The Uses of the Devil: Is there an Absolute Evil?

Transposing a famous maxim about God to the Devil one could say that if there were no Devil, it would have been necessary to invent one. To the credit of the Devil goes much adventure in the odyssey of life including the first one of leaving the Garden of Eden for earth, sharpening of our faculties and capabilities and unfolding of good as he is the principle of resistance, variety and colour in the drama of life and universal drive or march for excellence or assertion of individual talent  and ten thousand uses of the ego in the struggle and enrichment of life. It is not only the poet-philosophers such as Goethe and Iqbal who have paid rich tributes to it but  great saints and sages of various traditions. In fact the key functions attributed to the Devil such as leading people astray and inflicting loss are in the Muslim Tradition functions of Divine Names (Al-Mudill, Az-Zar). Jung in his Answer to Job was not too off the mark in identifying the Devil as the left hand of God and protesting against dualistic reading of religion so as to posit God against the Devil thesis as if God isn’t in absolute control and the Devil ultimately not serving except through His leave.

    What is the function of evil in God’s scheme? Is there any consolation for Satan? Are disbelieving people eternally lost in perdition and has mercy no role for them? To these questions traditions and their exponents including the sages have given answers that are hardly known today by those who cite problem of evil as a reason against belief in God. In fact there prevails a problematic view amongst major philosophers such as Nietzsche whose revised formulation of trinity figured God the Devil as one of the three constituents, as he felt that otherwise evil is left unaccountable. Eclipse of traditional metaphysical perspective is largely responsible for modern man’s perverted approach to the existence of evil. Evil is said to be ingrained in the ultimate nature of things. Let us explore how Frithjof Schuon, the Sufi sage of the twentieth century, addresses these issues.

    The first question requires establishing divine goodness in the first place so that one could afford not to worry about the power of Satan. One can’t critique the mystical vision or metaphysical realization of God’s goodness from outside. How can one possibly problematize the following position by any rationalistic critique? One must be a sage to find out any fault in it. It is self authenticating as is religious experience characteristically. One may disagree with it but can’t argue with it. One has to be an insider to evaluate the unanimous testimony of the mystics and sages which Schuon explicates here:

As far as theodicy is concerned, it is important to realize that the intellect perceives universal or divine Good a priori, that is, it comes to perceive it before it understands – or wishes to understand – the nature of evil; and if the contemplative metaphysician may perhaps overlook the doctrine of evil, this is precisely because he is certain in advance, and in unconditional and, as it were, primordial fashion, of the infinite precedence of Good, under three aspects of “Pure Being,” “Pure Spirit” and “Pure Beatitude.”

    Of course Martin and like minded critics would claim that the sage’s intuition is not verifiable for him and it begs the question but to this our Sage can’t reply by any rational argument and he need not as he has seen it and of course the victory over evil or consciousness of divine or Self’s Beatitude is an individual discovery.

    For Schuon, God being Unity and Totality can’t sin by going outside himself as man does, whose existence is limited to a single individuality and whose activity affects existences other than his very own. He argues that when God appears to do what would be evil if man did it, He compensates for it by a greater good. This follows necessarily from the premise that God is the absolute Good. God’s nature thus necessarily includes a compensating attribute which precludes evil as such.  But man is contingent by definition and can’t possibly enjoy the compensating attribute which derives from Absoluteness and Infinity. The evil man does is not a virtuality of good, but is evil pure and simple as he is a fragment and not the whole.

    For Schuon evil is ultimately naughted or reintegrated into Good. Willy nilly man is dragged towards God, his Ground of being, or real self through the travails of this vale of soul-making. Hick’s theodicy is provided a solid metaphysical grounding from this perennialist perspective. No souls or egos, to use Iqbalian terminology, will be ultimately lost or annihilated. God or the incorruptible Spirit at the heart of life is there to ensure it. The traditional doctrine of apocatastasis dissolves all evil or batil, to use the Quranic expression, which in reality had never existed and was liable to disappear. The night of Brahman will consume everything dross as the pure gold of the Spirit will have the final word as the samsaric realm is transcended. The hell will ultimately be emptied as the prophetic traditions testify. In fact hell is the creation of ignorance, avidya, and nothing but self will is burned in it as Eckhart has said.

    Maleific power, personified as Satan in Islam and Christianity, is finally reintegrated into the Divine Clemency. Evil is finally reabsorbed into its original and neutral substance. Fire and darkness will be transmuted into light. God’s Mercy rather than Wrath has the final word. The doctrine of apocatastasis is in a way expression of the fundamental enunciation of original blessedness of existence or Sat-Chit-Anand. The unfathomable peace and bliss of heaven or religious experience comes from simply coming home, returning to our original state of Self or pure consciousness that has been obscured by the Fall or vagaries of existence. Coming home or regaining paradise or nirvana or vision of God is simply cleansing of perception, dispelling of ignorance and regaining the repose of being. The smile of the enlightened ones, the joy, and the ecstasy of the mystics expresses the Beatitude and Bliss that is ours by inheritance, by being created in the image of God. “The sage–precisely because his subjectivity is determined by Intelligence – will tend to enjoy that which enjoys.”“There is in reality but a single Beatitude, just as there is but a single subject and a single Object. The three poles are united in the Absolute, and separated in so far as the Absolute engages itself in Relativity, in accordance with the mystery of Maya.” All relativity can, and must, ultimately be transcended. The world can’t be made to disappear, but “it can be rendered transparent so that the light, ever shining, may illuminate our existential darkness. The centre is everywhere, this room included; and where the centre is, there is the beatific vision.” God, the Bliss Infinite and Good, is ever close at hand-“closer than your jugular vein,” as the Quran calls it. As Marco Pallis says “The tree of Life is standing in this room, as certainly it stood in Eden; it is a pity if we will not use our eyes.”The real issue that should concern us is neither the existence of the world nor the world remade in accordance with our heart’s desire, but solely how to find our way home, to God who is the Origin and the End, to be realigned on the axis of Buddhahood, to “rejoin our own centre which is also the centre of all things, the Tree of Life, the axis uniting heaven and earth.” And religions are revelation or gifts from Heaven that shows the means to unite man to his Origin, to his home.