by the Rev. Lee Woofenden
Lectures delivered atFryeburg New Church AssemblyFryeburg, Maine
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There have been a lot of requests in recent years for basic introduction types of lectures at the Assembly--and for lectures that the Flames can get something out of. I'm thinking of this talk as a kind of "Introduction to Evil," or "Evil 101." I do expect to get into some of the trickier issues relating to evil before I am through. But first let's take a look at some of the basics of evil.
There's one basic basic that has to come first: God is not evil! God isn't even a little bit evil. This isn't just a theoretical issue. Whatever God is like, that's what the whole universe is like, because the whole universe comes from God. Whatever we think God is like, that's what we're going to think the universe is like. It's probably what we're going to think our life is like too.
For example, if we think God is some sort of detached observer who created the universe but doesn't have anything to do with it anymore, it's likely we're not going to be able to invest ourselves to heavily in the world around us either. Maybe we will outwardly, but inwardly we'll be thinking, "God doesn't care about me, so why should I care about God or anyone else?" This kind of God leads us toward an intellectually or emotionally detached relationship with the world.
If we think God is evil--or even partly evil--we are likely to be pessimists. After all, if the head honcho in control has it in for us, how much of a chance do we really have? There are a lot of people walking around thinking God has it in for them. Most of them aren't very happy.
But if we really believe that God is totally good, we're going to be optimists. "Sure," we'll say, "there are bad things in this world. But God has a good purpose for everything, and I'm going to look for that." So even in the middle of terrible circumstances, we can have this little voice inside of us reminding us that even in this there can be good, because God is completely good and would not allow anything to happen if there couldn't be some good in it.
So on the "Who is evil" question, one thing we can say is, "Not God!" That doesn't answer the question, but it at least narrows it down some.
If God is completely good, and God made the whole universe, how can there be any evil in the universe? That is the ten million dollar question! I don't completely understand how God pulled that one off--making room for evil, that is--but I do have a few thoughts that might be helpful. They have to do with the "Why is evil" question.
This is really basic stuff in Swedenborg. But when I've talked to different people about it, I have found that it is also some of the more controversial stuff in Swedenborg. For now, let's just get the ideas out and leave the controversy for later.
In the Genesis creation account, everything is pronounced good as God creates it. The light is good, the land is good, the plants are good, the animals are good. At the end of the sixth day, when the work of creation was finished, God pronounces everything "very good." It isn't until the Garden of Eden story that things start to be not good. The Garden of Eden is where the human story really begins. It is also where evil begins. (There--that takes care of "When is evil"!)
Why does the story of evil begin with the story of human beings? Swedenborg's answer is that evil is something God allowed human beings to come up with so that we could be free, and so that our relationship with God could be real.
Let me illustrate this with an example. Most people in our culture are bothered by the idea of arranged marriages--even if the marriage turns out to be a good one. Why? Because we feel that a marriage relationship must be freely chosen by both partners for it to be real. I recently heard a radio interview with a woman who lives in a part of India where arranged marriages are still the norm. She said that she had rebelled against her parents arranging her marriage for her. But when she established her right to marry who she wished, she went ahead married the man her parents had chosen for her. In her eyes, it wasn't that her parents' choice was a bad one; it was that she felt the choice should be hers.
It is the same in our relationship with God. God could "arrange" a marriage with all of us, so that our only choice would be to love God and live a life that is harmonious with God. But that wouldn't be any different from programming a computer to print "I love you" on the screen. There would be no meaning and no depth to it. We would just be parroting back what God had programmed into us.
God's dilemma was how to provide something other than God to choose. If God is totally good, and everything good comes from God, what else is there to choose? And if there is no other choice, it's not really a choice, is it?
This provides the basic "why" for evil in Swedenborg's system. Evil exists so that people can be free to choose whether we want to be in a loving relationship with God and each other--and so that if we do choose to be in loving relationships, our relationships will be deep and real. If we choose to turn away from God, we are choosing to turn away from everything good, since everything good comes from God, and is God. Evil is what results when we turn away from God.
If that is the "why" of evil, what is the "what" of evil? I'm not sure I have to tell you that. You can watch it on the TV news and read it in the newspapers every day. You can also encounter it by driving down the Southeast Expressway in Boston during rush hour. When we're not waxing metaphysical, we can easily see what evil is; it is all around us, and also within us in our negative thoughts and feelings.
Still, I would like to give a brief working definition of evil, and the parallel definition for good. Good news first: Good is everything constructive; evil is everything destructive.
Though these definitions are very simple, there is a lot packed into them. The idea that good is everything constructive ties in with the idea that God is entirely good and that God created everything in the universe. Creative is another word for constructive.
But let's focus again on evil. Evil is everything destructive. Unlike constructiveness, where new things can be created that weren't there before, destructiveness depends on something already being there to destroy. You can create something that doesn't exist, but you can't destroy something that doesn't exist. What it boils down to is that evil doesn't have any existence of its own. Any "reality" it has comes from twisting and destroying something good.
A simple illustration of this idea comes from the second table of the Ten Commandments. The things listed there that we're not supposed to do summarize the various kinds of evil. They are all things that take away or destroy something good. Murdering is destroying someone's life. Committing adultery is destroying someone's marriage relationship. Stealing is destroying someone's livelihood. Giving false testimony is destroying someone's reputation and standing in the community. Being jealous of others' possessions is destroying our own satisfaction with what we have. Next time you watch or read bad news, think about why it is bad. You'll find that the reason the bad news is bad is that something of value is being destroyed. Good is everything constructive, evil is everything destructive.
I'd like to wax metaphysical for a minute and talk about the nature of evil. In other words, I'm going to say in a fancier way what I just said in plain English.
Last year, Horand Gutfeldt came to one of my classes at the Swedenborg School of Religion as a guest speaker. One thing he said particularly struck me. He spoke of "levels of reality" reaching from the being of God down to physical matter. And, he said, the more we grow spiritually, the more there is an inversion in our sense of reality. (Inversion meaning turning upside-down) When we start out, the material world seems to be the "realest" thing to us. As we develop spiritually, the material world seems less and less real in comparison to the spiritual world, and even that seems less and less real in comparison with God. As we draw closer and closer to God, God is what seems most real to us, and everything else, while still real, just doesn't have the same level or depth of reality.
Let's take this idea and relate it to good and evil. In C.S. Lewis's book The Screwtape Letters (chapter 30), Screwtape, a senior devil, explains to Wormwood, a tempter-in-training, how to manipulate his "patient's" sense of reality. The way to do it, Screwtape says, is that whenever something gory or nasty happens (the book is set during World War II), give the human the sense that this is really real. But if something sweet or nice happens, chalk it all up to subjective sentimentality. Screwtape concludes by saying,
Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather a mere sentiment.
We often have this kind of inversion of reality about evil and good. The bad things we read about in the papers are what the world is "really like." The good things are just "fluff." When I first moved out to Washington State in the early 80's, I did odd jobs and yard work for people. One woman I worked for lived back in the woods. Her only neighbor was a younger man who generally did his best to get along with her--although she was not the easiest person to get along with. Usually when I was working for her she would say favorable things about him. But once he ran very badly afoul of her. The next time I went down there to work for her, she told me the whole story, ending with, "New he's showing his real colors."
But evil is not the realest thing. Good is. Bad things have no reality of its own--it is simply the destruction of what is good. Because if this, good has all the real power. In the spiritual world, Swedenborg says, a single angel can chase away thousands of evil spirits (A.C. 1398).
If that's so, why does evil seem so real and so powerful to us? I would like to get at this issue in a roundabout way, by first looking at the question of "Where is evil?"
Swedenborg teaches that evil is not in God. This leaves two other general locations for evil: the spiritual world and the material world. In Christian thought, spiritual evil is represented by hell. Swedenborg expands the idea of hell to include those parts of our own inner selves that are hellish. Material evil is what we read about on the front page of the newspaper.
However, we don't get the full picture of where evil is just by saying it is in the spiritual world and the material world. Where in those worlds is it? For the material world, there's a simple rule of thumb: there is only evil where there are people. No, I don't just mean that people are always messing the place up and that the world would be better off without us! It is true that we tend to mess the place up. But what I really mean is that outside of the human domain, there's nothing we can really call evil.
There are things that correspond to evil in Swedenborgian terms, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, carnivorous animals, droughts, and so on. However, without human beings, these things aren't really evil; they are simply a part of the fabric of the material world. A couple months ago Heidi and I went to the Science Museum in Boston and saw the IMAX movie "Africa: The Serengetti." There were graphic scenes of lions hunting down wildebeests and tearing them open with their teeth. It's hard to watch those scenes without shuddering at the violence of nature. But within the context of nature, the lions constantly circling at the edge of the herds of wildebeests are providing a valuable service to the herds. By weeding out the weak animals, the lions keep the herd strong. By hunting down the sickly ones, they protect the other animals from sickness. Predatory animals also help prevent overpopulation and consequent starvation. In nature, predator-prey relationships are not evil--in fact, they are good.
In the human sphere, though, we recognize the same sort of thing as evil. If we say someone is predatory, we are not handing out a compliment. What is the difference? As human beings, we have a physical body like the animals do. However, unlike the animals, we also have a spirit that reaches upward through all the levels of the spiritual world and is in contact with God at its core. Because we have a spirit as well as a body, we live by different standards than animals do. We can't say that the things animals do are morally good or bad; they simply are, because animals' actions all come from their inherent nature. As human beings, we can step outside of our inherited nature and do things we were never designed for, all on our own initiative. Only when we do this can we say that evil has been introduced, because only then is something that in itself is good twisted into something that is evil.
One answer to the question, "Where is evil?" then is, "Evil is wherever humans cause it."
I've been talking about this in the context of the material world, but it applies to the spiritual world as well. However, when we start talking about the spiritual world, there is another answer to the question, "Where is evil?" Evil is only in the lower levels of the spiritual world and of our own spirits. According to Swedenborg, when we choose to turn ourselves toward evil, we don't corrupt the deeper parts of our spirits; we simply close them off so that we no longer have access to them. The higher spiritual levels of even the lowest devil in hell are still clean and pure. They are just undeveloped.
Since the deeper levels are closed off in people who have chosen an evil, destructive life, under normal circumstances those people cannot see or comprehend what spiritual good is. But people who have chosen a spiritually oriented path can see what evil is. This is good to keep in mind as we relate with other people. People may be completely unaware of problems in themselves even though the problems are blindingly obvious to others. But beware! We have a hard time seeing our own problems, too! As long as we are totally caught up in them we do not have the higher perspective we need to see them clearly.
Alcoholism provides a good example of this. People who are on the downward spiral of alcoholism will usually deny that they have any problem at all. Their lives may have to completely fall apart before they begin to recognize that there is a problem--and even then many resist the realization. Friends and family members often see the problem years before the alcoholic becomes aware of it.
There is another, more risky tie-in with this idea that evil is only in our lower levels. Some religions teach that the material world and everything in it is evil, while God and spirit are good. Swedenborg rejects this view, insisting that everything God created, including the material world, is good. Still, there is a sense in Swedenborg that evil is more closely connected with the material world than with the spiritual world--but with a twist. The material world is not intrinsically evil, but it becomes evil when it breaks out of its proper place in the order of things.
The way things are supposed to be arranged is with God at the center, spirit next, and the material world on the outside, like concentric circles. (one easy way to think about spirit is as our relationships with other people) As long as things are in this order, everything is good--including the material world and everything in it. However, we tend to get things out of order. Making a lot of money and having all the physical comforts looks pretty good to us. If they become the most important thing to us, pretty soon our priorities become reversed. We put money, physical pleasure, power, and things like that at the center. Our spiritual level--our relationships with other people--take second place. And God is pushed to the edges of our minds and hearts.
If we do this, material things do become evil because our exclusive focus on them causes us to hurt other people. If money is the most important thing to us, we will be quite willing to damage others in our pursuit of it. It's not that money in itself is evil. Money is simply an easier way to exchange things among ourselves--and that's good. When we forget that it is just a tool for human exchange and make it our primary goal, its purpose becomes twisted and destroyed. Evil is everything destructive.
This applies to everything on the material level. Houses, cars, personal belongings, sex--all are good as long as they are kept in their proper place.
Now we've gotten back to the question that sent us off on this detour into the "where" of evil: Why does evil seem so real and so powerful to us, when it really has no power of its own? Everything evil is simply a misuse or corruption of something good. The things we are drawn to in the material world are good things. Money is good. It is a much more efficient means of exchange than barter. Houses are good. Cars are good--though it would be nice if they were a bit cleaner. Sex is good. Without it, none of us would be here.
The trick that evil plays on us is dangling those good things in front of us and telling us the lie that things would be so much better if we only had more of them. If there were nothing good about material things, there would be no attraction in them, and we would not find them so distracting. It is when we turn away from a spiritual focus toward a material focus that evil gains power over us.
The pleasures of money and power can't hold a candle to the joy that comes from loving and caring for other people. Not that loving people is always easy to do. But when we do it from a real desire to make them happy, we gain a deep sense of peace and satisfaction that we can never get from having a big house or a fancy car. If we were always aware of this, evil would have no attraction to us. But we tend to close off our own minds do it, and listen to a lot of messages that come from our culture saying that if we have more toys we'll have more fun.
This brings us to the first question posed in my title, which, in proper Biblical fashion, has become the last question: "Who is evil?"
Who is evil? We are. . . when we choose to be. We are when we take the destructiveness of evil and make it a part of ourselves. Otherwise, we are "very good." Of course, we do come pre-loaded with tendencies toward various bad habits. Sometimes these tendencies seem very strong. But they only gain real power over us when we claim them as our own and make them a part of ourselves. In the words of the now famous "Fryeburg number," Heaven and Hell #302,
If people only believed the way things really are--that everything good is from the Lord and everything evil from hell--then they would not make anything good in themselves a matter of merit, nor would evil be charged to them. For in that case, they would focus on the Lord in everything good they thought and did, and everything evil that flowed in they would throw back into the hell it came from.
There are a lot of aspects of evil that I haven't touched on yet. What about those earthquakes and tornadoes? Aren't they evil when they happen to people? What about wars and famines, diseases and infant mortality?
The pain of those things is real, and we should do all we can to lessen it. That's one of our reasons for being here. But listen to this quotation from The Heavenly City (#269):
. . . If we see harmful people enjoying higher status and more wealth than good people, and if we also see these harmful people gaining success through unethical practices, we [may] say in our hearts that this must mean the divine provision does not apply to every single thing. However, we would be forgetting that the divine provision is not concerned with things that only last a short while, and come to an end when our life in the world is over. No, the Lord is concerned with things that last forever--things that have no end.
Things that never end really exist. Compared to them, things that come to an end do not really exist. Consider, if you can, whether even a hundred thousand years means anything compared to eternity. You have to admit, it does not. So how important are the few years we live on earth?
What Swedenborg says about people gaining material success through unethical practices also applies to diseases and natural disasters. From a material perspective, they look very terrible. But from a spiritual perspective, they are relatively unimportant when compared to what is happening spiritually in the lives of the people who go through them.
I would like to illustrate this--and conclude my talk--by telling you about Chris's birth. Just as when Patty was carrying Heidi, the pregnancy and labor went very well. Unlike with Heidi, we knew that this baby was in the right position to be born, so it looked like we could avoid a repeat of the Cesarean section Patty had had the first time. One of the midwives kept monitoring the baby as the labor progressed, and everything was looking good. After a while, though, the midwives decided that the baby might not be able to take the ordeal too much longer, so they changed Patty's position and worked hard on getting the baby out more quickly. It worked, and the baby was born.
But he was not breathing, and he had no heartbeat. The midwives swung into action. Within thirty seconds of the time he was born, they were doing CPR on him. Having taken CPR two or three times as part of my lifeguard training, I knew exactly what was going on. And I was scared. I knew that this was serious, and that the baby could die. But the midwives were wonderful in the way they handled the situation. Even while working on the baby and directing the action, our primary midwife was telling us to talk to him, sing to him, tell him we wanted him to be with us. And we did. It was an agonizing couple of minutes, but the baby did come around.
We will always know how close we were to losing him--and that it was both the CPR and the spiritual atmosphere that kept him here. One of the midwives later told us that she could feel the baby's spirit coming into his body as we talked and sang to him. The one who was doing the CPR told us afterwards that she doesn't really consider herself religious, but when she was working on him, for the first time in years she was praying with her whole heart and calling on any God there was to bring him back to us.
I can't resist telling you about how she described her praying. She told us that at one point, she said (inside herself), "Bring out the fat guy!" I had no idea what she was talking about. All I could think about was the old saying that "It ain't over until the fat lady sings." Not what I would want to think about when a newborn is having cardiac arrest. But then she mentioned Buddha, and suddenly the "fat guy" made sense. So now I like to say that at Chris's birth, instead of the fat lady singing, the fat guy came.
Naturally we all would have preferred that Chris's heart hadn't stopped beating when he was born. But that "evil" event led to some very good results. We will never take Chris for granted, because we know we could have lost him. The birth became a spiritual experience for all three of the midwives, and for us as well. It illustrates on a small scale what happens to us on a larger scale here on earth. We all go through scary, tough, and painful passages. When we are in the middle of them, they can consume our whole self. But it is what lasts that matters. What lasts is the growth in our spirits that can take place through all the experiences of our lives, both good and bad.
