evil

Cool and rainy. The greenery outside is wet and lush. The sky is a wet white overcast, tinged with India ink.

Morning notes: Rubicon, Hillel the Elder, Alexander the Great.

Back to notes on chapter 17. I picked up where I left off yesterday (took a bit of effort to remember): I was checking my notes from Shaye Cohen's From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. He gives a brief and excellent account of the evolution of Jewish beliefs about evil and redemption in the period I'm writing about. They grappled with the question of how God could permit evil in the world, and tried to explain his relationship to it. The ancient tribe we call the Israelites accepted the idea that God would punish not only evildoers, but their whole families for generations. Such was the sense of belonging that they had: before you were an individual, you were a member of a tribe, clan, family.

But as time went on, individualism developed. Ezekiel, early 6th century BC, said that each person receives an individual reward or punishment from God, and that a sinner can repair his relationship to God through repentance. Also, people became less able to accept that God rewarded or punished people within their lifetimes, since so many innocents seemed to suffer and die, while so many guilty prospered. So the idea developed of reward and punishment in an afterlife.

Evil is a central topic for me and for my work. What is my own stance toward it? I'm not sure. I wish to avoid perpetrating evil. As a Buddhist, I accepted the doctrine of karma, that the consequences of our motivated actions return to us eventually, in this life or another. In his book Aion Jung argues forcefully that Western man has not taken adequate account of evil as an active force in our psychology, having been sedated by the doctrine of evil as a privatio boni--the mere absence of good. In his words:

The doctrine of the privatio boni is in a sense responsible for a too optimistic conception of the evil in human nature and a too pessimistic view of the human soul. To offset this, early Christianity balanced Christ against an Antichrist. Only with Christ did a devil enter the world as a real counterpart of God.

If you reflect on that final sentence, the implications are large indeed. I'm not saying I know what they are--who does? But it's of keen interest to me, and if sentences were radioactive fuel-rods, this one is in my power-plant.

Maybe I'm tipping my hand too much about the dragons developing in the egg of my work.

But if I can think about these things, then so can my characters. We might not think actively about such issues, but everyone has an attitude to evil: what is it? where does it come from? what should we do about it? how do our own actions measure up on the evil scale?

Socrates said that no man knowingly does evil. Is that true? Certainly, some men knowingly do things that aren't nice...

It's as though I need to collect my own thoughts in order to find those that are proper to my characters. I've chosen my characters because I think they're important for our current age. Their problems are still our problems.

So I gathered notes from Cohen's book, compressing them further to look at them in point form. My character, Alexander, has had evil stuffed in his face, so to speak. How does he react? Sometimes the writer's freedom seems oppressive.

I have some ideas. But notice how many days can go by as I wrestle with just one character topic.