EVIL & EVOLUTION: A THEODICY

Chapter 5

The Evil Within

I cannot understand why the world is arranged as it is. Men are themselves to blame, I suppose; they were given paradise, they wanted freedom and they stole fire from heaven, though they knew they would become unhappy, so there is no need to pity them.
(Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov )

Ivan Karamazov, who has become our principal protagonist in his discussion of evil, has a point -- for the most part, mankind has only itself to blame. Among the problems of evil, moral evil or sin is, with certain reservations, the easiest to understand. St. Augustine, despite his insistence on the absolute all-powerfulness and all-knowingness of God, insists that mankind is free and responsible. In fact the only real evil, in Augustine's mind, is sin; everything else is secondary.

Is it really that simple, even if we ignore the predestination implied in the concept of an all-knowing and all-disposing God? Part of our uneasiness with such an apparently simple solution which holds that human freedom accounts for all evil (leaving the devil aside) is that such a solution is merely an abstract answer to the problem of a specific kind of evil. It is not, in itself, an adequate explanation of the specific problem of your or my or anyone's concrete sinfulness. As Ivan Karamazov says, rather paradoxically, "Men are themselves to blame... though they knew they would become unhappy..." But did they, really?

Perhaps this is why Augustine had to lay such great stress on the original sin. Adam's fall is the sin of all humans, infecting us to our very core, making it virtually impossible that any human being ever after be without sin. Every other evil that befalls us is, in Augustine's view, a punishment designed by God's justice either a retribution for sins already committed or a warning, lest we sin again. Seen in this way, there is nothing that happens to us that we do not deserve: We are all guilty. None of us is innocent, even the most blameless little child.

This solution of Augustine's, despite its apparent grotesqueness, has also a certain simple grandeur, particularly in light of his doctrine of God's saving grace. However interpreted, Augustine's concept of original sin (based on his own personal interpretation of St. Paul) has had immense influence on Western theology, whether it be along the lines of Luther's concept of the total corruption of human nature, Calvin's correlative idea of God's totally predestinating will, or the Roman Catholic doctrine of the "gracelessness" of mankind in its "natural" or fallen state. Yet there also seems to be a certain heartlessness and inexplicability to these views that appear to contradict the presumed mercy and goodness of God. Despite the qualified use of the concept of guilt (more often restated as the"stain" or basic condition of being born in the state of original sin) it amounts to a kind of initial curse, presumption of guilt without a trial, a punishment without personal responsibility. Is there not a better way of accounting for the human condition, a way that both explains the human propensity for sinning and yet preserves the intuition of the basic innocence of every child born into this world?

I believe there is, and that it can be found in the suggestion made earlier that what we have called "original sin" could be reinterpreted in terms of an "ultimate sin", in much the same way as the suggestion that the paradise of Eden may represent the possibility of the future rather than the memory of the past. As unorthodox as these suggestions may at first seem, they should be given a hearing. Such a reinterpretation would not be simply for the sake of providing the way out of the embarrassment occasioned by an ancient doctrine that has proved a source of scandal to modern sensitivities. Of much more importance, it would help us to deeper our understanding of our own situation, one in which the human race seems to be hound up more hopelessly in its present sinfulness than can ever be explained by a mere appeal to the past.

A. "Original" or "Ultimate" Sin?

At first, an inverted notion of original sin -- in this case, more that of an ultimate sin -- may seem as strange as that unusual scientist-mystic, Teilhard de Chardin, who to my knowledge was the first to suggest it. Yet everything fits.

Current thought regarding the biological origins of the human species, would indicate that the idea of the existence of a single, isolated "first" human couple is problematic if not highly questionable. Even though the majority opinion still holds to the concept of a single race or type of human as ancestral to our own (monogenism as against the polygenist concept of several different types arising at different times and in different places) the consequent lack of an identifiable first pair would make the idea of a transmission of an "original sin" in terms of a kind of genetically related or inherited " guilt" rather improbable.

NOTE: This opinion, scientifically termed "monophylism", is held by the majority of paleontologists as against a polyphylism that would look for human origins among diverse species. The more common term monogenism, often used in place of the above, strictly speaking denotes a single couple, both members truly human, as the ancestors of all subsequent humans. The papal encyclical of 1950, "Humani Generis," while rejecting polyphylism as incompatible with Christian doctrine, only cautioned about the difficulties of reconciling polygenism, that is, the idea of a number of couples of the same species, as co-progenitors of the human race, with traditional teaching. For a more recent discussion of this matter, see Karl Rahner's article "Monogenism" in Encyclopedia of Theology, edited by Karl Rahner (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).

Aside from this difficulty (of the biological order), can we really conceive of such an emerging human type as being morally or psychologically capable of such a sin (whatever it was) that would forever after plunge the human race into a state of automatic alienation from God? Certainly, Irenaeus' depiction of our first parents as naive and blundering innocents rings more true.

No doubt, as even Teilhard admits, the subsequent course of human development seems, at least as far back as we can go, to be marred by some primeval catastrophe, a penchant for wickedness and perversity that is more than mere naivety. Could not this basic tendency be better explained as a war between conflicting instincts, or between instincts inherited from our biological past and a present situation wherein they are no longer appropriate? May it not be that our basic drives are no longer even instinctual governed but have been set adrift as the result of the emergence of the higher faculty of reason? - like an aircraft that has had its autopilot replaced by a still to be trained human substitute: Whatever the origin of this conflict such a view would be surprisingly close to the medieval idea of original sin as being manifested primarily in concupiscence or the driving passions of the flesh.

Even granted such a basic propensity for evil and other forms of self-defeating behavior in human nature, can we conceive of sin in terms of deliberate transgression except where there is a basic awareness of ethical limits or moral demands? It seems hardly likely. This was partly St. Paul's point when he said that it took the Law to make mankind fully conscious of sin. A person can do wrong or act stupidly to the detriment of his own best interests as well as those of others without being fully conscious of what he is doing. But sin, properly speaking, is something more. It implies at least a minimal awareness of evil that in some way involves a malicious opposition to the will of God. Unless the first humans were an unaccountable exception to all that we can observe in both primitive cultures and human childhood, it seems difficult to imagine a first human or a primal group of protohumans who were anything more than barely self-conscious enough, never mind God-conscious enough, to do anything more than engage in passion-driven tantrums.

On the contrary, when we look for real malice, we must also look for real reflective awareness. Traditionally, we have seen pride, pure pride, classed as the worst sort of sin because it is the fruit of a self-centered awareness in opposition to the claims of a higher awareness centered on God. Sins of passion, stemming from violence, lust, or avarice, may be more common, but are also less malicious and more forgivable, precisely because they are very often the result of being driven by forces beyond our full control. By any such analysis, if the "original sin" is consummately a sin of pride, then we must look for the full manifestation of such sin in the growing self-awareness of the human race and in the perfected ability of humanity to act in total rebellion against God and in total inhumaneness towards itself. Rather than looking back into prehistory for such capabilities, have we not just recently reached that point, or nearly so?

It must be admitted that this inversion of the idea of original sin into an ultimate sin appears to fly in the face of long-standing Christian interpretation. Yet it is rather curious how much those who have made so much of biblical religion have seemed to over-concentrate on the Adamic myth of the Fall in trying to explain humanity's sinfulness, while the people that gave us these scriptures have been very reticent about jumping to any such conclusions. As Paul Ricoeur has remarked, with the major exception of St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, almost no further reference is made to the sin of Adam by either the Tanach or Old Testament scriptures of the Jews or the Christian New Testament. Jesus himself seems to have referred to the Genesis story of the creation of the human race only once beyond his allusion to the devil as "the father of lies", and that is in reference to the monogamous pattern of marriage -- his other references to sin as depicted in Genesis were rather to the stories of Cain and Abel, Noah, and Sodom and Gomorrah. If we were to look for the locus of the major sin of the human race, as Jesus depicted it, we would have to look to the future, to the time of the great apostasy that will be the prelude to the eschaton or final coming of "The Son of Man" and the subsequent final judgment of the human race.

Perhaps, too, we have misunderstood Paul's purpose in resurrecting the Genesis myth. The major point in his argument does not seem to be how "all have sinned in Adam" (the phrase in Romans 5:12 that defies translation -- does it mean "because of Adam," or "like Adam?" -- even Augustine was stymied by it) but more that mankind has a new progenitor, a new spiritual head, in Christ. Perhaps Paul was attempting to utilize what J. T. W. Robinson called the Hebraic concept of "corporate personality" (Abraham standing for all Jews, Joseph for all exiles, etc.). In any case, Paul appears to have been more intent on explaining that just as all people have become "living souls" (that is "living beings") in sharing the human existence of Adam (who for obvious symbolic as well as genetic reasons stands for us all), so even more, all human beings are enabled to become "spiritual beings", immortal sharers in God's life, through the sacrifice of Christ. That such a transition involves a cancellation of the debt of our Adamic sinfulness, is obvious. On the other hand, it is less clear that Paul actually meant that Adam's or any ancestor's sin produces a guilt inherited automatically by being born human. In fact, this last idea seems to have been more St. Augustine's interpretation of St. Paul than Paul's own idea. Even Augustine himself, who was more concerned with elaborating a theology of grace than producing a doctrine of congenital sinfulness, seems to have been hard-pressed to explain how this could be -- at one time Augustine even tried to blame sex for our sinfulness rather than simply our humanity! There can be little doubt that St. Paul's primary intention was to insist on the gratuitousness of God's favor toward us, and that this grace was merited for us by Christ. That sin itself can be inherited is another matter -- a conclusion deduced from reading Paul's analogy upside-down.

What we did undoubtedly inherit from Adam, at least in St. Paul's mind, was our mortality, our susceptibility, to death. It is very interesting to see what Eastern Christian theology has done with this concept. At least one line of the Oriental Church tradition has chosen to see our mortality (or death taken as a collective condition) as the very root and deepest condition of our sinfulness. Perhaps influenced more by the Greek tragic myths than by St. Paul directly, this theology sees death less as a punishment for sin than as the central motivating cause of our sinfulness. We sin because we are afraid to die. We are avaricious (piling up treasures on earth), we are lustful (seeking to undiscriminatingly misuse our powers to propagate life), we are violent (resisting our death with the death of others), all because we ourselves are afraid to die. But die we must. No man or woman born of Adam's descent can escape it. Nor did Jesus. In that is the tragedy but from his willing submission came the victory, for in rising he overcame death.

We shall have more to ponder concerning this Eastern Christian view of original sin and its relation to death, but it is quite obvious at this point that such a view requires a readjustment of our understanding of St. Paul's controversial chapter in Romans. At face value, Paul seems to have imagined that death itself, as a biological fact, entered the world only because of Adam's sin. Did he mean this to apply to the death of animals as well -- if then, how could humans "use" all the animals, at least for food? Perhaps we have read St. Paul, as well as Genesis, in a much too literal fashion. [On the other hand, there has been at least once school of thought that held that Adam and Eve were vegetarians!] However in I Corinthians 15:21ff., Paul, although he says that both death, as well as sin, come to us "in Adam," he also clearly says that "sin is the sting of death:" Again, in Romans 6 he says "the wage paid by sin is death." Which is it? What is first? The two seem to be intrinsically allied, bound up in a vicious circle. When we attempt to cheat death by sinning, we only reap more death.

In terms of biological evolution, it only makes sense to see physical death as a natural phenomenon, long antedating the appearance of the human type. Yet psychologically, and especially in moral terms, it is sin that has given death its real power -- the power to destroy humanity's soul, its life of divinely given freedom, its genuine chance to become "like gods." Death and sin, then, taken together, are both original and ultimate, for death and the futile attempt to escape it, have been with us from the very beginning; and sin, as the expression and protest of our fate, shall surely increase as the universe draws nearer to its own death. The fact of death has become the agony of dying, and the curse of the first sin has become the compounded perversity of us all.

How has this actually come about? How is it that the human race, born into the slavery of death, could aspire to life; and yet, for all its noble hopes, bring upon itself only more death, and this a death not only of body but of spirit as well? To answer this we must face a further paradox, perhaps one which is even more puzzling than the relationship between death and sin. Sin and death are, in so many ways, correlative, at least in their concern for freedom; and yet, in their failure to find it, find themselves ever more closely linked. Can it be then that it is really freedom, not death that is the great enemy? Or is it that only in the freedom of awareness can we at last fully experience the bondage of sin?

B. Freedom and Sin

Just as the logic of original sin as formulated by Augustine breaks down in what appears to be a series of irreconcilable contradictions, so too his defense of human freedom seems to lead to just the opposite conclusion. For just as Calvin was to draw his doctrine of double predestination (God's willing of some people's damnation as well as the salvation of the rest) from Augustine's view of divine grace alone rescuing humanity from the universal guilt of original sin, so Luther believed he was following in Augustine's footsteps when he denied that humans, suffering as they do from a total corruption of their God-given nature, have any real capacity to exercise free will. Yet Augustine himself stoutly maintained that we do in fact possess free will. It is this free will that is responsible for sin; and, after we have sinned, it is this free will which makes it possible for us to accept God's grace as a remedy, or to reject it. But there remains the question of how we can be seen to be free enough to do even that when the very acceptance of grace requires a special help from God, the outcome of which God knows from all eternity! Subsequent argument over the matter of God's grace and human free will seems to have led nowhere, with one counter-reformation pope even calling to a halt the great Thomist-Suarezian debate on the question. Clearly we have gone in circles and have gotten nowhere, except perhaps to have defined our terms a little more precisely. What then is amiss?

Assuming the reality both of God's grace and of human freedom, no matter how much they seem to clash, let us suppose that Augustine got off on the wrong foot on this matter of God's presumed all-powerful foreknowledge of events. Let us even forget, at least for the time being, this whole matter of man- kind having already sinned in Adam. Let us simply begin with what we think we experience as freedom.

Suppose we take freedom to be the ability, or even to desire, to do other than what we feel constrained or forced to do. To put it in a more theological way, would not freedom mean that at least some of the things that we do are not a direct result of God having willed them? This means, even if one reintroduces the idea that God already knows how things will turn out, that nevertheless God only permits some things to happen as they do, but does not directly cause them to so happen. Free creatures, then, ultimately derive their origin from God and in that sense their freedom can be seen as "caused" by God, but the exercise of their freedom, the result of their free decisions, is something they themselves carry out in their own right. My decisions are my own, free-will acts, not somebody else's -- not even God's.

Yet we know that what we often take to be freedom is not all that simple. Just as the idea of God as the ultimate cause of our existence and our freedom keeps intruding on the concept of pure freedom, so too a host of other causes whether genetic, environmental, social, or otherwise, constantly calls our freedom into doubt. Is freedom then truly a given, something that just appears out of the blue as part and parcel of being human, or is it something that is slowly acquired or won?

Note what Dostoyevsky's Ivan says (perhaps with more insight than he realizes): "They wanted freedom and they stole fire from heaven." Were the first humans, whoever they were, really free? Even if we regard a certain basic freedom as part of what it means to be human, would it not be more logical to suppose that freedom was, at the earliest stages of humanity, more of a tendency than an actuality? Would not "stealing fire from heaven" or wanting to "become like gods...knowing [deciding for oneself] both good and evil" be really more an impulse toward freedom than freedom already obtained?

True, one may argue that to grope for freedom is in itself a beginning of freedom, a kind of decision, or at least an acquiescence to a kind of vital impulse. In that case, depending on how you look at it, it was either a free act or a driven act, or more likely, a combination of the two. Regardless of how much actual freedom there might have been, the first sin seems to be bound up with a quest for more freedom. The result of that certain autonomy from God, the first sinners also experienced a new kind of slavery. Thus it is more than just a question of sinful disobedience; there is rather a certain ambivalence, even a self-defeating paradox, contained in this first real exercise of human freedom. To "know" in this way, that is, to decide for oneself what the standards of good and evil shall be, involves at the same time the loss of the freedom that comes with innocence. If "ignorance is bliss" it is because, at least on one level -- that of childish innocence, to not know is to experience the freedom from the responsibility of decision. But who would choose to remain a child forever? Freedom on this level involves almost no self-determination, the very essence of any fully human freedom. Such primitive freedom is illusory, being born of ignorance more than of anything else.

Yet, for all this, can was say that the freedom that we seek is all that much more free? Is there not something truly sinister about it? There is a kind of "drivenness" about it reminding us of Sartre's phrase about our being "condemned to freedom." It is as if evolution, even conceived as a process set in motion by God, will not rest until it has produced a creature which has stumbled, to its own regret, upon its own independence. Having found it, this strange creature we call "Man" has mixed feelings, both celebrating his freedom as proof of his humanity and ruing the burden of responsibility brought in its train.

If this existential insight into the dual or mixed good/bad nature of freedom is correct, then where does it lead us?

To begin with (and this is not too different from what Augustine or many others have said) it means that freedom, even at the cost of much deviation, is a value which the creator of the universe apparently considers to be of great importance. Like Henrí Bergson's view of evolution, the direction of the creative process is toward freedom or the emergence of a multitude of free beings. Biblically speaking, we were created to be in God's image and likeness and we presume that to be God is to be absolutely free.

Secondly, freedom, for created beings, is necessarily limited. Our freedom, unlike God's, is neither total nor absolute. It is limited by the same creative drives and impulses which bring this same freedom into existence. It also must contend with the claims advanced by the freedom of others.

Thirdly (and this follows directly from the second point), being limited, this same freedom is defective. It has evil aspects; one of them, perhaps the most significant, is that even partial freedom contains a certain rivalry with or duplication of the freedom of God, without ever being able to equal God's freedom.

Finally, and perhaps the most crucial point is that the paradox that the only sinless use of human freedom seems to be in giving it up! At first glance this statement seems outrageous both logically and humanly speaking. It appears flatly to contradict not only what we, especially in the Western World, hold most dear, but to undermine our most profound intuitions about the nature of human dignity. Did not God, as Eric Fromm insists, really not want us to become "as gods?" True, but it is quite another thing to become as gods on our own terms, defying God's plan and going off on our own to refashion things in our own image and likeness. Yet, does not any such restriction of our freedom, any such conforming of our will to God's will, truly make us "a little less than gods" (or "the angels" -- depending on how you translate the biblical phrase)? Thus it seems we must be content to be second or even "third rate" gods. But is this not enough? Apparently it is not, at least not for many individuals when faced with an actual contest between the human will and the divine will. It is one thing to accept gracefully the honor of being like gods, in our freedom, although not exactly God's equal. It is quite another thing to accept the responsibility of patterning our individual actions along the lines set by God.

This last point is why only a specific, concrete approach to individual evils can "solve," so to speak, the problem of sin. The existence of freedom as a "specific abstract" quality (to use Ahern's phrase) does, in fact, explain the possibility of equally abstract moral evils. It does not, however, answer the question of why this or that particular sin. The answer to that is to be found only in the particular situations in which we as individuals are confronted with specific choices. Either my decision brings me into greater conformity with God's plan and thus a share in his freedom, or it does not. If it does not, then my divergent use of freedom becomes a non-freedom, a capitulation to the blind and driven forces of nature, and to the unfreedoms by which they are compelled.

C. Sin and the "Excess" of Evil

Although freedom is a positive value, it brings in its wake both good and ill. We must, then, see sin as a distinct possibility in God's universe. "What is able to fall does fall at times," said St. Thomas Aquinas. Apparently God so values the existence of free creatures, even if they only poorly resemble himself, that he is willing to pay the price of our possible, even probable, failure. But the question is: are we willing to pay the price? Apparently we are -- but not without some misgivings. It is especially in this respect when we come up against the horrible excesses of evil, all the terrible things that could have been otherwise, the "could have beens" that never were, that second thoughts arise about the whole price that has been paid.

Toward the very end of Ivan Karamazov's impassioned debate he admits that there might be, after all, some "higher harmony" to be achieved out of or even despite all the sin and sufferings of the human race. He himself, however, must protest or even attempt to disaffiliate himself from such a horrendous process, one which demands the sacrifice of so many innocent victims for the sake of some elusive freedom or its by-products. Ivan does not doubt the possibility of such higher good. Rather, he doubts that any such good is worth the price being paid. He would just as soon turn in his ticket and refuse to participate in such a dreadful lottery.

Of course, what we witness in such a protest is not merely a denunciation of all the atrocities perpetrated against innocent victims. Even more, it implies a protest against the terrible misuse of human freedom and even the freedom of God to start such a process. It is not that freedom occasions some incidental abuse. It is rather that the chronic misuse of freedom is so widespread, so ingrained in the human condition that no amount of good seems sufficient to balance it. It would be a plausible, even just, arrangement if each sinner were punished for his crime, but it seems as if instead it is the innocent victims of sin who suffer. In this, even innocence itself is corrupted and the whole human race becomes an embodiment of evil.

Thus there is a certain "communal" aspect to sin; it is contagious, afflicting the sinner and victim alike. Like a single virus which finds a vulnerable host organism, it multiplies and transmits itself in a new, virulent intensity to all around. Evil becomes epidemic.

There is no need to enumerate all the forms of this phenomenon ranging from the betrayal of individuals to mass genocide. Let us simply recall how this excess or seeming multiplication of evil has not only scandalized the skeptics but even puzzled the prophets of old. "The fathers ate sour grapes and their children's teeth were set on edge"-- so goes the old Hebrew proverb which Ezekiel wished to see repudiated. Can it be? Certainly God's justice would seem to require that the sinner alone be punished (which Ezekiel announced would be the case); but, unfortunately, it rarely seems to work out that way. Not only do the wicked often prosper (at least in worldly terms) but they seem to do so mostly at the expense of the innocents to whom it must seem that indeed crime does pay!

In this way evil, especially communal or shared evil, is self-perpetuating. Take, for example, the evil of slavery which, paradoxically, so many of its original perpetrators in our era didn't even seem to think to be a sin at all. For the Arab slave traders, and the American Christians who sailed the "slavers" or who otherwise engaged in the trade, it was just good business. For the Americans who bought and used them it was the advance of civilization. Even Catholic religious orders who owned them could point to one pope who defended the whole practice if "souls" could be thereby "saved." The first victims of all this rationalization were, of course, the slaves themselves and, as immediate beneficiaries of their misery, their children. But what of the slave owners themselves and their descendants who found themselves locked into a social system based on human exploitation? Even after a bloody war to end slavery, is not our society still rife with the mutual distrust and ingrained injustices which slavery sowed?

Examples like this have been multiplied all over the world. The situations in Northern Ireland, Palestine or Israel, and South Africa are only some of the instances that have occurred recently in the so-called "Free World." By merely adding examples, however, we might miss the most significant aspect of communal evil -- its "snowballing" effect. The process is not as simple as it looks, for there are other factors at work that go beyond mere human malice and the direct responses it invokes.

Like Thomas Aquinas who observed that "what can fall will fall at times", Teilhard de Chardin also spoke of the inevitability of sin. Taking Christ's words in Matthew out of context, Teilhard often repeated the warning, "It must be that scandal will occur, but woe to the man through whom it occurs." Teilhard pointed to this saying as indicating what he believed to be "the statistical necessity" of evil, especially sin. Many claim to be scandalized by such an assertion, arguing that such a view reduces sin to a natural phenomenon, just another by-product of evolution. I think these critics miss the point, which may also account for what seems to be a peculiar application of Matthew's verse. Although it is statistically inevitable that there will always be sin in the world, humans are theoretically capable of avoiding it. We are in control at least of ourselves, and our personal reaction to evil is ultimately our responsibility. Sin there will undoubtedly be. but it doesn't have to be our sin.

Even this may be an oversimplification, but not in the direction that the critic decries. If anything, the case for the statistical necessity of evil is stronger still, despite the strong affirmation of personal responsibility. Constant repetition and accumulation of evil does more than confirm statistics. It is truly self-duplicating in the infectious manner described earlier, but not simply in an arithmetic progression. Moral contagion, not only in terms of the number of its victims, but even more in terms of the conversion of victims into carriers of the same disease, proceeds in what is more like a geometric progression. Sin is not only communal, but cumulative!

Another way of looking at this "snowballing" effect of moral evil might be seen in what is sometimes called "feedback." In terms of cybernetics we know that when information is programmed for use in a computer, the interpretation of that information is often prejudiced by the "yield" or data which the computer was pre-programmed to produce. People who have been refused credit cards because they have never owed anybody anything have some inkling of what all too easily happens! In a similar way we can see that it is not just a matter of sin affecting the sinner (like debt affecting the debtor) or affecting the victim (the holder of a bad debt), but a matter of the whole moral atmosphere becoming poisoned, complete innocence being interpreted as some kind of guilt. Evil can no longer be recognized as evil, or good as good. In such a morally ambiguous situation, even a good person becomes like one who is "sighted" among the blind, only to find out that the world itself is in complete darkness. Sight is then useless. In such a situation, how would one even know if one possessed sight?

Thus, the statistical necessity of sin turns out to be more than a mere contrasting of the percentages of failure with those of success. Rather it becomes like one of New York's now famous electric power blackouts, where the breakdown of one small segment of the power grid brings on an overload of neighboring generators to the point where one generator after another fails in rapidly increasing succession until the whole region is plunged into darkness. Rather than the "brownout" or reduced-power situation which the engineers anticipated, a total failure occurs. In much the same way, moral evil, when sufficiently multiplied, tends to fulfil Engel's philosophical dictum that sufficient quantitative change eventually effects a qualitative one. Enough individual sins, sooner or later, create a society that is sick to its very core. Personal sin, multiplied to this extent, becomes what theologian Piet Schoonenburg has aptly termed "the sin of the world."

Such an "excess" of moral evil would not be, in some people's judgment, a total loss since, in their estimation, there resulted a corresponding "excess" of good, even if in a concentrated form. Augustine, while lamenting the fact that the mass of humanity was surely damned, seems to have believed that even the existence of a "chosen few" who had achieved heavenly glory would be a justification of God and a triumph over evil. That a loss in quantity may be balanced by a gain in quality seems logical enough, until we remember we are dealing with human persons and, as we are taught, immortal souls!

The story of Abraham, bargaining with God over the sparing of Sodom and Gomorrah and getting God to agree to relent if even "ten just men" could be found there, illustrates my point. Ten could not be found, so the two towns were destroyed. So today Jewish legend holds that if the whole world has not already been destroyed, it is because there are at least ten such "just men" . If so, it would only speak of God's patience and the power of prayer, not necessarily of a final victory of the good.

After the living nightmare of Hitler's Holocaust, of the Communist purges, and of the atomic incinerations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, as well as the torture cells and internment camps that still defile the face of the earth, the word "excess" seems like a cold, clinical abstraction. It is not simply that over twenty million lives were lost within the decade of World War II, or that millions more have disappeared in such far-flung countries as Turkey, Nigeria, Cambodia, and other places almost too numerous to count. These facts are too horrible to be blithely termed mere excesses. Nor can we begin to measure the suffering of tens of millions more who survived, many of whom may judge the dead to have been luckier than they.

The reason that the word "excess" seems far too mild is that we are dealing with a kind of malice and collective guilt which is all the worse for never having been totally admitted. To admit an excess is to acknowledge a deficit that might be canceled, but like the good people just down the road from Auschwitz or Dachau, we have refused to recognize the stench in our nostrils or acknowledge the evidence before our eyes until it was too late. For what is the "greater good" that came from these atrocities? Repentance? Ask the average German today. Revived faith in God? Ask the average Israeli today. Reconciliation with enemies? Ask the displaced Palestinian Arab. A lesson for humanity? Ask the South African (black or white) about that.

The fact that the effects of these crimes are allowed to continue today in many places in the world, even in the so-called "freedom-loving" nations that not only the super-powers, but even the second-rate powers, and third-world nations (when they can) are jealously hoarding and building up stockpiles of conventional and even nuclear weapons in order to guard their "sovereign" territories and to preserve "inalienable" rights (as if there would be any territories or people left to enjoy them) all seems to point to a condition that defies any description as mere excess, although absolute madness might come close. How can such a state of mind come about?

Psychological studies (such as those of Jean Piaget or Lawrence Kohlberg) have shown that a child's sense of justice or of moral decision-making proceeds through different stages, beginning with motivations of mere punishment-avoidance and reward-seeking, through a rudimentary sense of fairness and on through a more developed sense of socially-shared standards of human decency and justice. Yet none of these is a mature moral sense of rightness for none of them point to a sense of "oughtness" in terms of goodness or rightness for its own sake. In fact, these studies indicate that very few adults can even comprehend such a higher criteria. Would this not seem to indicate that the excess of suffering in the modern world is due to a basic failure to even begin to grasp the moral root of evil?

Augustine, of course, would have said that such an awareness is impossible without an "illumination" from the source of all goodness and justice -- God.

It may be that St. Augustine can be faulted for having seen everything in such a dualistic-supernaturalistic perspective that he could calmly envision the "triumph" of God's goodness in the face of mass damnation. But at least he had more than an inkling of where the origins of true goodness and the ability to perceive rightness lay.

If people, even high-principled idealists, persist in thinking that true goodness is "instinctive" with humanity, it is hardly surprising that populations under the sway of political rhetoric consistently underestimate our capacity for self-destruction. If the concept of a "revealing" God is problematic for many of the intelligentia of the modern world, for even more of them the idea of an original sin remains a theological joke. If Thomas More's exercise in pure rationality was realistically titled "Utopia", the reason he so named it seems to have escaped the deeper capacities of the modern wit.

In this rationalistic escapism we are not unlike Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov in quite another way. As an intellectual man of the world and as a person of highest humanistic sympathies, the ultimate evil for him is to be seen in the death of the innocent. Even though he excoriates the bestiality of people who would inflict such tortures, he sees such senseless deaths as a symbol of something still more evil. Yet he is unable to recognize wherein it lies.

Dostoyevsky, it should be remembered, had himself been a social revolutionary; in fact, he had even been exiled to Siberia on the charge of subversive activities against the Tsarist regime. Ivan Karamazov represents, to a lesser degree, that type of person described more completely in another Dostoyevsky novel, The Possessed. In it he depicts, with self-critical insight, the mentality of so many politically involved men of humanistic ideals. While their ineffectual regret over the violence carried out by their more activistic comrades reveals the arbitrariness of their sense of justice, the persistence of their deluded idealism proves the shallowness of their understanding of evil. Yet it is just people as these; Engels, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin (to halt our chronology of one line of social reformers at its apogee of violence), that the movement of international Communism was born. The excesses of evil which these people saw in human society, they correctly ascribed to the devil of human selfishness. They simplistically believed that this demon could be exorcised by a restructuring of human institutions, especially the relationship of labor to capital. Yet the very fact that their vision of evil was in materialistic terms (in which physical suffering and death rate as the highest evils) ended up in their paradoxically inflicting much more death and suffering, psychological as well as physical, than that which they sought to remedy. Thus "All justice comes out of the barrel of a gun", as another great "social revolutionary", Mao Tse-tung, once said.

It may be, as Alexander Sholzhenitsyn has claimed, that from all this a new moral fiber has emerged, one which puts to shame the spinelessness of the Western capitalistic world. If so, the West has only its own materialistic humanism to blame. Perhaps Sholzhenitsyn, like a new Augustine, is calling us to a revived appreciation of the true nature of the good and its intolerance of whatever we mistake for worthwhile goals in the world. But is the lesson worth the price? Are moral pride and self-righteousness any better than slackness and corruption? Have not both East and West, each in its own way, confirmed the same ugly truth about ourselves? Have we not proven, beyond a doubt, that one excess breeds another? Ultimately, the moral evil within our hearts breeds and festers unchecked, not simply through the excess of man's inhumanity to man, but because of its deepest roots in our original estrangement from God.

For the Christian, of course, things are not hopeless. The estrangement between humanity and God is not irreparable, for there has taken place that incomparable Atonement or at-one-ness through the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. If there continues to be an excess of sin, suffering, and death in this world, there is also the excess of God's love shown to us. Yet we may not relax our efforts or take too much comfort in believing that all is well. The evolution of the human spirit is a door which swings on the hinges of human freedom, but it swings both ways!

If this chapter on moral evil seems to have belabored the concept of original sin far beyond the insights discussed in Chapter 3, or if it has also seemed to unduly prolong the discussion of the amount of evil present in the world (which ended Chapter 4) the reasons for doing so are most critical.

For a biblically based Christian theodicy, the whole conflict has tended to draw up its battle lines around these issues. For even if all moral evil and a great deal of the physical and psychological evil in the universe could be traced to an original sin, there is nevertheless a tremendous amount of suffering and death which seems to be nobody's fault except God's -- a conclusion that most believers find to be totally unacceptable. It is at this point, therefore, that most theodicies break down, leaving us with the alternative visions either of a heartlessly cruel God or else one who is incompetent. It is also at this point that the reader is asked to shift to a whole new mode of thinking about God's creative activity, that is, to evolution and particularly its relationship to human freedom. For it is at this point that we will have to reach far beyond such suggestions or adjustments as reversing our time perspectives about original sin or paradise: those were only preliminaries designed to smooth the way. What is called for now is a whole new vision, (a new "myth" if you will) that can make sense out of all the facts - many of them just as unpleasant to the modern mind as any threat of damnation was to the medieval.

If such an effort can succeed, as I believe it will, not only will we be able to make a lot more sense out of the universe but we will also, I believe, make a great more sense out of our ideas of God.

Proceed to Chapter 6

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