Evil as spiritual
May 19, 2018 § 10 Comments
What do I mean when I say that for me, evil is “spiritual”?
By spiritual I mean transcendental. Real evil transcends individual consciousness. Psychopaths and sociopaths not evil, they are sick. Evil for me is social. Yet it even transcends normal social interaction. It has a power of its own, though it has no existence in itself.
Here, I am deeply influenced and inspired by Walter Wink’s series of books on the Powers. I’ve reworked some of his ideas for my own understanding, but I think his basic approach is right on—defining angels, demons, etc. as the spiritual dimension of “sociological” phenomena, the ways that humans embody collective impulses to power in human systems, institutions, and collective behavior more generally.
But how can an institution or a collective behavior have a spiritual dimension? The spiritual dimension of these collective human systems, institutions, and behaviors lies in their power to affect and even infect individual moral choice, very often against the will, or at least the natural inclination, of those involved.
Mobs are the most obvious example. “Good,” “Christian” men and women caught up in a spirit of rage or fear to do something or enable something that they would never do on their own—haul a wrongly accused black man from the county jail to string him up in a tree, cover up or stay silent about the fact that your pharmaceutical company’s drug causes heart attacks.
But here it gets tricky. I am saying that the forces that turn a society or a person toward harm, toward violence and oppression, are manifestations of evil. The evil is the momentum in collective human behavior that calls to the darkness that dwells within each of us, the shadow side of our consciousness, and that turns us away from the light, that animates harmful behavior.
That momentum has no existence apart from human experience and consciousness. It is not self-existent; it is not the devil. Or rather, the devil is not some independent, sentient spiritual embodiment of evil, but rather the force of evil as a phenomenon that emerges sometimes spontaneously in the interaction between individual humans through their fears, desires, and hatreds when they are gathered together in human collectives and someone or something lights the spark. The spirit of evil manifests in these collectives and takes on a life of its own.
These negative harmful impulses can manifest in a mob, or in the Third Reich, but they live in human interaction, in parking lot conversations, media content, Facebook posts, popular songs and stories. They are collective nightmares given mouths and hands and feet.
And some persons get energy from these manifestations, these impulses. For me, evil people are people who get energy from doing harm, very similar to the way we get energy from sharing love with each other, only turned back to the shadows, towards deep wounds, needs, fears, and negative impulses.
This is essentially a Jungian argument. We’re talking about the collective unconscious, which is the “consciousness” that dwells in a “body” or infrastructure comprised of human groups, institutions, and systems. We are talking about collective memory stored in stories, art and literature, in the news and the “media”, in religious liturgies and theologies, in political ideologies, Facebook trends, Oscar reception speeches, urban myths, and conspiracy theories.
When a human collective experiences trauma, the memories and the wounds evoke an impulse to repress the experience, to deny it or push it down.
But this does not work. Just as psychic wounds cause neuroses in individuals, collective trauma causes collective neuroses. Just as individuals store the impact of trauma in their psyches and even in their bodies, so human groups store their shared pain in their narratives and their institutions. This repression affects collective behavior. A generation traumatized by the Great War punishes a generation of Germans, who then lash out against their persecutors with another war and traumatize another generation.
The whole thing turns “evil” when it enters a down-spiraling feedback loop, a maelstrom into the shadows caused by holding the microphone up to the speaker, a group listening to its own angry and fearful voice and getting more and more worked up.
But the collective needs the voices—and the ears—of real people. The collective consciousness needs its tongues and hands and feet. Someone has to be Hitler. Someone has to propose the lynch mob. Someone has to say, we’re going to cover up this data about our drug or product. Someone has to get off on this cycle—or at least get something out of it.
For me, the momentum behind this kind of feedback loop is what I call evil.
Still, calling something or someone evil says more about the person doing the calling than about the thing they are calling evil. What am I saying when I call something or someone evil? What do I become? I want to explore this in the next post.
Through the Flaming Sword 
Steve,
I suspect that the liberal Quaker understanding of evil comes down to the expression: “hurt people, hurt people” (and, by extension, “hurt peoples, hurt peoples”). Which is good enough as far as it goes, but it does not explain why some people hurt more that others. Surely, we have all been hurt and surely, the amount of hurt we do is not a direct function of the amount we have received.
Chance and circumstances probably have a lot to do with it. I take this to be the point of the suggestion that we pray “lead us not into temptation”.
This does not address that “momentum in collective human behavior that calls to the darkness that dwells within each of us”. About which, I presently do not have anything to say.
Rather, I want to speculate on the nature of that darkness. Although I don’t know the literature very well, believe it is far from original to identify that darkness with human selfishness. Is this not the source of the observation about the difficulty of the rich man entering the kingdom of heaven? I would not be surprised if early Friends spoke eloquently to this point.
I want to very tentatively push this line of argument one step further. I want to suggest that commonly recognized symptoms of selfishness — greed, pride, vanity, fear, etc. — only scratch the surface of the phenomenon. My hypothesis is that the root of “individual evil” is the delusion of the existence of “individuals” separate from the human community (and its environmental exoskeleton).
Our collective thralldom to that delusion is so pervasive that I, for one, find it difficult to imagine a world without it. I am told that, within the week of the birth of my sister, my 17 month old self had learned the words “me,” “my,” and “mine.”
Is it possible to conceive of evil in a human community without a concept of “self”?
Am I reaching too far to observe that the admonition to love one’s neighbor AS ONESELF suggests this hypothesis as does the early Christian notion of unity in Christ? Is this the Kingdom of God that Jesus found to amongst and within us? Isn’t this the meaning of the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira?
I have grown old, cynical, and disillusioned. I cannot see how we can get there from here. But, I will suggest three possible corollaries to the hypothesis:
1) Perhaps this is a case where “social being” — the ways that we interact with each other — precedes “social consciousness” — the ways in which our language allows us to think about ourselves and the world.
2) Capitalism corrupts everything it touches and it touches everything.
3) If the hypothesis is correct, then any religious tradition that aspires toward individual salvation is barking up the wrong tree.
As for a tradition that aspires toward individual salvation (which ours does) barking up the wrong tree, I think I might agree. Have to think about that. Ironically, however, Jesus’ tradition did not conceive of individual salvation separate from that of the community of Israel (though definitions of “Israel” varied)—until Jesus. When researching Israel’s collective identity several decades ago, I think I remember learning that Jesus was actually the very first prophet in Israel’s tradition to identify the individual as the focus of salvation. But even he could not imagine a “kingdom of God” without community—so he redefined “Israel” (the “true” Israel) as the community he had created. In this, he was very similar to the Essenes, who also thought of themselves as the holy remnant of an idolatrous Israel made up of those who had chosen to join it.
Gonna think more about what you’ve said here, Bowen, about community and its implications for my exploration of evil. Definitely some overlap.
I think the focus on individual salvation or damnation was well in place by the time of Jesus, as is reflected in the fight Paul was able to provoke between Pharisees and Sadducees in Acts 23:6-10. Second-Temple literature as early as Daniel 12:2 attests belief in a resurrection of “some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” It’s attested in the Book of Jubilees, the Enochian literature, and the Qumran Community Rule (all 2nd century BCE). One might trace this newly-awakened interest in what becomes of a soul (separable from the body) after death to Persian, Egyptian, and/or Greek influences on the Jews of the Second-Temple era, but it has to be remembered that these people were divided as never before between “collaborators” with their imperial conquerors and “resisters.” When “a man’s enemies are those of his own house” (Micah 7:6 KJV, quoted by Jesus at Matt 10:36), I think it becomes more plausible to imagine part of one’s people saved and the other damned, rather than one’s entire people saved because they are “chosen.”
But yes, it is selfish to seek one’s own salvation and not care enough about the salvation of others to make some sort of bodhisattva-vow, at least to be _willing_ to forgo one’s own salvation, if God allows it, until everyone else can be saved. And I think that if you look closely at Matthew 6:14-15, you may see that that’s implied. If we forgive everybody everything they’ve done contrary to our feelings and interests, we open our hearts fully to God’s forgiveness of all our own trespasses. If we withhold forgiveness from so much as one sinner, neither can we receive God’s full forgiveness. Do the math: God wants us to be universalists.
In many traditions there’s a teaching that all humans are not really, or originally, separate beings, but members of a primordial (perhaps genderless) Adam, who “fell” from unity with God by willing to be separate, by willing to experience the exercise a will separate from the Creator’s. _Eko ‘ham, banu śyāma_ is the Sanskrit phrase for this: “I am one; let me become many.” This theme emerges in Greek philosophy, in Qabalah, in the revelations of Boehme and Swedenborg. In _A Course in Miracles_ it takes the form of a teaching that God ever had only one “Son,” and we are all that Son — if we could only wake up from this bad dream of separateness by extending universal forgiveness! If this is the truth about our existence, then the law of karma (“we reap what we sow”) is not mysterious at all: the “enemy” we attack really _is_ ourself; the soul we damn to hell, gloating over its torments, is our own — if we are foolish enough to do that. But if we are, let’s cease to be foolish. If we’re addicted to hating and holding grudges, there is a Holy Spirit that stands ready to heal us of all addictions, and wash us clean of all guilt, just for the asking. I have known this by experience. Join me.
Amen.
Steve, I just ran into the following two paragraphs from Lewis Benson’s Five Lectures given at Haverford, PA in 1976. They seem applicable to your topic.
“The darkness that overshadows human life is caused by man’s rebellious spirit and his willful refusal to seek God’s counsel and obey it. “Darkness came into man by transgression, “(17) says Fox, but “that which lightens every man is Christ.”(18) It is when we experience Christ as the prophet that we experience and know him as the enlightener. To the Jews he said, “the Messiah is come . . . who is the prophet like Moses, if you hear Him you obey the light.”(19) And, “everyone that cometh into the world. . . which hears not the light, the light which doth enlighten him, he hears not the prophet that Moses prophesied of.”(20) Fox claims that there were few people in England who had not had an opportunity to hear this gospel message. “Friends were moved to go to them,” he says, “to tell them where their true teacher was, and a great people were convinced and brought to their teacher . . . and came to own the light of Christ Jesus . . . which is Christ the great prophet. . . .”(21) And Margaret Fell says, “None heareth this Prophet, Christ Jesus . . . but who heareth and owneth that which this Prophet hath enlightened them with; who saith ‘Learn of me’. . . and he who heareth not this Prophet, he heareth not the light that cometh from the Prophet . . . (22) and “now is this Prophet teaching His people by His light.”(23)
We cannot fully understand Fox’s message about the teacher who has “come to teach his people himself” or about “the light that lighteth every man” without an understanding of the gospel he preached and the important place of “Christ the prophet” in that gospel. He believed that those who received this gospel would experience the power of God as it had been experienced in apostolic times. He argued that Christians were not experiencing the power of the gospel because they were putting their faith in an attenuated gospel. He claimed to have recovered the gospel of power that had been lost. Francis Howgill says, “We are come to the everlasting gospel again, and have received it, and its the power of God, which . . . is to be preached to the nations again after the Apostasy.”(24) ”
I am working on making these lectures available. They will appear on the New Foundation Fellowship website (http://nffquaker.org)
Ellis, you wrote, “[Fox] argued that Christians were not experiencing the power of the gospel because they were putting their faith in an attenuated gospel. He claimed to have recovered the gospel of power that had been lost.” I believe I’ve seen many people – both in my life and in historical accounts – who’ve put their faith in an attenuated gospel, gotten attenuated results, and then contentedly settled for a Savior of uncertain power — but it doesn’t really matter anyway, does it, because do we really need “salvation” in a world where I’m OK and you’re OK?
The spiritually lukewarm can’t be counted on to strongly want deliverance from evil, their own or society’s, because, I suggest, there’s so much invested in keeping things lukewarm and in the dim glow of twilight, where evil seems faraway and one doesn’t need to use the word. This, Steve, is what I think you’re confronting in this series of articles: a Religious Society of Friends most of whom are successfully repressing the effects of trauma. At least for now, they _want_ an attenuated gospel. The tragic thing is that souls torn by self-loathing over what they find in themselves, or by despair at finding love, or hope for the world, or meaning, or immortality, or even survival, might not know that that’s what the living, ever-present Christ Jesus offers, and that the Religious Society of Friends was created as a society of people who knew and followed Him.
Ellis, I look forward to seeing these lectures. Last time I went to the New Foundation Fellowship website, it seemed somewhat abandoned. I am glad to see it revitalized, or at least to discover that my impressions were wrong.
You wrote: “That momentum has no existence apart from human experience and consciousness. It is not self-existent; it is not the devil. Or rather, the devil is not some independent, sentient spiritual embodiment of evil, but rather the force of evil as a phenomenon that emerges sometimes spontaneously in the interaction between individual humans through their fears, desires, and hatreds when they are gathered together in human collectives and someone or something lights the spark. The spirit of evil manifests in these collectives and takes on a life of its own.”
But I have met the self-existent evil one. I have known its rapacious desire to consume me and to destroy me. I have experienced the power of God to intervene. My experience makes me wonder if your are speaking (writing) about things you do not know?
The alternatives you have laid out to deal with the problem of evil–liberal Quakerism or Bible-thumping Evangelicals–is not the full picture. Neither one rises above the power of human effort, which I can provide ample testimony to its insufficiency to overcome evil. Accepting the judgment of God against evil within is the means of its removal. This judgment is seen as “harsh” by those wanting to hold onto what God requires you to give up. To those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the judgment of God is a source of singing and rejoicing at being remade into the image of God. We encounter this judgment in the light of Christ: “This is the judgment that the light has come into the world and men have loved the darkness…”
When God called Moses at the burning bush, His instructions were: “Moses, put off your shoes. The ground you are standing on is holy ground.” Why put off your shoes? Because there is to be no separation between ourselves and the holy ground of God’s presence, no shoes to buffer our contact with God. Evil comes into the human experience, personal and collective, with “shoes.” The scriptures relate how the Israelites grumbled, rebelled against God, refused to enter the promised land, etc. Why? Shoes! and so for 40 years they wandered and “their shoes did not wear out?” What does it take to wear out our shoes? to induce us to stand barefoot upon the holy ground? This is the one place, the only place, where evil cannot enter.
One can do no better than look at the experience of the early Quakers, a truly barefoot people. Evil was a common part of their social environment. But they overcame by the power of the Lamb.
I should more often in these comments reaffirm that I am exploring here. I’m trying to sort out for myself some truth from the myriad ideas and feelings I have about evil and sin. My words only express my own experience and reflection, and—at that—only those working for me this moment in my exploration.
On the other hand, I reject all binary answers to these questions. This to me is the great seduction of thinking about evil, that it invites a dualistic view of the world, a preoccupation with the black and white of evil and good. Many moral decisions we face appear in a mist at twilight, shifting through greys at the edge of a vague horizon obscured by our ignorance, our predilections and social conditioning, and the clamor of others, the loudest of which are inevitably the most blindly certain and dualistic.
At the same time, I’m not ready to rely on the Bible as my guide—or, more accurately, on anyone’s interpretation of the Bible—in this exploration. In some parts of this library, the mist is especially thick. At one end, we have God’s commandment to Saul to slay every human and animal in a city. On the other, we have Jesus saying love your enemy. Even Jesus seems to shift from one passage to another, from one book to another. Go out and buy a sword; he who lives by the sword. . . . His apocalyptic worldview was awfully binary—and then sometimes it wasn’t. So now we all pick and choose our passages.
It seems to me that all I can do is turn toward the Light within and do my best.
Thank you for turning our attention to this most important topic, Steve! Obviously Jesus thought it important enough to include in his model prayer: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” He followed that prayer with a warning (Matt 6:14-15 NRSV): “if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” Herein, I think, is a key to escape from evil: universal forgiveness. I’ll return to this idea.
I’d suggest that evil has its roots in our archaic desire _not_ to be children of God who always do our heavenly Parent’s will, as Jesus claimed to be (John 6:38), but to be separate entities with independent wills. This engenders fear; fear engenders projection of our own rage against people and things that resist our will onto _them_: they become enemies who hate us, and must therefore be destroyed. In this way we became, long ago, co-creators of an adversarial world filled with danger, scarcity, and death. The author of the Wisdom of Solomon (1:13-16 KJV) daringly asserts, “God made not death: neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living … But ungodly men with their works and words called it to them: for when they thought to have it their friend, they … made a covenant with it.” We are now, all of us, heirs of that covenant. Our terror of our inescapable aloneness drives us into, or keeps us bonded to, a social contract with the like-minded: the problem is, the like-minded share with us the self-reinforcing belief that life is a constant war of rival entities, and so evils such as warfare and lying are self-perpetuating.
That this view of the world is not an objective truth but a projection of the beholder is taught in the Bhagavad-Gita (18:19-22): a person whose nature is _sattva_ (roughly translatable as “purity”) recognizes but one Imperishable Being expressing Itself in all beings, “undivided in the divided” (Radhakrishnan’s translation). One whose nature is _rajas_ (lit. “dust:” think both “separateness” and “irritability”) knows only the separateness of the beings. There’s a dumbing-down involved in being “fallen,” alluded to in Romans 1:19-23, where Paul speaks of our “foolish heart” being “darkened.”
But if we allow ourselves to be restored to our primordial oneness in Christ, so that He lives in us and we in Him, scales begin to fall from our eyes. We begin to recognize where we have projected what causes us shame in ourselves onto other people, freeing us to withdraw the projection and instead see the living Christ in them all, perhaps veiled by their own continuing delusion, but there nonetheless. Shall we attack Christ in our brothers and sisters? Shall we ignore Christ’s appeal, expressed through them, for love, comfort, food, drink, forgiveness? We can behave like separate beings no longer. And as our behavior changes, so does the knowledge by which we know them.
Readers who find my world-view odd are advised to refer the question to the Holy Spirit, who is accessible in their own heart.