There is no reason, nor could there ever be one : The best theory of Evil

For the Christian, there is no answer to the question of evil - a burden to be borne, not a question to be answered. Rather, Christianity offers a dead God pitifully strung upon a cross as a promise of God’s good will, and the sacraments, mysteries being of more comfort than mere answers.

But, as philosophy goes, far away from the fleshly screams of living reality, there is one theodicy that makes much headway on the problem, precisely because, with rigorous logic, it shows that not only is evil, necessarily, unintelligible, but that an answer is, in fact, not rationally possible. In this, the outrage of evil is safeguarded from superficial theories that refuse to give Horror the fair honor its due.

Basically, it is the well known evil as privation argument. Known Its very success is that, unlike others, at the very end of its reasoning, it refuses to succeed with it.

Goodness, recall, is the ability to go from potential to actual, a good acorn is one which grows into a tree, and by doing so “reverts” to God as the Good, the Telos thawed which things are aimed from potential being to actual being.

Ok,

Eric Perls ably lays out a sketch of Dionysus’s on Evil :

A careful philosophical consideration of this doctrine in its Dionysian form reveals that the identification of evil as non-being is not a shallow “cosmic optimism,” an absurd denial of the obvious fact of evil in the world, but a profound and compelling theory which is more philosophically satisfying than many other accounts of evil. 

The doctrine of evil as privation of being follows as a necessary consequence from the production of all things by God. If absolutely all that is, with no exception whatsoever, is made to be by God, the Good, then evil cannot be included within the whole of reality as anything that is at all. But the derivation of all reality from a God who is Goodness itself is not a philosophically unjustified article of faith, which could easily be falsified by the evident presence of evil in the world. It is rather, as we have seen, a philosophical consequence of the intelligibility of being: since being is intelligible, therefore it has the Good beyond being as its first principle, and every being is a different manifestation of goodness. 

The traditional claim that  “every being, insofar as it is a being, is good” is virtually a restatement of the law that to be is to be intelligible, for the intelligibility of anything consists in its goodness. That which is altogether devoid of goodness has no intelligibility, no unity, no identity, and hence is not anything at all. Nothing can be and be evil, insofar as it is. A wholly evil being is a contradiction in terms, for it would be a wholly unintelligible being, and so not a being. It is from these fundamental considerations that the Neoplatonic doctrine of evil as deficiency is developed. 

The causes of evil are not productive powers, but lack of power, of productive activity: “Therefore the generation of what is contrary [to good] comes about . . . on account of weakness of that which makes. Again, “evil is alien and supervenient, an unattainment of the befitting end for each thing. But the unattainment is through the weakness of that which makes” Since evil itself is a deficiency, its “cause” is a lack of efficiency, of productive power. “And as good, [an evil thing] is from the gods, but as evil, from another, weak cause; for every evil is generated through weakness and privation” (And since the “cause” of evil is in fact a lack of causal power, evil, as deficiency, can even be said to be “without cause”

Evil can be found, then, only as a deficiency in a being which, in that it is a being, must have some goodness whereby it is intelligible and so is. 

The greatest change Dionysius makes in Proclus’ theory is to extend the doctrine of evil as a partial privation of goodness to all levels of reality. On this last point he expressly follows Proclus in denying Plotinus’ “notorious” position that “evil is in matter, as they say, in that it is matter” . Dionysius argues, first, that “if [matter] is in no way whatsoever, it is neither good nor evil. But if it is somehow a being and all beings are from the Good, this too would be from the Good” . He goes on to take up Proclus’ cogent argument that if matter is necessary, it cannot be evil: “If they say that matter is necessary for the completion of all the cosmos, how is matter evil? For evil is one thing, and the necessary another”

Whatever is necessary for the perfection of the whole is not evil but good. If, as Plotinus argues, matter is necessary, then it cannot be evil. This argument is effective not only against Plotinus’ doctrine that matter is both evil and a necessary consequence of the Good, without which the (good) cosmos could not be produced, but also against all attempts, such as have been made from antiquity to the present, to explain the evils that occur in the world as necessary contributions to the perfection of the whole. Any such theory, as Dionysius here points out, does not explain evil but rather explains it away by claiming, in effect, that it is not really evil at all. 

Nothing, then, is evil insofar as it is a being. Conversely, anything is evil insofar as it fails to be. Dionysius’ doctrine of evil as non-being must be understood in light of the principle that any being is in virtue of its proper determinations or perfections, which are its way of being good and therefore its mode of being. Anything is evil, i.e. not good, then, insofar as it lacks the proper goodness which is its constitutive determination, and to that extent fails to be itself and so to be. 

Thus Dionysius says, for example, that “the demons are not evil by nature” and are called “evil” “not insofar as they are, for they are from the Good and received a good reality, but insofar as they are not, by being weak (as the Oracles say) in preserving their principle. For in what, tell me, do we say they are evil, except in the cessation of the possession and activity of divine good things?” He then says, still more clearly, that “they are not evil by nature, but by the deficiency of angelic goods”

They are evil, then, insofar as they lack the perfections proper to and constitutive of them as angels. And since these perfections are their very being, to the extent that an angel lacks them (i.e. is a demon), to that extent it fails to be. Dionysius goes on to point out that the demons do have some perfections, for otherwise they would not exist at all, and to this extent they are good:

“They are not altogether without a share in the Good, insofar as they both are and live and think”, and again, “In that they are, they both are from the Good and are good . . . and by privation and fleeing away and falling away from the goods that are appropriate to them they are called evil”. 

Exactly the same principle applies to human souls.  

“This is evil, in intellects and souls and bodies: the weakness and falling away from the condition of their proper goods.” And in lacking its “proper goods,” a being lacks the very unity and identity whereby it is, and to that extent it fails to be. 

The “proper goods” of any being, as we have seen, are the constitutive determinations whereby it is itself and so is. But these determinations, at once its goodness and its being, are the presence of God in it, making it to be. How then can any being fail, to some degree, to possess them? 

Here we must return to the doctrine of reversion, which as we have seen means that a being actively takes part in its own being made to be. Its possessing its proper determinations, and so its being, is not a passive reception but an active performance of its nature, so that, as we saw, God cannot make it to be without its active cooperation or participation. To be is the activity of a being; and herein lies the possibility of evil. For the being may fail fully to exercise this activity, to appropriate the divine processions proper to and constitutive of it, to enact its nature, and so to be. A being is evil, then, insofar as it does not perform the proper activities which are its mode of being, and to that extent it fails to be. 

As a being’s partial lack of its proper perfections, evil is ultimately a failure of reversion, the being’s failure to appropriate, to desire, to love God as the Goodness whereby it is. Since, as we have seen, to be is to love God, and anything can be only in and by desiring God, then insofar as anything does not desire God, it falls short of complete being. 

The natural activity of any being is its reversion, its mode of being, of desire for God. A thing’s lack of its proper perfections, which qualifies it as evil, is a failure of this desire, and therefore a deficiency of being. 

Whatever is desired is by definition regarded as good, for to desire something means to take it as one’s good. 

Evil qua evil, as what is not good, has no attractive or motivating power and cannot be a goal, a purpose, an object of desire for anything. Evil, therefore, cannot be the cause of any activity. 

No activity, qua activity, then, is evil. Evil, therefore, lies not in a being’s acting contrary to its nature but only in its not acting according to its nature, and so not fully being. 

At bottom, then, evil as deficiency of being is a failure to revert to, to love, to desire God, who as the Good is the sole cause and end of all desire. 

Evil, then, is fundamentally passivity, the failure in a being of the reversion, the agency, the interiority which is its taking part in its being made to be. This interiority, as we saw in chapter 3, is the freedom which is analogously present at every level of reality. 

A being is evil, then, insofar as it fails to act, to exercise its freedom. But that agency or freedom, we also saw, is God himself at work in the being, making it to be. Hence, insofar as anything is evil, i.e. insofar as it is not, God is not productively present in it. All reality is (nothing but) the manifest presence of goodness, i.e. of God. Where reality is lacking, goodness is deficiently present. But this deficiency is due to the being’s failure to appropriate the love which is God as its own being and activity. The less the being acts, the less God acts in it, and so the less it is. In these terms we can understand Dionysius’ account of why there is no contradiction between universal divine providence and the freedom of beings, which includes the possibility of evil.

A man is vicious, then, not in that he desires evil but insofar as he does not desire the Good. But to that extent he is not desiring, not acting, not moving himself but being moved by passions, which means precisely that which we undergo (poscein) as opposed to that which we ourselves do. Dionysius’ account of the fall of man in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is thus fully in accord with the metaphysics of evil developed in the Divine Names: “The life of many passions received human nature which in its beginning unintelligibly slipped away from the divine goods . . . Thence it miserably exchanged the eternal for the mortal . . . But also, having willingly fallen from the divine and upward-leading life, it was drawn to the opposite extreme, the alteration of many passions. . . It pitiably fell into danger of non-existence and destruction”.

Here Dionysius repeatedly links the fall, as a fall toward non- being, with the passions in their multiplicity. For to the extent that a man is subject to passions he is failing to be a self at all, a center of unity that exists in and by performing its own activity. Largely passive, driven about not by himself but by the passions, by what happens to him from without, he is vicious in his lack of unity, of interiority, of selfhood, failing to take part in his own being and to that extent failing to be. Nothing can be wholly passive, for that would mean having no unity, no identity, no activity, no selfhood, and so not being at all. But to the extent that anything is passive, it fails to be one, to be itself, and so to be, and to that extent it is evil. 

Having come this far in the discussion of evil, we inevitably ask: Why do some beings not fully desire God? What is the cause of this failure? By raising this question we reach the very heart of Dionysius’ doctrine of evil: as non-being, as inactivity, evil is without cause. For it is only beings and their activities, things that are and that take place, that must have causes, without which they would not be or happen. To look for the cause of evil is to ask why it occurs. But evil is not something that occurs, but not-something that does not occur. It is not an act of non-love, but a non-act of love.

As we have seen, whatever any being does, it does for some cause, and that cause is a good. As non-activity, evil is precisely what is not caused to happen and hence does not happen. Hence there can be no reason why a being fails fully to love God, i.e. to be. If there were such a reason, the “failure” would not be a failure but an activity, and as such not evil but good.

“Everything which is according to nature comes about from a definite cause. If evil is without cause and indefinite, it is not according to nature.” Everything that is, insofar as it is, is according to nature, is caused, and is good. The causelessness of evil, conversely, is one with the identification of evil as a thing’s not fulfilling its nature and so not fully being.”

He claim that evil, as non-activity, has no cause, may seem highly unsatisfactory, a facile evasion of an unsolvable problem which in fact vitiates Dionysius’ entire doctrine of evil, or indeed the privation theory of evil in any form. To see why, on the contrary, it is in fact a truly profound and philosophically insightful treatment of the problem, we must return to the fundamental connection between goodness and intelligibility.
 In demanding to know the cause of whatever we are trying to understand, we are in fact demanding intelligibility. Anything is intelligible, able to be understood by thought, only in virtue of the “why” for it. As Aristotle says, “We do not think that we know until we grasp the ‘why’ about each thing, and this is to grasp its first cause” (Physics II.3, 194b19–21). This is why philosophy, the effort to understand reality as a whole, is for the ancients fundamentally a doctrine of causes. For the Neoplatonists, as we have seen, the One is the “cause” of all things precisely as the universal principle of intelligibility. But further, the cause in virtue of which anything is intelligible is always its good, so that the end, the t°loV of anything is its cause of being. 

To understand anything, to grasp the “why” of it, is to see how it is good, and therefore the Good is the universal principle of intelligibility and so of being. Consequently, if evil, the failure to desire the Good and so to be, took place for some reason, if it had a cause in terms of which it could be explained, that cause, that reason, would be a good. Evil itself, then, would not be evil but good, and explainable only because and insofar as it was good. Conversely, evil is evil exactly in that it is not good and therefore not intelligible, not understandable in terms of any reason or cause. 

When we describe something as evil, we mean that it is to some degree not good and to that extent does not make sense, that we can see no reason, no “why” for it. We may recall Dionysius’ statement in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy that man “unintelligibly fell from the divine goods.”

To be intelligible, to have a cause, and to be good, are one and the same. Unintelligibility, or causelessness, is therefore the very meaning of evil; and it is as unintelligibility that evil is non-being. The following passage thus summarizes Dionysius’ entire doctrine of evil as cause- less non-being: 

“Evil, then, is privation and lack and weakness and asymmetry and failure, usually translated as “sin” but literally having the negative meaning “missing” or “failing” and aimless and beautyless and lifeless and mindless and irrational and purposeless and unstable and causeless and indeterminate and unproductive and inactive and ineffective and unordered and unlike and limitless and dark and insubstantial and itself no being whatever in any way whatsoever.”

Dionysius’ inability, or rather refusal, to assign a cause to evil, then, marks not the failure but the success of his treatment of the problem. To explain evil, to attribute a cause to it, would necessarily be to explain it away, to deny that evil is genuinely evil at all.

 For to explain something is to show how it is in some way good. “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.” Only by not explaining evil, by insisting rather on its radical causelessness, its unintelligibility, can we take evil seriously as evil. This is why most “theodicies” fail precisely insofar as they succeed. To the extent that they satisfactorily account for or make sense of evil, they tacitly or expressly deny that it is evil and show that it is in fact good.

Dionysius’ treatment of evil, on the other hand, succeeds by failing, recognizing that the sheer negativity that is evil must be uncaused and hence inexplicable, for otherwise it would not be negativity and would not be evil. 

It has been wisely remarked that any satisfactory account of evil must enable us to retain our outrage at it. Most theodicies fail this test, for in supposedly allowing us to understand evil they justify it and thus take away our outrage. For Dionysius, however, evil remains outrageous precisely because it is irrational, because there is no reason, no justification for it.

The privation theory of evil, expressed in a radical form by Dionysius, is not a shallow disregard or denial of the evident evils in the world. It means rather that, confronted with the evils in the world, we can only say that for no reason, and therefore outrageously, the world as we find it does not perfectly love God, the Good, the sole end of all love. And since the Good is the principle of intelligibility and hence of being, to the extent that anything fails to partake of that principle it is deficient in being. The recognition of evils in the world and in ourselves is the recognition that the world and ourselves, as we find them, are less than fully existent because we do not perfectly love God, the Good.

End.