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Journal of Ecumenical Studies the DARK SIDE of the SOUL

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Journal of Ecumenical Studies the DARK SIDE of the SOUL 88 Journal of Ecumenical Studies Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 35:1, Winter 1998 THE DARK SIDE OF THE SOUL: HUMAN NATURE AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IN JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS Cain said to Abel his brother, "Let us go out to the field." And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. (Gen. 4:8)! It is an ancient story, wrapped up in a vision of the world's creation that the modern mind is inclined to take with a grain of salt. Yet, for all its mythic proportions, it is a very human story. Cain and Abel were brothers at the dawn of time, the first two natural offspring of the primordial man and woman, Adam and Eve. Cain, the older and presumably the stronger, was a tiller of the ground; Abel, his younger brother, was a keeper of sheep. Both brothers had brought an offering to God. Abel's was accepted; Cain's was not. The reaction of the aggrieved older brother might have to be explained to a visitor from another solar system but not to a human being born of earth. He was 'Very angry, and his countenance fell" (4:5). In your anger "sin is couching at the door," God had warned him, and "you must master it" (4:7), but Cain did not master it. Instead, he lured his brother out to the field, where he thought no one could see and there murdered him. "Where is Abel your brother?" God then asked him. "I do not know," he brazenly replied, "Am I my brother's keeper?" (4:9). To the very end there was neither compassion for Abel nor remorse for killing him. Cain's only grief was for himself, that he had been found out and punished. The tone of the story makes it quite clear that Cain's evil deed did not come from the prompting of some malign demigod, as is so often the explana­ tion for human evil in other ancient literatures; nor was it the result of dread Ananke, the inexorable Necessity of the Greek tragedians. It was something that issued from his own nature, which is to say from his own intrinsic human nature. Sigmund Freud once observed, somewhat cynically, that "each of us will be well advised, on some suitable occasion, to make a low bow to the deeply moral nature of mankind; it will help us to be generally popular and much will be forgiven us for it."2 These ancient scriptures of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions make no such low bows. Human nature, in their view, is capable of every wickedness. If it is not Cain murdering his brother, then it is his descendant Lamech killing a man on slight provocation and then struttingly, triumphantly boasting All biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version (New York: Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A, 1952 [Old Testament] and 1971 [New Testament, 2nd ed.]). 2Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, tr. and ed. James Strachey (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1961), p. 67. Explorations and Responses 89 of it before his two wives (Gen. 4:23-24); or the two cunning daughters of Lot getting their father drunk and then seducing him (Gen. 19:30-38); or the woman who is willing to have a child cut in half rather than see the other woman have it whole (1 Kgs. 3:16-28); or Solomon's use of the remnants of five conquered peoples as slave labor in construction projects (1 Kgs. 9:15- 24). Murder, rape, cruelty, theft, guile, treachery, callousness, ruthlessness, abuse of power and authority—it is all there, unflinchingly sketched out in the most vivid colors. Even King David, biblical hero par excellence and sweet singer of psalms, cunningly contrived to have his loyal captain Uriah slain in battle so that he might possess Uriah's wife (2 Sam. 11:2-27), for he had seen her from his roof late one afternoon while she was bathing, "and the woman was very beautiful" (11:2): human, all too human—especially if one has the powers of a king. From the standpoint of the religious traditions that are rooted in these scriptures, the problem with all this unflinching recognition of the soul's dark side is to understand how it got there. For, that is not at all what the Creator appeared to have had in mind. It is a problem even for those portions of the Jewish and Christian traditions that do not take their scriptures as literally true in every jot and tittle. In the first creation story recounted in the book of Genesis, we are told that God, having labored six days to create the world, looked upon all that God had made—"and, behold, it was very good" (1:31). At the center of it all were two human creatures, man and woman, the primordial pair from whom all subsequent generations would descend (Gen. 1:26-31). They had been made in the image of God, after God's own likeness; behold, they, too, were "very good." God blessed them and said to them, with a distinct tone of parental pride and confidence: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth" (1:28). What an auspicious beginning for the human race! Then, with hardly any transition at all, we begin to sense that there is something grievously amiss in this newly created bearer of the divine image. First comes the disobedience of the man and woman in the paradise of Eden (Gen. 3:1 -13). It was not a heroic disobedience, as some have tried to represent it but a mere pusillanimous yielding to temptation. "The serpent beguiled me" said the woman, "and I ate [of the forbidden fruit]" (3:13). The man went even further in disowning responsibility: "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate" (3:12, emphasis mine). Next comes the story of Cain, then Lamech, and on and on it goes, verse upon verse, chapter after chapter. After only a few human generations, even the Creator came to have second thoughts about whether these creatures were really "very good," as God had first pronounced them or, indeed, whether they were any good at all. For God "saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continual­ ly. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved 90 Journal of Ecumenical Studies him to his heart" (Gen. 6:5-6). At the risk of making complex things seem over-simple, we might say that virtually everything else in the books of the Bible, beyond Gen. 8, is the story of God's endeavor to make the best of these human creatures despite their disappointing flaw—that "the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth" (Gen. 8:21). So God had created humankind in God's own image and pronounced it "very good." Yet, it obviously contained some propensities that were not so very good. How was such a thing possible? If God were truly God, creator of all things according to God's own design, then how could it happen that the creature at the very center of it all was so terribly flawed? For all but the most recent of the past twenty centuries of Western history, this was the predom­ inant and, indeed, virtually the only form in which the question of human nature and the problem of evil was asked. That is hardly surprising, for the question itself is a distinctly Judeo-Christian kind of question. In and of itself, the human capacity for doing things that we call "evil" is merely a fact. It becomes a burning question only when it is apprehended as something that cries out for an answer. It arises only when one is shocked by human evil— when one looks upon it and senses that this is not the way things should be and that something is therefore surely out of joint. This is what lies at the heart of the biblical, Judeo-Christian vision of human nature—that the capacity for evil is not only a fact, but a shocking fact. There is no other religious or philosophical tradition in which the ques­ tion ever had quite the same burning intensity. There are some, indeed, in which the "problem of evil" is really no problem at all. In Hindu tradition, for example, what humankind calls "evil" is as much a true manifestation of the divine as everything else. In its occurrence, therefore, there is nothing out of joint, nothing startling, nothing that cries out for an answer. I do not offer this comparison invidiously but only to make the point that the view was radically different among those peoples who sooner or later fell under the spell of the biblical tradition, for here even God was represented as being shocked by the occurrence of human evil. "What have you done?" he thundered at Cain, "The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground" (Gen. 4:10b). Insofar as the several branches of the Judeo-Christian tradition remained strictly monotheistic and included assumptions concerning God's omnipo­ tence, omniscience, and essential goodness, certain kinds of answers to the question were simply ruled out of court.
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