Charles Williams on the origin of evil
In He Came Down From Heaven Williams makes some striking arguments about the nature of evil, closely based on the account of the Fall in the Bible. The nature of the Fall, Williams says, is clearly an increase in knowledge. Specifically, the Fall brings a change from knowing good alone to knowing both good and evil. Man thereby takes on a Godlike state, because only God (or divine beings)were "intended" to know evil. This is because God is capable of knowing evil in imagination only, while Man must experience actual evil in order to know it. In tasting the apple, Adam bit off more than he could chew.
(This insight is apparently original to Williams; but he credits Aquinas with the idea that it is in the nature of God to know all possibilities, good and evil alike, and to determine which of these should become actual.)
See comments for my thoughts on this.
posted by Mr. Spog | 11:19 p.m.
3 Comments:
The first thing to observe about this argument is that pure idealists—those (if I have my terminology right) who see reality as no more than a kind of thought in the mind of God—would never have produced it. Williams is in effect saying that in the unfallen state of the world, God "creates" evil in an entirely different way from how He creates good. Evil is presumably created in full detail (otherwise, God would not really know it); but the evil world remains purely hypothetical, without consciousness in its own right. Individual, human consciousness seems to require a "centre" outside of God; it is not merely God playing at being Man. Or so Williams' argument would seem to require.
Another line of thought that Williams' idea suggests is to ask what the implications are of man's "godlike", if very meagre, ability to imagine evil. Not only is this faculty limited, but it also has to be cultivated, and even then relies largely on the experience of previous similar situations. Nevertheless, it exists. Hannah Arendt somewhere (I think) gives it tremendous importance: the ability to anticipate, in imagination, the painful effects of committing an act of evil is the crucial power which prevents us from doing so. Those who commit evil acts thus tend to be deficient in the ability to imagine the consequences of evil (for their own consciences). Arendt's observation fits in very well with what Williams is saying here.
Another implication: If human beings could develop a sufficiently powerful individual memory (and personal longevity), or even merely a highly-developed sense of collective history, they might become sufficiently able to imagine the consequences of their actions (based on the already-experienced consequences of similar previous actions) that they would ultimately commit no more evil acts.
This would, however, be an utterly different state from the innocence of the Garden of Eden. We would have returned to goodness but as adults rather than children.
This is very far from what Williams says in the book being quoted here. Williams appears to think that the Fall was nothing but a catastrophic mistake on man's part, and that our job is to forget what we have learned about evil, so we can return to innocence. I think the (quasi-heretical) Origen had an idea of the future state of goodness resembling what I just suggested, on the other hand.
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