Re: 03: The Foreknown and Fatal Morn RY Deshpande Sat 27 Jan 2007 06:27 AM PST
Evil at Life's Afflicted Roots A Sanskrit prayer invokes good auspicious things to all, sarvéşām bhadram astu vah. The Mother’s supplication to the divine Master is: “May all beings be happy in the peace of Thy illumination!” But the roots of life are afflicted by evil and the question that always haunts us is, how does God permit evil, if God is all-good, summum bonum? give rise to evil, summum malum? can a perfect creator cause imperfection in his creation? in the divine’s world arise the undivine? But we see good and evil, perfection and imperfection, divine and undivine under life’s duress and not in the freedom of the spirit. It is human reason that gets baffled at the dichotomy appearing in front of it, not only in evil and good, but also in truth and falsehood, ignorance and knowledge, pleasure and pain, light and darkness, life and death, everywhere. “Is this your God who created pain, evil, falsehood, error, sin, the whole dark-skinned brood?”—effectively asks Savitri’s disturbed mother Malawi to Narad who has announced the death of Satyavan one year after the marriage. Is this your God…. The Mother would say, it is a bad question. Malawi was asking a bad question. What she can rather ask is, how has this happened in his world? Sri Aurobindo answers it in his Riddle of this World and of course in The Life Divine. But before we see that, let us have a look at the best formulations that have tried to give an exposé of the same. For Plato the question of good and evil was positional, arising out of our ignorance of things. Spinoza does not find real difference between good and evil; he took a relativist’s position and thought good and evil as subjective experiences of the individual, and that there is complete identity of spirit and nature. According to him, there are three kinds of evil: physical, moral, and metaphysical. In the last limitation is the cause of evil. Christian philosophy has, like the Hebrew, uniformly attributed moral and physical evil to the action of created free will. Man has himself brought about the evil from which he suffers by transgressing the Law of God, on obedience to which his happiness depended. Evil is in created things under the aspect of mutability, and possibility of defect, not as existing per se: and the errors of mankind, mistaking the true conditions of its own well-being, have been the cause of moral and physical evil. Adam in the Garden of Eden used his free-will, due to excessive love for Eve as Milton says, and paid the price for doing what he was told not to do, told not in uncertain terms. Use of free-will in a state of imperfection is bound to lead to such disastrous consequences. For correcting such wrong-doings crucifixion is the precious remedy. If existence is fundamentally evil, then the only way to overcome it is by abandoning it altogether, by Nirvana, by going into the impersonal state. Such a view could lead us to the extreme philosophy of pessimism. Greek thinkers, however, considered that distrust and doubt could be overcome by wise and virtuous conduct; they were positivists. For Plato God was blameless (anaítios) and the cause of evil rested with the imperfection of the material existence. But if evil is due to two opposing hostile principles, as we have in several religions, for instance in Zarathustran Ormuzd and Ahriman, independent of each other, then the talk of possibility of a better world will be meaningless. The extreme position will then lead to the evil as inherent in Matter, with good in God, making Matter and Spirit irreconcilable. In the presence of permanent evil the retributive justice of religion becomes anathematic to reason. The sin of mankind arising out of his free-will passes on the buck to it. I contrast to such dualistic formulations, monism views evil merely as an interaction of human agency with nature, making nature as the begetter of evil. Haeckel’s extreme materialism in which substance or matter is the basis of all things has no place for any other cause for the appearance of evil. In the theory of pragmatism the world is what we make. Going beyond good and evil, Nietzsche-like, the future man will get endowed with the will-to-power, making him the master of everything. When such a man, Nietzsche’s superman with titanic power arrives, there will be no evil. But the occult truth of the presence of evil is beyond mental formulations. It is present at Life’s afflicted roots. This is what the Yogi-Poet sees and tells, sees and tells because he has experienced it so.
Evil at Life's Afflicted Roots A Sanskrit prayer invokes good auspicious things to all, sarvéşām bhadram astu vah. The Mother’s supplication to the divine Master is: “May all beings be happy in the peace of Thy illumination!” But the roots of life are afflicted by evil and the question that always haunts us is, how does God permit evil, if God is all-good, summum bonum? give rise to evil, summum malum? can a perfect creator cause imperfection in his creation? in the divine’s world arise the undivine? But we see good and evil, perfection and imperfection, divine and undivine under life’s duress and not in the freedom of the spirit. It is human reason that gets baffled at the dichotomy appearing in front of it, not only in evil and good, but also in truth and falsehood, ignorance and knowledge, pleasure and pain, light and darkness, life and death, everywhere. “Is this your God who created pain, evil, falsehood, error, sin, the whole dark-skinned brood?”—effectively asks Savitri’s disturbed mother Malawi to Narad who has announced the death of Satyavan one year after the marriage. Is this your God…. The Mother would say, it is a bad question. Malawi was asking a bad question. What she can rather ask is, how has this happened in his world? Sri Aurobindo answers it in his Riddle of this World and of course in The Life Divine. But before we see that, let us have a look at the best formulations that have tried to give an exposé of the same. For Plato the question of good and evil was positional, arising out of our ignorance of things. Spinoza does not find real difference between good and evil; he took a relativist’s position and thought good and evil as subjective experiences of the individual, and that there is complete identity of spirit and nature. According to him, there are three kinds of evil: physical, moral, and metaphysical. In the last limitation is the cause of evil. Christian philosophy has, like the Hebrew, uniformly attributed moral and physical evil to the action of created free will. Man has himself brought about the evil from which he suffers by transgressing the Law of God, on obedience to which his happiness depended. Evil is in created things under the aspect of mutability, and possibility of defect, not as existing per se: and the errors of mankind, mistaking the true conditions of its own well-being, have been the cause of moral and physical evil. Adam in the Garden of Eden used his free-will, due to excessive love for Eve as Milton says, and paid the price for doing what he was told not to do, told not in uncertain terms. Use of free-will in a state of imperfection is bound to lead to such disastrous consequences. For correcting such wrong-doings crucifixion is the precious remedy. If existence is fundamentally evil, then the only way to overcome it is by abandoning it altogether, by Nirvana, by going into the impersonal state. Such a view could lead us to the extreme philosophy of pessimism. Greek thinkers, however, considered that distrust and doubt could be overcome by wise and virtuous conduct; they were positivists. For Plato God was blameless (anaítios) and the cause of evil rested with the imperfection of the material existence. But if evil is due to two opposing hostile principles, as we have in several religions, for instance in Zarathustran Ormuzd and Ahriman, independent of each other, then the talk of possibility of a better world will be meaningless. The extreme position will then lead to the evil as inherent in Matter, with good in God, making Matter and Spirit irreconcilable. In the presence of permanent evil the retributive justice of religion becomes anathematic to reason. The sin of mankind arising out of his free-will passes on the buck to it. I contrast to such dualistic formulations, monism views evil merely as an interaction of human agency with nature, making nature as the begetter of evil. Haeckel’s extreme materialism in which substance or matter is the basis of all things has no place for any other cause for the appearance of evil. In the theory of pragmatism the world is what we make. Going beyond good and evil, Nietzsche-like, the future man will get endowed with the will-to-power, making him the master of everything. When such a man, Nietzsche’s superman with titanic power arrives, there will be no evil. But the occult truth of the presence of evil is beyond mental formulations. It is present at Life’s afflicted roots. This is what the Yogi-Poet sees and tells, sees and tells because he has experienced it so.
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