THE CONSTITUTION OF THE WORLD IN RELATION TO SIN
§ 75. Once sin is present in man, he finds also in the world, as his sphere, persistent causes of hindrance to his life, i.e. evils. This section, accordingly, will deal with the Doctrine of Evil. 1. It is clear that in a system of doctrine the world cannot come under discussion at all except as it is related to man. Even though, in consequence of sin, the world were to suffer a change outside the human relation, new elements being introduced or the old modified, this could have no place whatever in Dogmatics. Only incidentally, therefore, and only because the idea of such a change is frequently brought into religious teaching, do we need to state that this is a wholly untenable idea, deduced from certain Mosaic passages1 on quite insufficient grounds. Even in its relation to man, in fact, the world can only assume different characteristics in the manner indicated in our proposition—partly by its appearing different to him, and partly because the results of sin dissolve the original harmony between the world and man. Thus the conception of the original perfection of the world,2 if brought into relation to the original perfection of man, does not imply that the world is the domain of evil. No doubt there must always have been a relative opposition, making itself felt with varying intensity, between the existent as externally given and the corporeal life of human individuals, otherwise human beings could not have been mortal;3 but as long as every moment of human activity might have been a product of the original perfection of man, every moment being determined by the God-consciousness, and all the sensuous and bodily aspects of life being brought into in exclusive relation to it, that opposition could never have been construed by the corporate consciousness as an obstruction to life, since it could not in any sense act as an inhibition of the God-consciousness, but at most would give a different form to its effects. This holds good even of natural death and the bodily afflictions that precede it in the shape of disease and debility; for what can no longer serve the guiding and determining higher consciousness, is not willed. Hence it is not by death, but, as Scripture says, by the fear of death, that we are subject to bondage.4 If, however, the predominant factor is not the God-consciousness but the flesh, every impression made by the world upon us and involving an obstruction of our bodily and temporal life must be reckoned as an evil, and the more so, the more definitely the moment of experience terminates solely in the flesh apart from the higher consciousness; the reason being that there is then a repression of the only principle which could in such a case restore the harmony. Since, then, the relative opposition between the external world and the temporal life of man is an inevitable and universal fact, sin involves evil of the first type indicated above; the world, that is, appears otherwise to man than it would have appeared had he had no sin. As regards the second type, which must primarily have its source in human activity akin to sin, it is obvious that an activity that was purely and simply an expression of man’s original perfection could never turn out to be a hindrance to the spiritual life. For, even if such activity, through the error and against the intention of the agent, were to turn out a hindrance, though only to the life of sense, then, since along with this would necessarily go an incentive to correct the error, it would not be regarded as an evil. Just as little again could the action of one person prove a hindrance to another’s life, since, in virtue of the God-consciousness that was supreme in all, each could not but acquiesce in the other’s every action. But if that supremacy is done away, there emerges opposition between the individual beings, and what is a furtherance to one will often for that very reason become a hindrance to another. So that here, too, evil arises only with sin, but, given sin, it arises inevitably.
-
Now, anything that gives rise to obstructions in human life so far as it is independent of human action, we call natural evil; while what in bringing about such obstructions is really due to human action, we call social evil. The latter term is preferable to ‘moral’ evil; for if we say ‘moral’ we suggest that the bad also as such (das Böse) is subsumed under the concept of evil.5 It is true that social evils too presuppose sin; what in one person issues from sin becomes an evil for another, and probably for himself as well; but precisely on that account it seems the more necessary to insist, even by our use of terms, on the essential difference in the reference involved in the two. The above division may not look quite satisfactory, since, e.g., disease may in many cases be a natural, and in other cases a social, evil (this ambiguity being inherent in general terms); indeed, we must often regard as one and the same evil what should be ascribed partly to the one source and partly to the other, and it would perhaps, therefore, be more accurate to say that all evils arise from the two elements together or from one of the two. Still, the main fact remains unaltered, namely, the different way in which the two kinds of evil stand related to sin. Both kinds, however, when viewed from the standpoint of the original perfection of the world,6 are evils only because they either diminish the wealth of stimuli which further men’s development or make the world less tractable to human effort. Of the former class are the evils of scarcity and want, of the latter those of oppression and antagonism; and everything that from our point of view may be regarded as evil, together with all the deadening and derangement of our spiritual powers in consequence of sin, must be traceable to these two types.
-
As summarizing the foregoing, our proposition implies, first, that without sin there would be nothing in the world that could properly be considered an evil, but that whatever is directly bound up with the transitoriness of human life would be apprehended as at most an unavoidable imperfection, and the operations of natural forces which impede the efforts of men as but incentives to bring these forces more fully under human control. Secondly, it is implied that the measure in which sin is present is the measure in which evil is present, so that, just as the human race is the proper sphere of sin, and sin the corporate act of the race, so the whole world in its relation to man is the proper sphere of evil, and evil the corporate suffering of the race. Finally, the proposition signifies that, apart from such evil, there is no other consequence of sin that bears upon the relationship of the world to man, and that our religious consciousness makes no claim to substantiate the theory of some sort of magical effect which sin at its first appearance must have produced upon the world as a whole.