Big Evil

The occasion for these reflections on the problem of evil is my reading of the sixth essay, “On Nature of Evil,” in Bogoljub Šijaković, Between God and Man: Essays in Greek and Christian Thought (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag 2002). This collection of seven essays, written between 1985 and 2001, covers such topics as anthropology and self-knowledge (the famous Apollonian dictum “Know Thyself”), paradox and mysticism, guilt and repentance – to name but a few. What interests me here, however, is Professor Šijaković’s nuanced, philosophical, and at times even subtly poetic discussion of evil in our world.

Professor Šijaković’s chief concern is the result of viewing evil as strictly meontic – i.e., as having no existence, being no-thing, simply the absence of good. However, since the good is God, and God is not a “what” but a “who,” a person and not a mere substance – or, more accurately, God’s substance is His person, the person of the Father – then evil must not be considered a substance, even if that ‘substance’ is no-thing; rather, evil is properly understood as an “ontological usurpation” (p. 91) resulting from the faulty exercise of human freedom. Evil, then, is “personological” (ibid.); the concept of “metaphysical evil” can never, as Professor Šijaković explains, be resorted to as an explanation for the intrusion of “senselessness and madness” into our world. Certainly there is such a thing as “natural evil” (disasters, disease); however, as Šijaković explains, by the mere fact that we use the terms good and evil as “moral categories” (pp. 92-93, my emphasis), we are tacitly acknowledging that all evil “bears witness to the abuses of human freedom [and] rests on freely made decisions of the will” (p. 93).

However, it is often easy to explain away evil – especially natural evil – by resorting too readily to the exercise of human freedom, and its sometimes negative results, as a cause. Stanley Harakas, for example, in his book Toward Transfigured Life (Minneapolis: Light and Life 1983) makes an attempt to exonerate God of any blame for natural evil with the example of the destruction of a village in the French Alps by an avalanche. Harakas tacitly places the blame on the villagers, who should have somehow been aware that the location of the village was not a safe one, and so built elsewhere (p. 75). It was their free choice to build in a bad location that caused the evil of the loss of life, not God or some abstract system of nature or fate. Taken to its extreme conclusion(s), of course, Harakas’s attempt at theodicy ends in absurdity. Suppose, for example (following Harakas’s ‘reasoning’) that, wishing to eat a healthier diet, I purchase a bag of salad tainted – unbeknownst to me – by some potentially lethal chemical. I eat the salad, sicken, and die. Who is to blame? The company who distributes the bagged salad? The farmers who grow the vegetables? The government agency whose job it is to inspect the various sites of manufacture? All of the above? Or perhaps the blame should be placed on my hypothetically deceased self? That’s it! I shouldn’t have been such a lazybones. If only I had grown my own veggies in my backyard, I’d still be here today.

Things get trickier, of course, with moral evil, especially when we enter the misleadingly black and white realm of victims and perpetrators. How often do we hear the families of victims of violent crimes demanding ‘justice’? Invariably, this ‘justice’ involves retaliation or vengeance against the perpetrator of the crime. When the ‘justice’ in question involves the government-sanctioned murder of the perpetrator, then evil has only succeeded in doubling itself; now not only has one human being bearing the image of God been eliminated from existence, but two! It seems to me that one of the least remembered biblical verses, especially among so-called conservative Christians (particularly in the United States) is Romans 12:19-21. Šijaković is, fortunately, sensitive enough to the complexity of the problem of evil to avoid the Herculean task of attempting an explanation for the varieties of moral evil in our world. He does, however, give us a much-needed warning: “The biggest evil is when evil succeeds in convincing us that there is no evil” (p. 99). On the ontological level, evil may indeed be no-thing; but it can usurp the being of the world, and turn the positive ascendancy of life into a degeneration, a return, as St. Athanasius would put it, into the nothingness out of which God called us (De Incarnatione 3.3.1-5).

Evil must be personalized; for it is, according to Šijaković, precisely our personal powers of reason, scientific ability, and education that provide evil with an opportunity to burst forth from nothingness into existence. While reliance upon our God-given gifts of rational understanding, creativity, ingenuity, etc., can indeed result in contributions to a better world, it is easy to overlook the increased opportunities for ontological usurpation (evil) created by such progress. This is, of course, a perennial problem, and one for which there is no ready solution. As Christians, we have faith that God will, when the time is right, return His creation to its intended state – which, for us, means deification (theôsis). In the meantime, we would do well to follow the advice of Professor Šijaković: love the other, even to the extent of taking responsibility for his or her own evil – that is the only path to salvation from evil (p. 104).