Tag Archives: Good and Evil

The Value of Myth in Depicting the Conflict Between Good and Evil, Part Two: Reinhold Niebuhr on the Superiority of Christian Myth

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In a previous essay, I discussed the conflict between good and evil tendencies within human beings and the role of myth in depicting these tendencies. The philosopher Plato employed colorful myths to depict the struggle within humans between a lower nature and a higher nature, but he argued that reason could direct human impulses to a devotion to ideal forms.

The American Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was also concerned with the internal conflict between good and evil within human beings, but argued that Christian myth was ultimately more accurate in diagnosing the problems of human nature and more effective in providing guidance in how to live. Niebuhr’s essay, “The Truth in Myths,” (The Nature of Religious Experience, Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1937) made the case that, despite the historical and scientific inaccuracies of the Christian religion in the books of the Bible, Christian myths used symbols to express moral and holistic aspects of reality more effectively than reason, philosophy, or science.

How is it possible that stories composed of fictions (partly or in whole) can serve as the basis of a valid belief system? According to Niebuhr, there are several aspects of reality that defy attempts at explanation solely by logic, mathematics, and the sciences, requiring recourse to myth.

The first such aspect is that of value or goodness. The search for goodness is fundamental to human experience — it is the basis for morals and art, and it even underlies the creative inspiration responsible for mathematical and scientific discovery, as Robert Pirsig argued in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Religion illustrates what is good not only through commandments but through stories that contain a greater or lesser amount of fiction. Of course, moral systems can be developed through reason, but there must first be a commitment to a transcendent vision before one can begin deducing. Without a commitment to a higher, ideal state of being, reason can just as easily justify self-aggrandizement without limit. According to Niebuhr, religion supplies ideal ends through its imaginative and poetic interpretation of life.

The second aspect of reality that religion addresses is wholeness. In science and logic, analysis attempts to explain reality by breaking it down into parts and observing how the parts fit together; misalignment or malfunctioning of parts leading to disorder, decay, and destruction. But knowledge of how things work is not the same as knowledge of what things are as a whole, what qualities and properties existing things have, and the value of those qualities and properties. This latter knowledge is holistic knowledge. Holistic knowledge moves beyond atoms, molecules, and chains of causation, and evaluates wholes, including the meaning and value of existence. (For an extended discussion of the role of holism in understanding reality, see this post.)

A third aspect of reality that religion addresses, according to Niebuhr, is the organic nature of reality. The devotion of science to predictive cause-and-effect sequences has led to a mechanistic view of the universe, in which eternal laws dictate the motion of objects, from the very beginning of the universe to its likely end. The mechanism metaphor has been widely used in science and is responsible for a great many useful predictive models. However, the mechanism metaphor sometimes goes beyond specific predictive models to support general interpretations of the universe as being merely a mechanism. This interpretation is too sweeping. In fact, the universe can also be interpreted as being analogous to an organism — that is, an organized structure containing parts that are coordinated in a single, harmonious whole. In this metaphor, the universe is more similar to a life form than a machine — and in fact, the growth of the universe from its very simple beginnings to the gradual creation of stars, heavier elements, planets, primitive life forms, and complex life forms — does resemble a growing organism more than a machine. In fact, a number of physicists have even proposed that the laws of the universe themselves emerge and grow over time, and are not unalterably fixed from the beginning.

These three aspects of reality — value (goodness), wholeness, and the organic nature of the universe — are symbolized and communicated in the myths of religion, according to Niebuhr. While the myths cannot be taken as literally accurate depictions of events, they illustrate aspects of existence, life, and meaning that straightforward historical descriptive accounts and scientific explanations have difficulty expressing.

Religion in contemporary western societies was declining in Niebuhr’s time (1892-1971), and has diminished even further since Niebuhr’s death. But Niebuhr noted that even the modern, rational, science-based civilizations of the west relied upon secular myths – in particular, the myth of historical progress. The idea of inevitable historical progress toward an ideal end is, in Niebuhr’s words “really a rationalized version of the Christian myth of salvation,” in which faith in the redeeming love of Christ is replaced by allegedly unstoppable historical forces. Unfortunately, Niebuhr argues, the myth of historical progress “is more optimistic and really less credible than the Christian myth.”

Consider the fate of the two most prominent theories of historical progress, those of Hegel and Marx. The German philosopher Hegel saw the ideals of the French Revolution as culminating in the full realization of freedom and reason at the “end of history”; and yet the French Revolution devolved into terror, the attempted conquest of Europe, and the crowning of Napoleon as emperor. Karl Marx took Hegel’s idea and proposed communism as the logical endpoint of history, with all societies governed according to the principles of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Fired by Marx’s vision, communist parties emerged throughout the world, and at one point, communist governments controlled nearly one-third of the world’s population; yet the result was oppression, starvation, and the extermination of populations.

The Christian view of human history, by contrast, is definitely not one of inevitable worldly progress. Rather, Christianity sees the growth of both good and evil in history. In this view, there is no motor of history that gradually builds toward an end state of lasting human freedom and happiness; only divine intervention can rescue humanity from its predicament. Now this Christian view of history is not easy for secularists to accept. But the secularist view history as an unstoppable motor of liberal progress seems scarcely more credible, given actual historical events. For Niebuhr, the myths of Christianity provide a much better explanatory framework for the human predicament than frameworks that emphasize human reason and historical progress:

“The real fact is that the mystery of both good and evil in human life and in the world can not be completely comprehended or stated in perfectly rational terms. Every sensitive human spirit is conscious of belonging to a reality which embodies values beyond his achievements; but he is also conscious of incarnating forces of evil which mysteriously defy this order. . . . Neither the vital thrust of life, nor its organic unities nor its disharmonies nor its highest possibilities can be expressed in terms of logic and rational consistency. The dynamic and creative energy of life can be described but not comprehended by reason.”

Niebuhr argues that human beings have free will, but that human sin is also inevitable. This paradox cannot be solved or fully explained by reason, nor can it be overcome by history. Only myth can express it. Even if humans can transcend most of their animalistic impulses, these primitive impulses are easily replaced by human dreams of conquest, great wealth, and rule over others:

“The relation of man to freedom and to mechanism is paradoxical. His conscious self is never in complete control of the mechanisms of impulse with which nature has endowed him. Yet it is in sufficient control not only to check these impulses in the interest of a more inclusive purpose but to interfere with the harmony of natural impulses, and to transmute the harmless impulses of nature into demonic lusts and imperialistic purposes. It is, in other words, the nature of human sin that it arises at the juncture of nature and spirit and is as much the corruption of nature by spirit as the corruption of spirit by nature. All this is darkly expressed in the myth of the fall in Christian theology, much more adequately than in rational explanations of human evil. . . . It is because man can transcend nature and himself that he is able to conceive of himself as the center of all life and the clue to the meaning of existence. It is this monstrous pretension of his egoism, the root of all imperialism and human cruelty, which is the very essence of sin.” (p. 128)

Whatever the historical and scientific inaccuracies of the Bible, then, the Christian religion still contains profound truths. These truths are communicated through stories that have a greater or lesser degree of falsehood about historical events, but the stories are still capable of telling facts about human nature, about the conflict between good and evil, and about reconciling our desires with the needs of others. The teachings of Jesus and the nobility of his self-sacrifice on the cross point to clues about the meaning of our existence that philosophy and science alone cannot fully express. In the words of Niebuhr, “The Cross justifies itself to human faith because it symbolizes an ideal which establishes points of relevance with the deepest experiences and insights of human life.”

The Value of Myth in Depicting the Conflict Between Good and Evil

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In October 2013, three young friends living in the Washington DC area — a male-female couple and a male friend — went out to a number of local bars to celebrate a birthday. The friends drank copiously, and then returned to a small studio apartment at 2 a.m. An hour later, one of the men stabbed his male friend to death. When police arrived, they found the surviving male covered in blood, with the floor and wall also covered in blood. “I caught my buddy and my girl cheating,” said the man. “I killed my buddy.” The man was subsequently found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

How did this happen? Was murder inevitable? It seems unlikely. The killing was not pre-planned. No one in the group had a prior record of violence or criminal activity. All three friends were well-educated and successful, with bright futures ahead of them. It’s true that all were extremely drunk, but drunkenness very rarely leads to murder.

This case is noteworthy, not because murders are unusual — murders happen all the time — but because this particular murder seems to have been completely unpredictable. It’s the normality of the persons and circumstances that disturbs the conscience. Under slightly different circumstances, the murder would not have happened at all, and all three would conceivably have lived long, happy lives.

Most of us are law-abiding citizens. We believe we are good, and despise thieves, rapists, and murderers. But what happens when the normal conditions under which we live change, when we are humiliated or outraged, when there is no security for our lives or property, when our opportunities for happiness are snatched from us for no good reason? How far will we go to avenge ourselves, and what violence will we justify in order to restore our perceived notion of justice?

The conflict between good and evil tendencies within human beings is a frequent theme in both philosophy and religion. However, philosophy has had a tendency to attribute evil tendencies within humanity to a deficiency of reason. In the view of many philosophers, reason alone should be able to establish that human rights are universal, and that impulses to violence, conquest, and enslavement are irrational. Furthermore, they argue that when reason establishes its dominance over the passions within human beings, societies become freer and more peaceful. (Notably, the great philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith rejected this argument.)

The religious interpretation of the conflict between good and evil, on the other hand, is based more upon myth and faith. And while the myths of religion are not literally accurate in terms of history or science, these myths often have insights into the inner turmoil of human beings that are lost in straightforward descriptions of fact and an emphasis on rationality.

The Christian scholar Paul Elmer More argued in his book, The Religion of Plato, that the dualism between good and evil within the human soul was very effectively described by the Greek philosopher Plato, but that this description relied heavily on the picturesque elements of myth, as found in the The Republic, Laws, Timaeus, and other works. In Plato’s view, there was a struggle within all human beings between a higher nature and a lower nature, the higher nature being drawn to a vision of ideal forms and the lower nature being dominated by the flux of human passions and desires. According to More,

It is not that pleasure or pain, or the desires and emotions connected with them, are totally depraved in themselves . . . but they contain the principle of evil in so far as they are radically unlimited, belonging by nature to what in itself is without measure and tends by inertia to endless expansion. Hence, left to themselves, they run to evil, whereas under control they may become good, and the art of life lies in the governing of pleasure and pain by a law exterior to them, in a man’s becoming master of himself, or better than himself. (pp. 225-6)

What are some of the myths Plato discusses? In The Republic, Plato tells the story of Gyges, a lowly shepherd who discovers a magic ring that bestows the power of invisibility. With this invisibility, Gyges is able to go wherever he wants undetected, and to do what he wants without anyone stopping him. Eventually, Gyges kills the king of his country and obtains absolute power for himself. In discussing this story, Glaucon, a student of Socrates, argues that with the awesome power of invisibility, no man would be able to remain just, in light of the benefits one could obtain. However, Socrates responds that being a slave to one’s desires actually does not bring long-term happiness, and that the happy man is one who is able to control his desires.

In the Phaedrus, Plato relates the dialogue between Socrates and his pupil Phaedrus on whether friendship is preferable to love. Socrates discusses a number of myths throughout the dialogue, but appears to use these myths as metaphorical illustrations of the internal struggle within human beings between their higher and lower natures. It is the nature of human beings, Socrates notes, to pursue the good and the beautiful, and this pursuit can be noble or ignoble depending on whether reason is driving one toward enlightenment or desire takes over and drives one to excessive pleasure-seeking. Indeed, Socrates describes love as a type of “madness” — but he argues that this madness is a source of inspiration that can result in either good or evil depending on how one directs the passions. Socrates proceeds to employ a figurative picture of a charioteer driving two horses, with one horse being noble and the other ignoble. The noble horse pulls the charioteer toward heaven, while the ignoble horse pulls the charioteer downward, toward the earth and potential disaster. Even so, the human being in love is influenced by the god he or she follows; the followers of Ares, the god of war, are inclined to violence if they feel wronged by their lover; the followers of Zeus, on the other hand, use love to seek philosophical wisdom.

The nature and purpose of love is also discussed in the Symposium. In this dialogue, Socrates relates a fantastical myth about human beings originally being created with two bodies attached at the back, with two heads, four arms, and four legs. These beings apparently threatened the gods, so Zeus cut the beings in two; henceforth, humans spent their lives trying to find their other halves. Love inspires wisdom and courage, according to the dialogue, but only when it encourages companionship and the exchange of knowledge, and is not merely the pursuit of sexual gratification.

Illustration of the original humans described in Plato’s Symposium:

In the Timaeus, Plato discusses the creation of the universe and the role of human beings in this universe. Everything proceeds from the Good, argued Plato. However, the Good is not some lifeless abstraction, but a power with a dynamic element. According to More, Plato gave the name of God to this dynamic element. God fashions the universe according to an ideal pattern, but the end result is always less than perfect because of the resistance of the materials and the tendency of material things to always fall short of their perfect ends.

Plato argues that there are powers of good and powers of evil in the universe — and within human beings — and Plato personifies these powers as gods or daemons. There is a struggle between good and evil that all humans participate in, and all are subject to judgment at the ends of their lives (Plato believed in reincarnation and posited that deeds in one’s recent life determined one’s station in the next life.) Here, we see myth and faith enter again into Plato’s philosophy, and More defends the use of these stories and symbols as a means of illustrating the dramas of moral conflict:

In this last stage the essential truth of philosophy as a concern of the individual soul, is rendered vivid and convincing by clothing it in the imaginative garb of fiction — fiction which may yet be a veil, more or less transparent, through which we behold the actual events of the spirit world; and this aid of the imagination is needed just because the dualism of the human consciousness cannot be grasped by the reason, demands indeed a certain abatement of that rationalizing tendency of the mind which, if left to itself, inevitably seeks its satisfaction in one or the other form of monism. (p. 199)

What’s fascinating about Plato’s use of myths in philosophy is that while he recognizes that many of the myths are literally dubious or false, they seem to point to truths that are difficult or impossible to express in literal language. Love really does seem to be a desire to unite with one’s missing half, and falling in love really is akin to madness, a madness that can lead to disaster if one is not careful. Humankind does seem to be afflicted by an internal struggle between a higher, noble nature and a lower nature, with the lower nature inclined to self-centeredness and grasping for ever more wealth, power, and pleasure.

Plato had enormous influence on Western civilization, but More argues that the successors to Plato erred by abandoning Plato’s use of myth to illustrate the duality of human nature. Over the years, Greek philosophy became increasingly rationalistic and prone to a monism that was unable to cope with the reality of human dualism. (For an example of this extreme monism, see the works of Plotinus, who argued for an abstract “One” as the ultimate source of all things.) Hence, argued More, Christianity was in fact the true heir of Platonism, and not the Greek philosophers that came after Plato.

Myth is “the drama of religion,” according to More, not a literally accurate description of a sequence of events. Reason and philosophy can analyze and discuss good and evil, but to fully understand the conflict between good and evil, within and between human beings, requires a dramatic depiction of our swirling, churning passions. In More’s words, “A myth is false and reprehensible in so far as it misses or distorts the primary truth of philosophy and the secondary truth of theology; it becomes more probable and more and more indispensable to the full religious life as it lends insistence and reality to those truths and answers to the daily needs of the soul.” (p. 165) The role of Christian myths in illustrating the dramatic conflict between good and evil will be discussed in the next essay.

Misunderstanding Manicheanism

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A lot of religions and philosophies are misunderstood to varying degrees, but if I had to pick one religion or philosophy as being the most misunderstood it would be Manicheanism.  First propounded by the prophet Mani (or Manes) in Persia in the third century C.E., this religion viewed the universe as consisting of a battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.  God was good, but was not all-powerful, which is why there was evil in the world.  Human beings and other material things were a mixture of the forces of light and forces of darkness; the task of human beings was to separate the light from the dark by shunning evil and doing good deeds.

In modern day America, the term “Manichean” is used disparagingly, as a way of attacking those who see political or social conflict as being wars of good vs. evil.  A Manichean view, it is argued or implied, depicts the self as purely good, opponents as demonic, and compromise as virtually impossible.  A recent example of this is a column by George Will about the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.  Will describes Iran as being “frightening in its motives (measured by its rhetoric) and barbaric in its behavior,” and quotes author Kenneth Pollack, who notes that Manicheanism was a Persian (Iranian) religion that “conceived of the world as being divided into good and evil.”  Of course, Manicheanism no longer has a significant presence in modern-day Iran, but you get the point — those Persians have always been simple-minded fanatics.

Let’s correct this major misconception right now: Manicheanism does NOT identify any particular tribe, group, religion, or nation as being purely good or purely evil.  Manicheanism sees good and evil as cosmological forces that are mixed in varying degrees in the material things we see all around us.  Humanity, in this view, consists of forces of light (good) mixed with darkness ; the task of humanity is to seek and release this inner light, not to label other human beings as evil and do battle with them.

If anything, Manicheanism was one of the most cosmopolitan and tolerant religions in history.  Manicheanism aimed to be a universal religion and incorporated elements of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The most dedicated adherents of Manicheanism were required to adopt a life of nonviolence, including vegetarianism.  For their trouble, Manicheans were persecuted and killed by the Christian, Buddhist, and Muslim societies in which they lived.

The Manichean view of human beings as being a mixture of good and evil is really a mainstream view shared by virtually all religions.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn has described this insight well:

It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good.  In the intoxication of youthful successes I had  felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel.  In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor.  In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.  It was only  when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.  Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and  through all human hearts.  This line shifts.  Inside us, it oscillates with the years.   Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: they struggle with the evil inside a human being  (inside every human being).  It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

This is what Manicheanism teaches: the battle between good and evil lies within all humans, not between purely good humans and purely evil humans.