We have with us always—in this mortal realm—various heresies which take too seriously the theological quandary: how could an all-powerful and all-good God have created a world in which there is so much evil? The great thinkers who have seeming headed this way, Isaiah and Jeremiah and Lord Acton as just 3 examples, have eventually retreated to a prayer such as, “Lord God Almighty, why did You create a world in which such a high percentage of powerful and successful men are outright evil?” In modern psychological terms, this is somewhat equivalent to asking, “Why is it so easy for men with the `mentality of gangsters’ (Acton’s term) to gain power and wealth?” or even “Why is this world made so that psychopathic men can so easily take advantage of the bonds of trust which are necessary for complex (and potentially wealthy and powerful) communities to form?” The parasites eventually invade any successful centers of power and wealth, destroying the relationships which are productive of that power and wealth.
To think matters through to the formation of tightly phrased questions is good. In doing such, we are being honest to the workings of God’s Creation, honest to the acts-of-being which God performed in creating from nothingness and in sustaining and shaping what He has so created. (Per Etienne Gilson, `act-of-being’ is an English-language term for giving us a sense of the sheer action in God’s interaction with contingent being, a sense of the radical existentialism involved in Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of a true Creator-God.)
So it is that we can derive insights from analyses of and contemplations upon this matter of a Creation with high levels of natural evils (volcanoes and parasites and so on) and seemingly higher levels of human evils. We can’t draw anything that could be called answers or explanations which are more than partial and contingent. Yet, many try to explain this world of mixed goodness and evil in absolute terms, not always simple but absolute.
One possible set of explanations start with the idea found in ancient pagan traditions that there was some sort of a fall from perfect being which is `spiritual’; our `material’ world is a mistake and must be conquered in such a way that `material’ being disappears and only `spiritual’ being continues to exist. This is more extreme, though similar to, the Greek idea of a Golden Age which decays to a Silver Age and on to the Bronze Age through a Heroic Age and on to the low-point of the corrupt Iron Age. (See Ages of Man. See Yuga for a Hindu version of this sort of a system. Note that the Greeks and Hindus both came from the people we can describe roughly as `Indo-European people’ who are discussed in Proto-Indo-Europeans and Indo-Aryan migration.)
One aspect of this whole matter confuses me: why is it that this idea of a fall, by stages or all at once, so thoroughly dominated any theories that man arose from more primitive creatures? Why do we tend to think of ourselves as being descendants of more perfect men? Is it a trait of Indo-European modes of thought only? I don’t know enough to provide even tentative answers and doubt I’ll explore this particular line of questions, but—even unanswered—such questions can point to interesting ideas.
My intent is to look at one particular problem coming from this: the tendency on the part of Christians to hypothesize a conflict between a more perfect state of being, spirit, and a state of being, material, which is imperfect at best and maybe outright evil.
A powerful thinker, Mani, lived during 216-274. He was of Persian origin (Indo-Aryan in all likelihood). He drew upon Gnosticism which taught (roughly and simplifying over a variety of similar but not identical sets of beliefs):
- All matter is evil, and the non-material, spirit-realm is good.
- There is an unknowable God, who gave rise to many lesser spirit beings called Aeons.
- The creator of the (material) universe is not the supreme god, but an inferior spirit (the Demiurge).
- Gnosticism does not deal with “sin”, only ignorance.
- To achieve salvation, one needs gnosis (knowledge).
This Wikipedia article on Gnosticism also tells us: “A major question in scholarly research is the qualification of Gnosticism, based on the study of its texts, as either an interreligious phenomenon or as an independent religion,” pretty much the same as my question regarding this entire line of thought and of feeling which I’ll simply label “pessimism about matter.”
Mani’s system, Manichaeism, taught:
an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. Its beliefs were based on local Mesopotamian religious movements and Gnosticism.
Using categories of Christian thought: what exists necessarily (it couldn’t not exist) is good and pure; what exists contingently is evil and impure, but that which is good and pure has become trapped in this material world, which has basic stuff, matter, which is evil and impure. These lines of thought are so complex that its hard to properly criticize or analyze them without a good deal of study. My goal is to deliberately stay at a more general level to drive home the point that there is no good reason to consider the usual understanding of the fall of Adam and Eve as even plausible while there is also no good reason to reject evolutionary theories as being incompatible with Holy Scripture or with nearly all subsequent Christian theologies—though some versions of Darwinian evolutionary theories have been corrupted by thought due more to Karl Marx than to Darwin.
One aspect of Christian speculative theories (yes—not settled dogma) which puzzles me is: if we are to think about spirit as perfect and good and matter as evil and defective, why would we imagine that we share in spirit? Why do we think there is a form of human created being (matter or body) which is evil and defective and a form of human created being (spirit in the form of soul) which somehow shares in divinity? Mani, and his possible Gnostic forebears, might have been to believe this because of their polytheistic religions and their confusion in or lack of concern with various forms, but Christians believe in one God who is the one Creator, in divine Being and in contingent being. We should be more careful in blurring boundaries, while confessing that God has crossed the boundaries in creating what is not Him and then in taking on, through the Son, a human nature of contingent being.
Yet, it would seem that most modern Christians don’t generally see the world as outright evil or even bad in a strong way, though anyone with open eyes and an active mind will see there is much in this world which is not good. Some might even perceive that such non-goodness might be the result of processes which lead to goodness. But… Modern Christians, and most other modern peoples in the West, form—or, more likely, adopt—their core beliefs as if the world were irrelevant, and so it is easy, as one important example, for them to absorb the liberal position that only individuals matter and communities have only nominalistic existence. (See A Very Simplified View of the Woes of Christianity—Now and at Two Earlier Times.)
It becomes not only possible, but mandatory in a sense for those modern Christians to think in terms of soul as eternal (contingent being as eternal?) and matter as something ephemeral and created for the use of our `pure’ and `eternal’ souls. Even our bodies can be mutilated if we feel ourselves to be of a different sex than that to which we were born. (Lest the reader think I be indifferent to the small but real population of truly troubled people: see Individuality, Freedom, and the Real Conflict Facing Modern Christians.)
Modern Western Christians, other residences of Christian regions of decay still more, have conformed their thoughts and feelings in such a way as to accept God’s declaration that what He created is good or very good while also thinking only the spiritual can be truly good, though the spiritual is no more than an undisciplined desire. The world is not “what it is” but rather “what we feel it is or should be.” So it is that modern Western Christians can accept both evolution and the story of a human race born in Eden of a special Creation which is in nature but not of nature. It allows some to move toward the radical, but consistent, position that we are what we feel ourselves to be, or think to feel ourselves to be, at the present moment. Government bureaucrats and their soul-mates, Christian leaders, can decide to move primitive tribal peoples from Uganda to Maine, feeling that all human beings are the same—why in the world would they think natives of tropical Africa evolved to the same characteristics as natives of the temperate and arctic zones? Despite the illusions of such as those Christian leaders of the modern West, or most members of their flocks, this is the same reasoning, low-quality and oblivious to the facts of God’s Creation, which is found in those who advocate that a 6 year-old boy who feels he is a girl should undergo hormone treatments and surgical mutilations to become a `girl’. Africans have the traits to live in a suburb of Boston and boys have the traits to be girls with a little `help’ from the medical industry.
The above paragraph discusses ideas so stupid as to be held only by Catholic bishops and others educated beyond their capabilities—in a chaotic environment, many might have functioned well enough in a morally and politically stable world. More interesting, from my perspective, the tendency of the modern man or woman or child of the West to overlay their own illusions and delusions upon the world outside of themselves has allowed many modern Christians of the West to accept the material benefits of modern science and engineering while remaining in the mainstream of a Christianity which relies upon an understanding of Creation which made of both Bible-based theology and modern science—as of 1700 or so.
To these modern Christians of the West, our physical natures don’t really matter much. Our desires, taking the place of spiritual natures in Gnostic or Manichaeistic thought, overrule any considerations of reason or even basic facts; this sort of corruption has even overtaken the self-sacrificing religious and secular missionaries of the modern world: see Here Be Dragons for a discussion of the great dangers they, with our support, have nurtured.
To hell with reality, even the ways in which God has created and continues to shape and to sustain Creation, in particular—the ways in which the human race has evolved and continues to evolve. To hell with reality, even our own bodies to which we were born.