Evil and Redemption, part I: The House Prepared

Illustration: The first meeting between Flaubert, God, the Devil and the Universe.

From The Flaubert Report.

Over the past few days, I've been engaged with a close friend and associate in the Gurdjieff work on urgent questions regarding the nature of evil.

I say, "urgent,” first of all, because the questions this person is asking are for them very personal, and having a direct effect on their being and life; and secondly, because the question of evil is urgent in general and, while we’re completely surrounded with it at all times, it barely registers on the consciousness of most people most of the time.

Before we say anything else about evil, let us recognize it as a failure of love.

Evil makes its money and does its deeds—it earns its living—by going unnoticed until it is too late to stop it. The Germans found this out after Hitler rose to power; everything about it looked somehow ordinary until it was too late to stop it. This is evil’s superpower: it disguises itself as the good. This is not difficult to achieve, because evil is in fact nothing more than a perversion of the good, which has left the path. It knows the good well enough to wear its face.

As David Bentley Hart puts it,

“there is a… stream of eastern Christian spiritual tradition that tells us the fires of hell are only the glory of God that must at the last… pervade the whole of creation;, although that glory will transfigure the whole cosmos, it will inevitably be experienced as torment by any soul, that willfully seals itself against love of God and neighbor.”  ( from “You Are Gods: on Nature and Super Nature," 2022, University of Notre Dame Press, page 46)

It might be said, in the case of humans, that we don't know what evil is because we don't know what love is. Swedenborg’s opening comments on the subject of love in his indispensable Divine Love and Wisdom read as follows:

"Even though the word “love” is so commonly on our tongues, still hardly anyone knows what love is. When we stop to think about it, we find that we cannot form any image of it in our thoughts, so we say either that it is not really anything or that it is simply something that flows into us from our sight, hearing, touch, and conversation and therefore influences us. We are wholly unaware that it is our very life—not just the general life of our whole body and of all our thoughts, but the life of their every least detail.”

I consider this a bit more interesting than what the Gurdjieff people I know usually have to say in “defense” of why we so rarely discuss love — that is, "we don't know what love is," as though that forbade us from discussing it until we understood it. Let us be honest with one another, and admit that we would have to remain silent on all subjects if we refrained from speaking about them until we understood them properly; and so the perennial excuse of the Gurdjieff work for not discussing love is revealed for the fraud that it actually is. It occurs to me as I say this, that the fraud of the Gurdjieff work may not lie in the man himself, but in the way we understand what he brought to the west; and anyone who considers this carefully will have to admit that it is the more likely case.

Now, let’s we consider what Swedenborg says about the consequences of a failure to love in angels. In Heaven and Hell he says it makes them depressed.