Now the question is: what kind of experience
will that be? The American psychologist C. Fred Alford published in 1997 an
impressive book about that question. It deserves to be called a Classic.[5]
Based on a series of interviews and conversations with prison inmates, most of
them murderers and so called hard core criminals, Alford succeeds in
circumscribing how evil is experienced in a cultural era of individualisation.
According to him one may say that evil essentially is the experience of dread.
More specific: its the ultimate fear for the dissolution of the self. Its a
kind of experience in which, metaphorically expressed, future death, that is
the annihilation of the self, extends itself backwards from a future moment to
the present moment. Then one can feel the loss of foundation and of trust in
life, both coming forth out of the primordial feeling, that the form of
personal identity fades away.
Evil gets two dimensions then. At one side it
is the dreadful feeling of loosing oneself, mentally or simply physically, in
both cases causing a dreadful feeling. (Although the dissolution of the self
also can have an attractive quality, in line with the romantic and modern
view that the modern individual person, despite an almost lifelong search for
the real self, eventually only finds him- or herself by loosening the very own
self, an insight remarkably expressed by a literary figure of E.T.A. Hoffmann:
the moment in which someone dies is the first moment in which the real self
arises.[6])
At the other side however, evil also flows forward out of the attempt to take a
shortcut to that always dreadful, but nevertheless sometimes attractive and
fascinating dissolution of the boundaries of the self, into an ocean of
nothingness. This shortcut consists in the practical projecting of dread on others! It is trying to evade the
victim hood of falling prey to existential fear, by inflicting the victim hood
on another. Evil inflicts pain, abandonment, helplessness, ultimately death on
others, writes Alford, so that the evildoer will not have to experience them
himself. It is that simple, and that complicated. It is why torture is the
paradigm of evil ... All evil has the quality of torture, inflicting dread on
another so as to escape it oneself.[7]
By the way:
this interpretation of evil, as based on Alfords insights, is not a
psycho-empirical observation. It does not state that every evildoer is
conscious of or willing to admit an existential fear, out of which his own evil
acts are coming, for there simply are cold blooded, emotionless criminals and
torturers. No, this interpretation may be considered as a kind of a
psycho-transcendental interpretation: it can function as a stimulus to search
for the conditions which have led to evil acts or evil behaviour.
That may
well be so, but the question still is, why evil can be considered as
non-existent? The answer is: basically because evil refers to something that is
(onto)logically and morally impossible, as was just alluded to with the help of
Alford. For evil may be described as being ultimate fear and dread, experienced
by those who suffer it, as well as by those who inflict it! And this
combination, the insight that evil is lying in terms of the Christian
tradition at the root of suffering and at the root of sin, gives evil an
impossible quality. According to normal human understanding, structured as it
is by dual schemes which prefigure our distinctions, it may not and it can not
exist, for victims and perpetrators simply may not and are not united in a
mysterious way. And yet the Christian tradition has tried to do justice to this
impossibility of evil. By using for instance for evil metaphors like confusion,
chaos, fog, knot, all expressing that in evil all normal boundaries are
transgressed; or metaphors of darkness and silence, indicating that human
understanding we could also say, human construction of the world cannot
work.
Why then do
we say that evil, although not existent, is yet effective, and self-evident?
We could point here to the great evils and mass
crimes of the past century: the actively inflicted and simultaneously suffered
massacres of the First and the Second World War, Auschwitz, Biafra, Rwanda,
Darfur. Or, if we prefer not to refer to that massive forms of evil, we may
think of a violent perpetrator, lets say a hooligan or a person who committed
a so called act of pointless violence on the street. Or we may point to the
kind of experience of which St. Augustine tells in his Confessions. For instance when he unavailingly reflects on the
reasons why he and his fellow youngsters committed a quite normal theft of
pears out of the garden of a neighbour, normal for boys of all times (Confessiones, II, 9-18). Although we
cannot compare these very different kinds of acts and happenings as far as perpetrators,
scale and effects are concerned, if we should search for causes or goals, the
common thing is, that we may happen to find only conditions under which these acts were perpetrated, and under which
these happenings were favoured (by for instance economical, political,
cultural, racial or ethnic tensions, respectively by a too low or too high self
esteem, or by the boredom and the boastful atmosphere among a group of male
youngsters etc). We shall find out, that we cannot designate what actually made
the hatred and destruction going. Neither can we find a ratio, i.e. a more or
less imaginable goal. If, for instance, one wishes to know why a bunch of young
men committed an pointless act of violence by attacking someone who was only
standing there, one may for instance point to the use of alcohol, the
aggressive atmosphere, the macho-culture in the group, sometimes even to the
challenging behaviour of the victim himself etc., but if we want to know why
exactly the perpetrators did what they did, in a police investigation or
perhaps even in a mediation procedure, one almost never gets a satisfying
answer. Most often the answer turns out to be that there was no reason, or that
it was a completely arbitrary, random, gratuitous act, or that the perpetrators
were taken away by, yes by what?
Is it not appropriate here to use the word
evil, and to accept that evil not only is a predicate or a judgement of value
which people attach to certain acts and happenings, but also a noun, indicating
something that has its own power, which can overwhelm not only the victim, but
sometimes also the perpetrator? (Which may be a reason why so many criminal
perpetrators also regard themselves as victims; which is a judgement that we
may not always dismiss as an attempt
to exonerate themselves from responsibility, but sometimes also as an
expression of the experience, that evil can be an effective power which
overwhelms both perpetrator and victim[8]).
3.
Objections
However, a
lot of objections can be brought up against the just mentioned justification
for the statement that evil is an effective power. There are at least three
arguments against this kind of statement.
In the first place, there is the argument that
whenever evil manifests itself, this will be due to the defective arrangements
of society. Although this argument is relatively old, it was strongly developed
in the nineteenth century, and became very popular in the sixties and seventies
of the past century. We may think for instance of a very influential, widely
read book of the German social-educationalist Arno Plack: Die Gesellschaft
und das Böse: Eine Kritik der herschenden Moral (Society and Evil: A
Critical Commentary on Prevailing Ethics), published in 1967 in Munich with
many impressions after that year). Placks message was, that society
disciplines people by softly drilling them into two mental and behavioural
attitudes: competition on the level of economy and labour and consumerism on
the level of living and entertaining. These attitudes however cause the
repression of the existential fear of death, which, according to Plack, should
lead to human relations in which cruelty and aggression are hidden, but real
social mechanisms.
What shall we say of this apparently
humanistic kind of reasoning? In the end it comes down to the
de-responsibilisation and the de-culpabilisation of human beings. For the
ultimate message is: you are never guilty, only society which resides in you,
is guilty. Evil is a product of society, which shall fade away when society is
transformed. A paradoxical consequence of this humanism is that in order to
honour humanity, the individual human being is declared to be relieved from
responsibility, guilt and shame. Which ultimately implies, that the individual
person is degraded to a part of a greater totality. So, lets forget this
humanism, which actually is a form of anti-humanism.
In the second place, there is the argument that
builds on insights which were already developed during the so called
pre-disciplinary phase of the human sciences. It is the argument that greed,
lust, ambition and other vices and expressions of evil in the end turn out to
be good for society. Then we may hear, for instance, of Mandevilles dictum
private vices, public benefits, or, even more beautifully expressed, of
Swinburnes saying: the foundations of paradise are laid in hell.
We can be short about this argument. It
definitely is not nonsensical. Since the work of Georg Simmel and Lewis Coser,
most sociologists are familiar with the insight that conflict not uncommonly
designated as a manifestation of evil can be good for a community or society,
it even can be a medium for cohesion. However, those who think according the
line of argument that evil always has a social function, simply miss the point
that there are excesses of evil, and that not only human lives can break down
by evil, but also societies. The evils of for instance rape, mass murder, war,
societal Angst, simply are not good for societies. They are not functional.
The same goes for another variety of the
functional explanation of evil, this in the third place. It concerns the
explanation which focuses on the positive functions of aggression and violence
in the behavioural and biological sciences. A scholar whose name is often
mentioned then, is Konrad Lorenz. He wrote about das sogenannte Böse (the
so-called evil), indicating that aggression, extra- and intra-specific
aggression, is not an unimaginable mystery, but a behaviour that serves
important functions in the healthy evolution of the animal group and remains
adaptive where it limits are intact. Lorenz sometimes also jumped to
conclusions about the useful function of human (intra-specific) aggression.
However, he did not claim that humans maintain beastly instincts, but rather
that beasts are more adaptively evolved than mankind, and even more important,
that when intra-specific aggression is not restricted by their environment, it
easily can develop in a direction that is maladaptive. That is often the case with human beings.[9] So, by pointing to the relative freedom of
human beings from their environment, Lorenz actually refers to the possible
destructive tendencies of human aggression; with which he implies the
possibility of the negative, but yet effective power of evil mediated by
human beings.
4. Lets
be careful!
So far some
indications in favour of the assumption that the arguments do not hold of those
who explain evil, or better, who explain away evil. That is to say: if we
consider the striking massiveness of evil and the everydayness of (the
experience) of evil. And yet theologians, in particular theologians, should be
very careful in using the word evil. There are several good reasons to be
careful.
One of these reasons has to do with
the sheer complexity of the concept, if not to say with the confusion which
seems to be part and parcel of it. We just pointed to the ultimately scandalous
circumstance, that evil points to the unthinkable and, if one may say so, the
illicit root of both sin and suffering. Which makes the classical distinctions
evil as malum physicum (focus on
suffering) and evil as malum morale
(focus on the perpetratror) are hardly helpful. There is another thing. When
one tries to deal with reality by thinking about a concept, one almost has to
identify himself or herself with what the concept refers to. Paul Tillich once
wrote that real knowledge implies love with the object which is to be known.
However, identification and love seem to be impossible where evil is at stake,
he indicated in an essay on the demonical. [10]
(That is to say, if we share the classical conception of the adaequatio rei et
intellectus, the assumption that a thing only can be acquainted with by that
which is equal with it).
Another reason to be careful with
evil, can we find in what may be called the Nietzschean tradition of thinking
on evil. It is a tradition in which evil is not considered to be a natural
characteristic of human acts, neither a power or a substantial entity, but
only a prejudice or a judgement pronounced and applied by human beings on
acts, states of affairs or other human beings (as outside the Nietzschean
tradition emotivists in psychology declare evil as a expression of emotions,
just as speech-act theoreticians consider evil being an act with which speakers
attach their value judgement on others). Nietzsche himself brought forward the
idea that the fiction of evil is a trick, used by priests and other spiritual
and secular rulers in the construction of their world, in order to gain
and to maintain power over the masses. They invented definitions of good and
evil to promote an ethics of slaves. And why are so many people willing to
accept this moralistic fraud of power seeking people? According to Nietzsche:
because most people dont dare to look into the abyss of fear, which can open
itself when one lives a really great life. Led astray by the dual schemes with
which slavish people construct their reality, and disciplined by ages of
Christianity, these people learn to divide all social reality in good and evil.
Whatever we may think of Nietzsches analysis, the moment of truth in it is
the all too human inclination not to be able or not to be willing to face the
dread and fear which are lying at the basis of evil, but to project evil on
persons and happenings out there. A consequence and we have to say an all too
obvious consequence can be, that one falls prey to the myth of pure evil.[11]
Holding this myth implies that one locates evil out there, at the other, the enemy,
the societal system etc., which paradoxically also implies that one misses
the real mystery of evil, namely that it can be everywhere, that it is a kind
of a rhizome which can interweave itself just into good intentions and good
acts, even of ourselves.
Still another reason to be very
careful with the use of the concept of evil, has to do with the fascination
evil apparently wields on us. Evil fascinates, because it symbolizes that which
transgresses boundaries and regulations. And since human beings, seen from a
philosophical perspective, may be considered as moral beings who, just because
of their morality, have made something like a Differenz, a boundary with the
non-moral dynamics of always indifferent Being one may trace an insight of Levinas
here there always is the lure to transgress that boundary, to return to a
non-distinctive situation, in which we are not commanded to be responsible.
But, apart from the all too human yearning to get rid of ethics and morality,
why precisely is the fascination for evil risky? Before we can answer that
question, we have to realise that in the twentieth century the paradigm of evil
changed. Before the massacres of this century the paradigm of evil was the
earthquake of Lisbon from 1755, meaning that evil is not so much what man does
as what he suffers. While in particular Auschwitz has focused us more than
ever on the evil committed by human perpetrators.[12]
Which makes it hardly a coincidence that our fascination for the killers and
perpetrators, and our abilities to identify with them, is much more conspicuous
than our fascination for the victims. One may assume, that this is partly due
to the sheer horror of passivity and powerlessness of the victims, which makes
attention very difficult, not to mention identification: their evil is simply
unimaginable.[13] However,
the fascination for the perpetrators can have a strong cynical element, not
only because it almost ever is a form of detached, intellectual fascination,
mediated as it always is by the television screen or a book, [14]
but also because it is usually not focussed on the dread and the fear out of
which evil acts emerge. Which makes the development of a counter fear
impossible. And even worse: this kind of fascination can dry out our capacity
for compassion, and for remembering the victims. So, lets be very careful with
evil.
5. Tasks of
a Theology of Culture
An yet, a
theology of culture has to deal with evil. But how? Lets proceed with
indications about the task of a theology of culture. Such a theology has to be
both a critical and a self-critical intellectual engagement.
5.1. A
critical task
Theology
has to fulfil a critical role in cultural debates, because there definitely is
a striking evidence of evil, even an everydayness of it, while simultaneously
our culture is tempted to explain away evil, or, even worse, to set aside
evil, that is, to identify evil with others: with fools, madmen, or frightening
out-groups. For theology this implicates among other things the critical unveiling
of reductionist mechanisms by which scientists sometimes deal with evil. It
also implies the unveiling of several psycho-cultural mechanisms by which we
are inclined not to face evil. We may think of the fully understandable
revulsion that people can feel when they are confronted with horrific
manifestations of evil. Or we may think of the understandable reaction to cover
up the ultimate incomprehensibleness of evil deeds, either by refusing to face
evil or by giving final and permanent, clear cut explanations.
Where evil is concerned, a theology of culture
should also be attentive to some kind of a need of consolation! The historian
and journalist Ron Rosenbaum observed in his book Explaining Hitler (1998)
that hardly any scholar is willing to call Hitler evil. And which person can be
called evil, if not Hitler? Although most scholars rightly were seeking for
causes and reasons of Hitlers personality and behaviour, Rosenbaum detects
time and again in their works the intention not to accept the possibility that
a human being, any human being, commits excessive evil. He suggests that the
aversion of many scholars to use the word evil comes forward out of the
consoling effects which can come with rational explanations! We have already
indicated, that also the opposite can be the case: the deliberate use of the
word evil, applied upon another, can have a consoling effect too.
In fulfilling a critical role in contemporary
culture with respect to evil, theology should not make the mistake to identify
evil as an effective but mysterious power in order to imply that the search for
explanations of evil is not necessary anymore. Designating evil as ultimately a
mystery, may not lead to the conclusion that one does not have to search for
explanations (or that one does not have to look for practices to prevent evil).
Why is that? The theological answer is, that at
the one side we may consider evil as having transcendence, the cause of which
we cannot explain out of the nature of
things. But at the other side we cannot find evil a pure form of
transcendence like Levinas once had designated the commanding voice of the
other/Other as transcendence, the voice, or the naked face which ordains the
human subject to moral responsibility. Thinking of an argument of Hegel, we may
say that evil is a form of bad, finite transcendence, while the infinite
responsibility with which we are confronted with, as soon as we hear the
commanding voice of the other/Other, points to pure transcendence. Pure
transcendence is what ruptures Being, bad transcendence is what comes forward
out of human being and turns itself against it. Its because of this origin of
evil in the immanence of the human world, that theology should promote the
continuous search for explanations and prevention of evil.
5.2. A
self-critical task
Theology
should be self-critical too. Why? Because theology originates from an
imperative tradition which still steers contemporary theologians into the
direction of an onto-theological line of thinking, and
to its pinnacle:
Theodicy (despite the fact that onto-theology and Theodicy almost have
become terms of abuse in academic theology).
Onto-theologians are inclined to think about
the existence of God in terms of being. Which makes onto-theology in
the end coming down to the attempt to put God at work as the keystone of
a theory. It is a theory rendering the whole of being intelligible to human
thinking, whether one chooses God to be the Unmoved Mover, or Nature, or
Spirit, or if we think theology is the theory of a modern, invisible
religion The Human Self, The Market, or Technology. Thats why onto-theology
is bad theo-logy: it makes the rules that God must play by.[15]
As already indicated: Theodicy is the
pinnacle Paul Ricoeur once remarked: the pearl of onto-theology.
According to Richard Swinburne Theodicy is the enterprise of showing that
appearances are misleading: that evils of the kind and quantity we find on
Earth are neither incompatible with nor render improbable the existence of God,
we may still have stronger evidence to show that there is a God which outweighs
the counterevidence, which suffices to make it rational for us to believe that
there is a God.[16]
These words indicate what at first
sight seems at stake in all Theodicies, not only in classical, also in
modern forms, in particular in many varieties of Theology after Auschwitz.
The problem apparently circles around the rationality of belief in God
whether it is an argumentative or an experiential rationality. This problem
is formed by three premises: 1) God is omnipotent; 2) God is benevolent; 3)
Evil exists. Basically, one can not accept all three at once. Something has to
go.[17]
We can observe that Leibniz for instance, and Hegel and the friends of Job
are questioning the third premise. In many varieties of Theology after Auschwitz it is the first
premise which is modified or questioned, by speaking for instance of the God
Who suffers, or Who fails, or Who has withdrawn Himself from the world.[18]
There are even some theologians who dare to question the second premise. We may
think of those who ponder on the mystery of the book of Job. What to think, for
instance, of Job 9, 22-24, where Job implicitly albeit de facto indicates that
God is a sadist? What to think of that text, if we relate it to Job 42, 7,
where God is said to declare that Job has spoken right from Him?[19]
We may also think of Karl Barth, who in his Church Dogmatics states that Gods benevolence His opus
proprium is restricted, even countered by the wrath, poured out by His
Left Hand opus alienum, which apparently means that evil is
admitted by God Himself. [20]
One step further and we draw near to the view that evil comes from a dark side of God Himself. There are but a
few theologians who dare to assume that. One of them is the Jewish theologian
David R. Blumenthal. He brings forward the idea that the best argument of
Theodicy is that God is good, but
not forever. According to him, we have to
acknowledge the awful truth of Gods abusing behavior. We have to do that in
order to relate faithfully to God, to worship Him in a theology of protest
(against God)! For we can question Him, we even can accuse Him, we can complain
about Him, but
we cannot reject Him.[21]
These latter words, as well as Blumenthals revealing words the best argument in Theodicy, express a crucial point. In these radical
forms of Theodicies, in which God can be indicted, evil may at the one hand
be an unsearchable mystery for human thinking and pondering, like Gods ways
always were considered to be unsearchable. At the other hand however, in this
kind of theological reasoning evil is not
an operating, really existing mystery, which in the form of its effects the
excessive suffering of its victims eventually rejects God in the practice of
life. No, the existence of God is finally justified, in the medium of human
rationality, usually an experiential rationality.
But why would one wish to justify God, and to
make Him rational for human experience?
Hannah Arendt once gave the perfect answer:
because of a need for reconcilement. According to her Theodicies are those
strange justifications of God or of Being which, ever since the seventeenth
century, philosophers we may add: theologians and many other believers, included secular believers, AvH
felt were needed to reconcile mans mind to the world, i.c. to a world full of
evil.[22]
So, reconcilement of man, not only to God, but also to evil in the world.
Lets be short about this. We live after the
end of onto-theology and Theodicy. We live in the wake of the death of God.
After all, we may be aware of the traces of God. These traces are left in i.a.
Christian traditions, in churches, in religious feelings, also in our religious
longings for a vanished God. However, we also know that He is dead. For if He
would exist and if He would foresee history or deploys His power in history,
then He would be co-guilty of the massacres of the past century. In other
words: we may not think of, or pray to, an all powerful God. So much for mans
reconcilement to God.
Now what about our longing for reconcilement to
the world, and to ourselves? We must say, that we cannot be reconciled to the
world (yet?). For with respect to evil, we do not have the competence to
declare, that evil in the form of excessive suffering is reconciled. Besides
that, we have to acknowledge, that we cannot consider ourselves to be
reconciled beings. We cannot be at home in a world in which evil is inherent.
If that would be the case, and if we
yet would consider evil being a mysterious but real effective force in life,
then it would be inevitable to project all evil out there, on others. It also
would be inevitable to deny, that we are interwoven in networks of complicity,
to deny that such a situation makes us guilty. We, affluent, well to do
Westerners, are witnesses of evils done to others, in particular of the evils
of starvation and violence in the South, while we close ourselves off for the
voices with charges against us and while most of us are unwilling to change our
political and moral attitudes and style of living.[23]
Eventually we would deny, that evil lingers in each of us. We would actually
claim, that we are pure and good beings. Which ultimately brings along the
intimation that we are like angels or gods, even worse, we would act like
angels or gods.
We dont need to elaborate here on the insight
that just that human beings trying to act like angels or gods is an almost
certain road to doing evil! By which we have arrived at a paradoxical insight:
trying to reconcile ourselves with evil, that is to say, trying to give it a
place in the ways things are going in a world which is, or which is not
governed by a God could possibly well lead us to evil. So, let theology be
self-critical, towards the need for reconcilement to the world, to ourselves
and to God.
6. Theo-logy and evil?
Meanwhile,
weve got a serious problem now, especially the theologians amongst us. The
implication of what just has been said about the self-critical task of
theology, necessarily have to be, that theology has come to her end. She has
become redundant. For if we would define theology as a special form of
God-talk, and if God is dead, slain by evil, what sense does it make to keep
on theo-logising?
A possible answer may be a robust: No, theology is not at her end. This
answer however appears to be valid, if only we use a specific definition of
theology. For instance the definition
that theology is: the methodologically disciplined, cultural and historical
presentation of Christianity. This definition matches well with the nature of
many works and activities of theologians, while during the last two decades,
theology has become a bundle of cultural and historical disciplines.[24]
And for obvious reasons quite a few foundational theologians did and do take
issue over the question whether these disciplines have a normative character or
not, whether they belong in Academia or not, and whether the appropriate
terminology for these disciplines still is theology or should become
religious studies. Although the points at issue in these debates do have some
importance, we can be confident, that theology will not come to her end very
soon. Simply because of the situation that churches and Christians are still
making culture, like Christianity has been shaping Western culture for a long
time. And if we realise, that the idea of the death of God or of the
disenchantment of the world is believed in only by a small group of intellectuals,[25]
and that God-talk is practiced by many people, why would methodologically,
disciplined God-talk (= theology) not has a future, and a right to exist?
As already indicated, this answer is valid, if
only we employ a specific definition of theology. If one should try to
legitimise this definition, it turns out that one actually locates oneself on a
socio-cultural level of reasoning, viz. by pointing actually to the social and
cultural relevance of Christianity and to the social clientele of Christian
theology. If, however, one opts for a classical theological level, the already
mentioned serious problem shows up.
The classical approach to theology as
God-talk, or lets be somewhat more precise, as knowledge of God, is, that
theology is not only a methodologically disciplined discourse about God,
it is neither a form of intellectual speaking to God, but it is a
discourse of God Himself! This classical view once was taken by two of
the greatest Christian theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth. Both are
usually positioned against each other, as icons of natural versus dialectical
theology. But both monuments of theology can be considered as being in
agreement on the insight, that God is known to Himself alone, and that the
knowledge of God, given to us in revelation, is based on human participation in
Gods own self-knowledge.[26] However, if that actually would be the case
about theo-logy, and if God is dead, slain by the excessive, radical evil, it
would appear to be evident that theo-logy has come to her end.
But lets think further for some moments. We
may ask: why precisely did classical theology approach theology as Gods own
self-knowledge? The answer is: because of the noetic effects of sin. Human
wills and human intellects are considered to be corrupted by
evil,
which makes human knowledge of God impossible.
This way of thinking about the impossibility of
pure human knowledge of God, is part of a traditional theological and religious
framework. In this framework the following background assumption is of utmost
importance right now: the knowledge of evil, being something which has no
existence (no-thing), is only possible from a view which is informed by God
Himself! We may say, that just as the knowledge of God was based on Gods
self-knowledge, the knowledge of evil had to be dialectically shaped by His
self-knowledge too (as expressed in human faith). In classical theology this
does not mean, that God and evil can be considered as forming a dualistic pair,
ontologically so to speak. No, this is to say, that strictly seen from an
epistemological level, evil was considered to be revealed as the absolute
denegation of being, if only one should take a theo-logical
perspective. Just as God could never be pursued directly by human beings, so
evil was never to be pursued, while simultaneously God and evil were considered
as most real.
All this implicates, that the death of God
inevitably leads to the disappearance of evil; a disappearance which suits our
culture of cynicism. In this culture we are after all inclined to consider evil
as no-thing, viz. by forgetting, or explaining away or making sense of
evil (as indicated earlier in this essay). So, when we loose the habit of
thinking about an unthinkable God while He is dead we are expected to loose
the ability of thinking about the unthinkable evil.
However, right here, with some help of the just
mentioned classical theological insights, we will find a motive for not stopping
to theo-logise. For evil may be no-thing, it nevertheless works. Consequently
we know now, that we may not try to think
the no-thingness of evil, that we may not ponder on its mysterious
character, but, as we are confronted with the real effects of evil, in
particular in our remembrance of the faces of the victims of evil, we have to
take issue with evil. Why and how can we do that? The answer is: we have to do that, just for the sake of
the victims of evil. Thats why we can not give up theo-logy. Lets think
here of what the old Jean-Paul Sartre said a few months before he died (in
1980). According to him, we cannot do otherwise than hoping for the victims of
evil.[27]
According to him we may assume, that in our hope lies a kind of necessity: we have
to remember the victims, we must
keep trying to know a world in which evil manifests itself so massively. And
Sartre suggests, that when we are hoping, we actually locate our perspective on
an eschatological standpoint: we do the impossible thing, we transcend our
own view, and we observe the world from a point of view from where all evil is
revealed and simultaneously transcended. Another great European thinker from
the last century, Theodor W. Adorno, expressed this latter view in now famous
words: while thinking and remembering the absolute negativity (of suffering
from evil), we have to take an impossible position: we can develop our
knowledge of a world full of evil only from the standpoint of redemption (vom
Standpunkt der Erlösung).[28]
When we are confronted with evil in history, we are obliged to see history in a
messianic light! Which implicates that, although we know of the death of God,
we still have to think theo-logically, if only because of the commanding voices
we can hear coming from the victims of evil.
Can we
decide now that theo-logy is of utmost importance, especially when we are
dealing with evil? The answer must be: lets not be too certain about that.
One reason for not being too certain, is given
by the just mentioned Adorno. He indicates, that whenever we hear the ethical
command vom Standpunkt der Erlösung, we have to realise, that the problem of
the reality or of the unreality of redemption, is almost indifferent.[29]
Almost! In other words: pure theo-logy God-talk and God-thinking about
the subject of Erlösung/redemption is not that important. Just as
asking for the grounds of evil the disreputable Why-question , may not be obsolete, but it is not that important.
Important is commemorating the victims of evil. Important is giving words to
rage. Important are actions of consolation and narrative, and actions of prayer
and devotion. So it is important to act against evil, and to deal with
evil in oneself. So: we need more God-practices and less God-talk and
God-thinking (and the latter mentioned intellectual activities may have some
function in rendering service to the first mentioned practices).
Another reason for being not too certain about
theo-logy, has to do with the hope which God-talkers and God-thinkers have
to cherish. This hope actually is an uncanny hope words of
theologian David Tracy. Why is that? I surmise because we derive this hope not
from God, not from ourselves, but apparently from our confrontations with the
effects of evil! Moreover, when we are confronted with evil and we feel the
necessity of hope, we also feel, that this hope is not ours, that this hope is
not based on human will and human capacities, and that seen from a human
perspective attempts to get rid of evil inevitably will fail. Thats uncanny.
Besides that, we may say that hope for the better runs the risk of implying a
condemnation of what ever was misshaped by evil. Therefore hope bears risks,
the risk of forgetting our failures, and the risk of forgetting that
expressions of radical evil will always be unacceptable. So, yes, we must only hope. Let theo-logy help us
in countering the risks of hoping.
Comments are welcome: a.van.harskamp<at>mdw.vu.nl
Back to the English homepage of the Blaise
Pascal Institute: www.blaise-pascal-institute.org
[1] New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1995.
[2] Ib., 19.
[3] R.J. Bernstein, Radical Evil: A
Philosophical Interrogation, Cambridge etc.: Polity 2002, 42ff.
[4] S. de Wijze, Defining Evil:
Insights from the Problem of dirty hands, in: The Monist 85 (2002)
nr. 2.
[5] C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means
to Us, Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press 1997.
[6] M. Doorman, De romantische orde, Amsterdam: Bert Bakker 2004, 36.
[7] Alford, o.c., 52. One may also think of the sometimes reported situation in
which soldiers, almost overwhelmed by fear, yet attack and kill in fearfull
trance, intoxicated by and feeling the very own self submerged in the presence
of death: the own fear for death is overcome by inflicting death on others. The
French historians S. Audoin-Rouzeau and A. Becker report that there only a few
testimonies of soldiers who dare to tell from this horrible mechanism, which
nevertheless must have characterized and still characterize the experience
of many fighting men: threatening evil is warded off by doing evil (14-18: Retrouver la guerre, Paris:
Gallimard 2000, 60f.).
[8] However, when we consider the so
called writing table murderers (Schreibtischmörder) of the Third Reich,
when we read for instance the diary of Rudolf Höss, camp commander of Auschwitz
or the memoirs of Adolf Eichmann, we can notice at the one side that they can
say of themselves that they were submerged in the workings of evil, even that
they delivered aid and assistance to it (more often in a diminutive sense of
the word: Beihilfe: additional help), while at the other side it turns out
that they did not realise (and actually did not admit) that they really were
involved in evil. Lets take Eichmann. Not only did he characterize his role
many times in technical terms, as only a specialist in the Judenfrage, but
also as a tragic role. He regarded himself as someone on whom the fate of
tragedy was fallen. He simply turned out to be (and to stay, even during his
trial) a fanatic nazi, who uses the discourse of evil as an excuse, to get rid
of his responsibility (cf. I. Wojak, Eichmanns Memoiren: Ein kritischer
Essay, Frankfurt/New York: Campus
2001, 80ff., 90ff.). Which is not to say that the experience of evil as
something which can overwhelm someone, including a perpetrator, is all together
nonsensical.
[9] Cf. W.C. Hamblet, The Sacred Monstrous: A Reflection on Violence in
Human Communities, Lanham, Maryland U.S.A.: Lexington Books 2004, 10ff.
[10] P. Tillich,
Das Dämonische: Ein Beitrag zur Sinndeutung der Geschichte, in: Gesammelte
Werke, Vol. VI, Stuttgart:
Evangelisches Verlagswerk Stuttgart 1963, 42-71.
[11] R.F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty,
New York: W.H. Freeman and Company 1997, 61-96.
[12] S. Neiman, Evil in Modern
Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Princeton/Oxford: Princeton
University Press 2002, passim.
[13] Alford, o.c. , 133.
[14] H.Häring, Tussen theorie, praktijk en verbeelding, in: Concilium 1998-1, 30-48, esp. 39f.
[15] M. Westphal, Transcendence and
Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul, Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press 2004, 18ff, 34ff.
[16] R. Swinburne, Some Major Strands
of Theodicy, in: Daniel Howard-Snyder ed., The Evidential Argument from
Evil, Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana 1996, 30-39, esp. 30.
[17] S. Neiman, Whats the Problem of
Evil?, in: M. Pía Lara ed., Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives,
Berkeley etc.: University of California Press 2001, 27-45, esp. 35.
[18] A. van Harskamp, God en het kwaad van Auschwitz, in: A. van Harskamp e.a. red., Geloof en vertrouwen na Auschwitz, Zoetermeer: De Horstink 1995, 11-30; J. Oegema, Een vreemd geluk: De publieke religie rond Auschwitz, Amsterdam: Balans 2003, 149-173.
[19] E. Noort, God als boosdoener Over de rol van God bij de ervaring van het kwaad in de Hebreeuwse bijbel, in: B.J.L. Peerbolte/E. Tigchelaar red., Kennis van het kwaad: Zeven visies uit jodendom en christendom, Zoetermeer: Meinema 2004, 11-28, esp. 28.
[20] K. Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik: Bd III: Die Lehre von der Schöpfung, Teil 3, Zürich: EVZ-Verlag 19612, 409f., 411, 416f.
[21] D.R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of
Protest, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press 1993, 259-262.
[22] H. Arendt, Willing, New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1978, 20; also cited by Neiman, o.c., 299.
[23] A central theme in a recent Dutch novel: Désanne van Brederode, Het opstaan, Amsterdam: Querido 2004.
[24] J.P. Wils, Attestatief oordelen: notities met het oog op een interreligieus procesrecht, in: Tijdschrift voor Theologie 42 (2002) 354-359, esp. 356.
[25] Cf. C. Taylor, Sources of the
Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University
Press 1989, 17.
[26] The differences between the two
theological giants can be traced back to different views on the nature of
participation (included the problematic of analogia): Westphal o.c.,
140, 165f. The definition of theology as based on participation in Gods
self-knowledge, may be interpreted as the view, that whenever real theology
should be present, one could believe that Gods Word was manifest in that
theo-logy.
[27] J.-P. Sartre/B.-H. Lévy, L espoir maintenant: Les entretiens de 1980, Lagrasse: Verdier 1991 (recently translated in Dutch: Wat blijft is de hoop: De gesprekken van 1980, Kampen: Klement 2004).
[28] T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Franfurt/M: Suhrkamp 1980, 281.
[29] Ib.