The Next Step in Religion: An Essay toward the Coming Renaissance

by Roy Wood Sellars

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

It is noteworthy that there has never been a problem of good, but always a problem of evil. Man takes the good in his life for granted, while he bewails the presence of evil in all its forms. The Greeks had the myth of Pandora's box to account for the sorrows and ills which afflict the human race; the Hebrews told of the Fall of man from his original state of bliss to a life of toil and sin through the weakness of our first parents and the wiles of the Serpent; the Scandinavians sang of Loki, the Spirit of Deception, whose artful malice led to the death of Balder, the Beautiful. And Christianity has been accustomed to connect evil with a personal devil "who rushes about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour." At his door, popular thought has lain those temptations and backslidings that bewilder poor humanity. Even the more physical evils, such as famine, sickness and bodily injury, have been ascribed to his agency.

Is it necessary to say that primitive man thought of all evils as due to mysterious potencies which surrounded him on every hand? His ritual of purification corresponds to the signs which now surround electrical machinery. Irrational as many of these taboos were, they yet implied that the actual world was a strange mixture of favorable and unfavorable potencies to which man had to adapt himself. "To the primitive mind nothing was more uncanny than blood, and there are people still who faint at the sight of it: for 'the blood is the life,' life and death are the great primeval mysteries, and all the physical substances that are associated with the inner principle of either partake of this mysteriousness." This early idea of a miasmic contagion slowly unites itself with the belief in demons, as animistic religion evolves. Bad demons work havoc, while favorable spirits bring blessings to the needy worshiper.

But, as religion developed a more distinctly ethical and personal character, the existence of evil in the world became a problem. In the early days, it was not so much a problem as a fact. But a Jew who believed that Yahweh controlled everything that occurred in the Kingdom had to account for personal and social disasters in a rational way. What was more natural than the hypothesis that those whom disasters overtook had been guilty of some secret wrong? And it was this point of view which was adopted. The Book of Job represents the puzzled reflection of a late period over the difficulty of squaring the hypothesis with the facts. And, so far as I can see, the puzzle is handled as well as it could be within the accepted setting. The whole treatment is deductive rather than inductive. Assume an omnipotent, omniscient and ethically perfect deity, and it follows that, when facts do not square with your sense of justice, you must either suspect the individual of secret sins or proclaim that God's ways are past finding out. In other words, the search for a theodicy leads to agnosticism. Since you don't really know anything about the world, one hypothesis is as good as another. But agnosticism is a cheap way of establishing a position, and is likely to suggest to the reflective that the whole setting of theodicy is at fault. If the religious view of the world leads to this impasse, may it not be better to take a more inductive way of approach to what we call evil? May not reality be of such a character that evil is as natural as good?

When we glance a little more closely at the Christian tradition, we find that the popular answer to the problem of evil is by no means unambiguous. To explain the existence of evil by the agency of the devil (Satan, Ahriman) is a straightforward answer, quite in accordance with the appeal to personal agency so characteristic of religion, but it does not harmonize with the ethical monotheism which Christianity inherited. The query will not down, Why does this omnipotent and ethically perfect deity permit such a being to exist to work havoc amongst his children? Even upon a casual examination, it becomes evident that there are many strands of tradition and doctrine in Christianity. There is the classic monotheism of the prophets, and the more polytheistic tendencies of later times, a contrast parallel to the sanity of classic Greece as compared with the flabbiness of Hellenistic times.

In the New Testament, itself, there are many evidences of the acceptance of a dualistic view of the world. Satan is the Prince of this World. We have already pointed out that the writers of the gospels think of Jesus as casting out demons which have infested the bodies of men and women and made them sick. Yet, strange to say, we are told that not a sparrow falls to the ground without God's consent.

This dualistic strand of thinking dominated during the Middle Ages. The world is given over to the devil for him to work his will upon it. Here we have both a cause and an effect of the pessimism of the times. For the early Christians, society was corrupt and filled with abominations; the only sure way to achieve salvation was to flee from its lure to deserts and monasteries, there to purge the soul of fleshly desires. No one has painted the situation more keenly and unflinchingly than Anatole France in Thais. Humanity was sick. A strong wave of asceticism spread from the East to the West and carried with it doctrines based on the metaphysical extension of the contrast between light and darkness, good and evil. Matter is evil in its very nature and leagues itself with those instincts in the soul which come from its contamination with flesh. The taint of original sin is deepened by the grossness of the material out of which man's earthly tabernacle is made. The body with its passions plays double traitor to the soul. Only by prayer, purification, fasting, and the grace of God can the son of corruption save his soul alive for the heavenly kingdom among the stars.

The number of mythical elements woven into this ascetic dualism is striking. Woman was the temptress most to be feared; the daughters of Eve were considered the most powerful instruments Satan had at his command. It was even debated whether she had a soul. It was even whispered that a woman guarded the gates of Hell. Again, Satan was pictured as a demon leading the unwary astray by the desires of this world. Ethics was an affair of external fighting for the souls of men. The whole setting was mythical and supernaturalistic and full of picture-thinking.

We have already referred to the doctrine of original sin. This doctrine was taken up by St. Augustine who had been a Manichean. Pauline theology, Augustinianism, and Manicheism have much in common. They are all instances of what may be called mythological metaphysics. The dogma is, that, left to his own devices, man tends to take the path of sin. He is, moreover, alienated from God, who, because of his perfection, cannot condone imperfection and demands an atonement which cannot be made by man himself. Hence, the need arises for a savior to mediate between man and God. What a construction is this in which myth, rabbinical theology and pagan dualistic cosmologies are drawn together to furnish the setting for a juridical drama! How can those who accept the teaching of modern science and realize the more subjective and personal spirit of modern ethics conserve any portion of this strange creation of past ages? The idea of evolution, as applied to both nature and man, undermines the whole fantastic drama. Man has arisen painfully from a brutish condition, instead of falling from a perfect state. The contrast between flesh and spirit can no longer be taken literally as corresponding to a sort of physical division of the universe into spheres of good and evil which can have no commerce with one another. This is ethical poetry which is not sufficiently aware that it is poetry. Instead of seeking to re-interpret the belief in an external, sacrificial savior, mediating between God and man in vague, mystically symbolic language which suggests a depth it does not possess, the sensible thing is to drop the whole outlook frankly, as outgrown, and as having essentially lost its meaning. We saw that Jesus, himself, would probably not have comprehended its intricacies, and certainly would not have accepted it as true of his own mission. Instead, it represents the theosophic speculations of the Ancient World. So long as the thinker toys with these imaginative speculations which have no direct foundation in the knowledge and experience of to-day, so long will he live in a mental fog unable to see the really pressing social and ethical problems of the present.