The Burden of Evil

I've recently been exploring my at least quasi-heretical notion of "neo-Manachaeanism" in posts beginning with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I and ending with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V. It's not good Christian doctrine because it sees God as all-good but not all-powerful. God's ongoing struggle with Satan reflects into the material world as a neverending clash between (say) order and chaos.

I've thought of another approach to the same question of why the all-good, all-powerful God of standard Christian belief would not trounce Satan straight away and end all our suffering and vulnerability at the hands of evil. This approach, unlike neo-Manichaeanism, would probably pass muster with most theologians.

To lead up to it, I have to make an admission. I am a person who has trouble distinguishing between two categories of experience: the truly evil, and the merely burdensome. By our personal burdens I mean all the "stuff" we have to endure in life: things which we would rather not have to put up with, like hangnails and nosy neighbors, menstrual cramps and hot, humid days. By evil I mean that which either is prima facie wrong or is absolutely wrong, as I laid out toward the end of Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V. From a religious perspective, it's what an all-good God doesn't want.

My admission is that I all too often identify anything which ruins my own particular day as evil.

This is a mistake that perhaps many others are prone to as well. And, I think, the problem of distinguishing between the two is rendered all the more complex because there can be actual evil behind that which ruins one's own particular day.

In my case, I have had assorted health woes of late: an operation to fix an aortic aneurysm and perform a double heart bypass seems to have brought on a reactive bout of clinical depression. A fair number of my days have been "ruined." I'm now recovered from the surgery and am taking an antidepressant to combat the mental woes. Perhaps quite naturally, this thought has on several occasions popped into my head, "Why is God doing this to me?"

Now, if evil is real, I think it's fair to identify the ground of suffering as Something or Someone Evil. Human suffering, writ large, is much worse than just "having a bad day." So another way to ask the question is, "Why doesn't God destroy the ground of suffering once and for all?"

And this is the answer that has just occurred to me: He doesn't destroy it, but he does "co-opt" it. He does turn evil into a burden for us, and for good reason. Bearing burdens is absolutely necessary for us if we are to grow as persons.

Personal growth seems to require that we die, little by little, to our selfishness. That's the bottom line. We won't die to our selfishness unless we are somehow burdened in life. Jesus was burdened with carrying his own cross prior to his crucifixion. We, too, must pay a (much smaller) price and bear a (much lighter) burden, if we are to locate a more "selfless self" to supplant our native selfishness.


Turning evil into a growth-sparking challenge to us: it patterns with a notion I draw from the new sciences of complexity. Some scientists have discovered an "edge of chaos," a fecund conceptual/mathematical region between order and chaos that is said to be the seat of evolutionary progress. The edge of chaos exerts its pull on computer models of living systems in such a way that perturbing a system into actual chaos causes a rebound toward order. During that rebound, growth and progress accelerate.

Perhaps this is exactly what happens when God co-opts evil, rather than banishing it outright.