Does this make sense?
The strong antipathy and disgust that good has for evil comes from a love of the good. The hatred that evil has for good comes from resentment, pride, fear and the desire to bring down and destroy. Two emotions that may, on the face of it, seem similar but which come from very different sources.
7 comments:
Yes. And it seems that the hatred evil has for good is in fact a self hatred.
Good point. At root that may be just what it is.
And why the self hatred?
Maybe rooted in despair, deep beyond knowing, accumulated from a lifetime failing to choose good. But because it is unknown, repentance cannot be sought.
There is an understanding of the human soul in Greek philosophy that sees it as tripartite: intelligible good, reason, and sensible good. The first is real, i.e. closest to the Divine; the last is ephemeral and has the least reality. Reason, the dianoetic power, can be directed to the intelligible or the sensible. When it is directed primarily toward the sensible, it loses itself in formlessness, for matter has no intrinsic or lasting form and is forever tending toward dissolution (entropy). When it is directed primarily toward the intelligible, it ascends to the more perfect forms, to greater definition and reality. Evil is formless, a return to the chaotic in which reason becomes impotent. The modern world, in rejecting the intelligible good and focusing entirely on matter, has destroyed its reason. This is why it is pointless to argue with most people: they can no longer follow an argument. And as like tends to like, unreasoning matter and unreasoning mind coalesce and become antagonistic toward reason and its proper object - the intelligible good. Conversely, the more one loves reason and its creations, the more one turns away from a darkly materialistic attraction to chaos. To offer an illustration: the purpose of fasting to gain spiritual insight rested on the knowledge that the senses distracted us from the Divinely infused intelligible good. It was a question of reorientating our attention: directing our reason toward its proper object. The sensible good can then be understood as an expression of the Divine, in which we can participate, rather than as an end in itself, which terminates in meaningless extinction. As a side note: all material things are subject to death because matter cannot maintain form, i.e. is not an adequate vehicle for the lasting expression of the Divine creation. This may be why the resurrected body as described by St. Paul is posited as something unlike our present body, in that it is incorrupt, which implies it is not material as we understand matter.
That certainly makes sense. Chaos seems to be the way we are heading what with our ever-greater denial of what you are calling here the intelligible good. Argument with those who don't or won't see that is pointless but that doesn't mean we should not state our case because the truth must be maintained and not allowed to be suppressed as we see everywhere these days.
Yes, we may and sometimes should state our case, but contemporary polemics almost always involve an acceptance of the premise that we must begin with material causes, rather than formal or efficient ones. And material causes can, at best, be descriptions of how things appear to connect to one another. It is difficult to rise to final causes from such a starting point, or so it seems to me. As absurd as it may be, the notion that matter is self-explanatory and self-contained is the near universal assumption of our time and it is hard to make a dent in it, no matter how brilliant at dialectics we may be. If one watches debates by theists with Hitchens, Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al., it is plain to see that access to any interior sources of knowledge, to soul and spirit, are ruled at from the beginning. And reason, whose mysterious existence is never explained, is then pressed into service to prove its uselessness as a means of knowing anything beyond the senses.
You can never convince those who do not want to be convinced. It all comes down to first principles. If you get these wrong then everything else will be wrong too. And many people adopt their first principles from what they want to be true so you can never make an impression on them.
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