Previous - 127. Time in dreams
Candide
"Well, Everything Is Well" (or "Bien, Tout est Bien" from the Dictionnaire Philosophique of 1764, also by Voltaire.p85 What! to be driven out of a delightful garden [after the Fall]... to experience every sickness, feel every grief, die in anguish, and then in recompense to be roasted for eternity! This fate is really the best thing possible? It's not too good for us; and how can it be good for God?
Leibniz sensed there was nothing to be said in reply; and so he made big fat books in which he confused himself. [I love this analysis... of German philosophy in general.]
A denial that evil exists: it can be made in jest by a Lucullus in good health, who is eating a fine dinner... but... let him catch a fever, he'll be miserable himself....
(Yes, I love this in part because he correctly refers to Lucullus rather than making the common mistake of associating this high living to Epicurus, but beyond that... no, I just like that he brought up Lucullus, an excellent Roman general who refused to pander to his troops. Though, now I think of it, that incident is a little more problematic than it seems while you're plowing through Livy. Lucullus's troops balked as he lead them further and further east into lands Rome had never before interfered with. I can't exactly say they were wrong in that. But then Pompey came along and managed to get them on board. I believe this campaign also let to the conquest of Judea.
In any event, Lucullus, fed up with public life, retired with his amazing wealth and spent the remainder of his life enjoying himself. Cultivating his garden, as it were.
OMG! At the end of that paragraph Epicurus is mentioned.)
...But I must cite Lactantius, father of the church ["the Christian Cicero"... ouch!], who... makes Epicurus talk in this fashion:
Either God wants to remove evil from the world and cannot; or he can and does not want to; or he cannot and does not want to, either one; or else, finally, he wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, that is impotence, which is contrary to the nature of God; if he can and does not want to that is malice, which is equally contrary to his nature; if he neither wants to nor can, that is malice and impotence at the same time; if he wants to and can (and this is the only one of the alternatives that is consistent with all the attributes of God), then where does all the evil of the world come from?
This is a nice statement of the Problem of Evil.
...
The origin of evil has always been a pit of which nobody could see the bottom...
...
Here's a creation story I haven't heard before.
The Syrians imagine that when man and woman were created in the fourth heaven, they decided to eat cake instead of the ambrosia which was their natural diet. The ambrosia they could exhale through their pores; but after eating the cake, they had to go to the toilet. Man and woman together asked an angel where were the facilities. -- Look ye, says the angel, see that little planet down there, no bigger than a minute, some sixty million leagues from here? That's the privy for the whole universe; now get there right away. -- So they went, and were left there; and that's why, ever since, our world has been what it is.
Of course you can ask the Syrians why God let man eat the cake and allowed such a swarm of evils to follow from his doing so....
I really like that Creation story. It does have a bit in common with Douglas Adams's theory of the Golgafrinchan ship of fools that originally settled Earth.
p88 ...God, says Pope,
sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall;
Atoms or systems into ruins hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
Essay on Man, 1. 87-90
p89 Here, I confess, is a pleasant consolation; don't you find great comfort in Lord Shaftesbury's [who inspired Pope] remark that God isn't going to disturb his eternal laws for a miserable little animal like man? But you must grant this miserable little animal the right to exclaim humbly and to seek, as he exclaims, why these eternal laws are not made for the well-being of each individual.
This system of all is well represents the author of all nature as a potent, malicious king, who never worries if his design means death for four or five hundred thousand of his subjects, and poverty and tears for the rest, as long as they gratify him.
Far from consoling, the best of all possible worlds doctrine is a doctrine of despair for those who embrace it. The question of good and evil remains an insoluble chaos for those who seek in good faith for an answer....
This argument actually left me in a place I didn't expect to find myself, I see the Shaftesbury/Pope position. What has always bothered me about Voltaire is how outraged he was by the Lisbon Earthquake. To see "evil" in that event is to take the personal, Christian God rather too seriously, in my view. He seems to see God as a kind of guardian angel. The Lisbon Earthquake was a disaster, certainly, but I don't see it as an instance of evil. Ivan, in The Brothers Karamazov, did a great job of describing the evil in the world to Alyosha. That's the evil I feel a religious person has to come to terms with.
I would have to read more of Shaftesbury/Pope then I currently feel like, to discover if they tackled that task or only took on the straw-man of natural misfortune instead. I just did a search on the contents of Pandora's Box and found this:
For Zeus had packed the box full of all the terrible evils he could think of. Out of the box poured disease and poverty. Out came misery, out came death, out came sadness - all shaped like tiny buzzing moths. The creatures stung Pandora over and over again and she slammed the lid shut.
I would call these misfortunes, not "evils." As is so often the case, I think we are talking about two different things using the same terms. I'm happy with Pope's take on misfortunes, but evil is another matter and probably will take us all the way to de Sade.
(I am sitting in the window of the Market street Peet's and, as a seemingly endless stream of damaged and demented people wander past, it occurs to me that there could hardly be a better place to contemplate Candide.)
No comments:
Post a Comment