In the Shadow of Evil

1997

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A few years ago while taking a seminar on the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, I came to the conclusion that even one's most fundamental beliefs need to be excruciatingly questioned: “Convictions are prisons.  Men [of conviction] do not look far enough, they do not look beneath themselves: but to be permitted to join in the discussion of value and disvalue, one must see five hundred convictions beneath oneself—behind oneself."1 The avoidance of this need leads to tragedies as diverse as the holocaust and the crusades; two events driven by the ostensibly well-founded convictions of a whole people.  As my own beliefs were turbulent at best, the added momentum of Nietzsche's caustic reason led me to the brink of nihilism.  I wondered, given honest self-examination in Nietzsche's fashion, how one might ever keep convictions of any sort.

The scholar who taught this course had spent a lifetime studying the German theological thinkers of the last few centuries.  In addition, he himself possessed a keen, logical mind.  I had heard that his own father was a pastor and I began to wonder about his beliefs.  He had obviously been raised in a strong religious setting; additionally, he had spent a lifetime contemplating the finest theology western culture has to offer.  Surely, this man must have convictions.  One day, after having built up enough courage to really question the professor, I attended his office hours.  After a few preemptive questions about specific issues in Nietzsche's canon I dared to ask him more personal questions.  The main one, of course, came out as, "Do you believe in God?"  I felt very self-conscious putting him on the spot in this manner but I really had to know what was left on the other side of Nietzsche and a life devoted to careful scholarship about God.  The professor took my question seriously and answered me in as understanding fashion as he was able: "No, I don't."  Upon questioning him further he explained to me that he could not believe in any traditional conception of a benevolent God when he knew and had witnessed the sufferings so easily found in our world.

I thanked the professor, talked about some other issues raised in the class, and left.  I was heart-broken.  The fact that he didn't believe in God had not surprised me as much as his reason.  I had heard the same one many times before but from uneducated, uncreative minds; minds lacking maturity or honesty or both.  I needed a revelation, a reason not to believe if that’s what the future held for me.  But this?  This I already knew.

After sitting with his response for many months I realized that my intellectual snobbery had blinded me to the fact that the deep truths and the perennial questions are old, and basic, and apprehensible by any mind that cares to reflect.  The esoteric questions and answers I had hoped to find were themselves a self-deluded escape.

My professor and hordes of others who possess sensitive hearts and questioning minds face the problem of evil.  The problem of evil, a problem that slaps the face of any theist, continues to challenge all who attempt to believe in a benevolent creator.  The mystery that it teaches provides a challenge nearly impossible to face, and more difficult still to live.  Among the brooding initiates into this living mystery was Carl Jung.  Jung, one of the twentieth century's most creative minds, wrestled with evil throughout his life.  Though he is best known for his psychological writings, the truth is that Jung's renditions of psychology derived from a very religious mind.  One of his finest works, Answer to Job, directly probes the question of evil and the nature of God.

Before delving into Jung's own reflections on evil it is vital to trace the history of this concept.  The current manner of discussing the problem of evil, as well as Jung's own writings, portray evil within the twentieth century zeitgeist, a century which many feel to be the century of evil.  In these times evil acts have been done, evil thoughts thought, and evil itself defined in tragedies beyond words.  Many would proffer that the scholars of our era are best prepared to consider evil.  Jung's complex thoughts about evil reveal such preparation and experience.  Nevertheless, any era must be understood in light of its predecessors and any concept traced to its deepest roots.  To consider anything less would result only in a period piece, something that accurately paints the thoughts of a generation but evades the understanding of any primordial question.  When questioning evil, the most dangerous of mysteries, it is one's duty and responsibility to turn every leaf in the hope that the knowledge gained will enlighten one not just of a concept but of life itself.  This was Jung's quest and it is ours now.

Evil is a loaded word, for in it is contained all that which contrasts with life, growth, hope, and good.  A contemporary dictionary of philosophy reflects the many-sided conception of evil: "1—That which is injurious, painful, hurtful, or calamitous... 2—Morally bad or unacceptable, sinful, wicked, vicious, or corrupt... 3—That which impedes the achievement of goals, ideals, happiness, or general well-being... 4—Misfortune."2  As this definition illustrates, evil is not one, but many.  Perhaps this is also the meaning behind that cryptic passage in the Gospel of Mark when Jesus confronts the demons in a possessed man: "For Jesus had said to him, 'Come out of this man, you evil spirit!' Then Jesus asked him, 'What is your name?'  'My name is Legion,' he replied, 'for we are many.'"3   Since the time of Christ at least, evil has not been a unified entity.

Unfortunately, evil is even confused with other concepts which, upon careful rumination, are not evil in any sense.  For instance, the first definition of evil above refers to it as anything painful or hurtful.  Many of the most blessed gifts one can receive may be painful and hurtful.  Injured pride, castigation for a wrong, growth of almost any sort: all these things may be infused with pain yet are not evil.  Sometimes the greatest creations and the most important edification require careful destruction.  Over the millennia, evil—as a term—has become the repository for many confused meanings, some of which should not be stigmatized by being considered 'evil' at all.  To know evil in its first meaningful sense one must travel back to ancient Persia and the teachings of a radical religious thinker, the prophet Zarathushtra.

In ancient Persia the religious thought of the Indo-Europeans abounded.  This religious thought, probably best exemplified in the now extraordinarily complex polytheism of Hinduism, conceived of many anthropomorphic gods who lived in much the same way as mortal man† did.  Greek polytheism also reflects this thought.  The Aryan (synonym for Indo-European) people of Persia, now Iran (from Aryan) and Iraq, were a warring group of nomadic tribes.  Many small kingdoms existed side by side, usually none-too-peaceably, and worshipped hosts of divinities.  Zarathushtra (in Greek transliterated to Zoroaster, hence Zoroastrianism) lived in this culture sometime around the sixth or seventh century before the common era.  He is thought to have been the son of a pastoral priest, an office which each tribe supported.  Around thirty, Zarathushtra experienced a powerful religious vision in which he encountered the one God, Ahura-Mazda ("The Wise Lord").  This dramatic event transformed Zarathushtra into a very enthusiastic prophet who was quickly chased from each kingdom in which he attempted to preach his new message.  Eventually, though, one king received his words with wisdom and became his protector and benefactor.  This king was the father of Darius the Great under whose extreme power Zoroastrianism became the dominant religion of ancient Persia.  Zarathushtra, now protected, wrote the immortal Gathas ("songs") which create the core of the subsequently much larger religious literature of the Zoroastrians.

The heart of Zarathushtra's message held that the many gods that were worshipped by the Aryans were false gods.  In Zarathushtra's vision only one all-powerful God existed who, in addition to holding supreme power, was supremely good.  Whereas the many gods of the Aryans were often human-like and 'sinful', Ahura-Mazda existed as a supremely moral being.  Ahura-Mazda taught Zarathushtra that the moral quest was each man's challenge.  Such a message contrasted with the state of the world then, as now, and the irreconcilability of the existence of evil within the kingdom of an omnibenevolent God made little sense.  As Smart outlines:

The belief in the malicious opposition to the purified religion that he preached and the incompatibility of Ahura-Mazda's goodness with the creation of evil led Zarathushtra to conceive of a cosmic opposition to God.  He mentions Druj ("The Lie"), an evil force waging war against Ahura-Mazda.  From this early concept developed the later Zoroastrian theology of dualism.4  

While the existence of evil obviously troubled Zarathushtra, he chose not to dwell extensively on it.  Rather, he focused on the supreme power of Ahura-Mazda and the moral life that God desired for men.

As Zoroastrianism developed, later thinkers (the Zoroastrian priests called "Magi") were not content with Zarathushtra's simple postulation of Druj.  How, if Ahura-Mazda was truly all-powerful, could Druj exist and evil with it?  Struggle, the constant of the ancient world, especially the Aryan culture, found its way into Zoroastrian theology and Ahura-Mazda met his own warring opponent, Angra Mainyu ("Evil Spirit").  Angra Mainyu was opposed to the work of Ahura-Mazda and, of equal power, he brought all evil into the world.  Now, the moral edification that Zarathushtra had proposed became not only personal and social but cosmological.  By living in a moral way, the Zoroastrian devotee contributed to the eventual victory of Ahura-Mazda over Angra Mainyu.  The eventual victory, of course, was far in the future in an end time when the powers of good would triumph over the powers of evil and the good would awake from their graves and live in eternal joy with Ahura-Mazda in the now perfect world.  To put it simply, dualism had been born to the world.  Good and evil were now distinct oppositional elements present in all the cosmos and the heart of man.  In their creation of Ahura-Mazda's nemesis, Angra Mainyu, the Zoroastrians had unwittingly brought mankind's fiercest opponent into existence—the devil.

Despite the prominent role the devil played in later Christianity's world-view, he was not a stable part of Jewish cosmology.  The devil is young and he was born after Zarathushtra.  The first time Satan truly appears in the Judeo-Christian canon was not until the late Book of Job, written roughly the same time as Zarathushtra's Gathas.  The history of evil is also the history of the devil.  The devil is the symbolic vessel of evil in western mentality.  God's first meeting with the devil: "One day the divine beings presented themselves before the Lord and the Adversary came along with them.  The Lord said to the Adversary, 'Where have you been?'  The Adversary answered the Lord, 'I have been roaming all over the earth.'"5  The term used in Job, translated as "The Adversary" is, in Hebrew, ha satan ("the satan"), hence our term Satan.  The text is misleading, though, in appearing to register Satan as a stable character.  In fact, he is not, as Elaine Pagels explains:

In biblical sources the Hebrew term the satan describes an adversarial role.  It is not the name of a particular character.  Although Hebrew storytellers as early as the sixth century B.C.E. occasionally introduced a supernatural character whom they called the satan, what they meant was any one of the angels sent by God for the specific purpose of blocking or obstructing human activity.  The root stn means "one who opposes, obstructs, or acts as adversary."  (The Greek term diabolos, later translated "devil," literally means "one who throws something across one's path.")6

Though many moderns might find great jest in the Hebrew's juxtaposition of the devil with an attorney, he was anything but a joke to Job.  God boasted to his angels (translated divine beings in the text above) of Job's righteousness.  Satan put God to a wager: if Job was anything less than prosperous he would curse God to His face.  It was only Job's success that made him upright and moral.  God denied Satan's supposition and the two made a bet.  God empowered Satan to do whatever he might in order to prove which of the two were correct about Job's faith.  After each increasingly bitter ordeal (in which Job loses everything from his family, to his wealth, to his health) Job remains fast in faith though miserable in spirit.  Satan is proved wrong one ordeal to the next and commits God to increase the wager until, in his diabolic majesty, he achieves nearly complete power over Job's existence.  Job breaks under the pressure and, though never cursing God, puts Him to trial.

The ancient Hebrew formulation, that the good receive benefits and the wicked punishment, is the true matter of the Book of Job.  Job, a believer of the Hebrew moral conceptions, affirms his own righteousness and puts God to the test of proving his wickedness.  God never answers Job's question, he does not explain why bad things happen to good people.  He does not explain why evil exists in His world.  Rather, the Lord shows His mightiness to Job and expresses the incomprehensibility of His ways.  He shows Job that as a human he does not, nor cannot, know the ways of God and should feel ashamed of asking God for such divine knowledge.  Job recants and prostrates himself before God.  Nevertheless, God affirms Job's experience and declares that Job spoke the truth about Him.

The Book of Job teaches of God's mystery.  It does not answer the question of evil but affirms that there is evil in the world when God says that Job spoke the truth about Him.  Evil is real.  Only by witnessing God's almighty power and knowledge does Job receive any kind of answer.  His answer would best be characterized by a submission to God's ways and an acceptance of their mystery.  The important role Satan plays in this book illustrates the dramatic fact that he is, in fact, God's servant.  Only by God's will does Satan do what he does and only for God's purposes.  Furthermore, Satan as obstructer leads to Job's higher faith.  From Satan Job comes to realize that God is not an equation: doing good does not result in the reception of benefits.  Such a simple universe would not evoke man's devotion to God but only man's blind following of an axiomatic truth.  Life would be mathematical.  Job's renewed faith in God, a higher faith built on mystery and unswayed devotion in good and evil alike, could only have arisen after the satanic tests.  Satan, in his role as opposition, serves God's higher purposes.  In Job, the devil is good.

The idea of dualism, though not explicit in the Book of Job, as God is left undefined as doing both good and evil alike, received much nurturing after Zarathushtra's time.  The figure of the devil would again recede while the philosophical underpinnings of his existence would receive help from the father of occidental reason.  A new challenge to man's understanding had emerged in Athens.  Plato, as voiced through the character Socrates, buttressed the duality of good and evil and paved the way for the western world's acceptance of evil as the antithesis of that which is good.

Plato's doctrine of forms is well known.  For Plato all that which exists contains its perfect template in the world of forms.  All things that exist are but poor copies of the perfect forms.  Furthermore, the highest forms—justice, beauty, truth—derive from the all-encompassing form, the form of the Good.  Of course, like Zarathushtra with his notion of an all-good God, one necessarily questions the existence of such a goodness when such badness is ubiquitous.

In his conception of evil, Plato designates it as a non-entity, or a negation.  Evil, in other words, has no form but is simply a negation of that which is good.  For instance, injustice is not a form but only that which impedes justice.  In The Republic he phrases it this way, "That which destroys and corrupts in every case is the evil; that which preserves and benefits is the good."7   Plato also thinks that evil is never done intentionally but only from ignorance.  In other words, even those who seem to be doing pure evil are really just attempting to reach some good: "...no one willingly goes to meet evil or what he thinks to be evil.  To make for what one believes to be evil, instead of making for the good, is not, it seems, in human nature, and when faced with the choice of two evils no one will choose the greater when he might choose the less."8  Evil is ignorance.  In Plato's world, all who know the good do the good and all who err, who 'miss the mark', fall into evil out of mistake and ignorance.  Nevertheless, evil becomes palpable in this faulty world and Plato knew it.

Evils... can never be done away with, for the good must always have its contrary; nor have they any place in the divine world, but they must needs haunt this region of our mortal nature.  That is why we should make all speed to take flight from this world to the other, and that means becoming like the divine so far as we can, and that again is to become righteous with the help of wisdom.9

Plato, a man who conceived himself as fulfilling a divinely-inspired vocation, knew that the existence of evil could not easily be understood as extant in a good world.  He thought that evil, though essentially a negation, derived from some source, and surely it was not the same source from which issued forth the good: "For good things are far fewer with us than evil, and for the good we must assume no other cause than God, but the cause of evil we must look for in other things and not in God."10  Plato never clearly dealt with the source of evil.  One would imagine, given his previous statements that evil is merely error, that evil does not proceed from any source.  The dualism present in much of Plato's reasoning kept him from any monistic explanations of good and evil.  As such, his thinking supported the dualism already spreading from Zoroastrianism, a dualism that would achieve crystallization in Christianity.

When Jesus was born he received visitation from eastern Magi.  As mentioned earlier, the Magi were the priests of the Zoroastrian religion.  It is little noticed that this visitation reflects enormous symbolic and philosophic importance.  The first people to recognize Jesus as divine were the priests of Zarathushtra:

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, "Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?  We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him."11

This encounter remains puzzling for many reasons.  First, why would eastern priests, from a far country (Persia) have reason to worship the king of the Jews, a people long oppressed by the Romans?  Also, how did the knowledge of this birth come to them?  Surely, the plebeian parents of Jesus must have been but stunned by these strange visitors.  Jesus, born to give a new message to his people and the world, reiterated the message of Zarathushtra: that the all-powerful God is good and that He desires each of us to lead moral lives.  Of course, the same message would encounter the same problems and evil would come to be the demonic presence in contradiction to the good that is now our heritage.

Christ commonly exorcised demons and saw wickedness everywhere, including his own disciples: "But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter.  'Get behind me, Satan!'  he said.  'You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.'"12  Obviously, Christ does not see Peter as Satan.  For Jesus, Satan is anything contrary to the Gospel.  As Carus reflects on this particular passage he concludes that: "...while it is natural that Christ used the traditional idea of Satan as a personification of the evil powers that furnish him with materials for his parables, Satan to him was mainly a symbol of things wicked or morally evil."13  According to which Gospel one reads, Satan plays different roles.

In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus is probably best seen as 'the miracle man.'  Jesus works miracles and heals prolifically.  It seems that the most common illness in Jesus' Israel was demonic possession.  Certainly the demons did not proceed from God's kingdom.  They were in effect, Satan himself.  Jesus is once accused of being possessed but answers: "Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.  If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself."14  Here then, the Satan of the Old Testament which was an unstable, adversarial angel, is now the sole author of evil.  Further, he spends a good amount of time possessing Jesus' countrymen.  Before Jesus took up his particular mission he faced Satan in a very dramatic way in the desert.  Satan, though he knew Jesus to be the son of God, supposedly tried to win him over to the dark side.  Jesus, who knew himself to be the son of God, was not tempted by any of Satan's puerile tricks.  Why, indeed, would the son of God feel any temptation by the devil?  Whether this question merits any serious consideration is not clear.  What appears certain, however, is that Satan was needed by the Christians.  His unusual, if not illogical appearances cemented his character as Christ's adversary.

In the Gospel of Luke the character Satan does not appear so often.  While Jesus does heal some possessed of demons he is not quick to mention Satan.  The synoptists did not agree on Christ's own feelings about Satan.  In the Gospel of John, Christ does not even meet Satan in the desert.

Why, given the relative absence of Satan in the Old Testament, does he play such a role in early Christianity?  Some scholars have entertained the idea that Christ spent time with the Essenes, that group of highly religious minds that lived in Qumran and left the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The Essenes' doctrines parallel Jesus' in many fundamental ways and reinvigorate the moral quest seen in Zarathushtra's religion.

The Essenes outdid their predecessors in setting ethnic identity aside, not as wrong, but as inadequate, and emphasized moral over ethnic identification.  When they depict the struggle of the Prince of Light against the Prince of Darkness... they envision the Prince of Light as a universal energy contending against an opposing cosmic force, the Prince of darkness.  For the Essenes these two energies represent not only their own conflicts with their opponents but a conflict within every person, within the human heart itself.15

This depiction of the struggle within the human heart illustrates the struggle that one faces on the moral quest.  Few would deny that the Jews, both ancient and modern, are a highly ethical people.  However, their ethics reside from a careful obedience to religious law.  Christ, as the 'fulfillment of the law', essentially destroys the significance of the holy texts and makes man's conscience his own law.  A law from texts can only apply so far to a world which often defies description.  Christ initiates humans into a moral quest that knows no laws but creates them anew for each situation.  The parable of the Good Samaritan illustrates this deeper law.  For such a quest the representation of the wrong, of the evil, can no longer be transferred to the goyim or the oppression of Egyptians, Romans, Canaanites, Babylonians, et al.  The evil necessary in following the Christian tradition must be a cosmic evil, as such a symbol for this evil became important.  The devil, no longer an advocate of God's higher purposes, was now the very antithesis of the moral quest.  He was Angra Mainyu and Druj­—the lie.

Satan is a sporadic and mysterious character in the different Gospels but he receives necessary clarification from the church fathers.  Every church father—Tertullian, Origen, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Tatian, Clement, Ambrose—had something to say about the devil.  His necessity, either theologically, or psychologically, was clearly recognized.  As these men and others slowly built the edifice of Christian theology, the mythology of Satan became increasingly complex.

One church father whose powerful writings shaped early Christianity spent a lifetime investigating the problem of evil.  Augustine, living in the fourth and fifth centuries of the common era, began his philosophical investigations very young.  Before he was converted to Christianity, he was a Manichean.  The Manichean religion stemmed directly from Zoroastrianism.  Consequently, its focus clearly delineated good and evil.  After his conversion, and much reflection, Augustine rejected Manichean dualism and affirmed God as the sole reality.  Augustine funneled Platonism and neo-Platonism into Christian thought, much as Aquinas was later the conduit for Aristotelian philosophy.  Plato, as discussed earlier, believed evil to be ignorance of the good.  Augustine translated this idea into Christianity as the privatio boni—the privation of the good.  Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher, expressed this ancient idea succinctly: "Nothing evil exists in itself, but only as an evil aspect of some actual entity."16

Augustine is one of the first to create an elaborate theodicy.  A theodicy attempts to explain the existence of evil in God's world.  As such, almost every thinker covered so far has created a theodicy.  As a true genre of thought and literature, though, the theodicy appeared with early Christianity.  Theodicies fundamentally rest on three tenets: I. That God is all-powerful, II. That God is all-good, and III. That evil exists.  Generally, it is thought that the existence of evil implies that either God is not all-good or all-powerful.  Augustine felt that evil does not really exist in God's kingdom: "Evil is fundamentally self-defeating and absurd; for to the extent that it succeeds it can only destroy that upon which it lives.  Accordingly a totally evil entity could not possibly exist; so far as anything has being it is good, and if it had no goodness it could not be at all."17  Evil, as we know it, derives not from God but from our own free will.  This thought was Augustine's major contribution to theodicy, one that remains current in our own time.

Augustine holds that natural evils, such as disease, are divinely ordained consequences of the primeval fall of man, and thus traces all evils either directly or indirectly to a misuse of creaturely freedom... the origin of moral evil lies hidden within the mystery of human and angelic freedom.  The freely acting will is an originating cause, and its operations are not explicable in terms of other prior causes.18

Augustine thus begins what will become an increasingly complicated set of theological, psychological, and mythological beliefs that all aim to reconcile the coexistence of good and evil. 

While Satan would seem to be essentially a non-entity in Augustine's model, he persists nevertheless.  It seems that the source of evil, though residing in our own free will, receives bitter temptation from God's nemesis.  Another theodicy, which takes a different turn with Satan's character, came to be known as Paradise Lost.

That to the hight of this great argument

I may assert Eternal Providence.

And justify the ways of God to men.19

Justifying the ways of God to men, this seems to be the sole purpose of theodicies.  It is perhaps, why the Book of Job is the finest theodicy by denying any explanations.  To understand God's ways, Job realized, was not a human's destiny.  Whether this changed with the advent of Christ, none can be sure.  Milton, at least, thought God's ways might be illuminated.

In Paradise Lost, Satan, though called the Arch-enemy, again fulfills the role that God intended him to fulfill.  He is part of the Godhead and his opposition serves its higher purposes: "Satan is... in service to God in a variety of ways that mostly involve their common enmity to Chaos."20   Is Satan then a scapegoat?  For what ends?  Satan seems to be the scapegoat whereby one does not trace evil back to God but to another.  God has been demoted from omnipotence, but perhaps this makes Him powerful in ways that are more important to humankind.

Satan has to be an opaque, self-generated, self-sustained figure, at least in his own conceit.  By being such a figure, Satan becomes the chief bulwark of God, a lightning rod for his protection from the old enemy he has to fear in the poem, a resentful human conscience.21

Satan, like Judas, does the thing that God cannot do, yet must do.  However, without the proper scapegoat the vilification felt in every human heart towards the cause which kills parents, starves children, and tortures the thinker would lead to a hatred of God, for human understanding finds the existence of evil irreconcilable with God.  Satan takes the blame in his role as the one who loved God too much.  The ancient sacrifice remains the heart of our religion.  Of course, the logic does work out quite right—that is, Satan too, must ultimately be God's creation—so the problem of evil falls from the lips of all who live: why?In Jung's life, the problem of evil was a central concern.  As a scholar he actively pursued research into the history and philosophy of evil.  As a psychologist he dug down into the hearts and minds of men to find what agency led to the evil acts men commit.  Whether or not Jung answered the problem for himself remains unclear.  The wealth of thoughts and analyses he left, though, are highly original.

One of Jung's most original ideas, the shadow, shows that evil need not be some external, demonic force but only the parts of consciousness that each of us represses.  The shadow is both relative and personal.  For one person, the shadow may contain envy and jealousy—things not allowed conscious awareness—while for another (for instance, a storm trooper) compassion and pity may reside in the shadow.  The shadow holds those parts of our consciousness that we cannot attend to with our ego-ideal in our social world.  Most often, especially in the west, the shadow becomes associated with very dark elements.  Mr. Hyde, for example, is literature's greatest metaphor for the shadow, he is Dr. Jekyll's worst side.  The lust, greed, and anger that Jekyll would not attend to consciously came out full blown in Hyde's careless existence.  The Victorian attitude that makes man's creaturely elements unacceptable makes Hydes out of Jekylls, and demons out of angels.  Nietzsche expresses this sentiment well in a passage from his masterwork Thus Spake Zarathushtra:

And nothing evil grows out of you henceforth, unless it be the evil that grows out of the fight among your virtues.  My brother, if you are fortunate you have only one virtue and no more: then you will pass over the bridge more easily.  It is a distinction to have many virtues, but a hard lot; and many have gone into the desert and taken their lives because they had wearied of being the battle and the battlefield of virtues.22

The overly deliberate path of repression towards sainthood leads to spiritual despair.  The shadow grows too large when all that is unsightly gets stuffed into it.  The time comes when the shadow, because of its sheer size, becomes overwhelming.

The parts of the shadow that we choose not to face are true parts of ourselves and should not be ostracized by consciousness; their recognition is both natural and necessary: "The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.  To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real."23  This proper recognition involves an honesty and courage few can muster.  Avoiding this task, though, allows the shadow to foment its violence and come out in unexpected, unforeseen ways. 

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.  Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance.  Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world.  And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.24

Placing the locus of evil outside of oneself quickly leads to the kind of consumptive evil stated above.   The fiercest evil makes itself known not by blatant acts but by a quiet, insistent destruction that hides within the simple acts, words, and thoughts of the unthinking man.  Evil, as shadow, is not loud and brutal, but sly; it is thoughtlessness, carelessness, laziness, envy, and insecurity.  As such it will make the best of men succumb to its power and feed the cycle of gentle harm that like an infestation devours the fertile crops leaving all to suffer famine.

Is evil, then, a matter of conscience?  Is it, like many thought, the privatio boni?  While Jung considered evil to come largely from man's personal shadow, he also believed there to be a collective, archetypal shadow.  This, unfortunately, is the spirit of an evil that haunts mankind, but unlike a phantom, it is real: "Who says that the evil in the world we live in, that is right in front of us, is not real!  Evil is terribly real, for each and every individual.  If you regard the principle of evil as a reality you can just as well call it the devil.  I personally find it hard to believe that the idea of the privatio boni still holds water."25  Jung thought that the privatio argument wrongly underestimated evil.  To have a good, he considered, required a bad.  The opposites between which all things extant are strung, require each other.  Good must have its evil for there to be any morality at all:

On the practical level the privatio boni doctrine is morally dangerous, because it belittles and irrealizes Evil and thereby weakens the Good, because it deprives it of its necessary opposite; there is no white without black, no right without left, no above without below, no warm without cold, no truth without error, no light without darkness, etc.  If evil is an illusion, Good is necessarily illusory too.  That is the reason why I hold that the privatio boni is illogical, irrational and even a nonsense.  The moral opposites are an epistemological necessity...26

The hidden sanctity of Satan emerges again.  He serves God's purposes.  The presence of evil produces a better world than the ignorance of morals.  The difference between man and animal reflects this.  Animals live in an apparent bliss for they lack the consciousness that man's fall created.  Self-consciousness, consciousness of others, and consciousness of good and evil: these are man's divine attributes and though their price is heavy, their value lies beyond the stars.  Few would choose to be beasts rather than men, though some do and we rightly call them monsters, for they do not belong among men.

Jung was not sure whether God was entirely free of the bestial and demonic.  In Jung's, Answer to Job, he ruminates over the Book of Job which seemingly became a lifelong obsession.  Jung was puzzled by God's nature among the ancient Israelites.  He thinks the entire incident with Job the work of an immature God:

...a God who knew no moderation in his emotions and suffered precisely from this lack of moderation.  He himself admitted that he was eaten up with rage and jealousy and that this knowledgewas painful to him.  Insight existed along with obtuseness, loving-kindness along with cruelty, creative power along with destructiveness.  Everything was there, and none of these qualities was an obstacle to the other.  Such a condition is only conceivable either when no reflecting consciousness is present at all, or when the capacity for reflection is very feeble and a more or less adventitious phenomenon.  A condition of this sort can only be described as amoral.27

God as unreflective!  This seems a bit far for Jung to go.  However, he thinks that Job represented a higher morality than Yahweh because humans, being less than omnipotent, developed a more scrutinizing consciousness than God.  Again, Jung seems to have overstated the case by using something akin to Occam's razor in understanding the situation.  In the comprehension of God, though, the simplest explanation is almost never the correct one.  God represents those things beyond human understanding and, as such, the morality of humans cannot easily be applied to Him.  Nevertheless, God Himself concedes at the end of Job (as mentioned earlier) that Job spoke the truth about Him.  This curious statement stretches understanding well-beyond normal limits.

In one of Jung's more crafty, perhaps slightly resentful, analyses he brings God to charge:

...the idea that the good father-god of Christianity is so vindictive that it takes the cruel sacrifice of his son to reconcile him to humanity; ...the belief that the Summum Bonum has a tendency to lead such an inferior and helpless creature as man into temptation, only to consign him to eternal damnation if he is not astute enough to spot the divine trap.  ...an affront to our religious feelings...28

As Jung shows here, God possesses a side that offends what is normally taken to be 'religious.'  Looking closely at Job's case or any number of others, like the almost-sacrifice of Abraham's son Isaac, God puts man to tests beyond the ethical.  Somewhere between the ethical life that Zarathushtra and Jesus promulgated and the ostensible cruelty of God lies true religion, connection with the divine.  Jung thinks this to be Job's victory:

This is perhaps the greatest thing about Job, that, faced with this difficulty, he does not doubt the unity of God.  He clearly sees that God is at odds with himself—so totally at odds that he, Job, is quite certain of finding in God a helper and an 'advocate' against God.  As certain as he is of the evil in Yahweh, he is equally certain of the good.  In a human being who renders us evil we cannot expect at the same time to find a helper.  But Yahweh is not a human being: he is both a persecutor and a helper in one, and the one aspect is as real as the other.  Yahweh is not split but is an antinomy—a totality of inner opposites and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism, his omniscience and his omnipotence.29

This explains the existence of evil and Satan in God's kingdom: God is Satan.  He is not divided against Himself, just as the trinity is not simply three, but three and one.  God is all things.  To feel the insuperable pain of existence and yet know that it too forms part of the good; such a task lies beyond human reason, even beyond emotion, yet it remains possible for the spirit and possible for God.  The experience of God, that ineffable gnosis of reverence, acceptance, even affirmation; such are the things that lie beyond humanity, the highest state of  a unifying human consciousness.  Nietzsche adequately expresses this notion calling it "joy":

What does joy not want?  It is thirstier, more cordial, hungrier, more terrible, more secret than all woe; it wants itself, it bites into itself, the ring’s will strives in it; it wants love, it wants hatred, it is overrich, gives, throws away, begs that one might take it, thanks the taker, it would like to be hated; so rich is joy that it thirsts for woe, for hell, for hatred, for disgrace, for the cripple, for world—this world, oh, you know it!

You higher men, for you it longs, joy, the intractable blessed one—for your woe, you failures.  All eternal joy longs for failures.  For all joy wants itself, hence it also wants agony.  O happiness, O pain!  Oh, break, heart!  You higher men, do learn this, joy wants eternity.  Joy wants the eternity of all things, wants deep, deep eternity.30

            Job's trial.  Perhaps it was not even the angel Satan who started it but Job's own righteousness.  As God's favorite perhaps he knew the joy that thirsts for woe.  Out of his horrific suffering he achieves gnosis of God, he meets Him face to face.  His suffering brought the God from above to the world below.  Job came to know the very nature of God, he spoke truly about Him.  Knowing the nature of God, as Job did, may explain the evil of the world in a religious light but how does one even begin to integrate such a conception with the common context in which man lives and interacts?  Few would suffer as Job did, fewer still would feel blessed by it and achieve gnosis.  As God said to Satan, Job was like no other.  How then do we, the untested, perhaps even the failed and the despairing, accept evil?

Despite being despairing and resentful, the vast majority of people retain their conscience.  They stand, a bit shattered, more than a little fatigued, but still mainly unified hearing the voice of goodness.  Just as often, though, the voice of evil speaks:

...the moral reaction is the outcome of an autonomous dynamism, fittingly called man's daemon, genius, guardian angel, better self, heart, inner voice, the inner and higher man, and so forth.  Close beside these, beside the positive, 'right' conscience, there stands the negative, 'false' conscience called the devil, seducer, tempter, evil spirit, etc.  Everyone who examines his conscience is confronted with this fact, and he must admit that the good exceeds the bad by only a very little, if at all.31

Facing such a stand-off man yet tries, over and over, to do the good while recognizing the evil.  This is as much as we can do.  Striving, soon our actions form patterns of habit and the good becomes the norm.  Nevertheless, it is our duty to remain vigilant, knowing that thoughtlessness and forgetfulness often turn into cruelty.

The journey of individuation, though a hard one, remains one's task as it is both a social and sacred responsibility: "If we are to have any real power in meeting the challenge of the world's evil, each of us must take responsibility at an individual level."32  Collective evil, the combined horror of many individual shadows, arose too often in this century: "Collective evil often defies understanding.  These forces arise from the unconscious minds of great numbers of people.  When such mental epidemics occur, we are often helpless in combating the scourge that ensues."33   Epidemics are best treated through prevention.  The prevention of such collective evil involves the inoculation of evil by its acceptance.  Just as a disease is avoided through the injection of weakened germs, so evil must be treated by itself in weakened form.  The acceptance of evil on its own terms, neither denying its invidiousness nor amplifying its power over the good, leads to a more whole consciousness of oneself and the world:

Therefore the individual who wishes to have an answer to the problem of evil, as it is posed today, has need, first and foremost, of self-knowledge, that is, the utmost possible knowledge of his own wholeness.  He must know relentlessly how much good he can do, and what crimes he is capable of, and must beware of regarding the one as real and the other as illusion. Both are elements within his nature, and both are bound to come to light in him, should he wish—as he ought—to live without self-deception or self-delusion.34

Self-deception becomes the greatest evil in Jung's new understanding.  True authenticity recognizes the horror of reality and accepts it as unavoidable.  The evil that can be avoided, that should be avoided, the evil in our relationships and perceptions of others; these evils we can still conquer.  The triumph of oneself over such evil, a triumph not of victory but of empathy, leads to a world less rife with evil.  To achieve such a world one must trust in both themselves and God and accept the great work that lies ahead:

God acts out of the unconscious of man and forces him to harmonize and unite the opposing influences to which his mind is exposed from the unconscious.  The unconscious wants both: to divide and unite.  In his striving for unity, therefore, man may always count on the help of a metaphysical advocate, as Job clearly recognized.  The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious.  That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite.  The conflict in his nature is so great that the incarnation can only be bought by an expiatory self-sacrifice offered up to the wrath of God's dark side.35

Sacrifice remains the heart of our religion.