Gurdjieff on Evil

Detail from the Apocalypse Tapestries at Angers

“what the opposite of good is, even every nonpossessor of hemorrhoids must very easily understand.”

—Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, page 12.

I'm pinch hitting here, because I somehow skipped the entry for this publishing date. As a result we're on fast forward into evil.

The subject of evil has been on my mind lately, not just because I occasionally have theoretical discussions with people about whether good or evil actually exists, but also because of my dream life and the general sense I find in me that we are, collectively, rather unaware of real evil in any practical terms, although it's a common and even banal fixture in the stupidly artificial mythologies of popular culture.

Starting out down this path, I found it expeditious to do a review of how many times the word evil is used in Gurdjieff's Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, and in what context. The word is surprisingly abundant—but it ceases to exist after page 696 of the new addition – it doesn't get another mention throughout the book, even though he uses the expression with great frequency in the first half. Broadly speaking, Gurdjieff classifies two different kinds of evil; one group of evils centers nearly exclusively around things and practices that cause the sane being-mentation of humans to deteriorate, and the second, moral evils of one kind or another. Of the two, the first predominates; and perhaps we should expect that, given that said deterioration is one of the main themes of the book.

Yet there’s little, if any, of the gut-wrenching, deplorable evil that humankind is so addicted to: the wholesale slaughter of one another (to be fair, this gets a mention or two, cleaned up and sterilized into the unconvincingly dispassionate phrase, “process of reciprocal destruction.”) 

Where are the condemnations of the tortures, the rapes, the murders, the wars? The greed, gluttony and selfishness? One wonders. If Belsen and Auschwitz —hideous seeds already planted, but not sprouted yet when the book was written— had already taken place, would events like them (insofar as there might be any, which is another question)  have earned a mention in G's otherwise lengthy annals of purported violation?

In order of introduction, the evils Gurdjieff cites verbatim as evil are as follows:

wiseacreing, self-calming, animal sacrifice, vengeance, opium addiction,  devils, “hasnamussians,” (selfish people), procrastination (the disease of “tomorrow”), Greeks, vodka, art, theater, morality, the wearing of clothing (!), homosexuality and lesbianism, and the idea of good and evil itself.

I may have missed one or two, but this list is I think reasonably complete. 

These seventeen evils sum up the whole of Beelzebub’s litany of same. In the end, the fabric seems to me thin. One suspects Gurdjieff hasn’t sufficiently grappled with the issue here, except in a victorian, moralistic and allegorical manner. The critique of man, in other words, is strikingly incomplete—as it is in its lack of female characters. 

Let’s put it bluntly: if a man thinks the only major evils on the planet center around a range of things this narrow, something is missing. These ”evils” seem very nearly venial. 

Where are the deadly sins? 

The seven deadly sins are all deeply personal sins, transgressions against inner decency. Given the strong emphasis—today, at least— on the quality of inner work, inner quality of Being, the lack of a personal sense of sin or responsibility in the book is striking. Of the above, I count only vengeance, selfishness, and sexual transgressions as personal in nature—a  meagre list, and certainly disputable on the count of sexuality. Are homosexuals and lesbians evil? Really? I don't buy it. I see it as a cheap shot, given Gurdjieff's extensively documented association with the rope. On the other hand, perhaps it's just an intentional provocation for his readers. 

Agreed that Gurdjieff set his priorities differently than other men; and that he wrote a book intentionally different than other books (though not so very different, really.) Agreed that his priority for humanity was the re-acquisition of conscience and consciousness, in that order; but in service to what? For what reason?

One can, I think, plausibly argue that if a human being does not stand for and strive for the good, and oppose the evil, they stand for nothing. Gurdjieff contains enough of this idea—at the very least the seeds of it— in his teaching and writings to argue that he well understood the question. Yet he seems to avoid it, especially the question of those most visceral evils that beset humanity.

Gurdjieff’s failure to discuss the traditionally deadly sins flies in the faith of both Roman and (more tellingly in his own case) Greek orthodoxy. If we have learned anything about Gurdjieff over the years since his death—inevitably, the post mortem and the deep perspective of time have unearthed far more features of his work and ideas than were conceivably visible during his lifetime—it's how surprisingly orthodox his supposedly radical ideas actually were. It was his practice that was unorthodox—not his theology or his mysticism, both of which have ample and fascinating precedent.   

The accusations of moral turpitude that dogged Gurdjieff throughout his lifetime (and have followed him into his historical afterlife) stem at least in part from his oddly aberrant moral relativism: morality, it would seem he maintained, related only to consciousness. 

Yet even here the question is ambiguous: his hasnamuss individuals, especially the cryptic Lentrohamsanin, attain high degrees of conscious development but are still reprehensible… even evil, under the range of definitions Gurdjieff worked within. He does, after all, cite hasnamusses as evil influences... more will be said about them at later date.

The road to a legitimate inner morality flows into Being from a higher source. Yet that inflow of the divine is not, as everyone knows, guaranteed—and without an outer practice of morality, one based at the very least on intelligible principles which one ought to follow, things fall apart. 

One can’t, for example, invoke Gurdjieff’s principle of behaving as if one had moral qualities if no concrete moral form is proposed. 

Further thoughts on the subject of evil, which is still percolating, will be published in late March.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.