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Theologians have struggled for centuries with theodicy, the problem of a good God and the existence of evil. Almost all such exertions have been unconvincing. Augustine, speaking of the struggle to understand evil, at last wrote fatalistically, "Do not seek to know more than is appropriate." At the time of the Black Death, William Langland wrote in Piers Plowman: "If you want to know why God allowed the Devil to lead us astray . . . then your eyes ought to be in your arse."
The historian Jeffrey Burton Russell asks, "What kind of God is this? Any decent religion must face the question squarely, and no answer is credible that cannot be given in the presence of dying children." Can one propose a God who is partly evil? Elie Wiesel, who was in Auschwitz as a child, suggests that perhaps God has "retracted himself" in the matter of evil. Wiesel has written, "God is in exile, but every individual, if he strives hard enough, can redeem mankind, and even God himself."
Perhaps evil is an immanence in the world, in the mind, just as divinity is an immanence. But evil has performed powerful works. Observes Russell: "It is true that there is evil in each of us, but adding together even large numbers of individual evils does not explain an Auschwitz, let alone the destruction of the planet. Evil on this scale seems to be qualitatively as well as quantitatively different. It is no longer a personal but a transpersonal evil, arising from some kind of collective unconscious. It is also possible that it is beyond the transpersonal and is truly transcendent, an entity outside as well as inside the human mind, an entity that would exist even if there were no human race to imagine it." So here evil rounds back again into its favored element, mystery.
Perhaps God has other things on his mind. Perhaps man is to God as the animals of the earth are to man -- picturesque, interesting and even nourishing. Man is, on the whole, a catastrophe to the animals. Maybe God is a catastrophe to man in the same way. Can it be that God visits evils upon the world not out of perversity or a desire to harm, but because our suffering is a byproduct of his needs? This could be one reason why almost all theodicies have about them a pathetic quality and seem sometimes undignified exertions of the mind.
An eerie scene at the beginning of the Book of Job, that splendid treatise on the mysteries of evil, has God and Satan talking to each other like sardonic gentlemen gamblers who have met by chance at the racetrack at Saratoga. God seems to squint warily at Satan, and asks, in effect, So, Satan, what have you been doing with yourself? And Satan with a knowing swagger replies, in effect, I've been around the world, here and there, checking it out. Then God and Satan make a chillingly cynical bet on just how much pain Job can endure before he cracks and curses God.
Satan wanders. Evil is a seepage across borders, across great distances. Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, wrote that a colt in rural Vermont, if it smells a fresh buffalo robe (the colt having no knowledge or experience of buffalo, which lived on the plains) will "start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrenzies of affright. Here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism of the world."