How can God allow evil to flourish in the world he has created good? Why do awful things happen to fine people? Is there any way of explaining such monstrous evil as the Holocaust and the other murderous atrocities of our time?
Questions like these assail people of faith now as they have for thousands of years. The issues they raise find classic expression in the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible and reappear whenever evil strikes again.
Last week Boston College and the Atlantic Monthly assembled a panel of writers to discuss the subject “Evil: the Artist’s Response.” Christopher Lydon served as moderator, while three writers – – Kathleen Norris, Joyce Carol Oates, and Nathan Englander – – shared their thoughts with a large audience in Boston.
I found the symposium disappointing because only one of the writers spoke to the subject with recognizable wisdom, though she, too, did not do so consistently. Even in response to questions, the three failed to meet my expectations of spiritual insight.
On reflection, I consider the subject ill advised. Evil is too abstract a notion for most people to talk about. Successful authors can presumably devise fictional characters who embody evil but that does not mean they can talk about the subject intelligently. And surely the panel needed a philosopher and a theologian to speak to this admittedly difficult topic.
Kathleen Norris, author of The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace, among other books, brought to the discussion an element that I consider indispensable – – reliance on a spiritual tradition. She has had long association with the Benedictine monks whose monastery is near her home in South Dakota. Extended stays and shorter visits with these men have given her access to a Benedictine spirituality that dates from the sixth century and has proved valuable for her own inner life.
From this tradition, she has learned to value the wisdom in the monks’ daily life and in the Psalms that they recite in common. Each day, the Benedictines also say the “Our Father” together because they are aware of their own need for forgiveness.
Living with other people, each individual monk knows that, almost despite himself, he gives offense to his brothers. As one monk told her, “I have to attend to the evil in my own heart.”
Norris quoted approvingly a dictum that brought the laughter of recognition from audience members: “Living with others is the only asceticism that most people need.”
As to the Psalms, they show human beings as we really are. For example, they often express the desire for revenge, a human emotion laden with evil. These realistic prayers enable us to get away from what Norris calls “the litany of self-justification that pervades our culture.”
Norris also noted with approval a theme in one of Joyce Carol Oates’s novels: “any creative encounter with evil demands that we not distance ourselves from evil.” To anyone who thinks of evil as apart from human beings, Norris recommends Psalm 36, a prayer that does not, however, stay fixed on evil. The theme of the last two verses is expressed in the line: “How precious is your steadfast love, O God.”
Summing up the message of the Psalms, Norris gets to the heart of the matter. “The main thing they offer is that God is still a mystery.” This comes close to the response to evil given by many spiritual seekers. We do not understand but we trust in the God of love.
In my view, evil is too profound to be answered by a single individual. A spiritual tradition must be invoked for help in wrestling with this fact of life. Though many people regard it as excessively negative in its view of human beings, I myself have always found light in the traditional teaching about original sin. No matter how we try to get away from it, there is something terribly askew in human life.
The central Christian tradition sees Christ as freely accepting the evil of an agonizing death on the cross. In this faith, God in the person of his son, is willing to take upon himself the human condition with all of its suffering and the ultimate sacrifice of earthly life.
This, of course, does not explain why evil is at work in the world but it says that even God has been willing to undergo evil for the redemption of the human family.
Richard Griffin