What is evil and how could it possibly be deemed “necessary”?

In the beginning the Creator said, “Let us make the human being in our image and likeness”.  What does that mean, but that we too are creators? However, there is no possibility to be creative without the capacity to choose, to choose something else. First of all we must consider that the possibility for a human being to engage in evil is indeed a necessary by-product of our freedom of choice.

Unlike animals, whose behavior is dictated by the compulsions of instinct; unlike the angels, who were created to joyfully serve the good always; human beings are created with a developing capacity for choice. This unfortunately opens up the possibility that we could choose evil over good. It is a necessary concomitant to our freedom of creative choice. The Godhead is willing to gamble on our freedom of choice so that human beings can become creatures who choose the good. We are gradually meant to be evolving into human beings who stand less and less under any kind of compulsion. With our evolving humanity, we are able to develop greater and greater freedom of choice.

What is the good? And what is evil?

One good working definition would be that evil is a good that is not in its proper time or place.

For example, once upon a time, in humanity’s childhood, the good involved being subsumed, serving the family, the tribe, the group. This is still the case with children today, who are “socialized” by family and school in order to become useful and cooperative members of the human race. However, what is good for a child is not necessarily good for an adult. An adult must sometimes make choices that disappoint or even enrage the group in order to fulfill his or her own divinely ordained destiny. Examples abound of grown individuals who, for instance, had to choose to abandon the life-path that their parents had laid out for them. It would be evil to compel an adult to subsume himself to the group’s hopes and expectations. Done out of love, it is appropriate enough for childhood or for an earlier phase of human history, but it is no longer a good for the modern adult. It destroys destinies.

Evil and its destructive consequences can also be brought about by a good being given too early. To take again the example of the adult’s relation to the child – to give children complete freedom to eat what and when they want, to sleep (or not) when they want, to go to school or not, to do chores or not, etc., would be to compromise the child’s future health and its capacity to contribute helpfully to its fellow human beings. In this case, complete freedom of choice is a good at the wrong time; given prematurely it would destroy health and human relations.

We usually think of the number one as a unit; a unit that can be multiplied to make something bigger and greater. However, we could also think of the number one rather as a great, all-inclusive unity out of which all numbers are derived: one divided becomes two; divided again, three four and so on.

The creator said, Let us create the earthly human being in our image, according to our likeness. (Genesis 1:26) Out of the One-ness of God a unified archetype of the androgynous human being is created. God first creates an archetype for the human being, imaged after God, imaged after the One-ness out of Whom all else is derived. This human archetype is at first both male and female – androgynous – since God contains all.

Then in Genesis there follows:

….So God created humankind [the archetypal human being] in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1: 27)

Thus comes the first division of the unity; the androgynous whole is divided into male and female.

God is the great unity that encompasses all genders. To the question of whether God is male or female, the answer is Yes!

One can think of Christ as the human being who has perfectly integrated the divided masculine and feminine sides of human nature. In order to fulfill His mission (including His crucifixion), He had to incarnate in a male-gendered body, but His relations with women were exemplary, neither chauvinistic nor submissive. This is an indication of a man who has integrated himself well with the inner feminine side of his own soul. Perhaps this is one of our truly Christian tasks – for men to integrate into themselves the feminine side of their own soul, and for women to integrate in a healthy way the masculine aspects of their soul. Thus, we will ultimately re-unite in love, on a higher level, what was divided in the beginning.

In the past a farmer would pray before going into the fields to sow. The ritual of the seeds in his warm hand and the rhythm of his light steps did not change for centuries. The old farmers working in their fields were in perfect harmony with nature, and as they went through the process of growing the grain, they understood that nature was communicating God’s Word to them.

Today, we hardly ever see a lone farmer sowing seeds in his field. It was our parents’ generation that last witnessed the love of the farmer for the earth. Read more