source; https://cslewis.wikispaces.com/Dualism
Miracles
4.14 "It is true that Dualism has a certain theological attraction; it
seems to make the problem of evil easier." ... " ... I think there are
better solutions to the problem of evil."
There are only two views that face all the facts. One is the Christian
view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains
the memory of what it ought to have been. The other is the view called
Dualism. Dualism means the belief that there are two equal and
independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the
other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight
out an endless war. I personally think that next to Christianity
Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market.
Mere Christianity, chapter 2, paragraph 4
Dr Joad's article … suggests the interesting conclusion that since
neither 'mechanism' nor 'emergent evolution' will hold water, we must
choose in the long run between some monotheistic philosophy, like the
Christian, and some such dualism as that of the Zoroastrians. I agree
with Dr Joad in rejecting mechanism and emergent evolution. Mechanism,
like all materialist systems, breaks down at the problem of knowledge.
If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions,
what reason have we to trust it? As for emergent evolution, if anyone
insists on using the word
God to mean 'whatever the universe
happens to be going to do next', of course we cannot prevent him. But
nobody would in fact so use it unless he had a secret belief that what
is coming next will be an improvement. Such a belief, besides being
unwarranted, presents peculiar difficulties to an emergent evolutionist.
If things can improve, this means that there must be some absolute
standard of good above and outside the cosmic process to which that
process can approximate. There is no sense in talking of 'becoming
better' if better means simply 'what we are becoming'--it is like
congratulating yourself on reaching your destination and defining
destination as 'the place you have reached'. Mellontolatry, or the
worship of the future, is a
fuddled religion.
We are left then to choose between monotheism and dualism--between a
single, good, almighty source of being, and two equal, uncreated,
antagonistic Powers, one good and the other bad. Dr Joad suggests that
the latter view stands to gain from the 'new urgency' of the fact of
evil. But
what new urgency? Evil may seem more urgent to us
than it did to the Victorian philosophers--favoured members of the
happiest class in the happiest country in the world at the world's
happiest period. But it is no more urgent for us than for the great
majority of monotheists all down the ages. The classic expositions of
the doctrine that the world's miseries are compatible with its creation
and guidance by a wholly good Being come from Boethius waiting in prison
to be beaten to death and from St Augustine meditating on the sack of
Rome. The present state of the world is normal; it was the last century
that was the abnormality.
This drives us to ask why so many generations rejected Dualism. Not,
assuredly, because they were unfamiliar with suffering; and not because
its obvious
prima facie plausibility escaped them. It is more
likely that they saw its two fatal difficulties, the one metaphysical,
and the other moral.
The metaphysical difficulty is this. The two Powers, the good and the
evil, do not explain each other. Neither Ormuzd nor Ahriman can claim to
be the Ultimate. More ultimate than either of them is the inexplicable
fact of their being there together. Neither of them chose this
tete-a-tete. Each of them, therefore, is
conditioned--finds
himself willy-nilly in a situation; and either that situation itself,
or some unknown force which produced that situation, is the real
Ultimate. Dualism has not yet reached the ground of being. You cannot
accept two conditioned and mutually independent beings as the
self-grounded, self-comprehending Absolute. On the level of
picture-thinking this difficulty is symbolised by our inability to think
of Ormuzd and Ahriman without smuggling in the idea of a common
space
in which they can be together and thus confessing that we are not yet
dealing with the source of the universe but only with two members
contained in it. Dualism is a truncated metaphysic.
The moral difficulty is that Dualism gives evil a positive, substantive,
self-consistent nature, like that of good. If this were true, if
Ahriman existed in his own right no less than Ormuzd, what could we mean
by calling Ormuzd good except that we happened to prefer
him.
In what sense can the one party be said to be right and the other wrong?
If evil has the same kind of reality as good, the same autonomy and
completeness, our allegiance to good becomes the arbitrarily chosen
loyalty of a partisan. A sound theory of value demands something
different. It demands that good should be original and evil a mere
perversion; that good should be the tree and evil the ivy; that good
should be able to see all round evil (as when sane men understand
lunacy) while evil cannot retaliate in kind; that good should be able to
exist on its own while evil requires the good on which it is parasitic
in order to continue its parasitic existence.
The consequences of neglecting this are serious. It means believing that
bad men like badness as such, in the same way in which good men like
goodness. At first this denial of any common nature between us and our
enemies seems gratifying. We call them fiends and feel that we need not
forgive them. But, in reality, along with the power to forgive, we have
lost the power to condemn. If a taste for cruelty and a taste for
kindness were equally ultimate and basic, by what common standard could
the one reprove the other? In reality, cruelty does not come from
desiring evil as such, but from perverted sexuality, inordinate
resentment, or lawless ambition and avarice. That is precisely why it
can be judged and condemned from the standpoint of innocent sexuality,
righteous anger, and ordinate acquisitiveness. The master can correct a
boy's sums because they are blunders in arithmetic--in the same
arithmetic which he does and does better. If they were not even attempts
at arithmetic--if they were not in the arithmetical world at all--they
could not be arithmetical mistakes.
Good and evil, then, are not on all fours. Badness is not even bad
in the same way
in which goodness is good. Ormuzd and Ahriman cannot be equals. In the
long run, Ormuzd must be original and Ahriman derivative. The first hazy
idea of
devil must, if we begin to think, be analysed into the
more precise ideas of 'fallen' and 'rebel' angel. But only in the long
run. Christianity can go much further with the Dualist than Dr Joad's
article seems to suggest. There was never any question of tracing
all
evil to man; in fact, the New Testament has a good deal more to say
about dark superhuman powers than about the fall of Adam. As far as this
world is concerned, a Christian can share most of the Zoroastrian
outlook; we all live between the 'fell, incensed points' of Michael and
Satan. The difference between the Christian and the Dualist is that the
Christian thinks one stage further and sees that if Michael is really in
the right and Satan really in the wrong, this must mean that they stand
in two different relations to somebody or something far further back,
to the ultimate ground of reality itself. All this, of course, has been
watered down in modern times by the theologians who are afraid of
'mythology', but those who are prepared to reinstate Ormuzd and Ahriman
are presumably not squeamish on that score.
Dualism can be a manly creed. In the Norse form ('The giants will beat
the gods in the end, but I am on the side of the gods') it is nobler by
many degrees than most philosophies of the moment. But it is only a
half-way house. Thinking along these lines you can avoid Monotheism, and
remain a Dualist, only by refusing to follow your thoughts home. To
revive Dualism would be a real step backwards and a bad omen (though not
the worst possible) for civilization. 'Evil and God' Part 1, Chapter 1
of
God in the Dock.
I should begin, I think, by objecting to an expression you use: `God
must have a potentiality of His opposite - evil.' For this I would
substitute the idea which someone had in the Middle Ages who defined
God as
`That which has no opposite' i.e. we live in a world of
clashes, good and evil, true and false, pleasant and painful, body and
spirit, time and eternity etc, but God is not simply (so to speak)
one
of the two clashes but the ultimate thing beyond them all - just as in
our constitution the King is neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader
of the Opposition, but the thing behind them which alone enables these
to be a lawful government and an opposition - or just as space is
neither bigness or smallness but that in which the distinctions of big
and small arise. This then is my first point. That Evil is not something
outside and
`over against' God, but
in some way included under Him.
My second point seems to be in direct contradiction to this first one,
and is (in scriptural language) as follows: that God `is the Father of
Lights and in Him is
no darkness at all'. In some way there is no evil whatever in God. He is pure Light. All the
heat
that in us is lust or anger in Him is cool light - eternal morning,
eternal freshness, eternal springtime: never disturbed, never strained.
Go out on any perfect morning in early summer before the world is awake
and see, not the thing itself, but the material symbol of it.
Well, these are our two starting points.
In one way (our old
phrase!) God includes evil, in another way he does not. What are we to
do next? My beginning of the `next' will be to deny another remark of
yours - where you say `no good without evil'. This on my view is
absolutely untrue: but the opposite `no evil without good' is absolutely
true. I will try to explain what I mean by an analogy.
Supposing you are taking a dog on a lead through a turnstile or past a
post. You know what happens (apart from his usual ceremonies in passing a
post!). He tries to go the wrong side and gets his lead looped round
the post.
You see that he can't do it, and therefore pull him back. You pull him
back because you want to enable him to go
forward. He wants exactly the same thing - namely to go
forward: for that very reason he resists your pull
back,
or, if he is an obedient dog, yields to it reluctantly as a matter of
duty which seems to him to be quite in opposition to his own will: tho'
in fact it is only by yielding to you that he will ever succeed in getting where he wants.
Now if the dog were a theologian he would regard his own will as a
sin to which he was tempted, and therefore an
evil:
and he might go on to ask whether you understand and `contained' his
evil. If he did you cd. only reply `My dear dog, if by your will you
mean what you really want to do,
viz. to get forward along the road, I not only understand this desire but
share
it. Forward is exactly where I want you to go. If by your will, on the
other hand, you mean your will to pull against the collar and try to
force yourself forward in a direction which is no use - why I
understand it of course: but just because I understand it (and the whole situation, which you
don't understand) I cannot possibly share it. In fact the more I sympathise with your
real wish - that is, the wish to get on - the less can I sympathise (in the sense of `share'
or `agree with') your resistance to the collar: for I see that this is
actually rendering the attainment of your real wish impossible.'
I don't know if you will agree at once that this is a parallel to the
situation between God and man: but I will work it out on the assumption
that you do. Let us go back to the original question - whether and, if
so in what sense God contains, say, my evil will - or `understands' it.
The answer is God not only understands but
shares the desire
which is at the root of all my evil - the desire for complete and
ecstatic happiness. He made me for no other purpose than to enjoy it.
But He knows, and I do not, how it can be really and permanently
attained. He knows that most of
my personal attempts to reach
it are actually putting it further and further out of my reach. With
these therefore He cannot sympathise or `agree': His sympathy with
my real will makes that impossible. (He may
pity my misdirected struggles, but that is another matter.) The practical results seem to be two.
1. I may always feel looking back on any past sin that in the very heart
of my evil passion there was something that God approves and wants me
to feel not less but more. Take a sin of Lust. The overwhelming thirst
for
rapture was good and even divine: it has not got to be
unsaid (so to speak) and recanted. But it will never be quenched as I
tried to quench it. If I refrain - if I submit to the collar and come
round the right side of the lamp-post - God will be guiding me as
quickly as He can to where I shall get what I really wanted all the
time. It will not be very like what I now think I want: but it will be
more like it than some suppose. In any case it will be the real thing,
not a consolation prize or substitute. If I had it I should not need to
fight against sensuality as something impure: rather I should
spontaneously turn away from it as something dull, cold, abstract, and
artificial. This, I think, is how the doctrine applies to past sins.
2. On the other hand, when we are thinking of a sin in the future, i.e. when we are tempted, we must remember that
just because
God wants for us what we really want and knows the only way to get it,
therefore He must, in a sense, be quite ruthless towards sin. He is not
like a human authority who can be begged off or caught in an indulgent
mood. The more He loves you the more determined He must be to pull you
back from your way which leads nowhere into His way which leads where
you want to go. Hence Macdonald's words `The
all-punishing, all-pardoning
Father'. You may go the wrong way again, and again He may forgive you:
as the dog's master may extricate the dog after he has tied the whole
lead round the lamp-post. But there is no hope
in the end of getting where you want to go except by going God's way. And what does
`in the end'
mean? This is a terrible question. If endless time will really help us
to go the right way, I believe we shall be given endless time. But
perhaps God knows that time makes no difference. Perhaps He knows that
if you can't learn the way in 60 or 70 years on this planet (a place
probably constructed by Divine skill for the very purpose of teaching
you) then you will never learn it anywhere. There may be nothing left
for Him but to destroy you (the kindest thing):
if He can.
I think one may be quite rid of the old haunting suspicion - which
raises its head in every temptation - that there is something else than
God - some other country (Mary Rose ... Mary Rose)55 into which He
forbids us to trespass - some kind of delight wh. He `doesn't
appreciate' or just chooses to forbid, but which
wd. be real delight if only we were allowed to get it. The thing
just isn't there.
Whatever we desire is either what God is trying to give us as quickly
as He can, or else a false picture of what He is trying to give us - a
false picture wh. would not attract us for a moment if we saw the real
thing. Therefore God does really in a sense contain evil - i.e. contains
what is the real motive power behind all our evil desires. He knows
what we want, even in our vilest acts: He is longing to give it to us.
He is not looking on from the outside at some new `taste' or `separate
desire of our own'. Only because he has laid up
real goods for
us to desire are we able to go wrong by snatching at them in greedy,
misdirected ways. The truth is that evil is not a real
thing at all, like God. It is simply good
spoiled.
That is why I say there can be good without evil, but no evil without
good. You know what the biologists mean by a parasite - an animal that
lives on another animal. Evil is
a parasite. It is there only because good is there for it to spoil and confuse.
Thus you may well feel that God understands our temptations -
understands them a great deal more than we do. But don't forget
Macdonald again -
`Only God understands evil and hates it.’56
Only the dog's master knows how useless it is to try to get on with the
lead knotted round the lamp-post. This is why we must be prepared to
find God implacably and immovably forbidding what may seem to us very
small and trivial things. But He knows whether they are really small and
trivial. How small some of the things that doctors forbid would seem to
an ignoramus.
I expect I have said all these things before: if so
, I hope they have not wasted a letter. Alas! they are so (comparatively) easy to say: so hard, so
all but impossible to go on
feeling when the strain comes.
Collected Letters, to Arthur Greeves, 12 September 1933