The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (3 page)

and gave them their flowing manes?

Did you make them leap like locusts

and frighten men with their snorting? (Job 39:19ff.)

Look at the monster Behemoth;

I created him and I created you.

He eats grass like a cow,

but what strength there is in his body. (Job 40:15ff.)

Can you catch Leviathan with a fishhook

or tie his tongue down with a rope?

Can you put a rope through his snout

or put a hook through his jaws? (Job 41:1ff.)

Touch him once and you’ll never try it again. (Job 41:18)

Finally Job confesses that the Lord is “all powerful; that you can do everything that you want . . .”

I talked about things I did not understand,

about marvels too great for me to know. . . .

In the past I knew only what others had told me,

but now I have seen you with my own eyes.

So I am ashamed of all I have said

and repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42:2ff.)

The Lord finally accepts Job’s confession, truer than the words of his friends. And blesses Job with a greater prosperity than he had ever known before—fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, two thousand head of cattle, and a thousand donkeys. Now he has seven sons and three daughters, and no other women in the world are as beautiful as Job’s daughters. He lived a hundred and forty years, enjoying his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Why is Job not punished for questioning God’s ways? Nor is he ever told why he had suffered. Was God now rewarding his faith—or only his independent spirit? Could God have admired Job’s courage in challenging his maker? Or was God only reminding Job that God’s ways were beyond his understanding? Did God enjoy wrestling with his creatures?

This problem that haunted Western thought—Why would a good God allow evil in the world He had created?—was one that Judeo-Christian man had made for himself. It was plainly a by-product of ethical monotheism: a “trilemma” created by the three indisputable qualities of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-benevolent God. “If God were good,” observed C. S. Lewis, “He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.” Some have chosen a more radical solution. “The only excuse for God,” said Stendhal, “is that he does not exist.”

Reluctant to abandon belief in their God, Western Seekers have exercised ingenuity and imagination. Not until the seventeenth century did the philosopher Leibniz give a name to this troublesome problem. “Theodicy” (from Greek
theos,
God, and
dike,
justice), he called the study aimed to justify God’s ways to man. And ever since Job, thoughtful men and women have been tantalized by the meaning of evil. They would deny neither their God nor the facts of their suffering lives. Where would they turn?

A World Self-Explained: Evil in the East

But this problem of justifying God’s ways to man did not haunt all the world equally. Other world religions were not especially troubled by how to account for the suffering of the innocent or the existence of evil. The Muslims (from
islam,
surrender to divine will) believed that God owed no explanations to His insignificant creature, and it was blasphemy for man Job-like to demand one. Still, Muslim thinkers volunteered explanations of their own. One was that everything was predestined by God for His own inscrutable reasons.

Whomsoever God desires to guide,
He expands his breast to Islam;

Whomsoever he desires to lead astray,
He makes his breast narrow, tight. (Koran, Sura 6:125)

So God’s ways need no further gloss, for “He leads none astray save the ungodly.” And “Whatever good visits thee, it is of God; whatever evil visits thee is of thyself.” For the Muslim, wrong-worship, failure to surrender to the one God, was the sum of all evil, for which man alone must bear responsibility.

This was the paradox of Islam. For every man must bear the consequences of failure to surrender to “the Lord of the Lord of the worlds.” Yet only an inscrutable God could guide man to the true worship. In the Koran, “the Book in which there is no doubt,” Muslims dissolved the “problem of suffering” in the unchallengeable sovereignty of God. Who was man to make suffering a “problem” when it was simply a fact of Allah’s creation?

Hindus and Buddhists, who had not committed themselves to a single Creator God, and so had not the burden of ethical monotheism, found their own ways of explaining evil and suffering. “For Hindu thought,” Alan Watts observes, “there is no Problem of Evil. The conventional, relative world is necessarily a world of opposites. Light is inconceivable apart from darkness; order is meaningless without disorder; and, likewise, up without down, sound without silence, pleasure without pain.” The fertile Indian imagination enjoyed enriching their populous celestial pantheon and embroidering their prolific mythology. They even imagined some gods who created evil against their own will.

Prajapati created the golden egg of the universe. He created the gods, and there was daylight. Then, by his downward breathing, he created the demons, and they were darkness for him. He knew that he had created evil for himself; he struck the demons with evil and they were overcome. Therefore, the legend which tells of the battle between gods and demons is not true, for they were overcome because Prajapati struck them with evil. (Sata. 11.1.0.1-11)

Other gods created evil willingly. When a wise man asks why Brhaspati, the guru of the gods, told a lie, he replies, “All creatures, even gods, are subject to passions. Otherwise the universe, composed as it is of good and evil, could not continue to develop.” The gods themselves were pleased at the variety and mixture and plenitude of the creation, which would have been incomplete without evil. This mixture was revealed in the paradoxes of good demons and evil gods. The wonderful plenitude appeared in the birth of death, in the overpopulation of the heavens with gods, in the appearance of heretical gods, and every conceivable combination of good and evil.

* * *

Still, two quite specific dogmas, shared by Hindus and Buddhists in various forms, diverted them from the problem of the origins of evil and the suffering of the innocent. First, most distinctive and ingenious—and convenient—was the idea of
karma
(from Sanskrit
karman,
“deed,” fate, or work). This was a by-product of belief in the transmigration and reincarnation of souls. Karma was a name for the force of all a person’s acts—good or evil—in all past incarnations shaping his destiny in the next incarnation. So karma was an ingenious way both of giving each person some responsibility for prosperity or suffering in the present life and, at the same time, of affirming a fatalism that left the person little power to change the fortunes of the present life.

A classical form of the idea imagined this
karmasaya,
an accumulation of the forces of good and evil from what a person did (or failed to do) in earlier incarnations. The suffering or good fortune in the present life, then, was a punishment or reward for earlier acts, just as suffering or good fortune in future lives would compensate for the acts in this life. Personal weaknesses like ignorance, egotism, hatred, and even the will to live all stored the seeds of punishment in the flow of karma. Writers in the Upanishads suggested that somehow the practice of yoga or the power of a god who lived outside the realm of karma might possibly help get a person off the wheel of
samsara
(life-and-death-and-life). Thus a person might avoid consequences of his acts in earlier incarnations. Otherwise, for example, by the rule of karma, a person driven by gluttony in one life might be reborn in the next life as a hog. It was conceivable that a devout ascetic, renouncing all corrupting desires, might struggle free of his karmic debts.

Some Hindu sects saw karma as physical seeds that could be passed on through the generations. A dying father, in one Upanishad text, is said to transfer his karma to his son. “Let me place my deeds on you.” Then the son’s acts of atonement would free the father in his later incarnation from the consequences of his own earlier misdeeds. The Jains, from the sixth century B.C., made much of these possibilities. They imagined the pure
liva,
or living spirit, in each person that could and should be kept free of the karmic pollution that might burden a person’s next incarnation. The Jains’ discipline aimed to keep the
liva
unpolluted, and so assure its rising toward enlightenment through rebirths. Their
ahimsa,
dogma of absolute nonviolence, made them fearful even of accidentally killing insects. As rigorous vegetarians, they applied ahimsa to plants. They refused to pick a living fruit from a tree, but waited till it fell ripe to the ground.

Followers of Buddha (who died about 480 B.C.), embroidering the Hindu notions, found their own ways of calculating the ethical balance sheet. They distinguished “deed karman” from “mental karman” (thoughts and motivations), and distinguished deeds from their results. They also attached karma to families and nations. But they kept inviolate their belief in the inevitable balancing of the karmic books. A person’s present life was determined by past actions in other incarnations, but only until all those influences had been used up. Still, the chanting of sacred verses by a relative or a monk might reduce the force of evil karma. The Buddhist belief in an all-pervading flux kept them from any idea of a personal immortal soul. But they imagined a kind of karmic residue that adhered through endless incarnations.

Hindu Seekers, not believing in a single original Creation by one Creator God, unlike the West, were not so troubled by the Fall of Man. Instead, they avoided the problem by their belief in cycles—cycles of birth, death, and rebirth for the individual, and cycles for society too. For them the problem of origins was dissolved: there was no Origin, and there never was a Beginning. Instead they dramatized the never-ending cycles in their myth of the Four Ages of Man, of deep and vague antiquity.

Similar myths in Iran, Greece, and Mesopotamia probably shaped one another from the eighth to the third century B.C. Karma was their way of saying that evil is not a single menacing overarching Sin, but an endless chain. Their culprit—if there was a culprit—was not God, Satan, or Man, but Time. They saw no single melodramatic Fall of Man, with a persuasive serpent, a tempting apple, and a seductive woman. At some remote, indefinable era they imagined that man had passed from Eternity into Time. As one of the traditional Sanskrit Puranas explains:

In the beginning, People lived in perfect happiness, without class distinctions or property; all their needs were supplied by magic wishing-trees. Then because of the great power of time and the changes it wrought upon them, they were overcome by passion and greed. It was from the influence of time, and no other cause, that their perfection vanished. Because of their greed, the wishing-trees disappeared; the people suffered from heat and cold, built houses, and wore clothes.
(from Vayu 1.8.77-88)

So began another cycle, when each Age of Man is less pleasant and less virtuous than the last.

In the Golden Age, dharma was complete. There was no sorrow or delusion or old age or misery, no injury or quarrels or hate or famine. Man lived a long life. . . . in the Dvapara (the third) Age, dharma was only half left, and injury, hatred, falsehood, delusion, evil, disease, old age, and greed arose. Castes became mixed.

Civilization accumulates and creates evils—poverty, theft, murder, and falsehood. Then finally our Kali Age ends in conflagration and flood—a “washing away” to prepare for the next Golden Age. And another cycle.

At the end of the Age, Brahma created from his back an evil one known as Adharma. From him Kali was descended, foul-smelling and lustful, with gaping mouth and lolling tongue. He begat Fear and a daughter named Death; thus were born the many descendants of Kali, revilers of dharma. Men then became lustful, hypocritical and evil, intent upon penis and stomach, adulterers, drunkards, evil-doers. . . . The earth yielded few crops. Men abandoned the study of the Vedas and sacrifices, and they ceased to offer oblations. The gods were all without sustenance. and they sought refuge with Brahma.

Then the god Vishnu was reborn as Kalki to lead a war against the Buddhists. Kalki finally defeated Kali, but Kali “escaped to another age.”

In the Kali Age, men will be afflicted by old age, disease, and hunger, and from sorrow there will arise depression, indifference, deep thought, enlightenment, and virtuous behavior. Then the Age will change, deluding their minds like a dream, by the force of fate, and when the Golden Age begins, those left over from the Kali Age will be the progenitors of the Golden Age. All four classes will survive as seed, together with those born in the Golden Age, and the Seven Sages will teach them all dharma. Thus there is eternal continuity from Age to Age.

THE WAY OF PHILOSOPHERS: A WONDROUS INSTRUMENT WITHIN

We have an incapacity for proving anything
which no amount of dogmatism can overcome.
We have an idea of truth which no amount of
skepticism can overcome.

—PASCAL

Socrates’ Discovery of Ignorance

Just as miraculous minuscule Athens provided enduring models for Western ideals of beauty, there too were foreshadowed the works of Seekers for millennia to come. Their matchless trinity—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—revealed the powers of the courageous mind. None of the great Seekers was wholly displaced. We no longer lean on Galen and Hippocrates, but we never cease to be inspired and encouraged by the Athenian trinity. Plato was a disciple of Socrates, Aristotle a disciple of Plato. So heroic Seekers were links in an unbroken tradition, each a catalyst, an unconscious collaborator of all to follow. We are disciples of all of them. They all have become our contemporaries.

Socrates left his own account of how he was led to the questing venture of philosophy. On the final day of his trial in Athens (399 B.C.) he recalled the crisis of his intellectual life, which was reported by Plato in the
Phaedo
(translated by Benjamin Jowett). Socrates had heard a reading from a book of Anaxagoras, a leading physicist of the day, “that mind was the disposer and cause of all, and I was delighted at this notion, which appeared quite admirable, and I said to myself: If mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all for the best, and put each particular in the best place. . . . I rejoiced to find a teacher of the causes of existence such as I desired. . . . He would tell whether the earth was flat or round, and then give the reasons for it being so.” And also the reasons why this was the best.