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Sin and Evil
MORAL VALUES IN LITERATURE
By RONALD PAULSON YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2007 Ronald Paulson
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-300-12014-1
Chapter One
Evil, Sin, and Wrongdoing 1. EVIL
Evil and "Evil" ("Evil With a Very Big E")
Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, ... all these points were against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him. "There must be something else," said the perplexed gentleman. "There is something more, if I could find a name for it." -R.L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
RADICAL EVIL IS A TERM we often hear: evil at its root, its ultimate source; fundamental, basic, and essential. (In politics it suggests an extreme, evil of the far left or far right.) Absolute evil is another: perfect, unqualified, pure, and unmixed, without a trace of mitigation. These refer to our rock-bottom definition: harm to another human being. But there are also forms of added charge: "beyond limits" or "beyond the line," meaning beyond the acceptable, as in "a strong case could be made that the killing of tens of thousands ofcivilians within a little more than twenty-four hours, as at Dresden, should also go well beyond the line" (emphasis added.). What we call evil is wrongdoing plus n, or wrongdoing raised to the nth power (above or beyond the ordinary norm). As Henry James has a character put it in The Golden Bowl: The "very, very wrong" is "what's called Evil-with a very big E."
Evil can be approached by an analogy with tragedy. Tragedy is to pathos as evil is to wrongdoing. When a child is run over by a car and killed, bystanders say this is a tragedy, but the child's death, however closely it touches us, is not tragic but sad and pathetic. There must be something in excess in various ways of the sad accident of the child's death. Peripeteia, a reversal of fortune, derives from a human hamartia (a tragic flaw) and must be, in Aristotle's terminology, "of a certain magnitude"-we might say a wrongdoing by a wrongdoer great enough to "inspire pity and fear," of a dignity that renders his fall terrible; and this must be followed by an anagnorisis, a climactic recognition of something he had not previously realized. The pathos of the scene involves "suffering ... a destructive or painful action, such as death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds and the like"-by "those who have done or suffered something terrible" (in S. H. Butcher's translation of the Poetics). And what are these acts? For example, "a brother kills, or intends to kill, a brother, a son his father, a mother her son, son his mother.... Medea slay[s] her children."
In the same way, the murder of a person is a crime or a wrongdoing. It may never be in any real sense more than a felony or assault, manslaughter or homicide, but as the circumstances are aggravated in one way or another it becomes, in the eyes of many, evil or even Evil.
To correct Henry James: Evil is wrongdoing with a capital W; "Evil" is evil "with a very big E." Which means in the twentieth century plus dimension (6 million), intention (genocide, "racial cleansing"), or the gratuitously cruel (forcing a child to mutilate or kill its parents); in short, whatever is worst, or is unthinkable or even unimaginable. But also, a more artificial strategy, plus the scare quotes of religious discourse (of sin, as both one of the sources of evil and itself one of the evils) with the effect of deepening the sense of evil. We can say that evil has been theologized, then heightened for the purposes of rhetoric ("Evil Empire," "Axis of Evil") or of aesthetics (obscurity, power, sublime terror).
The root of Old English yfel, according to the OED, "usually referred to the root of up, over; on this view the primary sense would be either 'exceeding due measure' or 'overstepping proper limits.'" This can refer to a person as being beyond the normal human limits and/or an act that is what I have referred to as evil "with a very big E."
Suffering-Evil and Doing-Evil
The OED senses of evil fall roughly into two categories: suffering-evil and doing-evil. Suffering-evil is the condition of being unfortunate, miserable, wretched (as in evil health), a victim of calamity and misfortune. Under misfortune are also included the bad, wicked, inferior, offensive, and disagreeable agents who cause discomfort or repulsion. "In quite familiar speech," the OED adds, "the adj. is commonly superseded by bad; the sb. is somewhat more frequent, but chiefly in the widest senses, the more specific senses being expressed by other words, as harm, injury, misfortune, disease, etc." This is the significant root. The earthquake and tsunami that ravaged the Indian Ocean on Christmas Day in 2004 claimed some 220,000 lives and was, in the original sense of the word, evil. The Holocaust, involving the systematic murders of 6 million Jews, was also an evil but with a human, not natural, origin. The second sense of evil, doing-evil, is being morally depraved, bad, wicked, vicious; doing or tending to do harm; causing discomfort, pain, or trouble, arising from bad character or conduct.
The Greek kakia, with its excremental root, refers to suffering-evil, "what is bad" in the sense of "ill" or "ill-ness"-"what one desires to avoid, such as physical pain, sickness, suffering, misfortune, every kind of harm." The translations of the word in Sophocles's Oedipus tyrannos range from evil to ill, grief, and horror. The "French Evil" denoted syphilis; the Latin equivalent, malum (the noun or malus-a-um the adjective-bad, evil, wicked as well as unfortunate, weak, cowardly), like the French mal, denoted sickness as well as bad or evil. The Old Testament also presents evil as pain, sickness, suffering, and misfortune: doing-evil and suffering-evil (or moral evil and calamity) are covered by the same Hebrew root (ra'). When God decides to destroy his unsatisfactory creation in Genesis 5:6, the words ordinarily translated into English as "wickedness" and "evil," both words based on the root ra', are rendered literally by Robert Alter: God sees that "the evil [wickedness] of the human creature was great in the earth and that every scheme of the heart's devising was only perpetually evil [evil]."
The agency of evil, called natural evil, is ordinarily attached to God. As Samuel E. Meier puts it, in the Oxford Companion to the Bible, "Since God was the undisputed master of creation, it was assumed that every occurrence was through his explicit command." Isaiah's God speaks: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things." In 1 Kings 14:10 Jehovah vows to "bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam" because of his sins (worshiping "other gods"). Amos's rhetorical question is, "Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?," and Job's, "Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?" (Isa. 45:7; Amos 3:6; Job 2:10). These evils can be neutral dangers or calamities-"A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself" (Prov. 22:3)-but when they are disastrous they are attributed to the deity (originally, we may suppose, to natural forces, animistic then deified).
The Old Testament references gravitate toward a Genesis sense of evil summed up by the Christian theologians in the Problem of Evil (unde malum? whence and why evil?). The "evils" that entered the world with Adam's Fall were death, strife, and labor-disease, pain, and natural disaster, and all those effects people have found inexplicable given the belief in an all-powerful and benevolent deity. These are presented throughout the Old Testament primarily as punishments inflicted by God. Amos's rhetorical question, "Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?" reminds us that when evils happen they are attributed to God's wrath, and in this case "evil in a city" conflates the evil done by men and the reciprocal evil imposed by God.
When evil in the Old Testament does refer to injuries or wrongs done by one man to another (murder, fratricide), he is warned: "Whoso rewardeth evil for good, evil shall not depart from his house" (Prov. 17:13). This is doing-evil, moral or criminal evil based on lex talionis (the law of retaliation), which is also the basis for the evils God administers; as we read in 1 Kings 16, when Jezebel had Naboth killed to secure his vineyard, it was evil in the sight of the Lord, and this justified her punishment at the hands of Jehu (2 Kings 9:30-39).
An extension of suffering-evil (death, pain, natural disaster, murder), doing-evil has tended to designate the suffering of one sentient being imposed by another; it is the pain that matters and the fact that it is deliberately inflicted (as opposed to a natural disaster or an accident). The words "deliver us from evil" in the Lord's Prayer encompass both meanings, natural and moral (Mat. 6:13). But suffering-evil is natural evil plus moral or doing-evil insofar as both were included in what Adam's Fall brought into the world, that is, God's doing, God's punishment for sin. Doing-evil (as in Cain's murder of Abel) ordinarily refers to the suffering inflicted only by one man or woman on another. And yet when God punishes the family of Jeroboam he is also doing-evil to human beings.
Suffering-evil is the whole world of death, disease, pain, and so on, that is the basis for the Problem of Evil; which should perhaps more accurately be the plural evils, sometimes called sorrows, sometimes woes, but comes down finally to death, in Søren Kierkegaard's words, "what humanity normally calls the greatest evil." Evil is what the psychiatrist C. Fred Alford has called "an experience of [existential] dread"-that combination of natural and moral evil, of meaninglessness and victimhood which is the world; in short, "the dread of being human, vulnerable, alone in the universe, and doomed to die." All goes back to this sense of evil as suffering and misfortune or victimhood and loss. Pace the story of Eden, existential evil would appear to have preceded the Problem of Evil and called for the "attempt to master the experience," to explain and hopefully alleviate it, by the invention of a god. To begin with, there was existence-Hobbesian, nasty, brutish, and short, involving two parties, the stronger and the weaker-and then the need to cope with these facts, first physically and then psychologically; and so one posited forces of nature and/or gods and created the discourse of evil and the Problem of Evil.
One answer, in many ways the most obvious (with the Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Bogomils, and Albigensians), was to premise two gods, an evil god who, responsible for the evils, counteracts a good god. Only with the premise of a monotheist god did it become necessary to explain why he, if omnipotent and all good, permits evil; and so were postulated crimes/sins for which god has punished us with misfortunes-crimes against each other, sins against god himself. And with offenses/crimes/ sins arises the principle of rewards and punishments, either in daily life or, more significantly, in an eternal afterlife promised in recompense for the evils of a transitory life here, either (depending on the criterion of acts or of faith) in heaven or hell. And not only the hope in a life after death but the Christian belief, expressed here and there in the New Testament (e.g., the Magnificat), in a hereafter where the last will be the first.
2.SIN
Disobedience/Offense to the Deity
If one man sin against another, the judge shall judge him: but if a man sin against the Lord, who shall entreat for him? -1 Samuel 2:25
The first is evil, the second sin. Genesis says only that following the Fall women will suffer in childbirth and be ruled over by their husbands (because, eating the apple, Adam had subjected himself to Eve), and Adam will have to "till the ground" and labor for a livelihood. Most important (the felix culpa aspect), he will now "know good and evil." The idea of "evils" (death, suffering, and the rest) is introduced by the Christian interpreters. "Evil" as the evils of existence was implied by Paul and made explicit by Augustine, whose primary religious problem-at the beginning of his career, following his eating of the pears (see below), and at the end as he battled Pelagius-was the Problem of Evil, which first drew him to the Manichaean solution and then, in violent reaction, to the monotheist god and the conclusion that God created all things good, and therefore "there is no such entity in nature as 'evil' [malum]; 'evil' is merely a name for the privation of good." Augustine says malum and clearly means the evils of the world ("distress, like fire, cold, wild animals, and so on"), privations which he regards as "deserved punishment" for sin.
The two great subjects for Augustine were the Problem of Evil and the nature of sin and the ineradicable human sin that came with the Fall. His answer was that evil was the consequence of, the punishment for, the one sin of our remotest ancestor, which, in John Milton's words, "Brought Death into the World, and all our woe" (Paradise Lost, 1.3)-disobedience, the Original Sin of Eve and Adam in Eden. God made man in his own image, allowing man a share in Creation by giving him free will. Man abused this gift by disobedience followed by punishment (natural evil, moral evil), saved only through a miracle, God becoming man and suffering-taking upon himself evil-vicariously for Adam/man.
Suffering-evil precedes and, with a monotheist god, gives rise to the concept of sin. The religious term in English for doing-evil is sin, from Old English synn-an offense against God; disobedience against a God who commands, exacts obedience, punishes, and rewards (as laid out in Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus); willful violation of the divine order by presuming the pride of judgment, to choose whatever one wills for oneself. The concept of Old Testament sin (which Alter, in his translation of the epigraph for this section, renders "offend") has its linguistic root in the Hebrew verb chattat, missing the mark or target (or 'awon, a tortuous road, or shagah, losing one's way or-a synonym for sin-trespassing). The Greek word used to translate the Hebrew chattat was hamartia, also the missing of a mark with bow and arrow (see below, chapter 2).
Paul Ricoeur has noted that sin "does not so much signify a harmful substance as a violated relation," a "personal relation to a god," what is in the Old Testament the violation of a Covenant, thus a lawbreaking, but of a religious bond, of a contract with the deity himself. The Prophets introduced the senses of sin: Amos defined sin as essentially evil deeds, the exploitation of the poor and lowly, traffic in slaves, cruelty to enemies at war, and luxury among the great, and Hosea defined it as adultery; but Isaiah extended the betrayal of the conjugal bond to revolt against God (as we shall see, adultery becomes a form of treason), by which man becomes "unclean in lips and heart," and, as Ricoeur notes, "Henceforth sin is represented by the figure of violated suzerainty; sin is pride, arrogance, false greatness." Sin is in fact transgression (L. transgredior, transgressus, to step beyond or across, i.e., trespass), and at this point evil and sin may overlap in the etymological sense of yfel as up, over.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sin and Evil by RONALD PAULSON Copyright © 2007 by Ronald Paulson. Excerpted by permission.
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