And Deliver us from Evil

Eve and the serpent, from the museum at Reims Cathedral

The noblest thing in man is blood, when it wills good. But the most evil thing in man is blood, when it wills evil. When the blood rules the flesh, a man is humble, patient and chaste and has all the virtues. But when the flesh rules the blood, a man is haughty, angry, and lascivious and has all the vices.

—Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, Sermon 56.

The word deliver stems from the latin de (away) and liberare (set free.) Implicit in the word is the idea that we’re somehow enslaved by evil.

As I explained in Metaphysical Humanism, the difference between obedience and slavery is that obedience is voluntary. In both the life of the world and the spirit, I have a choice between voluntary and involuntary impulses. Involuntary impulses are what Gurdjieff called mechanical; yet once again we see an odd sterilization of language at work here. The Lord’s prayer never said, deliver us from the involuntary or mechanical. It says deliver us from evil; and I think we can all agree that inflections of good and bad hardly belong to the world of machines, which displays a material and spiritual indifference to morality. What the prayer means is that there is evil, unadorned and undressed; we need to come to terms with that proposition first and foremost. Evil is a real and living thing, just as good is; and both are living simply because we choose between the two alternatives and give them life.

Perhaps this is going to far, of course, because life exists before any choices; it’s the inflow of Divine Love that brings life in the first place. Yet Divine Love can’t be divine, or offer humanity choice, without the alternative to Love being laid on the table not just as a possibility, but an actuality. Hence our difficult position as the arbiters (judges) of choice, the ones who decide whether good or evil will prevail in us.

This is an essential and existential inner choice we all make. Our difficulty arises, perhaps, because popular culture, as well as traditional religion, tends to externalize evil and assign it independent character, as though it were a thing unto itself—a force, the dark side.  

This is because of a too-literal physical understanding of evil, as well as a misunderstanding of its metaphysical nature, which is organized not by individual creatures but by the laws. Creatures (things of creation, which expression covers all things and beings) express the law; it is not of them, but by them. Law is expressed in one of two ways: automatically, involuntarily, by compulsion of law and circumstance; or voluntarily and consciously. Here we can perhaps see the seeds of Gurdjieff’s great emphasis on consciousness.

Evil doesn’t have an independent, metaphysical character of agency. It’s a potential which can either be actualized or not. Its agency and existence always depend on the creatures that express it, since evil is a manifestation of will that goes against the good, goes against the other, and goes against God. Without creatures of will, there could be no evil.

The sum total of this result—evil in the hearts of created entities with agency—is that evil manifests as a set of results, inflicting intentional harm on other creatures. Where evil exists, individual agents bear responsibility: not God.

If we want to be delivered from evil, we’re requesting liberation from a form of slavery. Yet in order to understand that slavery, we need to define it; and evil begins with our intentions. 

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.