A book which begins with the sentence “Evil makes us Human” must surely compel
attention. This is no ordinary account of what is usually meant by the
problem of evil, where the main emphasis is on justifying the ways of God to
man. Instead, Paul W. Kahn’s aim is to explore the nature of evil itself. He
interprets it, not just as doing or experiencing bad things, but as “a way
of being in the world”. Evil, he claims, is about making ourselves the
source of our own meaning, a meaning inevitably negated by death, the
certainty of which gives urgency and depth to the way life is lived. It is
this consciousness of our mortality, and the refusal to accept its
implications, which can lead to the worship of false gods. Ascribing
ultimate value to what is essentially nothing at all results in what he
calls “a pathology of the will”. Personal evil is essentially about
wilfulness rather than reason, nor can it be subsumed within our rational
understanding. Evil in this sense, as part of our humanity, is not a
fashionable concept, but we have good reasons to recognize it, not least in
ourselves.
Such a crude summary of a profound and complex thesis cannot begin to do
justice to this strange and thought-provoking book. Its starting point is a
prolonged meditation on the first two chapters of Genesis, with their
contrasting stories of creation. Humanity, so the myths tell us, belongs
within an ordered world, which can be seen to be good, and of which it is
possible to make sense. This is the message of the first story, in Genesis
1, which in the light of our present understanding can be interpreted as a
charter for rationality and science. But that is not the whole story. As
human beings we are also aware of our radical incompleteness, of being
terrifyingly alone, of the need for action as well as contemplation, and of
possessing a finite will that seeks to realize an infinite meaning. This,
according to Kahn, is the message of the second account of creation and the
story of the Fall, in Genesis 2.
He sets both creation stories in sharp contrast to the tragedy of Oedipus, for
whom the problems of existence lay not in the order of the world, nor in the
assertions of his will, but in the limitations of his knowledge and the
apparent malevolence of fate. In Genesis, however, there are no hidden
traps. The choice is clear. We can know good and evil only by sharing in
them. There is no failure of reason, which is why, in biblical terms, the
Socratic maxim “know thyself” can never be enough. To know ourselves is to
know our mortality and that, acccording to Genesis, is precisely the origin
of our disordered wills and all that flows from them.
Which of these accounts is nearest the truth of our human condition? Will
knowledge save us? Or does the problem lie within ourselves? Kahn has no
doubts about the answer, and his repeated criticism of liberalism’s
optimistic remedies for the world’s problems, as if rationality could save
us, points to a much deeper source of evil than mere ignorance. Our human
problem, he writes, is that nothing we can do as human beings is adequate to
the ultimate meaning we intuit.
No life ever realizes its full potential; no state policies or actions are a
full realization of a state’s sovereignty; no work of art is adequate to the
artist’s full aesthetic vision; no narrative is adequate to the fullness of
experience. In every direction, man knows himself to be more than he can
realize. If we begin with this tension, the problem of evil has less to do
with the body’s uncontrolled desires than with the problem of a finite will
that seeks to realize an infinite meaning. Evil is not the pathology of the
body, but of the sacred.
In the story of the Fall, the reason for the disaster is fixed firmly on the
desire to be like God. Idolatry is the prime symptom of this fundamental
pathology. Its evil character lies in our human attempt to make ourselves
the source of the sacred. A religion of law, for instance, runs the risk of
becoming idolatrous in so far as it closes the gap between ordinary life,
and the power and mystery of the transcendent. The point is relevant to the
distinction between covenantal religious communities, such as Judaism and
Islam, which are united by common obedience to a code of practice, and
organic communities, such as Christianity, which are united by a common
relationship as expressed, for example, in the Eucharist. At stake are
fundamental questions about how and where we encounter the sacred – in the
law, or through self-sacrifice? Some of the misunderstandings and animosity
between Christians, Jews and Muslims can be traced to this distinction.
“Where one sees ultimate meanings, the other sees only negation; where one
sees God’s presence the other sees only the obstinate refusal of belief;
where one sees the sacred, the other see idolatry; where one sees life, the
other sees death”. These differences are experienced as being matters of
huge importance, because evil is perceived “not in the failure to meet
internal norms of a system of belief. Rather it is the external assault on
the claim to have located the point of the sacred in a fallen world”.
In Christian belief this identification of the sacred is associated, not so
much with obedience, as with love and self-sacrifice. On the face of it
neither love nor self-sacrifice makes sense, yet often each will seem to be
the most sensible phenomenon in the world. “Love” says Kahn, “is the sole
necessity in a meaningful universe . . . without love we would still know
good and evil but we would not care”. Love and evil are linked together as
opposites, two sides of the same coin. This close relationship is perhaps
one reason why suicide bombing has its attractions. Love expresses itself in
sacrifice, and evil in murder.
Both are represented in the story of Cain and Abel. Why did Cain murder his
brother? Jealousy because Abel’s sacrifice was recognized by God, whereas
Cain’s was not, cannot be the whole story. Was it that Cain could not face
recognition by God, a recognition that would have entailed the acceptance of
a love he could not tolerate? It is in loving and being loved that we
discover our finitude and mortality, a discovery which the story hints would
for Cain have been unbearable. We are told that he could not himself accept
the prospect of death; hence the mark of Cain, with its assurance that his
life would be spared. Paradoxically, the first murderer in this
extraordinary myth eventually becomes one of the founding fathers of
humanity.
Killing and being killed also lie at the heart of the nation state. The wars
we fight tell us who we are. A willingness for self-sacrifice may appear
senseless to those who observe only the suffering, but without such
willingness there can be no love, and without love there can be no meaning
to our communal identity.
A chapter on America’s guilt over its history of slavery raises uncomfortable
questions about how its acceptance and persistence were possible in a
supposedly Christian nation, and why the slaves never rebelled. The obvious
answer is that, at the heart of the experience, there was a readiness to see
slaves as less than human, a prejudice confirmed by their supposed moral
failure in not fighting back. The subsequent fear that they might, after
all, be a threat to their oppressors provided a further motive for
dehumanizing them. Safely relegated to the world of nature, rather than as
part of civilized humanity, they could be treated as objects of shame, like
Adam and Eve whose expulsion from Eden was the expression of their moral and
physical nakedness. It is no coincidence that humiliation and the shame of
nakedness also featured so largely in the Nazi death camps.
Out of Eden is a rich and fascinating book full of unusual conjunctions and
insights. Its meditative tone tends to lapse occasionally into
sententiousness; the following utterance is fairly typical: “Every symbolic
order, I suspect, has a rhythm which moves between transubstantiation and
labour”. I am shamefully unclear as to what that sentence actually means.
When Kahn resorts to straight exposition of Genesis, however, or to
historical analysis, he can be clear and convincing, but there are too many
sections in which the high level of abstraction can lead to frustration and
bewilderment. It is worth persevering, however, because the book is full of
unexpected insights, and there is much to be learnt from the way in which a
scholar deeply immersed in both Judaism and Christianity interprets some of
the foundation stories from both traditions. Evil, he concludes, is not
banal; it is the opposite of love, a symptom of our rage against mortality,
a false understanding of who we are, and what we are meant to be.
There is also a pleasing irony in the thought that what was once imagined to
be the location of Eden is almost certainly in what is now Iraq. Relevant
also, in the light of present experience, are questions about such paradoxes
as the use of force to create a culture of tolerance, or murder to express
the love of God. Even with the best will in the world, as Adam and Eve
discovered, “knowing good and evil” is not as easy as one might think. It is
also salutary to recall, as Paul Kahn so powerfully demonstrates, that evil
is often uncomfortably close to the sacred.
Paul W. Kahn
OUT OF EDEN
Adam and Eve and the problem of evil
240pp. Princeton University Press. £18.95 (US $29.95).
978 0 691 12693 7
John Habgood was formerly Archbishop of York. His books include Church
and Nation in a Secular Age, 1983, Being a Person: Where faith and science
meet, 1998, and The Concept of Nature, 2002.
