KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 13 October
Beguiled
Thanksgiving, we suggested, is a kind of thoughtfulness about God and the goodness of creation and thus a reminder to us about our place within that God-created order. But where then does evil arise? Unde malum? From whence evil? The Chapel readings from Genesis 3 this week speak directly to this question. It is the famous (or infamous) story of the Fall. Sadly, these reflections also follow upon the ugly spectacle of war in Israel that broke out this weekend, and in the extreme form of the rejection of the two-state solution by the militant organization ‘Hamas’ for whom the existence of the Jewish state is anathema, and even worse, the existence of all Jews. These are all part of the confusions and divisions within our global world. They have to do, in one way or another, with the idea of evil.
What kind of evil? “From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine … Good Lord, deliver us.” The Litany was the first service to be translated (and modified) into English from Latin by Thomas Cranmer in 1544. It reminds us of another dimension of thanksgiving: our thanksgiving from the threats of the natural world, what later thinkers in the Enlightenment, like Voltaire and Leibniz, called “physical or material evil”. We have experienced some of these things this spring and summer. But added to that phrase is the prayer for deliverance “from battle and murder, and from sudden death.” Such things belong to the disorders and disarray of human hearts in the various forms of “moral evil”. And they are very destructive, cruel and deadly.
That we come to the question about evil after the pageant of creation and the creation of our humanity within that order is most significant. The concept of the Good is absolutely prior and thus counters from the outset the pathological dualism of seeing things in absolute contraries. The story, moreover, seeks to show how we come to self-consciousness through an awareness of ourselves as selves. It happens through our separation from the goodness of the created order and, especially, in relation to the commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. At issue is how we come to the knowledge of good and evil. Will it be through separation by way of disobedience or in some other way? We choose the former with all of its fatal consequences. The Law and Mary’s fiat – her “be it unto me according to thy Word” (Grace) – suggest the other ways that belongs to human redemption.
