Harbal wrote: ↑Thu Jun 15, 2023 10:22 amI would have no difficulty in using the word, "evil", as an adjective that means extremely bad if everyone else used it in exactly the same way, but they don't. The word has religious, super natural connotations for many people, which distorts the truth of the situation. If we want to stop genocide from happening, then surely it would be better to study what is going on in the minds of the people who commit it, rather than looking towards the sky and bewailing the existence of evil in the world.
And I don't hate the idea of God; I have no emotional response to the idea of God. I do hate that some people look to God for answers to the serious problems we have in the world, because it diverts them from looking for answers in the right places.
It seems to me that in order to better appreciate the Christian sense of what is evil that one must state in clear terms precisely the core and also the inseparable metaphysical concepts that inform it. So, in this sense Harbal is very right to have noticed that the notion of evil is, beyond any doubt, *religious* (I use the term metaphysical) and infused with "supernatural connotations".
And the core of it has been expressed through a "picture" which is quite simple: The chief opponent of God's cosmic work, Satan, has fallen down into the earth-realm and has been allowed to have control over this domain -- that is to have significant influence -- until such time as the reign of Satan is contested and overthrown. So, to understand a Christian's given concern, or his basic grasp of the metaphysical picture -- a description of an operative cosmology -- we can usefully refer to the picture of it as presented by the theology-infused play MacBeth. Consider the Weird Sisters:
As dramatic symbols, Shakespeare's Weird Sisters seem to be preeminently adequate and successful. In appearance, speech, and action they seem intended to suggest accurately such witches and witchcraft as were familiar to the Elizabethan public. They are desiccated, hag-like creatures with choppy fingers, skinny lips, and beards, who dwell preferably in the murk of desert places and rejoice in upheavals of nature. Upon occasion, indeed, they themselves brew storms on land and tempests at sea, thus destroying the products of men's hands at home and distressing or sinking ships abroad. Their sail-boats are sieves. Associated with them in ceremonial dances --conducted under the influence of the magic number three and its multiples -- are evil spirits in the form of cats and toads or sometimes in the likeness of a woman; they employ parts of dismembered dead bodies, toads, and adders in winding up their necromantic charms. Compacts with the devil and his angels assure them a certain prophetic power, though they are likely to accomplish their ends by means of half-truths. All the hocus-pocus of magic rites seems to be familiar to them.
MacBeth's
experience is, naturally, an emblematic metaphysical picture of the means by which a soul is seduced, tricked and trapped by demonic power, resulting in the sacrifice the most precious gift or possibility that a Christian-theological man can conceive: the liberation of the soul from the temptations of the world and the attainment of redemption that opens the possibility of a life beyond these constrained and dangerous circumstances and on a higher metaphysical plane. So MacBeth pictures, in dramatic form, what damnation actually is, and thus presents an extremely potent picture of a descent that, certainly in the Elizabethan period, made clear
metaphysical sense.
The story of MacBeth then offers to anyone who senses his metaphysical position as precarious and danger-ridden, a very clear picture that, though perhaps through other means and circumstances, one could very easily fall into snares that lead to lead one into devastating levels of moral error and, finally, to damnation.
Harbal demonstrates, I think, how it has come about that a man -- the outcome of social, cultural, intellectual and moral processes -- has been extruded onto the scenario of the present devoid of any connection at all with an *informing metaphysics* of the sort that, for example, moved Gertrude (in Hamlet) to say:
Thou turns't mine eyes into my very soul / and there I see such black and grained spots / as will not leave their tinct
For Harbal -- for a man of a certain modern sort and for a man who had, say, resolved all metaphysical difficulties by seeming to become inured to them -- there is no more *metaphysic*. It has all evaporated or been dried by some sun of modernity.
When MacBeth said to his doctor:
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased / Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow / Raze out the written troubles of the brain / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart?
Harbal reveals that, now, all such moral angst has been done for. There is no more moral problem. Thus there can no longer be any *introspection* nor is there any looming sense of implication in the disease of bad, wrong or evil choices. There are really no consequences therefore -- from his position in a linoleum-lined kitchen in a flattened modernity.
IC wrote: The fear is, in the absence of a sufficiently strong and apt term by which to assign moral value to an act, we just might trivialize and thus extenuate it. I'm for keeping the term "evil."
Harbal writes: Of course you are all for keeping the term, "evil", because it has an important role in keeping your mythology deception going.
Well, mythologies are real, and mythologies have been studied and the elements within them brought to the surface where they have been examined. That is a modern intellectual endeavor, or one popularly cultural, but it is also one that has taken place in the *shadow* of a modern intellectual movement in which the former metaphysic has substantially collapsed. The core terms or predicates of that metaphysic are now regarded as quaint, picturesque and fundamentally
meaningless.
With this said, what is needed to understand a great deal going on in our present (in the world surrounding us, the world of contemporary events) is a better grasp of the fact that, for some, perhaps for many, the moral issue has not collapsed, nor the metaphysical conceptions that inform it.
The issue therefore is one between some people that say *
this is real, but
not this other* and those (from the Christian-metaphysical perspective) who insist that to take that tack is disasterous, on as many levels as we might list here.
Am I proposing a resolution? No. Not necessarily. It is far better to understand what issues actually operate so that they can be seen and better understood.
