I was castigated recently for going on too much about evil on this blog. I take the point but I would counter that we are living in a particularly evil time. In some respects, the worst ever since evil is essentially the denial of God in whom all good is centred and from whom all good arises. Today we have moved beyond the spiritual negligence of the 20th century into the active rejection of not only God but his created order as well.
People usually point to Hitler as the embodiment of evil in the modern age but I would maintain that, spiritually speaking, there are people as evil as him living now who outwardly might appear exemplary citizens. If you find this statement shocking let me point out that evil is not just measured by the bad things you may do. It is measured by your approach to reality. Reality is God. So when I use the word evil, I don't simply mean bad in the conventional anti-human sense. I refer to an attitude to life, an attitude towards the Creator. The anti-God sense. An evil attitude sets itself against real goodness and truth which are necessarily spiritual. They must be. If there is no spiritual truth then nothing has intrinsic reality and good and evil are meaningless terms.
The 20th century had Communism and Nazism which were obvious evils and had to be fought. But in the 21st century the dark powers have changed their tactics and evil takes a softer, subtler form, disguising itself as good but just as spiritually pernicious, probably more so as the soul embraces this spiritual evil willingly in the belief that it is being virtuous. This would not happen if the soul were rightly oriented and less fixated on itself and its lower nature to the detriment of God and its higher reality. But it does happen because the soul gives itself to a false good, a good based on its own fallen desires.
The false good is the religion of humanity in which natural and spiritual differences are denied, the higher brought down to the level of the lower and the fact of spiritual evil as a real thing dismissed as a prejudice of the ignorant, to believe in which is actually hateful. This false good also creates for itself a false evil which is anything in which the religion of humanity, together with its central pillar of egalitarianism or oneness, is denied. What the religion of humanity ignores is that being human in the full sense requires seeking the truth of one's being in what is beyond the merely human. If this aspiration or vision of humanity is not allowed then what happens is this. Instead of rising above the human, one falls below it. Humanity, in this sense, is a staging post not a destination which is not to lessen it but to see it in its proper context of spiritual transformation. It seems to be inevitable that if a human being does not seek to transcend himself he will fall into a lower than human state. Not animal which is a worthy, natural state but sub-human. Many of the demons belong to this category.
From a spiritual perspective, the most important human faculties are the will and the imagination. In modern man, both of these have been corrupted. The will is no longer oriented to God as it is in a spiritually healthy human being. It points towards self. And the imagination has been crippled by materialism with the result that the images that feed it are not based on symbols of the divine but, increasingly, those that derive from the infernal regions. Look at so much of modern art, music, film and general culture. Isn't it obvious where this comes from? Imagination now is not called to higher levels of being but spiritual debasement.
The modern age has been marked by the desire to liberate the human will from its 'enslavement' to God, rejected (irrationally) as irrational. What lies behind this supposed search for freedom is actually egotism with truth bent to suit the agenda of the autonomous ego. What results is not freedom but increased enslavement to the restrictions of matter. There is no freedom in matter. Without spirit there is only darkness and death. The human imagination has fallen into darkness and can only rise out of that when it opens itself up to transcendent reality. Re-polarise your will to the truth of God and allow your imagination to receive spiritual light.
20 comments:
William, we live in times of the greatest evil and yes - we must not resist speaking of it. It is right to do so.
Your piece brings to mind a description of the experience of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Referred to as the 4th Temptation, the Evil One shows him a vision of the loathsome degraded evils to which humans will descend in the times to come - often carried out in his own name. "You would choose to suffer to save these loathsome creatures?" A temptation of the highest order.
My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me...
And yet - through sheer force of Love, Goodness - He chose the Father's Will.
William,
It seems to me that the source of the trouble is naturalism, the philosophy of what some people have called "flatland" . According to Edward Feser, this worldview is materialist, mechanistic, nominalist, relativist, and skeptic. Atheism, or should I say "non-theism", strictly speaking, does not necessarily feature those characteristics.
Isn't that just quibbling over words, Chris? it's all part of the same thing which is the denial of God.
I don't think so.
Take Stoic philosophy for example..... I would be disinclined to regard that worldview as theistic , certainly not in a way that a traditional Christian would recognize, and yet Stoicism doesn't have much in common with naturalism.
I take your point but Stoicism as a real thing went out with Marcus Aurelius pretty much. I'm interested in the rejection of God in traditionally Christian countries and what that has led to in the modern era. If naturalism and atheism are not literally the same thing they are close cousins and feed each other. I suspect this is one reason Buddhism can accommodate itself or be made to accommodate itself to the evils of the present day and do so without totally losing its rationale which cannot be said of Christianity.
That's the thing- I don't think that eastern and pagan philosophies can be accommodated to the evils of the present day, any more than Christianity can, not without a good dose of selective reasoning. Also, let's not forget that atheo-materialism emerged specifically from within Western Christendom, so an argument could be made those two are actually the closer relatives.
I expressed myself badly. What I meant was that Buddhism is not able to show up contemporary evils as evil because it does not give the same value to the creation as Christianity does.
Ok, I see what you mean. Nevertheless, I don't think it is true that Buddhism and/or non-theistic philosophies are not able to show up contemporary evils as evil. Does the Eightfold Noble Path have no moral purchase because Buddhism is based on an anti-realist worldview? I'm not so sure about that.
And then again, consider philosophies like Stoicism (which is actually having a big comeback) that have a pantheistic flavor, and yet still have a realist ontology . That's why we find its adherents making serious and compelling arguments for natural law.
I have not read Aurelius. But I have read most of Epictetus. Epictetus and his philosohy were very much theist. I would even say he was a proto-Christian.
"Nevertheless, I don't think it is true that Buddhism and/or non-theistic philosophies are not able to show up contemporary evils as evil."
I call bull on that. First reason, Chesterton's "If there is no God, then nothing matters..." couplet. Second reason, is that in any given family line, once an offspring "goes atheist", or even fails to pass on whatever religion the parents had, the subsequent generations of that offspring "use up" or "spend down" the social capital. In other words, susequent generations/descendants of the one who went atheist get less and less moral, and more and more wicked. (of course there are individual exceptions, and sometimes even re-conversions.)
Someone back in the 1930's even did a study of ancient civilations, and found 100% correlation. (I may have read that here or on BC's blog.) It was very clear: go atheist (from any religion), and then marriages/families are destroyed, and then that civilization is destroyed.
In other words, atheists are inherently (and with a 100% track record) incapable of maintaining morality/virtue/goodness across a few generations. Morality _dwindles_ away from them, and you can't see it without taking a multi-generational view. All arguments to the contrary look at only one or two generations, and ignore the "spending down of social capital" aspect.
It's as if the first or second generation of atheists is oblivious to the ancestral source of whatever morality or virtue they are claiming.
-Bookslinger.
Buddhism, as I understand it, is motivated by a kind of spiritual hedonism: a desire to escape suffering once and for all. Its analysis is that pain comes from desire for the things of this world. Ergo, no desire = no pain. It does not engage the world, but removes the psyche from its contaminating influence. The Buddha has his eyes closed. He is not interested in the right ordering of creation. The noumenon has been divorced from the phenomenon. Christianity unites them; indeed, it sees them as one, with phenomena as the visible expression of noumena. The eye which is single and fills the body with light sees all that is, internal and external, in that light. Pain is not to be escaped, but to be used as a corrective or a goad to greater love. Stoicism made a brief comeback with Hemingway's popularity a few generations ago. Life can be good sometimes: enjoy it when it's good and be man enough not to grumble when it's bad. It won't help anyway. I don't see many people reading Hemingway these days and there's a great deal of grumbling from people who think life should be good all the time and it's someone else's job - God or the government - to make it so. It's true, I think, that a break in the family's religious tradition generally leads to moral confusion within a few generations. But traditions that have became formal and inertial cannot continue to be a vital part of life, despite whatever socially or morally stabilizing effect they may have had. I see young people in my family drifting and struggling, but I can't point them to the Faith of their Fathers, because those structures have been hollowed out. They must, as we all now must, find their own way. That is, if they really care about truth which, sad to say, is seldom the case. Whatever appetite is out there for living a righteous life and growing toward God is usually satisfied, as William points out, by subscribing to the politically correct attitudes maintained (and enforced) by the powers that be, who hate God and all that is good, including the natural order. Neither the Buddha nor Hemingway nor Epictetus can prevail in this fight. Christ is our ally, our armor, our hope.
We find a deep anti-Christian feeling amongst Buddhists (in the West at least).
This takes a form that is indistinguishable from the atheist antipathy. A sense of superiority, a looking down upon those who believe in a supersensible reality. The view is that there is nothing whatsoever to be learned from Christianity. The Theosophist movement insofar as it might be called Esoteric Buddhism (as per the foundational book of the same name by AP Sinnet) - managed to entrench this disdain for Christianity in the West.
There are of course many Christians who resist a spiritual unfolding of their faith. But for Buddhists, locked into an ahistorical view of the world - incapable of accepting the spiritual evolution that the unfolding millenia bring - these sublime teachings seem destined to suffer the same fate as Hinduism before it - a fading grandeur speaking of realities that belong to an ever receding past.
The point I was trying to make is that I think it is an error to conflate atheism with naturalism . The core problem , I believe , is the naturalism , not necessarily the atheism . Naturalism is the belief that the fundamental reality is matter/energy and that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain - or worse yet, completely non-existent (eliminative materialism). It is this de-spiritualizing mechanistic philosophy that inevitably eats away at virtue, creativity , imagination , and the whole of the human estate.
Some very good comments while I was asleep. I would just add that perhaps there were some ancient pre-Christian forms of atheism, if Buddhism and Stoicism are atheistic which is debatable, that were spiritual but practically speaking in the modern world I would say that atheism involves the active rejection of God which is an evil. Since the advent of Christ there is no longer any excuse for atheism. Before the Christian revelation in a world that struggled to understand the spiritual it could be justified but not since.
", by subscribing to the politically correct attitudes maintained (and enforced) by the powers that be, who hate God and all that is good, including the natural order"
Good point. The locus of those powers is the media (both news and entertainment) and academia.
The New Left had dominance of the media by the 1960's. And the Left controlled all of academia by the mid 1980's. The 60's radicals had become the tenured professors by mid to late 80's. then everything seemed to be locked in and accelerated.
Somewhere along the line, perhaps the 50's or early 60's, parents began abdicating the raising of their children to academia and the media. I'm a late baby-boomer. We picked up what was fed us by our schools and the media, but mostly by the media, hours a day watching TV and listening to music.
It wasn't so much that the churches were spiritually hollowed out in the 60's and 70's, but the tidal wave of media/academia completely overwhelmed any religious messages/teachings. then subsequent generations of church leadership slowly started to come from the new media-influenced generations. It was the "long march through the institutions." First media, then academia, then churches, then businesses. I'm not sure where to place political parties and governments in that chain. That was likely simultaneous with media.
-Bookslinger
There isn't an accepted term for the mainstream mandatory materialism; not least because (as befits a negative ideology) they deny any positive and coherent identifier.
Perhaps - rather than atheism - *anti-Christianity* is the more accurate term (although also denied; and some self-identified Christians are actually anti - such as Justin Welby).
For example, Theosophy, mentioned above, is anything-but-Christianity in practice; same with adherents of Western Buddhism, Hinduism or Sufism.
Anti-Christians will adopt a wide range of beliefs or unbeliefs - so long as these allow scope for 1. the supremacy of leftist politics, as these evolve; and 2. that particular person's sexual preferences and wishes.
Bruce is right. It does amount to anti-Christianity unless that Christianity is the Welby form that has allowed itself to be hollowed out and possessed from within by leftism.
The weakening of Christianity in the West is what opened the flood gates which allowed the corrosive philosophy of naturalism to fester. I would argue that changes in Catholic theology centuries ago, specifically the movement away from realism to nominalism, is the root cause.
The "spirit" of mechanism and atomism brought an end to the teleological medieval synthesis of of final causes. The end result is what we have today- the machine- "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Since the Christ Event there have been two further impulses - firstly the advent of the Grail Mysteries in the 8th/9th century - upon which I believe the shared love of Albion and the Arthurian Mysteries derives. The 2nd Event is surely what we are living through today - the Return of Christ in his non-physical body which has triggered this demonic uprising from the abyss.
The evil that has sweeps through the world today uses the vehicle of Leftism primarily. It is said that the Luciferic aspect of Evil acts on the individual whilst the Ahrimanic aspect acts upon groups. The atheist, leftist ideology has perfectly equipped them to serve as zombie footsoldiers of Evil.
I don't believe these are the actual end-times but for many souls they might as well be. Or indeed might as "Welby"...
I believe that philosophers define evil as undeserved harm, and thus make it a consequence of injustice. I wonder if undeserved boon isn't also evil, but think this definition is a good starting place for thinking about evil. Injustice (and therefore evil) arises in two ways: a failure to perceive true goodness and a hatred of goodness correctly perceived. The first source of evil therefore arises from what is often described as false values or a false ideology, and I think it is what Jesus was talking about when he said "the light of the body is in the eye" (Luke 8:22). Since all values and ideologies cannot be correct, a multicultural society must have a great deal of injustice/evil.
I read one philosopher who called the second source of evil wickedness, and this seems to me a good and useful term. Bruce Charlton has written about this hatred of goodness, which is the real heart of darkness, but which every human has felt and likely acted on at one time or another. Wanton vandalism is the most obvious expression of wickedness--a will to make things uglier and less useful than they are. This would seem to be the evil of Satan. He did not fail to appreciate God's greatness. He appreciated God's greatness and hated it.
We're back to the definition of words again. But actually you make an important point. We must get definitions right or confusion arises, if not deliberate manipulation of ideas, an old trick of those who seek to muddy the spiritual waters. I am using evil to mean denial of the good taking the good to be that centred in the reality of God. I would say all human beings have some kind of instinctive knowledge of this even if it is covered up by several layers of personal thoughts and desires. So to deny God and behave in ways arising from that denial is always a conscious decision, an active choice. That is what is happening more and more these days and is a stage on from the simple spiritual negligence of the past. I would not call that evil though it is wrong. I do call the present active rejection of God evil.
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