Howard Wettstein
University of California, Riverside
For: Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of
Philosophy
The Classical Problem of
Evil
It has long been urged against
traditional theism, very long indeed, that God’s perfections—specifically in the
domains of goodness, knowledge and power—are logically incompatible with the
existence of unwarranted human suffering.
It has almost equally long been urged that the problem is illusory—or at
least surmountable; the tradition of theodicy must be only moments younger than
the problem. The debate is a philosophical classic, with many ingenious moves on
both sides, and epicycles galore. But whatever one’s view on the details of the
debate, it is difficult—and I think unwise—to resist the sense that evil
presents a real and indeed substantial problem for the Western religious
tradition.
With respect to theodicy, a
talmudic refrain springs to mind: the question seems better than the answer(s).
Such an intuitive sense should never be taken lightly. But in the present case,
there is more to be said against the tradition of theodicy. God, at the end of
the Book of Job, strongly reproaches Job’s would-be comforters while He praises
Job. What was the mistake of the Comforters? Perhaps their greatest sin was a
moral one—to talk so strongly and at times insensitively to the suffering
victim. But God’s rebuke—and his related praise for Job—had quite a different
emphasis: They, as opposed to Job, did not speak the truth about Him. The truth
is in question is not specified in the text. But what is most salient about
their speeches, what they insisted upon, and what Job denied, was the just
reality behind the unjust appearances. We
have it on the best authority, then, that their standard theodicy-like responses
to evil were mistaken, something we knew from Chapter 1 of Job in any case.
Unwarranted suffering is no mere surface appearance, but a ground floor
phenomenon, not to be explained away.
My suspicion, though, is that it
is not only the answers to the problem of evil that are suspect. The question
itself is problematic. It presupposes a conception of divinity that does not go
without saying. Imagine a dramatic presentation in which the personae are God
and a medieval philosopher. The philosopher carefully formulates the problem of
evil and the Master of the Universe yawns. “That should be my worst problem,”
says God.
After what I revealed about myself in the Hebrew Bible,
it is nothing less than amazing that they persist in conceiving me as ethically
impeccible, and able to do literally anything. This is beyond me—a tribute to
the power of philosophy.
My dramatic fantasy (to be
continued below) reflects my sense of a substantial conceptual distance between
the perfect-being theology that dominates from the time of the medievals and the
religious sensibility of the Hebrew Bible and its development in Talmudic
thought (first 6 centuries C.E.). This
gulf suggests a dissolution of the classical puzzle. Perhaps God simply lacks
some or all of the relevant perfections.
The Problem of Evil: The Theoretical Side
As one who favors the more ancient
conception, dissolution of the classical problem is attractive to me. But to
leave matters there is at least as dissatisfying as classical theodicy. For as I
said, the sense that evil presents a substantial problem for traditional
religion runs deep. The classical problem of evil reflects—in a classical
philosophical idiom—a worry (or two) that is (or are) indeed fundamental.
Imagine an episode of Star Trek in which the protagonists are
about to arrive at a galaxy created and ruled by a just, loving, beneficent
deity. We need not assume the perfections, just a good dose of the classical
divine virtues. The protagonists arrive and shudder at a glimpse of the horrors
that characterize human history.
The perfections are not the real problem, I want to
suggest. It’s rather the sheer dissonance of what every plain-thinking person
knows to be true about the world and what one would naturally expect from a
fundamentally just, benevolent, powerful, creator/ruler.
It is of utmost importance that
treatments of this problem respect the dissonance. The question is not whether
with enough brilliance one can make for a fit between what we know and the
traditional religious picture. Surely this can be done. In philosophy quite
generally, the most important question is not whether a theoretical approach can
with enough brilliance be shored up. Often, if not always, it can be done.
Perhaps it can always be done…if one is willing to pay the price. The real
question—the place one needs to train one’s vision—is rather that of natural
fit. One needs to focus not on “One could say…,” but rather on what is the most
natural thing to say.
Classical theodicy provides examples of violations, but no more than does
contemporary epistemology or the philosophy of language.
The dissonance is only one side of
the problem of evil—the theoretical side. I turn now to another, perhaps more
urgent, if not more fundamental.
The Existential Side
The Western religious tradition
advertises, one might say, a certain picture of reality, and recommends an
attitude, a stance—including a way of carrying on—appropriate to such a world.
The picture is, as noted, that of a world created and ruled by a loving,
benevolent deity. The world as advertised is just. It is filled with meaning; a
world in which one’s actions and character have a kind of cosmic significance.
Particularly appropriate to such a world, and at the heart of the religious
stance, are the attitudes, if that’s what they are, of awe and love. A
well-lived life is characterized by awe and love—towards one’s God, one’s
fellows, towards life itself.
Let’s return to my dramatic
presentation: God and the philosopher. God, you will remember, has just shrugged
at the classical problem of evil, formulated in terms of His perfections. After
admitting the problem of dissonance—He looks thoughtful, somewhat pained, when
it is proposed—God proceeds to what is, from His point of view, the most
pressing difficulty posed by evil. “The real problem,” He urges, “is how to get
them out of bed in the morning.”
Evil puts us low, sometimes
embittering us, sometimes deadening sensibility. Human suffering constitutes a
powerful obstacle to facing the world with awe and love, and thus to the
religious life.
I have said that at the heart of
the religious stance are awe and love towards one’s fellows, God, life itself.
If we put to the side the theistic member of this triad, we can see that the
situation of the traditional religionist, vis-à-vis evil, is not unlike that of
his secular fellows. This suggests an interesting generalization at least of the
existential side of the problem of evil. Evil, wanton suffering discourages—or
makes impossible—one’s sense of awe/wonder and love. And this is so for all of
us. Thus Robert Adams commented to me some years ago that the problem of evil is
a problem for any “religious” view, that is, any view that sees such things as
wonder and love as essential ingredients in human flourishing.
Non-Opiate Responses to the Problem of Evil
I. Job and the Voice from the Whirlwind
Marx is justly famous for his
remark that religion constitutes (I would say, “can constitute”) an opiate, a
kind of bill of goods sold to the suffering masses. Their suffering is in some
sense unreal, a superficial glitch in the workings of a perfect creation. I want
to propose a constraint on responses to the problem, both in its theoretical and
existential/practical aspects. Responses, I propose, need to be non-opiate.
I said above that in any treatment
of the theoretical aspect of the problem of evil one needs to respect the
dissonance. But my non-opiate condition is motivated by more than a conception
of sound methodology. There is an ethical dimension that is relevant even to the
theoretical aspect of the problem. It is crucial that we not belittle suffering
by seeing it, for example, as a mere appearance of some higher form of justice.
It is crucial that we call injustice and horror by their right names, as did
God’s faithful servant, Job.
The non-opiate condition has
application to the existential side as well. When we come to think about how it
might be possible to live a life characterized by awe and love, our
anti-reductionism about evil must remain in the foreground. The aim is to
achieve the religious life in full awareness of the dark side.
I will now sketch two sorts of
non-opiate responses. Given limitations of space and understanding, a sketch is
all that I can accomplish here. I hope to return to these themes elsewhere.
The first response derives from
the Book of Job, one of the wonders of the Hebrew canon. Let me begin by saying
why the book seems outrageous, in the most wonderful sense.
1. Job, a
gentile, is said by God to the most righteous man on earth. This bespeaks a
certain openness and expansiveness not always characteristic of canon makers,
orthodoxies.
2.
Impressionistically, the work may be divided into 2 books.
a. The first of
these includes the first chapter and the last. The first chapter—God’s
negotiation with the Accuser—has a
very distinct mythological feel. It reads as if it could have been written by an
ancient Woody Allen, poking fun at God’s alleged ethical perfection. And the
last chapter—the other component of what I’m seeing as the first book—suggests
the absurdity that the killing of one’s children—never mind the injustice to
them—might be rectified by getting some new ones, perhaps children who have a
higher IQ or better free-throw percentage. This is not to say that there is no
deep message here, for example, as Archibald MacLeish suggests, that
part of the point is that Job—post-Whirlwind—is ready to resume living in the
fullest sense. But this imagined book—composed of the first and last chapters of
Job—has a strange and mythological feel.
b. The central parts
of the book, on the other hand, constitute one of the classical religious
treatments of suffering, albeit not on my view an orthodox treatment—about which
I will say more shortly. It is a story of great power, of a person who has
everything, loses it all, and finds a way to re-engage God and life. Indeed,
before the last chapter begins, Job has been spiritually transformed, if not
materially restored.
3. As noted,
God reproaches quite strongly Job’s Comforters—who violate my non-opiate
condition. As I said above, perhaps their greatest sin is a moral one—to talk so
strongly and at times insensitively to the suffering victim. But God says that
they have not spoken the truth about Him, and it’s certainly tempting to see in
this the rejection of standard theodicy-like responses to evil.
4. Most amazing
is God’s speech to Job from the Whirlwind, to which I now turn.
One thing that’s relatively clear,
in this book in which little is clear and uncontested, is
that whatever it is that God says brings peace to Job. This seems not a matter
of simply finally meeting up with God, almost face to face, as it were. The book
might have been written so as to suggest that it is the awe attendant upon being
in God’s presence that does the magic. But Job, as actually written, seems to
place enormous weight upon the distinctive content of the speech from the
Whirlwind. What Job learns from God seems the key, or certainly one of the keys,
to his transformation.
The question, of course, is how to
interpret the speech from the Whirlwind. My idea is that given God’s rejection
of the Comforters, it’s important that we don’t read the Whirlwind as a
variation on the classical theodicy of the Comforters. But
even without this assistance from the context, the Whirlwind vision is extremely
striking in its unorthodoxy.
When Job hits bottom—one of the
times that God becomes accessible it would seem—he is, as it were, led by God to
the top of the mountain, a perch from which he is allowed, privileged, to gaze
upon the creation as God sees it, under the aspect of eternity. The world seen
by Job through God’s eyes is exquisite, awe-inspiring. But by stark contrast
with, for example, Genesis Chapter 1, it is a strikingly non-anthropocentric
world. It is a wild and violent world, and we are not its tamers. Most
important, it is not teleologically organized with respect to human needs, ends,
or values. Indeed, human beings don’t figure prominently in the vision.
Implicitly, of course, we are part of it, participants in what Stephen Mitchell,
in his translator’s “Introduction,” calls “the sacred game.” But
we are not the centerpiece, the virtual raison d’être of the creation, in the
way that we are so often depicted in biblical literature. At the same time, who
else is privileged to accompany God to the mountain top? With whom else does God
share His sub specie aeternitatis
vision of the creation?
How does the Whirlwind vision
address our problem? Implicit in the Job story, as I’ve told it, is a new
picture of our relation to God and to nature. Human values, as I’m understanding
the Whirlwind vision, are not written into the atoms. Justice is not a law of
nature of this world, nor does the book speak of any other world in which
injustice is rectified. This does not mean that our values cease to be
objective; there is no relativism here. Values can remain objective in the sense
of objectively appropriate to the sorts of beings that we are, this without
their being written into the universe as underlying its non-human structures. It
is human—perhaps a condition for human dignity—that we love and seek justice.
But it is naïve—even arrogant—to suppose that the universe conforms to our sense
of justice. Perhaps this arrogance is one source of the sometimes angry tone of
the Voice from the Whirlwind.
Such a non-anthropocentric vision is unusual in the
Western religious tradition, unless one counts Spinoza as a member. The more
usual anthropocentric picture is so strong in the tradition that one usually
thinks of the conception just adumbrated as heretical. The
admittedly more naturalistic perspective is, however, as theistic as you like
and gives pride of place in its thinking about a religious outlook to the
attitudes of awe and love.
The Whirlwind vision yields some
peace on the theoretical front. Not by denying the reality of injustice, but by
giving up on the unreasonable expectation that the universe is ethically
coherent. The price has been to complicate the relation between God’s
goodness/love for justice and the universe’s ethical coherence. Not that it was
ever simple. Moral faith need no longer be seen as faith in reality of justice,
in its instantiation, but rather in its status as an ideal to which, in
partnership with God, we are committed.
The existential side of the
problem of evil—remains, as it must, a serious human problem. But even a partial
glimpse of things from God’s perspective, with its attendant awe, certainly
helps. Not that it’s trivial to incorporate such a vision into one’s life. One
needs be able to flip perspectives, or to live with more than a single one. One
with such a religious outlook—“religious” in the broad sense mentioned above in
connection with Robert Adams’ comment—lives both as a participant in the ethical
life, committed with all one’s being to justice, and as one who sees the irony
in the expectation that justice prevails. For the traditional religionist, this
means sharing both God’s love for justice and His privileged vision of things,
according to which we are at once puny and little lower than the angels. The
sense of irony just mentioned is of great assistance in the project. One yearns
for justice, locally and globally, yet sees such things as messianic, a kind of
idealizing vision. One lives with the knowledge that among one’s most cherished
dreams are one’s ideals which remain ideal.
This approach to the existential
side of the problem puts great weight on the availability and power of awe. A
sense of awe at the holy game is variously available and variously efficacious.
No doubt it helps some more than others. But
it is not awe alone that is supposed to do the work. While it alone seems to
have been transforming to Job—he did experience quite a taste of it—for the rest
of us the religious tradition provides additional assistance, among other things
in the forms of ritual and community. I turn now to still another source of
assistance, indeed another sort of non-opiate response. I leave for another
occasion the question of how these two responses cohere.
II. One Sort of Rabbinic Response: God Super-Anthropomorphized
Problems of evil become
particularly acute during times of catastrophe. Jewish history is littered with
such, but the formative catastrophe is the 70 C.E. Roman onslaught on Jerusalem
which issued in destruction of the second Temple and in the next century (after
the failed Bar Kochba revolt) the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem. The
literature that will constitute my focus here is the rabbinic commentary on the
Book of Lamentations. That commentary, Midrash Rabbah on Lamentations,
is a compilation of materials composed over many generations post-70 C.E., an
attempt by the rabbis of the Talmud to bring Lamentations to bear on their
latest and by far greatest tragedy. (Lamentations itself was written some 650
years earlier, in connection with the destruction of the first Temple in 587
B.C.E.)
One would naturally suppose that
the aspects of divinity a literature emphasizes reflect salient features of the
community’s experience. Subject a community to great trial or triumph, and its
way of thinking about God may well alter or enlarge. One has the sense, from the
Midrash on Lamentations, that indeed
the near destruction of the community prompts a new—but of course not
historically discontinuous—perspective on God. God is, one might say,
super-anthropomorphized. The God of the Hebrew Bible, as opposed say to
Aristotle’s unmoved mover or the Greek philosophy-inspired medieval tradition,
was always anthropomorphically characterized. But something very different is
going on here.
It is one thing to see God as
angry at our antics, even (as in Genesis) as regretful that he initiated the
human experiment. But God suffering on our behalf, His mourning our loss, and
His weeping and feeling it as His own loss (Proem 24: “Woe is Me! What have I
done?”) is quite another thing. Sometimes the Midrash sees God in maternal terms, like
a sparrow bereft at the destruction of her nest (Proem 22). Sometimes paternal:
God is compared with a king who, enraged at his two sons, thrashes them and
drives them away. The king afterward exclaims, “The fault is with me, since I
must have brought them up badly” (Proem 2). More from Proem 24,:
Woe to the King who succeeds in His youth and fails
in His old age.
The Holy one, blessed be He , said to Jeremiah, “I am
now like a man who had an only son, for whom he prepared a marriage canopy, but
he dies under it. Feelest thou no anguish for Me and My children? Go summon
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Moses from their sepulchres, for they know how to
weep.”
God, it would seem, needs instruction in mourning from us.
There are related passages from
the Talmud according to which, for example, God is said to be in exile after the
catastrophe, or to feel bittersweet when his children praise him in prayer—on
one hand honored and on the other overwhelmingly saddened by their exile. Nor is
the humanizing tendency always related in the Talmud to mourning. God is said
for example to pray that his nurturing, merciful side dominate his desire for
strict justice, apparently not a trivial matter for Him. He is said to hurt when His creatures feel pain. There
is much more to be said on this score. But for present purposes, what I’ve
quoted will have to suffice.
Professor Swinburne, in his
contribution to the present session, writes, “Theodicy is the enterprise of
showing that appearances are misleading, and that (probably) all the world’s
evils do promote greater good.” This is what Job—vs. the Comforters—denies, for
which (on my reading) God praises him. The lesson I’m taking from Job, that
justice remains an unrealized ideal—it seems to me a plain reading of the
text—is not a lesson highlighted by the religious tradition. Notice, however,
that the post-destruction perspective on God sketched in this section seems,
with Job, to emphasize—rather than theorize away—the horrors of our world.
At the same time, the Midrash on
Lamentations goes to pains to attribute the catastrophe to Israel’s sins. To
what extent the spirit of that move is coherent with the tendency I’ve been
describing is an open question. No
doubt one could—some do—assimilate the tendency I’ve been discussing to a
theodicy-friendly picture. So the implications for the theoretical side of the
problem of evil are unclear.
It is on the existential front
that the new rabbinic emphasis has immediate impact. Elaboration is here
impossible, but the short version is this. What the new emphasis provides—and no
doubt the seeds are ancient—is a sort of life partner to the community and
derivatively to the individual. Here there are intimations of the Song of Songs,
God and Israel as lovers. For God to cry over our catastrophes, to feel great
pain over our losses, indeed to feel the pain as shared with us, is to mitigate
the loneliness of our suffering. Prayer, seen as communication with a divine
partner, transforms bitterness into a potentially healing outpouring of one’s
pains and disappointments. The new emphasis thus makes for the possibility of
nurture and comfort even in the face of a sometimes unyieldingly awful
universe.
It is significant that the
comforting does not proceed in only one direction. A considerable part of the
project in traditional Jewish prayer is comforting, nurturing God, or so the
liturgy suggests. One reading of the Mourner’s Kaddish—a communal mourning
ritual that never mentions death or the dead but that glorifies God—suggests
that the community is coming together to comfort God for His loss. The liturgy,
borrowing from Psalms 22:4, speaks of God as enthroned on the praises of Israel;
again pointing to our role in God’s flourishing. And then there is a centerpiece
of the liturgy, the Sh’ma, that
emphasizes God’s oneness. I’ve
often wondered whether the idea goes beyond numerical unity, whether what is at
issue is a kind of coherence that depends in part upon the success of one’s
projects. Seen in this way, the Sh’ma
is a messianic dream of God’s future, as it were, as in Zachariah 14:9, also
highlighted in the liturgy, “In that day, God will be one and His name one.”
It is common knowledge that a
partner who shares one’s life affords considerable nurture and comfort. It seems
worth emphasizing, however, that there is also nurture in being nurturing and
comforting. The new rabbinic emphasis provides a part of the tradition’s answer
to how to get them out of bed in the morning.
