EVIL & EVOLUTION: A THEODICY

Chapter 3

The Shape of Evil

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary;
men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. (Joseph Conrad)

Conrad's bold statement, on the face of it, would make this chapter unnecessary, but there is more to it than meets the eye. Mankind's "Heart of Darkness" may very well be capable of every kind of wickedness, yet mankind senses that the extent of evil often exceeds merely human capacities. How can this be? The problem is much more complicated than the mere fact of evil alone.

The problem of evil, as we have seen, is really a series of connected problems. The most fundamental of these has been bound up with misunderstandings about what is meant by the "power" and the "goodness" of God. Too often these divine attributes taken simplistically and uncritically, have failed to take into account what real goodness in God, translated into love for his creation, really means. Only when God's power is seen in conjunction with a self-giving love manifested in the creation of free and loving creatures like himself, is any reconciliation of the idea of an all-powerful and all-good God with the existence of evil possible -- indeed, not only is it possible but altogether necessary. With- out the possibility and even the probability of evil there can be no creation at all!

Such a general statement can only be a beginning, the first step in a theoretical "probe," so to speak. We have to be more specific. What "kinds" of evil can God allow? That God can, and must, allow the possibility of the occurrence of sin in free creatures seems logical enough, but how about death, sickness, or natural disasters? How can these fit in?

In dealing with this second, more specific, stage of the question, it is essential to first describe clearly, even if rather abstractly, just what kinds of evils there are, and what makes one kind different from another. Are all of our supposed "evils" really evil? We might even ask just what we mean by evil in the first place. How can we define evil? Is not evil, like good, self-evident? Perhaps, but observe what happened to our notions of "power" and "goodness" when we examined them more carefully. They turned out to take too much (or too little) for granted. So, too, in the case of evil. There can be no general description or definition until we take a closer look at the kinds of things humanity has called evil. We have not really analyzed what it is that makes people see certain kinds of things or happenings as "evils." Nor have we really looked to see how much these things vary and yet are all lumped together into a single concept. Added to this investigation into the kinds and nature of evil, we would like to try to gain some insight into the "genesis" of evil. Only when we have done all this can we begin to deal clearly with the concrete instances of evil in our lives.

So we must begin at the beginning, with the earliest myths about evil, and see where they take us.

A. The Myths of Evil

Much akin to Joseph Conrad's observation, yet bolder still, is Dostoyevsky's (again in the person of Ivan Karamazov) paradox: that "if the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness!" How true this is: whenever humanity tries to find some kind of explanation for the existence of evil, that solution invariably mirrors humanity itself. Human explanations of evil inevitably end by restating the problem, blaming someone else -- God, Satan, the first man or first people -- but in the end describing ourselves. What then is accomplished by such an investigation of myth? Do we not arrive at a dead end, or end up going in circles? So it might seem -- but let us see.

Myth, has been somewhat fancifully defined as "truth that never happened." By this is meant that myth is a way of symbolizing a profound and existential truth. While it can be described as a simile in the form of narrative, it is not really concerned with history or the way things came about so much as with describing the way things are. Yet if this is so, why the story element, why the pseudo-historical dramatic form? Why the "once upon a time" quality that makes it appear as if it was a moment in history? Paul Ricoeur, in his analysis in The Symbolism of Evil, enumerates three very important reasons for this. First, the story must point to a universal condition, and to do so must trace this condition back to the origin of things, to a point of common ancestry. Second, it must, through its "in the beginning" quality, include all time, for what better way is there to say that "this is the way things are" than to point back to the way things seem to have been from time immemorial? Thus "in the beginning" stands for all time - from beginning to end. Thirdly, the dramatic story must reveal the struggle that exists within us between the ideal (the way things ought to be) and the real (the way things are). For this last purpose, the most natural and effective form is the dramatic story, one which tells of a "before" -- a kind of primal condition before history -- and an "after" -- the condition that we experience now. But as we shall see, the ideal quality of this "before" may also stand for something else, not only for what might have been, but also for what might someday be.

Ricoeur's analysis reflects, I think, not only three major functions of myth, but also, in doing so, helps us to see how each of the three major myths concerning evil (and a fourth variation of one) in turn tend to emphasize one or another of these functions. For while Ricoeur insists that they are neither history nor explanations of evil, nevertheless, I believe that they will turn out to be seen not just as three distinct variations of a general statement about evil, but as three separate statements about three basic types of evil: cosmic disorder, human suffering, and sin. Depending on the major preoccupation of a people, the prevailing myth will tend to focus on only one major type of evil. But, because the prevailing myth cannot entirely ignore the other types of evil, it will be forced to compromise, dealing with these by incorporating them as minor themes. Very often the result turns out to be inadequate, showing gaps in logic and, in the end, too often spreading the seeds of doubt and the eventual loss of faith.

The remedy for this is not, as some foolishly think, to abandon all myth and "advance" to purely scientific analysis. Myth, as Ricoeur has shown us, is a science, a mode of knowledge in its own right, perhaps the only way of knowing or at least reflectively experiencing the total dimensions of existential truth. If each of the classical "myths of evil" should prove somewhat inadequate by itself, the best course of action is still to let each speak for itself, for each can fill the gaps in the others if allowed to express its truth in its own unique way.

[NOTE: Although I here adopt Ricoeur's terminology, I do so with some reservation in its application to the biblical story of the Fall. As Herbert N. Schneidau carefully points out in his chapter on "The Mythological Consciousness" in his book Sacred Discontent (Baton Rouge, La. : Louisiana State University Press, 1976), there is a paradoxical element in the Hebrew use of myth approaching almost what amounts to anti-myth. Thus while admitting Levi-Strauss's emphasis on the essential structure (rather than the stories as such) underlying myth as the key to its adaptability from one culture to another, Schneidau emphasizes that it is precisely this element that has been subverted in the Hebrew scriptures. In their desacralization of nature, the biblical writers made more of the story elements than the underlying structures which they contained, perhaps at some risk to the writers' central purpose. Nevertheless, Ricoeur's analysis of the basic functions of myth would seem to fit the biblical story of the Fall quite accurately.]

1. The Fall

The Biblical story of The Fall of Man, which Ricoeur terms "The Adamic Myth," is the account of evil best known to modern Western society. In it we see what seems to be primarily an account of moral evil or sin -- the willful turning away from God by the first man and woman whose names in Hebrew adam (or more exactly atham = mankind) and 'av = mother (or more properly, hawwah which may be derived from all life (hay): see The Jerusalem Bible, Genesis 3, note e). symbolize the whole human race. In this account of moral evil, death and suffering are secondary; they are only a consequence of sin. There is no such thing as a cosmic evil except a brief nod to a primeval chaos in the first of the two creation accounts -- all has been quickly brought into order by God and all is good. There is no mention of suffering or death, except by way of warning, and until the first couple ignores this warning, all is paradise. So what possible reason could there be for humans wanting to sin or even being tempted to transgress?

The traditional commentators all point to pride as the cause of the transgression. Yet how do we make any sense of this pride, as merely wanting to eat from the tree of knowledge, when Adam already has knowledge of everything useful to know, even to the point of naming (which is to say to have a controlling knowledge over) all the creatures of the earth?

Accordingly, we must look for a deeper pride -- the prideful ambition of wanting to be as gods, equal to the creator himself. As Eric Fromm has pointed out, it is not that God doesn't want to have humans who would be in some way "as gods." In fact, to have them thus share in the work of creation is precisely what God had in mind. Rather, the sin of humanity was in thinking that it could change the rules of the game, becoming instantaneously equal to God through an assertion of our own wills in opposition to the order (or should we say "process?") initiated by God.

But still, how do we account for such over-reaching ambition in the midst of paradisal bliss? Such pride may be quite understandable in moderns who seem all too often persuaded of their god-like powers, and that apparently without any outside help. But for ancient man, especially for a humanity that saw itself initially blessed with every bliss one could hope for, this kind of pride seems hard to fathom.

The ancient story teller may have had similar misgivings and so he introduces another element (although not too convincingly) -- that of deception. The Man pleads that he was beguiled by the Woman, while she, in turn, blames her misdeed on the Serpent, the Tempter, whom later Biblical books will name Satan, "the Father of Lies."

Why all this buck-passing? Is it not because the truth seems so obvious as to make the substance of the lie incomprehensible? Certainly there must be under the innocuous symbol of a forbidden fruit, some profound disorder, one that is so far reaching that the biblical author could only point to a diabolic origin for such great human disorder. Mere disobedience, even to a divine command, is forgivable. But the sway of the lie, the continual delusion, is something else.

Martin Buber has helped to isolate the uniquely human character of the lie in contrast to all other forms of evil. Every evil that we know is, in fact, but a ramification of or an intensification of some other phenomenon that we find already present in the subhuman world. Suffering, death, even most moral evils, are the consequences of unchecked and intensified occurrences and "drives"found within nature. But the lie, the outright affront against the very nature of things, only humans at their very worst, can conceive this. Beside the outrageous perversion of the lie, all forms of protective camouflage, or even the illusion of a fruit appearing as the elixir of immortality, seem innocuous or even ridiculous. The outright lie defies all description. While unique to humans in the world of nature yet it appears as something almost superhuman, a parody of the truth which is God himself. It demands a diabolic figure, a symbol even bigger than mere human life.

Yet the figure of the Serpent/Tempter really solves very little. If it epitomizes the degree of the perversion of the truth which was involved in the human race's rebellion against God, it nevertheless also emphasizes the basic problem of theodicy -- the ultimate responsibility of the creator for all that exists, and with that, for evil as well as good. The later identification of this tempter with Satan, the arch-devil, the leader of those spirits who refused to serve God in an earlier, prehuman, rebellion (as depicted in the Book of Revelation), only pushes the basic difficulty further back in time, or to before all time -- somewhat the opposite of another explanation hinted in the book of Genesis, the fleeting references to the Sons of God who inter-married with the daughters of men to produce the race of the Nephilim, or evil giants. None of these stories really explain anything, if by explanation we mean a solution to the problem of the origin of evil in respect to an all-good creator. We have been warned, however, not to look primarily for explanations in such myths, but instead for deeper insights into the real state of things.

If, then, we ignore or at least resist the tendency to seek such explanations of the origins of evil and simply let the story of The Fall speak in its own symbolic language, certain truths will emerge; some with more clarity than others. Most obvious is the universal character of the catastrophe. There is no question of only a part of the human race being affected. Adam and Eve stand as prototypes of the whole human race, and although there may be conflicting opinions as to whether their sinfulness is transmitted to the rest of the human species (in fact, Judaism holds no such doctrine of Original Sin in this sense), still the basic meaning of the story as universally applicable to all humans, past, present, and future, is readily understood, even by nonbiblical religious traditions. In this sense, the question of the historical accuracy of the story is beside the point. It is not really concerned about the historical origins of sin (or suffering and death for that matter) but rather about the condition of humanity in its existential experience.

Likewise, in terms of the contrast between the ideal and the real, between the vision of paradise and the picture of humanity driven out to the East of Eden, we have no discussion of geography but instead a graphic reminder of the gap between what we are and what we imagine we could have or should have been -- or even a vision of what we are yet to be: In this sense paradise represents not so much a place or even a state of existence as it does a state of mind.

These self-evident points of the story are not much different from those in any other myth about evil and the human race. But what this story depicts, perhaps more deftly than any other, is the interior struggle of "everyman" not so much with God, or even with the devil, but with himself. It is here that the lie enters the picture, not so much from outside as from within. If the boldfaced lie of the Tempter to Eve, or even more, Adam's gullibility in believing his wife, do not ring true, might this not be deliberately a cue to look more deeply? Certainly there is pride involved, but it is not so much a rebellious pride of wanting to dethrone God, but rather a stupid pride of thinking that we can outguess or do better than God in providing for ourselves. Socrates once observed that no one does evil for its own sake. We seek only the good. But we err in mistaking limited goods, bits and pieces -- perhaps even apples -- for the ultimate good. If the story of a snake and a forbidden fruit appear a trifle naive, it may only be evidence of a superficial reading. Might not the Biblical author have been trying to make the point that moral evil is rarely malicious in its intentions? It is more likely to spring from a kind of stupidity, but it turns out to be a foolishness that is truly diabolic in its devastation of human happiness. Although the stated motive for such brash disobedience -- to become "as gods, knowing both good and evil" -- seems plausible to us, the biblical writer was not attempting to indicate that "ignorance is bliss." Rather, he was demonstrating that a trusting innocence that accepts things as God intended them to be is, in itself, the realization of paradise!

Before we turn to the other great myths of evil, one final remark regarding the Adamic myth should be made. Does not the story still try to historically explain death and suffering as consequences of sin? Again, superficially, this may seem true and so understood caused little problem for a pre-Scientific Age. Yet I doubt that a mere explanation of the origins of such natural phenomena was the author's real intent. Did he really believe that a sinless existence would be without death, work, or occasional discomfort? This seems, unless we are being too subtle, a bit farfetched. Again, if we are to understand the language of myth not in terms of explanation but in terms of factual, existential, statements about life then a much more obvious meaning comes to mind. It is not that death, work, or pain suddenly come upon a scene where they were unknown, but it is rather, through mankind's foolish and over-reaching pride that they become known in a new and ominous, disheartening, way. Death is now experienced as dying and all that implies for an ego-conscious [i.e., self-reflective] being. Simple work now becomes toil, survival entails suffering, and even the birth of new life is wrought with pain.

If l have added what may seem to be a new twist in our understanding of The Fall, (especially on this last point) it is not to try to rescue it from its inadequacies as a statement, much less as an explanation, of all evil in the world. It has been rather to try to bring to the fore what this story has done better than all the others, that is, to emphasize the moral disorder that sin has visited upon the universe. When we turn again to the subject of human freedom and sin we will find that Genesis will have even more to say. Sin is not, however, the only disorder to be found in the universe. For the full recognition of this fact we must turn to another myth, one from which even the biblical author was forced to borrow.

2. The Chaos of the Gods

The Primeval Chaos theme, expressed in what is probably the oldest type of creation story, has many variations. One version, the most philosophical in outlook, sees the act of creation itself as a kind of a divine fall, while another more primitive version sees the created world as both the battleground and the product of a war between the gods. If the idea of multiple or opposed gods seems strange to us, we must remember that polytheistic thinking looks not so much for explanations regarding the origin of things (although apparent explanations form part of the story) but rather seeks comprehensible ideas about the behavior of what we would term the forces of nature. Gods or divinities were seen as the personification of such forces as the earth and its fertility, the wind, the storms, the sky, the sun and moon, and the rest of the heavenly bodies. While these all seemed to be harmoniously related, nevertheless the harmony existed as an uneasy truce between opposing forces. Occasionally, conflict broke out again, the moon seeming to swallow the sun at times of eclipse, the seasons encroaching upon each other, floods inundating the land, the earth itself sometimes shaking in terror. All these experiences bespoke primeval chaos reflecting a way among the gods themselves.

When the Biblical authors expropriated certain elements of this primitive cosmology, they reorganized them under a single God who makes everything good. Yet the "formless void" (the tahu w'bahu of Genesis 1) still lurks in the background, put in order and held in check by the creator, but still waiting to reassert itself as pain, suffering, and death. Although it may be true that for the author of the third chapter of Genesis it is the first human sin, not a rival god, that breaks the primeval harmony, still it is out of this same "void" - "the slime of the earth" from which they have taken their existence - that their punishments arise.

However, there may be still another element found in the two-god version of the chaos myths that has influenced the biblical story of the creation and fall. Significantly, the archaic Indo-European word root for gods or powers of the spirit world is div or dev -- even today we have the word "divinity", as well as the Hindu term deva (for the general term "god") -- and we also have the term "devil". If we follow this clue there seems to be no question about it; Jewish, Christian, and even Muslim theology have all identified the Tempter of the Genesis story with this figure who assumes the role of an anti-god, a kind of false divinity which is, although held in check by God, nevertheless present in creation, ready to tempt mankind and to form a sinister league with the destructive forces of plague, famine, war, and other disasters. Later passages in the Bible would identify these evil powers with the angels who had become devils through their rebellion against God before the rest of creation took place (another story of distinctively Babylonian origin). Meanwhile various Gnostic theories would recast them as any number of powers or semi-divine forces which both link creation with and divide it from God.

Would it be too rash to credit these ancient myths and theological world-systems with a deeper and more realistic understanding of a still untamed and chaotic side of creation? Do not the brute elements of the universe, the catastrophic upheavals of nature, the earthquakes, floods, droughts, pestilences still break loose with devastating regularity? The simple paradise of Genesis seems too good to have ever been true, even before the first sin.

It may very well be the weak point of the chaos myths to have shifted the burden of evil too directly from humanity to God or the gods, both good and bad. In the light of the threat of modern doomsday weapons to wipe out all life on this planet the ancient curses of natural disaster seem to pale into relative insignificance. Yet these myths, in spite of all their primitive and grotesque fantasy, do retain a certain power and persuasive hold over our human subconscious. It is as if all the human malevolence possible still pales into relative insignificance beside the horrors that nature can still unleash, or even more, that mankind can cause with nature's powers. Compared to such total disasters, it is as if the very worst of human sins (taken strictly in terms of their psychological content) are like the temper tantrums of a small child. They seem to have very little permanent effect -- at least until that child can reach out and press that small button which will blow us all into kingdom come! Thus despite the fact that the author of the biblical story correctly pictured human malice as being at the core of our existential experience of evil, even he was compelled to allude to a more sinister force, a non-human propensity toward a chaos that is inexplicably contained within the outer shell of order and goodness -- a certain diabolical disorder that can shatter the divinely given harmony.

A great deal more could be said in support of this group of chaos myths. The whole idea of creation as a fall from divine simplicity, for example, has something in common with what was said in the previous chapter about the price that God had to pay for creation. It also could be seen as a counterbalance to our Western and biblically inspired tendency to overlook the "shadow" or "dark side" of God -- but that subject would be perhaps best left to another place. What is most evident, however, for modern evolution-conscious humanity, is the affinity such myths may have with our realization that the universe has emerged with what harmony it does possess only at the cost of great struggle and almost continuous upheaval. What we read as an ordered balance of nature is more like a truce that descends on a battlefield after most of the combatants have been killed or maimed. The progress of evolution has not been a steady march toward victory but more like Mao-tse Tung's strategy of "three steps forward then two to the rear," an erratic advance and retreat pattern that has carried us thus far, but more by inches than by strides.

If much has been made in this discussion about elements in the biblical story which may be traceable to the chaos myths, it is not simply to reveal problems which the writers found in some of their literary sources and then tried to correct because of obvious theological difficulties. If the biblical account of the first sin can only be understood more fully in light of the ancient stories which it may very well have intended to contradict, at least in part, so too the chaos stories need to be corrected, or completed by the biblical view. Neither the chaos or Adamic myths were meant to be taken in any modern evolutionary sense. However, if we are to reinterpret them in any way that makes sense in our present mental climate, we must realize that it is not only the devil that humanity fashions in its own image and likeness, but its gods as well. If we find ourselves survivors, if not entirely victors, in this disaster-stricken landscape of evolution, we must realize that all the chaos is far from over. We can, through one more outburst of malice, or even through one more slip of Adam-and-Eve-like miscalculation multiplied on a megatonic scale, return our whole planet to the chaos from which it came. If the myth of the chaos of the gods had any validity in the past, its significance for the present has grown immensely. Having "become like gods" ourselves, much as the Tempter promised, we now toy with the very real possibility of a Gotterdammerrung, a twilight of the gods far more lethal than ever imagined in the Germanic version of the legend. The death that the Tempter claimed would never be ours has become, in us, a godlike power to reduce ourselves and the world to ashes.

Even if the chaos myths need the corrections offered by the Bible, they contribute, on their own, one important insight which we can not afford to overlook. However it came about, chaos did not enter upon the scene only with the arrival of the human species. Chaos, and the struggle to overcome it, has been part and parcel of the whole process of creation from the very start. Human wrongdoing is, from this perspective, just one more instance of the general tendency of nature to regress to its primitive state. This is not to downgrade the special significance of human malice or failure, but simply to see sin within a cosmic context. From this viewpoint, there is nothing new under the sun -- only a new depth of degradation relative to a new height from which nature could fall.

3. Man as "The Tragic Hero"

Of the three basic myth forms we have been considering this Greek motif of the tragic hero may have been originally (according to Ricoeur) derived from later additions to the stories of the primeval chaos. Nevertheless it definitely takes us a step further in our understanding of the essence and varieties of evil. Whereas the biblical story of The Fall focuses on sin as the key to all evil, and the ancient myths of the chaos concentrate on the cosmic, physical manifestations of disorder, the myth of the tragic hero is preoccupied with the human and specifically psychological consequences of suffering and death.

Whatever lives must also die -- "You are dust and to dust you shall return." Not only is death a condition universally afflicting life, but life is built upon death. Life itself depends on the death of that which nourishes and makes room for us. The story of life is that of a vast invisible pyramid (to use Loren Eiseley's phrase) in which one form of life has evolved upon and at the expense of other, lower forms. Even genetically speaking, evolution of newer forms of life depends, almost intrinsically, on the eclipse of and, very often, the destruction of the forms of life that have come before. If species evolve, it is only because individuals die.

Yet mankind would be different. Humans, according to the late biologist Theodosius Dubzhansky, are [i.e.,belong to] the only species that can reflect on their own death. While every other living type instinctively seeks to grow and preserve its life, still its individuals die dumbly and unreflectively without any perceptible regret. Humans have never quite accepted this. Humans always, in one way or another, attempt to become immortal, whether in the "spirit", in their children, in their reputations, or in the landmarks (even their tombstones) which they leave behind. While death itself may not be cheated (even by those "crynologists" who would have themselves frozen to be unthawed in a more long-lived age), the human type at least seeks to deprive death of its final significance and thus rob it of its power over the human spirit.

The ancient Greeks, in particular, developed this consciousness to a high art. The essence of the tragic is that humans, despite all their desire for deathlessness, must submit to death. Despite its universality, death is different for mankind. Only humans can suffer in this sense, for it is not the physical fact of death that sets up apart, but rather the psychological agony of knowing that we must die. Surely here there must be some explanation.

The Greek tragic myth states this most starkly. Man, the "Promethean", would be like the gods and steal the "fire" of their immortality. Godlike in all but this, mankind would wrest away this privilege of divinity, but the gods are jealous and, driven by their own fates, are cruel. Behind the Greek myth stands the suspicion, even the conviction, that the divine and demonic are one and the same. What the ancient chaos myths divide into opposing forces, and the Adamic story identifies as a malicious rebel in creation, the Greek tragedy unites, and humanity is fated to be in eternal and futile opposition to the gods who seem not to care.

If they do care, the gods manifest only a cruelly detached interest in mankind's struggle, which they then punish. No mere man may overstep his mortal bounds, yet no man worthy of the name would be merely man. Like Icarus the heroic man will always fashion wings to soar to heaven; also like that first would-be astronaut, he finds, to his horror, the feathers of his ambitions coming unstuck as he attempts to beat his way toward the undying heat of the sun.

Human suffering, then, is born from death and yet it is much more than death. It is dying that is the punishment. But punishment for what? For pride? Yes, but for the pride of trying to be more than human, for having that hubris, that ambition to evade the fate of death. For that pride man must die twice, not just once in his body, but again in his mind.

It is in this ironic note that the force of this myth is found. In some way we might say that this myth represents the Greek golden mean between the impersonal fatalism of the chaos myths (where in one ancient version death is but the natural state of a material world created from the slain corpse of the evil god!) and the seeming capriciousness of death in the biblical account, although this other tendency is exaggerated even more in a later Babylonian myth where the hero Gilgamesh, failing to slay the powers of death, has the plant of immortality stolen from him.

True, there is a kind of noble irony in the biblical story itself, where Adam, no longer innocent of good and evil, now knows what God knows and thus finds his way barred from the paradise where the tree of life could have been his forever. For him there is left the sweat and toil of wrestling his bread from the earth and, for his wife, the pain of childbearing, and, at the end, for both of them and for their children, the grave. But if this biblical account is in some ways, more tragic for its depiction of a death that did not have to be, it is flawed in its failure to come to grips with the necessity and inevitability of death in the natural scheme of things. That is to say, at least in terms of the world as we find it, the Greeks were more realistic.

Thus, setting aside the hope of immortality contained within the biblical story, the tragic theme of the ancient Greeks comes closest to the core of the problem as we experience it in merely human terms. The disorder inherent within the order of creation, the death that must accompany life, are "givens" against which there seems no possible appeal.

It is not just in this element of inevitability, however, that the Greek hero embodies the highest tragedy. It is in his free but doomed protest against this fate. As J.-P. Sartre has succinctly put it, we are "condemned to be free." This freedom, rather than leading to some final liberation, only tempts us with the illusions of immortality. The punishment of human suffering and death turns out in the end to be nothing more than the refusal to admit that we are merely human.

As for the gods of these tragic myths, they prove themselves to be, despite their immortality, even worse than humans. Their cold detachment from the human plight interspersed with fits of cruel revenge eventually made them, in the eyes of Socrates, only worthy of scorn and contempt.

In these themes there is really nothing new in this ancient Greek myth or cluster of myths with Man as the tragic hero. Could we expect it to have been otherwise? If this theme is universal, it is so with a special hopelessness, for in it there is no time pictured when death did not exist or a future in which death would be abolished. Mankind is eternally balanced over the jaws of death while the afterlife, the great Stygian swamp, remains forever the shadowy land of exile from the land of the living. It was the pagan vision at its very cruelest.

Yet, for all this, there is a unique element in that myth. Man, despite his fate, remains the hero as long as he resists. Death and humanity are locked in mortal combat, and physically death always wins. But heroism itself does not die, for out of this engagement a victory for the human spirit can be won. More than any other of these ancient myths, the paradox of the tragic hero has paved the way for a belief that, despite the chaos of creation and despite the maliciousness and stupidity of sin, the human spirit will ever and must never, give up its "impossible dream."

B. Myth and Evolution

How are we to relate these ancient myths to our own understanding of the evolution of life? Or why should we even attempt to do so? The fact is that in terms of its value systems, mankind lives by myth, so much so that evolution [i.e., the doctrine or theory] itself has become, at least from this perspective, the great all-encompassing myth for modern man. The problem remains, however, as to whether any one myth can convey the total picture, and it is here that the ancient myths can supplement the modern, just as the modern mode of understanding can help us solve the riddles posed by the old.

We have already seen how the ancient myths of the chaos in some ways come closest to the picture presented by evolutionary science. Yet they do so in terms and concepts that are incredibly grotesque. Theologically speaking, the Babylonian myths seem to be monstrosities, (as they seemed to the biblical writers as well). Nevertheless, they express, perhaps more effectively than any of the stories that appeared later, the primitive disorder of the material from which the universe is made. For our purposes, they best reveal the universal presence of that force which is antithetical to all created order, and which remains an ever present threat lurking within the depths of our physical, material existence. For all practical purposes, the myth or stories of primeval chaos are the revelation of physical evil.

In a similar way, but in terms that are, like the Greek civilization that produced them, humanistic and highly refined, the myths of the tragic hero depict the universal and paradoxical condition of a humanity aspiring to immortality but faced with certain death. Out of this conflict arises suffering or psycho- logical evil in its most relentless form, one which poses the conflict of the unattainable ideal against the ever present real in terms of relentless and protesting struggle. It is significant that modern philosophers, both the evolutionists who foresee mankind's victory over the mechanisms of evolutionary struggle, as well as the more pessimistic existentialists who see humanity's effort as eternally doomed, have reincorporated these myths into their outlook. Nietzsche's Zarathustra, the Persian hero who proclaims that "God is dead", becomes the prototype of the modern Ubermensch or Superman who is destined to subdue the forces of evolution for the eternal benefit of humanity. Albert Camus' recall of Sisyphus, on the other hand, was meant to depict the futility of the struggle, one in which humanity, like the doomed hero of old, is forced to roll the weight of ambition uphill against the fatal slope of evolutionary law. But the price of life remains death. The Prometheus in each one of us is not dead, but the Fire of the Gods has turned from immortality to the power of mass destruction.

What can be said for the "Adamic Myth" in the face of this renewed eloquence of the pagan myths? Surely it not only remains as one of the most poignant expressions of our universal folly, but even more it stresses that moral evil is the major obstacle frustrating God's creative plan. Through sin and the corruption consequent upon death, not only is creation dragged back toward the chaos from which it came, but there would also be an end of all human aspirations and divine hopes for God's image in humanity... unless... But here is found the major difference from the other myths. In the biblical story, paradise has never been entirely lost, or if it can be said to have been "lost," it can also be found or regained. It awaits us still, guarded by an angel until that day when mankind regains its primal innocence and is reconstituted in the image and likeness of God.

What factors lead to such a conclusion? First, there is the internal evidence of the story itself. It ends with just such a promise, a hint of ultimate victory in the prediction of the"seed" or offspring of the woman who shall crush the head of the serpent. A Messianic addition to the text? Perhaps, but one that colored the interpretation of the story for all time.

However, there are additional, structural reasons for this claim. Despite the timeless character of all of the myths, or rather despite their deliberate location at the "beginning" of or before all time, each of the major myths of evil displays in its own way, a distinctive temporal character. While the biblical stories of creation are mostly a setting for the drama of the human fall, and the Greek hero myths almost avoid the question of origins entirely, the myths of the primeval chaos restrict themselves more exclusively to the form of a cosmogony or creation story. From this frame of reference we can single out the chaos myths as being primarily symbols of the past. Not unlike the spate of modern books on sociobiology and other phases of evolution, their focus is on prehuman origins, and what they have to say for the present, much less for the future, is even less encouraging.

The myths of the tragic hero are, preeminently, depictions of the present. Like most Greek thought, they depict the pastas the archetype of the eternal present, while the future exists only in another world, one apart from time. Mankind's eternal frustration is thus timeless only because, paradoxically, it is presently bound up with time. There can be no true evolution in such a world, only repetition of the present. Past and future are only illusions.

With the Adamic myth in particular, as with biblical thought in general, we enter a new dimension. Only in light of the revelation of a future, can the past and the present attain any real significance. The Jews, it has been said, "invented history." Without a real future, time remains bound up with myth, and the past remains only as a symbolic statement of the ideal (like Confucius"'Golden Age") or else as a prototype of things simply as they are.

The Bible is so different that this difference is the source of much of our present confusion. Where myth, couched in terms of the past, is used, as in Genesis, to usher in a new vision of the future, the two become intertwined in a way that is apt to mislead. For example, was there really ever a paradise? - or put another way, it has been asked, "How long did paradise last?" To this question, some medieval rabbis are supposed to have responded, "About twenty seconds !" -- which is to say, it really never existed, or that it existed only in our minds. That is not, however, to rule out its possible future existence, or at least some final state which it symbolizes.

If the Jews can be in some way credited with inventing history, that is, discovering time as a truly significant factor in the unfolding of God's creative plan, it must be also said that Biblical thought paved the way, in its own non-scientific manner, for the concept of one-way or irreversible time in the modern scientific sense of the term. True evolutionary time, in any philosophical, biological or even cosmic sense is inconceivable without any concept of an actual beginning and, at least, a hypothetical end. Even the Marxists have had to admit as much.

For some, of course, such an imposition of evolutionary thought patterns in interpreting Scripture represents an attempt to read the Bible backward. Yet, if this charge be true, then we would also have to claim that the Bible itself was, to some extent, written backward as well. The Book of Genesis, in its present state, dates from the time of the high point of the classical writing prophets. It may not be directly their work, but it does incorporate into its message not just the mythic forms and legends of antiquity but even more importantly, the prophetic vision of an "end-time," a completion of human history when sin, and suffering, and death, and even human history, with all its ups and downs, its uncertainties as well as its recurring lapses, will have come to an end. It is this total prophetic and eschatological perspective of Scripture, and not just the vague, but very important hint found in the promise of the seed that shall crush the head of the Serpent, that I feel that we are entirely justified in seeing paradise not as a lost garden of Babylonian mythology, much less a location of impossible geographical description, but as a shimmering symbol of a reality yet to be revealed and attained.

What, then, of the devil? Does he exist in his own right, or is he, as Dostoyevsky's Ivan suggests, a creation of man "in his own image and likeness?" Insofar as he is the personification of mankind's own perversity, the devil is the worst in man revealed to himself. Just assuredly, he, or "it", is the super-human force of disorder and dissolution that threatens to drag all creation to the brink of the chaotic nothingness from which it emerged. However we choose to think of this "evil spirit", the really important facts which remain and which we must never lose sight of are not only the reality but also the extent of evil which dogs the creative act of God. If myth is truth that never "happened," then the devil must be seen as is that part of that truth. If this truth has taken on the mirror image of ourselves, the parody of what God intended us to be, it has had to be at the same time, the conscious symbol of whatever it is, whether in ourselves or in the universe, that stands between the ideal and its fulfillment. No more could be asked of such a symbol, but at the same time, in the face of the odds, nothing less.

Proceed to Chapter 4

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