Sorry, no Lee Van Cleef or Eli Wallach in this blog entry although one could probably come up with some dandy allegorical references on the nature of good and evil using the famous Sergio Leone movie as a vehicle.
Human beings have been trying to explain good and evil for a very long time. The biggest struggle, of course, is justifying the existence of evil. As different tribes and then societies invented their creation myths and religions they understood that the two forces of good and evil had to somehow be reconciled.
Evil has always been the stickier wicket. Human beings understand goodness. If a group of humans conceive of a deity, he or she is generally believed to have the best interests of the worshipers at heart. Good is to be expected. Where, then, does evil come from if the gods are good? How do the priests or shamans explain to the people the cause or source of sorrow, pain and catastrophe?
The early pantheists had an easier time dealing with evil. There were gods or spirits for everything. If the fertility god was properly attended to, healthy children were born. If not, the people were barren. Likewise, the harvest gods had to be kept happy or the people went hungry. There was no need for a single explanation of where evil sprang from, evil came about if the people let the deity down. If the sacrifices or offerings or rituals appeased the god or gods, the crops got better, the people got happier and the shaman kept his job.
In an interesting twist on pantheism, the Greeks gave their pantheon of gods and goddesses completely human emotions, only amplified to god-like dimensions. The Greek gods were jealous, petty, lustful, proud, vengeful and deceitful to an almost childish degree. The problem, for humans, was that the gods had the super-powers that are a side benefit of deification. When evil came into a Greek's life, it was generally one of the gods directly giving him or her grief.
The Dualists had a different take on how to reconcile the obvious forces of good and evil in world. Starting with Zoroaster, the Dualists posited various systems of belief in which there was a god of light and a god of darkness or a lessor god and a greater god. One of these gods or forces represented the good in the world and the other the evil. The tension between these two forces explained the waxing and waning of evil times in the lives of the people. The Dualists tended to value free will and the benefit of morally positive individual action.
The tradition of Dualism, as we know it in the historical written record, begins about 600 BCE with the writings of Zoroaster (also know as Zarathustra) and continued down through the Gnostics, Manicheans and the Cathars. The nature of Dualism was changed and debated amongst these different religions and there were differing sects in each of these broader groups, but the tension between some force of light and darkness or good and evil remained a central tenet. The deity that personified darkness or evil was independent of the good deity which effectively absolved the good deity from responsibility for the evil deity. The advantage of Dualism is that it allows the good deity to remain untarnished of the responsibility for creating evil in the first place.
As a side note, Dualism was a major threat to what would become the dominant European religion, Christianity. The Zoroastrians were virtually wiped out during the Islamic invasions of Persia in the 7th century CE and was also geographically isolated from the West and as such it was only an idealogical threat. Many scholars believe that Isaiah 45:7, for example, is a direct reference and refutation of the ideas of Zoroastrian Dualism (see the verse for yourself or previous blog entries).
The Manicheans and Cathars were not so lucky. Even though as great a pillar of the early Roman Church as Saint Augustine was himself a young Dualist, the Church developed a particularly intolerant attitude towards Dualist sects. This intolerance would evolve into a holy war.
Monotheism, as the name suggests, posits a single deity that is over-arching in the cosmos. The three large monotheistic religions in the world are Judaism, Islam and Christianity. As an aside, it is interesting to note the similarities between all three of these religions and Zoroastrianism, which preceded them.
The Christian religion teaches the doctrine of Original Sin. Based on this doctrine, all human beings are destined for hell unless he or she does something to alter that inevitable course. The concept is that the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden caused all of the humans that came after them to be inherently sinful as well. The only action that will save humans from automatic damnation is to accept the divinity of the Christian God.
The difficulty for a monotheistic deity is that if humans create an omnipotent cosmic force it follows that all things in the world spring from that one source. Good things come from one's god and so do bad things. Bounty and peace come from the same source as famine and war. This philosophical dichotomy troubled the early Christian church and is still a source of theological debate to this day. Biblical scholars from antiquity to the present cite various bible verses to explain how god is always good, incapable of evil. This calls for other verses to show that the serpent, Satan, the fall of humans, the tempting of Job and the other troubles that befall humans are somehow linked to forces other than god. The question then becomes, if the deity is omnipotent, what forces could be outside its control?
The Church fathers, seeing the threat that Dualism posed, declared anathema on the the concept of Dualism. Further, the Church would declare Gnostics, Manicheans and other Dualistic followers to be Heretics in the eyes of the church. Persecution of the heretics followed, but all of the trouble that fell on the earlier Dualists paled in comparison to the ferocity with which the Church reacted to the Cathars, also know as the Albigensians.
The Cathars were a Christian sect in Languedoc, which is now Southern France. In 1208 Pope Innocent III preached a crusade against the Cathars and in an amazing display of barbarity, fellow Christians answered the call for the crusade. Driven by the lust for free lands and the call of the Pope, the Christian neighbors of the Cathars fell upon them and slaughtered them. Estimates of the dead from this crusade range as high as 500,000 over two generations, although the actual death toll may be closer to 200,000. The most famous incident was at the siege of Beziers. When the besieged town finally fell, the victorious crusader leaders asked Abbot Arnaud-Amaury, their spiritual commander, how to tell the true Catholics inside the walls from the heretical Cathars. His reply has been recorded as "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." The translation is "Kill them all. God will know his own." Following his comments, between 5,000 and 20,000 (medieval records vary widely) of the former inhabitants of the town of Beziers were slaughtered.
The Albigensian Crusade is certainly not an isolated incident of wholesale persecution in the name of a monotheistic deity, nor was this type of behavior attributable solely to the Christians. The tribes of Israel warred across Palestine and Islam spread out of Mecca by means of the sword. Countless heads have been removed from countless shoulders in the name of religion.
Spreading death and destruction in the name of this or that god only adds to the difficulty of a rational explanation of the nature of good, the nature of evil and the relationship between the two. The struggle to clarify these explanations would continue on into modern philosophy long after the Medieval bloodshed ceased and the bloodshed of the Reformation began.
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