Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?
~ Amos, The
Christian Bible
The word theodicy comes from the Greek theos, which means
heaven, and dike, which means justice; it was popularized by Leibniz, who used
it to describe God's justice in the face of evil.
A succinct summary of theodicy's implications: If God is
wonderful in every way. He must desire to eradicate all evil; if He is
all-powerful, He must be able to do so; but, because evil exists, then God is
not perfectly good, or He is not all-powerful. C. S. Lewis stresses the lack of
happiness rather than the existence of bad in a similar definition: If God were
fair, He would desire to make His people absolutely happy, and if God were
almighty, He would be free to do whatever He wanted. The animals, on the other
hand, are not content. Therefore, God is either deficient in goodness or force,
or both. It might seem that theodicy is only an issue in religions that believe
in a single, all-powerful deity. If this is the case, the issue of evil may be
addressed by embracing one of three alternatives to benevolent monotheism: either
no soul beyond the world, a spirit oblivious to good and evil, or an evil
spirit.
In polytheism, where good and evil deities have their own
spheres of authority, in Zoroastrianism, where [there are two forces], one
benevolent but not strong, the other powerful but not benevolent, or in the
Indian philosophy of karma, which dispenses with god entirely, no basic logical
contradiction need exist. A theodicy is theoretically expected in any religion
in which any deity is believed to be invariably benevolent and omnipotent,
though it is most generally found in monotheistic religions. The word
"theodicy" refers to the existential desire to justify misery and
evil, and Talcott Parsons describes how such a theodicy emerges from events
like premature death: Weber sought to demonstrate that issues like these,
including the misalignment of natural human interests and desires in every case
and culture with what currently occurs, are implicit in the essence of human
life.
They pose problems of the first order that have become known
as the dilemma of bad, the sense of pain, and the like on a broad scale. The
key modes of divergence between the great systems of religious thought are
differences in the treatment of exactly certain problems. Not only is theodicy
not exclusive to monotheism, but it is also the touchstone of all faiths, and
it is an existential rather than a religious question, according to this
perspective. A concept of theodicy that includes non-monotheistic religions: A
theodicy occurs where a faith struggles scientifically to justify human
misfortune or fortune considering its scheme of values. Theodicy is seen as a
philosophical dilemma rather than a psychological one in this context; theories
that struggle to justify misery or that contain logically untenable
inconsistencies incite theodicy in this context.
However, as we can see, theology, logic, and psychology
cannot be completely removed from the theodicy battlefield. A theodicy cannot
be resolved in the strictest sense. Any effort to overcome the cognitive or
philosophical impasse raised by any theodicy is referred to as resolution.
Where logic and theology collapse, other forms of religious thought—notably
mythology—offer nonsensical resolutions, which, if psychologically satisfying,
are suitable to adherents of the religion, however insufficient they might seem
to trained philosophers. Where logic and theology collapse, other forms of
religious thought—notably mythology—offer nonsensical resolutions, which, if
psychologically satisfying, are suitable to adherents of the religion, however
insufficient they might seem to trained philosophers.
Three requirements for a satisfactory solution were
developed after an exhaustive analysis of Western and Indian theodicy: common
sense, accuracy, and completeness. Any approach that rejects God's beauty,
omniscience, or benevolence, or the presence of evil, is a phoney one.- Hindu
myths do, on occasion, refute any or more of these hypotheses, but they cannot
be seen to have a rational answer. The classical solutions can be categorized
into five main divisions, each with twenty-one subcategories: aesthetic or the
entire is good because, or even if, the pieces are not; the principle of
discipline or misery creates character; free will or bad is man's fault;
delusion or evil is merely an illusion; and restriction or God's preference at
the time of creation was minimal. He subsumes the arguments of contrast,
recompense, and imbalance or good outweighs evil; teleology; justice and
rebirth; privation or evil is merely the absence of good; and the concepts of
prevention or our evils are essential to prevent greater evils, the impersonal
wicked substance or evil matter, the personal wicked substance or Satan,
metaphysical evil or the impeachment of God.
All of these are mentioned in Hindu mythology in some way.
Every single one of them has a mistake. It's helpful to consider the numerous
concerns that come from three forms of evil: superhuman, or gods, powers, and
fallen angels, human, and subhuman, which includes animals and plants. The
classification into another triad is more important: spiritual evil, or sin;
misery, or teleological evil, which is often more divided into ordinary and
exceptional suffering; and natural evil, or death, or illness. The ethical
thesis or God is good, the omnipotent thesis, and the omniscient thesis are the
three philosophical theories of the issue of evil; either one of these may be
paired with the hypothesis of the nature of evil without contradiction, but
issues emerge when this hypothesis is combined with any two or more imaginary
properties of Deity. The Hindu Vedantists propose the most satisfying theodicy,
which sufficiently accounts for all three kinds of evil, or superhuman, mortal,
and subhuman, absolving God of all guilt by the hypothesis of lila, the playful
spirit in which God becomes interested in creation: After all, who would fault
a kid for behaving joyfully and exuberantly? The solution is simple: the
Hindus, since the Vedantic argument did not put a stop to Indian efforts to solve
the issue.
In India, there is a problem with evil. Despite the fact
that all of the theses required to produce the theological issue of evil can be
found in Indian metaphysical and religious literature, with many fascinating
variants, and despite the fact that all three theological theses have been
embraced and challenged, defended and targeted, the Indians are curiously quiet
about the problem of evil, a problem that has afflicted Western culture. In all
its metaphysical manifestations, classical and mediaeval Indian philosophy has
shown no regard for the issue of evil. When a problem of evil arises, it
manifests as a functional problem of bad, i.e. when one claims that everything
is misery and that samsara [the cycle of rebirth] is evil in and of itself. When
the subject of evil is brought up in older texts, it is more like an
afterthought, or it appears secondarily in the sense of Who made the world? We
attribute the strange silence in part to the satisfying existence of the
rebirth doctrine's approach.
According to the Indian viewpoint, the issue of Job cannot
emerge because hardship can often be the result of actions taken not only in
this life, but in previous lives as well. However, as we can see, not all
Hindus found the theory of regeneration to be fully acceptable, and many did
not accept it at all. The secondary occurrences of the problem of suffering—the
problem of Job—in texts about the origins of the universe form a large body of
literature on which this work is based. The misconception that Indians were
unaware of the issue of evil is pervasive. According to Alan Watts, there is no
Problem of Evil in Hindu thought, and a Hindu scholar agrees: Hinduism is
unconcerned about the Problem of Evil. Similarly, it is often asserted that
India has no sense of evil. In India, not only was there no dispute between
good and bad, but there was also a lot of misunderstanding. He proposed an
explanation for the confusion: many demons are said to have earned their
supernatural prowess by good deeds done in previous lives. To put it another
way, good may be used to construct bad. Both examples are simply popularized
versions of the basic Indian belief that good and bad have no sense or purpose
outside of the realm of appearances.
This propensity to conflate good with bad, according to Sir
Charles Eliot, is an inherent trait of pantheism, which finds it difficult to
differentiate and denounce evil. Such statements are commonly founded on
Vedantic Hinduism and Buddhism, which are more concerned with ignorance than with
sin, valuing goodness only as an addition to wisdom, in which the philosophic
saint rises above all good and evil; and many variations of Indian religion
consider misery rather than sin as the world's fault.
These views, however, do not extend to most of the Puranic
Hinduism. The idea that evil is unreal in Indian thinking is another basis of
the assertion that Indians do not have a problem with evil. False, in India,
there is no such thing as maya [illusion], asat [nonexistence], or reality. The
dilemma of evil is a fictitious one, and the brahmin treats it as fictitious
problems should be treated. The counterargument is that, even though many
Vedantists believed evil was objectively unreal, misery was still subjectively
recognized as true. Evil, pain, waste, terror, and paranoia are real enough
from the other Indian point of view—the same affective strain that denies the
consequences of karma.
Therefore, there is a context in which evil exists, as well
as a sense in which karma and rebirth occur. The action and care of the
faithful betray the dogma of unreality. Philosophers and theologians can create
rational requirements but building and approving a logical response to an
emotional question is challenging.
The death of a young child is the most common example of
exceptional evil offered in Indian texts. When one tells this child's parents,
"You aren't actual, and neither is your son; thus, you can't really be
hurting," one is unlikely to have any consolation. Such statements as
"God can't stop it" or "God doesn't know about it" will not
make the suffering go away. Only the ethical theory is emotionally
non-essential: God isn't good, or God doesn't want man to be free of bad, or
two very opposite arguments. And this is the line that Hindu mythological theodicy
is most vigorously developing.
Even a meaningful world order that is impersonal and
supertheistic must face the problem of the earth's imperfections, according to
Max Weber, who, while giving the doctrine of karma pride of place among the
world's theodicies, remarked: "All Hindu religion was affected by [the
problem of theodicy]; even a practical world order that is impersonal and
supertheistic must face the problem of the world's imperfections." A very
early example of an explicit declaration of the dilemma of God's
evil-justice can be found in a Buddhist text that mocks Hinduism's
inability to grapple with the issue: Why doesn't Brahma straighten out the
universe, which is so jumbled and out of whack? If he is the absolute ruler of
the whole universe. Why did Brahma, Lord of the Many Born, ordain misfortune in
the entire world? Why didn't he want to make everybody happy?
Why did he create the universe based on deceit [maya], lies,
and excess, as well as inequality [adharma]? Unjust is the king of beings.
Though there is such a thing as dharma, he wanted adharma. On a village level,
the issue of evil is still an important aspect of contemporary Hinduism, where
the cult assumes the presence of a dominant god or Vishnu, Siva, or Brahma,
who, while not all-powerful or all-kind in the monotheistic sense, has enough
strength and love to assist humanity in their search for redemption, and to
grant the worldly desires of his devotees. Theodicy is present in mythology
from the Buddhist text to the present day, not only indirectly in the legends,
but also explicitly in the questions asked by the sages to whom the myths are
told: Why is there death? How could God do anything so heinous? What is the
root of evil? The fact that many myths are about minor deities of an
extravagantly anthropomorphic kind, ridiculous clowns who perform numerous
peccadilloes of the kind infamous in the affairs of Zeus and Loki, has led
scholars to mistakenly refute the existence of theodicy in Indian religion.
This has helped to obscure the idea that there is a far more
extreme mythology in which the deity commits cosmically important bad deeds. As
C. G. Jung put it, "Of course, we cannot overwhelm an ancient deity with
the demands of contemporary ethics." Things were very different for the
inhabitants of early antiquity. There was simply everything about their gods:
virtues and vices abound. As a result, they could be fined, imprisoned, duped,
and pitted against one another without losing face, at least not for long. The
man of that age had been so used to biblical inconsistencies that he was
unconcerned as they arose. This is a fair definition of Indra in the Puranic
era and of Siva in some Vaisnava myths, but it is not true when applicable to
Indra in the Vedic period or Siva in Saiva myths; these gods do indeed have
anything, but the worshipper is disturbed by the consequences, as the myths
clearly indicate. Theodicy myths are prevalent in India; they do not seem to
emerge or propagate during times of social, political, or economic upheaval.
The solutions can adjust, but the dilemma remains the same.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, bad or adj. is
the opposite of GOOD. The noun now seldom used is that which is the opposite of
good, either physically or morally, and the second quoted example is the
strongest of all mysteries-the root of bad, or Tait & Stewart. Unlike its
English counterpart, the Sanskrit word papa can be used as an adjective or a
verb, and it signifies both physical and moral non-goodness. However, Christian
theology has long stressed the difference between moral evil, or evil that
comes from us as humans: inhuman, unfair, malicious, and sinful thoughts and
acts, and inherent evil, or evil that comes from outside of us, in disease,
bacilli, earthquakes, storm, droughts, tornadoes, etc..
This has resulted in an erroneous distinction being made
between primitive religions, which are mainly concerned with the elimination of
natural evils, and higher religions, which are concerned with sin. These two
types of evil are scientifically distinct in Indian religions, but they are
manifestations of a common entity for which a single interpretation must be
found. People are evil-minded; adultery is evil; incest is evil. In the Rig
Veda, papa, or henceforth to be translated as evil, also has a religious sense.
People can do or carry out evil, which we can interpret as committing a sin.
However, in Indian philosophy, sin will appear without the sinner's consent, so
personal repentance is uncommon, and one can pray for deliverance from sins
committed by others in the same manner as one can pray for sins committed by
himself. As a result, the Rig Vedic poet prays to the gods, "O gods,
deliver us today from both committed and uncommitted sin; both are
sinful." Similarly, the Atharva Veda makes a distinction between natural
and spiritual evil, but sees them as inextricably linked: Sleep, fatigue, and
misery—these divinities are known as evils—and old age, baldness, and greyness
invaded the body.
Then came fraud, evil deeds, deception, truth, sacrifice,
glory, and wealth. This conflation of natural and spiritual evil is aided by
the Indian propensity to treat sin as an intellectual error rather than a
character defect. Since the intellectual can't make a deliberate mistake, he
can just make mistakes based on incomplete knowledge or misunderstandings that
aren't his responsibility. Wrongdoing is not a sin, even though it is
unfortunate. If bad is not the result of man's fault, karma would not be able
to fix the dilemma. Some Rig Vedic hymns to Varuna, Tamil Saivism poetry, and a
Sanskrit verse still recited by many sophisticated Hindus today are striking
extraordinary examples of a real sense of sin and redemption in Hinduism: Evil
am I, evil are my actions... However, cases of sin due to natural causes
outnumber these by a thousand fold. Evil isn't so much what we do as it is what
we don't want to happen to us. The which we do is the product of illusion,
moha, or deceit, or maya. These illusions and deceptions are created by God. As
a result, we are once again compelled to reject the ethical hypothesis that God
is not good.
In Hindu mythology, there is a fight between good and evil.
There seem to be two clear explanations why a book about the issue of evil in
Hindu mythology should not be written: Indologists have long claimed that there
is no problem of evil in Indian thought, and philosophers believe that the
issue belongs in philosophy or theology rather than mythology. However, neither
Indologists nor philosophers can be taken too seriously, and I believe these
two objections balance each other out: scholars have ignored the issue of evil
in Indian thought because they have tried it in philosophy rather than
mythology.
In contrast to the nuanced claims of Hindu theologians, the
theodicy established in Hindu mythology demonstrates a more popular, general,
and spontaneous attitude toward evil. Furthermore, the myths are much more
provocative and original than the textual discussions: Theologians seldom
create high-quality poems or artwork. Their dogmatism limits their view of
life's contradictory and ambivalent aspects. They lack cynicism and the
perilous purity, candid and childlike, which are fundamental criteria for
someone concerned with theories, or this is a product of their preparation. They
lack or, and this is their virtue, their responsibility, the touch of amorality
that must be at least a part of one's intellectual and intuitive pattern if one
is not to succumb to predetermined prejudice and be cut off from some critical,
highly ironic, and troubling insights. Since the main body of Hindu
mythology—the mediaeval Puranas—was collected by Brahmins with extensive
theological expertise, some of these texts devolve into the narrow-minded
diatribes envisioned.
Some writings, on the other hand, climb to the level of
myth, giving a more simple and childlike approach to the issue of evil. In
protection of their sacred ground, theologians have a response: Biblical myths
are not generally suited to problem-solving. Their aim is to illuminate the religious
meaning of any current or recalled reality or experience by unforgettable
imagery. However, the experience the myth highlights and illuminates are the
source of mystery in and of itself. The approach suffered from fundamental
incoherence and inconsistencies as this pictorial representation of the problem
was wrongly viewed as a solution to it. But, where the problem is fundamentally
inconsistent, as theodicy is, this pictorial depiction of the problem is a
great achievement; the theologian needs answers, but the myth is happy to
wonder, like Gertrude Stein, what is the question? Furthermore, the myth's very
forcefulness, or even crudeness, may be its greatest strength; William James,
describing the deep melancholy and terror of the suffering sick soul, suggested
that the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint, if it is
to take effect; and that seems to be a reason why the coarser religions,
revivalist, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and supernatural occurrences,
seem to be the most effective.
When faced with the orgiastic and cruel gods of primitive
Tantrism, the Upanisads' intellectual pessimism and melancholy culminated in
the Puranic Hinduism's integrated theodicy. Another anti-mythological claim
argues that myths about gods and spirits have little influence on the study of
human suffering. This is complete and utter nonsense. Myths are not written by
gods and demons; they are written by man and about man. The problems of the
virtuous demon and the evil god are the problems of greedy low-caste men and
sinful kings; the problems of the virtuous demon and the wicked god are the
problems of ambitious low-caste men and sinful kings. No nation has ever had as
many human gods as India, according to Sir James George Frazer; the demons are
much more human and are clearly said to reflect human desires.
Jung has made a strong case for myth's specific, truthful,
and human nature: Myth is not fiction; it is made up of observations that are
repeatedly replicated and can be observed. It's something that happens to
humans, and guys, like Greek heroes, have mythical fates. The root theories of
evil tend to be about origins, but they also contain a concern about the
present situation. The pseudo-historical structure is merely a metaphor for metaphysical
theories about the relationship between good and bad, gods and men, and the
person and society. The myth elucidates the essence of evil with the use of a
made-up origin story. Philosophical strategies are necessary but not
sufficient; myths presuppose and often dismiss them.
Philosophy provides the language in which the questions can
be stated; myth is founded on philosophical principles, but it is then guided
by a commonsense reasoning that rejects the Vedantins' more complex answers in
favor of a more straightforward response, illuminated by the coarse ceremonial
imagery that philosophy scorns. Myth is a two-way mirror that allows ritual and
philosophy to see each other. It's the point at which people who are usually
engrossed in their daily routines are faced with questions that they had
previously left to the bickering of philosophers; and it's the point at which
philosophers, too, come to terms with the deeper, flesh-and-blood dimensions of
their philosophical inquiries.
Methodological Notes: I explored different methods of
research in a review of Saiva mythology and ended up using a slightly changed
structuralist approach because it seemed relevant to the issue. The issue of
evil does not readily lend itself to a structuralist solution, perhaps because
too many of its jagged dimensions prove stubbornly irreducible, perhaps because
it is almost always interpreted in logical rather than symbolic terms, even
though symbolism is suitable to some aspects of it, or perhaps because it is
almost always viewed in conceptual rather than symbolic terms, or perhaps
because symbolism is appropriate to certain aspects of it.
So, like a monkey piling up complicated science gadgets into
a miscellaneous heap in order to pluck the banana from the top of the cage, I've
used any method that would do the job-a bit of philology, a measure of
theology, lashings of comparative religion, a soupcon of anthropology, even a
splash of psychoanalysis-I've used any tool that would do the job-a bit of
philology, a measure of theology, I believe that, despite the fact that I might
have mishandled the specialist's machinery, I have not harmed or embarrassed
it. My only justification for this undisciplined trespass is that it seems to
succeed, allowing me to access at least some of the answers I've been looking
for. I've sometimes drawn on myths documented by anthropologists familiar with
the religions of Indian tribal groups, in addition to the classical Sanskrit
texts on the subject. Even though this work varies greatly from the Puranas in
many ways, the two traditions can be considered adjacent, if not contiguous;
certainly, there has been considerable borrowing in both directions. This
continuity between his materials and those of the Sanskrit tradition has been
noted by Verrier Elwin, who has published many important analyses of tribal
mythology.
Since these tribal myths were all written within the last
two centuries, they are likely to include signs of Christian missionary
influence. However, those influences are typically evident, and the consensus
between tribal and Puranic mythology is striking. I used some comparisons from
Greek and Judeo-Christian myths. Theologians and comparative mythology scholars
don't need me to point out the native varieties emerging in their own backyards,
and for Indologists, it's probably best to simply point out that many Hindu
ideas still appear outside of India, as the biblical quotations here show,
rather than including a sketch of non-Indian myths out of context. It would be
awkwardly pedantic to avoid referencing such concepts, such as the Fall or the
Disappearance of the Golden Age, since they are so automatically evocative of
their Western associations; however, these passing references are not intended
to substitute for a rigorous comparative analysis. Indeed, it is my sincere
hope that the current study will serve as raw material for a single aspect of
such a cross-cultural examination, the Hindu facet, possibly in combination
with analyses of the Western approach to the issue of evil such as those by
John Bowker, John Hick, C. G. Jung, C. S Lewis, and Paul Ricoeur. I discovered
that even without the comparative content, the Hindu texts alone offered an
embarrassment of riches.
The final objection to the historical approach stems from
the fact that Hindu mythology does not follow a straightforward progression;
archaic ideas reappear in later sources, frequently in direct conflict with
later concepts. This is partly due to the Indian habit of preserving the old
and merely introducing new innovations, such as Victorian wings added to
Georgian buildings, but it may also mean a fundamental reluctance to dismiss
any potential solution to the issue of bad. Nonetheless, some general historical
patterns can be discerned, and I've highlighted these where it seems most
fitting. To begin, I must admit that I chose my materials in a violently
Procrustean manner. If the devil can quote scripture, certainly a scholar can
do the same by quoting only certain passages that grant the devil his due when
portraying god in a negative way. I see myself squarely on the side of the
ghosts, who have previously gone unrepresented in Indological research.
Of course, many Indian scriptures portray the gods as good
and the demons as evil—a va sans dire—and a book based on these texts will be
neither difficult to compose nor fascinating to read—a consideration that
hasn't stopped a host of scholars from rewriting it over and over. The reader
is supposed to conclude that Hindus believe their gods are good and their
demons are bad; based on this chain of half-truths, I have set out to fix the
imbalance by stating the less apparent corollary—that the gods are neither good
nor evil in any consistent or relevant context of these crucial terms. I would
also admit that this thesis has another flaw. South Indian Tamil texts are a
world unto themselves, containing religious tracts and local myths that address
the issue of evil in ways that are diametrically opposed to the attitudes
prevalent in the Sanskrit texts on which my work is based, mostly from the
North Indian tradition.
The first of these emerges as a tentative solution in many
Hindu scriptures, but the theories of the Collapse eventually accuse destiny
rather than man, a logically coherent theory that is ultimately rejected: it is
not emotionally rewarding, and it bypasses the basic components of theodicy.
Most Hindus tend to assume that God is above destiny, that he intentionally or
unwillingly programmed evil into his creation. Furthermore, the collapse of
Manichean dualism, as well as the assumption that certain devils were
benevolent rather than bad, relegated the blame to the gods. The compassionate
intentions of the deity who understood the need of evil had been replaced by
the malevolent needs of demonic gods who forced their own evil over all good
and evil demons and men without prejudice. However, in bhakti philosophy,
though God is still responsible for evil, he is once again benevolent, and it
is then up to the person man to overcome the issue of his own evil within
himself. These different approaches to the issue, which in other religions may
have been removed or at least changed to strike a single theological tone, are
all maintained in Hinduism in a rich chord of unresolved harmony.
Note: This essay is an excerpt from a work being
compiled.
