THE “WILLS” OF GOD AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
“Thousands upon thousands attended him; ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him.”
Daniel 7:10
“And God said, Let us make…”
Genesis 1:26
The more I read about the symbolism that undergirds scripture and how it expresses a perennial metaphysics, the more I see it as imperative that literalism be stamped out of one’s mind when dealing with the deeper meaning of scripture, and even more when learning metaphysics. To the extent we do that, we gain a new appreciation and understanding of the convergences between the beautiful metaphysical philosophy that has held the minds of so many sages and the beautiful symbolic language of scripture.
This way of seeing things is the reason I see in the concept of the “Divine Council” a resolution for both the issues associated with the “Will of God” and the “problem” of evil. In short, I equate the council with the “Divine ideas/forms” of Plato (Which Schuon preferred to call “Supraformal” manifestation) and God Himself is (no surprise) the “Sun of the Good” or “The One” of Plotinus. Of course this is not original to me, anyone with a background in Platonism knows this. I’m just here writing this in part to explain this to myself and in part to those who are willing to read. As we start this properly, keep in mind this image of the “hierarchy of being”, since not everyone is familiar with Plotinus (and even I am still learning). It will be very important. It is also important to note that I will not be painstakingly precise here, since that would mean this post grows into a book. If you want some background, there is an entire series dedicated to the metaphysical cosmology that is assumed here, and is seen in the image below. So, let’s go on a journey.
I
THE WILL OF THE GOOD
“…the proper effect of the One’s activity is the existence of everything else.”
Lloyd Gerson [1]
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”
Genesis 1:1
God is often called “The Good”, because His nature is beneficent, willing creation and blessing it. Of course this is all analogical language, because God is not a creature that “makes choices”, “wills” like we do, or is arbitrary is any way. God is His goodness, and He is His own act of Goodness, the “first cause” that yields the “effect” of creation. As the saying goes, “good is diffusive of itself (bonum est diffusivum sui)” [1]. What is often forgotten here is that this “self-diffusiveness” is also not “differentiated”. Because God is simple, that is, without parts, or real distinctions in himself, His self-giving is also “without parts”. He, the infinite act and fullness of existence, gives it all, and this all is never exhausted, and is (at first), on the level of His fullness as the One, pure existence.
As this fullness of existence, He has in Himself the “possibilities” of all things, which are the “divine ideas”, and he has them “indistinctly”, that is, without differentiation. However, as His light of existence “spreads out”, that is, as we move our perspective from God in his fullness, or God as absolute, to the “effect” of his self-diffusiveness, “creation” (or the realm of change and relativity), these “possibilities” begin to take on “real” distinctions, “real” here meaning “relatively real”, not the absolute reality of God. This is where we enter the “realm of forms”.
II
THE WILL OF THE GODS
“The One provides the existence of things, not their ousia (essence, or substance), which derives from the second principle, Intellect as the arche of Forms.”
Aldis Uzdavinys [2]
“God stands in the congregation of the mighty; He judges among the gods.”
Psalm 82:1
“The sentence is by the decree of the watchers, the decision by the word of the holy ones, to the end that the living may know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will and sets over it the lowliest of men.”
Daniel 4:17
An important distinction I have learned from the perennialists is that between God as “Beyond Being” and God as “Being”. It is true that in God no distinction is “real” in an absolute sense, but nonetheless we can conceptualize distinctions, which are simply our differentiated experience of the one reality of God is an essentially fragmented cosmos, and not God’s essence in Himself. God in Himself is simple and “Beyond Being”, and all limitative affirmations whatsoever. God in relation to us is “Being”, and is, in Guenon’s words, “The first affirmation” [3]. It is through the latter we get to indirectly infer the former, just as it is through the Son we know the Father. It is God as “Being” we can call the “Uncreated Intellect” (different from the “divine intellect” of Plotinus, which is created, or “Caused”), “Logos”, or “Intelligence”. I should add here that the word “Consciousness” is applicable only in one analogical sense, since the Logos is nothing like our human consciousness, which is only a mode of intelligence among many. The Logos is that “self-diffusiveness” that spawns the cosmos. At the untraversable (for us, not God) boundary between uncreated and created, the “One” becomes “many” in a “fragmentation” that is also “incarnation” [4]. Keep in mind that in this, the uncreated doesn’t cease to exist, all this explanation in terms of movement is the movement of our “perspective” through the various levels of being, which exist “simultaneously”. The indefinite and uncountable multitudes of “modes” and “possibilities” of this “intelligence” are now “relatively independent” of each other. These are the “forms”, whether of “circularity” or “cubeness” or “man”; these are the various “sides” and “possibilities” of Being:
For Plotinus, every Form mirrors the whole of Intellect, but from its own perspective. [2]
These forms/ideas/possibilities are related hierarchically and “horizontally” in an unfathomable web of relationships, and are teeming with life, because these are not mere “objects”, but being “possibilities” of intelligence, synonymous with “Being”, they are intelligences themselves, “gods” or “angels” of varying “power” depending on the extent of their influence on each other; depending, in other words, on their place in the hierarchy. Since some possibilities are more “important” than others, they influence each other in a “hierarchical” manner:
“…the “place” of nous or divine intellect. Ennead V.8 (“On the Intelligible Beauty”) represents one of the most beautiful sections in Plotinus, in which the noetic realm is described not in terms of abstract and “ethereal” Platonic Forms, but as a living interpenetrating universe, boiling with life. So intense, we are reminded of the visionary “imaginal world” of the Islamic Neoplatonists, with its emerald cities and angelic spirits and concretized Ideas… The Forms of Nous are not simply self-subsistent universals but both thinking beings (analogous to the angels of the later Islamic philosophies) and objects of intellection. [2]
These are the “myriads of angel” around the throne, an angel representing a possibility. They are the “thrones” around the Throne. The uncreated light of the Logos spawns many lights, the “stars”, which are the Logos in a particular form or “perspective”. This realm is that of the “created intellect”, where the uncreated gives way to creation. Each world is governed by a collection of possibilities/forms arranged in a vertical “pyramid” of relations, all ultimately united in an overarching “arche”, the fullness of the intellect for that world, the uncreated intellect’s “created possibility/intellect/form” for that world. The same is true for other worlds, and yes this leads to what many would call a “multiverse”, as not all possibilities are suitable for our “world”, and there are an uncountable and endless amount of them, but that is beyond the scope of this post.
These “gods” are the “administrators” of the cosmos. It is admittedly hard for most to imagine “possibilities” as living, even more “alive” than we are without slipping into anthropomorphism and psychologism, but then we have no choice. It is where the logic leads us. This is why myth is so useful and important. The possibilities “rule” over that which concerns them. The possibility or form of the bird “rules” over the manifestation of birds, it does this indirectly through the subordinate possibilities of species, which in its turn rules whatever possibilities below it until the direct rule of the manifestation of the bird, analogous to how we organise our communities (Creation is called God’s “Kingdom” for a reason). Here there is no “direct will” of God, there are as many wills as there are possibilities, as each possibility manifests God’s will for existence in a particular mode, and it cannot be otherwise. No one ever “goes to” God without the intermediary of the forms. The gods are God in a limited form, a celestial incarnation. However, it is with this differentiation of possibilities that comes with the very diffusiveness of the Good that leads to “conflict”, or what we often call “evil”.
III
THE “WAR IN HEAVEN” AND THE “FALL OF LUCIFER”
And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
Revelation 12:7-9
God creates only by “giving existence” to that which wants to be this or that. Possibilities are differentiated revelations of Being; they proceed from It and not from an arbitrary Will which would conceive them ex nihilo; and it is this diversifying and contrasting refraction that gives rise to the inverted and privative modalities of possibilities which are necessarily positive at their outset, or positive in their roots. This opposing and inverting differentiation is due to the dark pole of Relativity, of Māyā; this is the metaphysical basis of the “fall of the angels”.
Frithjof Schuon [5]
There are two “directions” by which we can view the hierarchy of forms in “heaven”, the world of forms or the created intellect. We can either descend (creation) or ascend (redemption). These two directions are “simultaneous” as there is no “time” when speaking of the created structure of the Cosmos, even if there is “cause” and “effect”. The descending movement is due to the self-diffusiveness of the Good. This diffusiveness does not stop, “In a hierarchic fashion there is a descent in the direction of nothingness or non-existence without this limit ever being reached.” [6]. The image here is the spread of light in “darkness”, this darkness being both (as all symbols have multiple and often opposing meanings) the unknowable infinitude of God and, in a negative sense, “nothingness”.
This “spreading out” causes the various possibilities to manifest in ever more “independent” forms, their “horizontal” mutual exclusion becoming more and more prevalent until the “fragmentation” that was “peaceful” and “soft” in the “timeless” succession and “spaceless” distinctions of heaven’s “aeviternity”, which is like the difference between colours and musical notes, becomes the “hard” and “violent” exclusion of the “sensible” or “psycho-physical” world.
This is what is dramatized as the “fall of the angels”. The “dark side” of the self-diffusive Logos is “Lucifer”. What opposes “Lucifer” – the “hardening principle”, “ruler” of the “psycho-physical” cosmos of violence and death, who Paul calls the “prince and power of the air” and who Christ calls the “ruler of this age” – is the “ascending” principle, “Michael”; the “warring face” of the Logos, the “Guardian of Israel”, “Israel” having meanings extending up to the entire cosmos. Interpreting this part of the book of revelation in this light (and remembering that this is just one interpretation among many), the “hardening principle” cannot manifest itself in the heavenly intellect, it is “pushed out”, the “dragon and his angels” fall to “earth”, the realm of time, and entropy, and finally death. The “Woman with Child” is the “World Soul”, which is above the “sphere of the moon” (everything below that is ruled by the serpent). She contemplates the forms, which are the Stars on her head, and is therefore glorious as the Sun which is her garment. It is this world soul that births individual men, who are to partake of the intellect, and “snatched up” into the heavens.
IV
THE “RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD”
“It is neither in the existence of evil things that evil lies nor in their existential properties nor in their faculties of sensation and of action”
Frithjof Schuon
“And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever. And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. {hell: or, the grave} And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.”
Revelation 20:9-14
“This personification of the malefic power has induced some, in Islam as well as in Christianity, not only to see in the devil a quasi-human individual, but even to envisage his ultimate reintegration into Divine Mercy; if such an opinion is inadmissible in this anthropomorphist form, it nonetheless holds some metaphysical import to the extent that it refers finally to the apocatastasis: evil will be resorbed into its original and neutral substance; fire and darkness will be transmuted into light.”
Frithjof Schuon
When we think through the “problem of evil” as we have now, we see that evil is not “something”, but a tendency to nothing, the possibility of negation, which is not a “possibility” in the sense of a divine idea, which is “positive” and real, but an indirect “negative” effect of the diffusiveness of the Good, which is implicit in the realm of forms, but not manifest there. The manifestation must occur outside of that realm, as all possibilities must manifest somewhere, even the “indirect” possibilities. Because of this “indirect” nature of evil, it is safe to say that it will eventually exhaust itself. Since true “nothingness” is an impossibility, all “evil” effects are ultimately illusory on the level of the absolutely real, that is, on the level of God’s fullness as “The One”. As Schuon put it:
According to St Thomas, evil results from the diversity of creatures and the gradation of their qualities, the compensation for evil being the total Order in view of which it is tolerated; physical ills are the privation of Being in relation to the substance of creatures; moral evil is this same privation with respect to their activity. In order to escape from Manichean dualism, which ruins the notion of the Supreme Good, St Thomas concludes that evil does not have its cause in Being—it does not in fact have its direct cause there—and that it simply attaches itself to the good by depriving it of a particular quality; evil “is” not, but it “exists” or, in other words, it is an evil, whereas its existence is a good with respect to—and because of—universal totality. In referring to an Augustinian formula previously mentioned, we might add that the cause of evil—but not inasmuch as it is evil—is the innate need of the Good to impart itself, for it is this need that produces the world, and it is this production—or this unfolding of Being—that requires differentiation, vertical as well as horizontal; now differentiation entails modes of privation of Being, hence what we are entitled to call evil… Divine Freedom means that God is free not to create a particular world, but not that He is free not to create at all. This is to say that Divine Freedom—that of Being (Brahma saguna, “with attributes”)—acts on the modes and forms of universal Manifestation and not on its immutable principles; God is free—and He has the power—to eliminate a specific evil, but not evil as such, given that evil as such is a necessary penalty for the full unfolding of Manifestation, and that this unfolding—like Manifestation itself—results necessarily from the Infinitude of the Divine Essence. Now for the Essence, the question of Manifestation, and all the more so that of evil, does not arise; from the perspective of the eternal Wakefulness of the Absolute, the universal Dream has never been, for the accident, whatever its quality, can never add anything to the Substance. But one could also contend that the accident is nothing other than the Substance, or that it partakes of the latter’s reality; or yet, that it possesses all the reality corresponding to its nature or possibility.
What this means is that whether through “death” or “resurrection”, which are two sides of the same principle (I explain that here), evil itself is exhausted, as a dead man cannot feel pain, and is free from evil, “He who loses his life for me will find it”. Of course I haven’t mentioned “Hell”, but then a person in hell is not “dead” in the fullest and truest sense (negation of “ego”). When we all meet at the “Summit of the ages”, the “apex of heaven” – and by “all”, I mean all men from heaven, hell, and everything in between, as seen in the book of Revelation’s white throne Judgement, where “the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them”, precisely because this is the “summit” beyond all forms and at the “edge of the created”, above the heavenly forms and the fallen earth – our true selves are revealed, our true “positive” possibilities are shown is in the unified form of the Logos, the “book of life”. On this “level”, Death and Hell cannot manifest, they are “thrown into the lake of fire and tormented”, their torment being their inability to manifest. This is the same fate awaiting the “false ego”, which is not found in the Logos, or in other words, whose “name” is not found in the “book of life”. Only our true “intellectual/possible” selves are left to participate in the life of the forms and return with the “New Jerusalem” to an unfallen “earth”.
If you have been paying attention. What I just described is not something that will happen in the future, but is happening now, and is always “present”, and is a long symbolic explanation of the spiritual life that we are called to emulate. The greatest lesson of the book of Revelation is that it describes the present spiritual life of the Christian. “The dragon” is the principle of the fallen cosmos “The beast” is this principle as it manifests in what Paul calls “the flesh”. Christ is to come with his “army” of virtues to conquer this beast, and put it down. The result of this is Theosis, “heaven” or the “New Jerusalem” settles in our hearts, and this reality will be revealed in the “resurrection”, the revelation of a reality that already is. This is where the logic of Scripture takes us. It is in that unity of the heavenly intellect that Athens meets Jerusalem. The ultimate lesson of the book of revelation is also the "best of theodicies", as Schuon put it:
“Whatever our degree of doctrinal knowledge or of ignorance may be, the best way to grasp the metaphysical limits of evil is to conquer evil in ourselves, and this is possible, precisely, only on the basis of an intuition of the Divine Essence, which coincides with the Infinite Good… Knowledge of the immanent Substance is victory over the accidents of the soul—hence over privative accidentality as such since there is an analogy between the microcosm and the macrocosm—and it is for that reason the best of theodicies.”
[1] Gerson, L. P. (1999). Plotinus (The Arguments of the Philosophers).
[2] Uzdavinys, A., & Bregman, J. (2009). The Heart of Plotinus: The Essential Enneads (The Perennial Philosophy) (A. Uzdavinys (ed.)). World Wisdom.
[3] Guenon, R. (2004). The Multiple States of the Being. Sophia Perennis
[4] Wood, J. D. (2017). Creation Is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity Of The Logoi In Maximus Confessor. 7177. https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12382
[5] Schuon, F. (2013). From the Divine to the Human: A New Translation with Selected Letters (Writings of Frithjof Schuon). World Wisdom.
[6] Schuon, F., & Nasr, S. H. (2005). The Essential Frithjof Schuon. In The library of perennial philosophy. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0513/2005014071.html