Good and Evil in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Part II: Chapter 44

 Part II of a seven-part series

The preceding introduction is, however, just a 30,000 foot view of chapter 44. The core of mankind’s concepts of good and evil are embedded in a relatively brief passage, the kernel of the chapter, which recounts MK’s great discovery, which was later corrupted by human beings and their various religions.

The passage begins with a tripartite proposition which we can approximate as a representation of Meister Eckhart’s tripartite division of the soul. It casts itself at once as an inner proposition in which there is a part in mankind that receives emanations from the Prime Source, easily equated with Meister Eckhart’s transcendent nature of God. This describes the innermost part of the soul which receives the most intimate contact with God, equivalent to God the Father:

'It is evident that we men, like all units existing in the Universe, are formed and always consist of the same three independent forces, by means of which the process of reciprocal maintenance of everything existing is actualized, that is, the following three universal forces. 

'The first of these forces continually arises from causes appearing within the Prime Source itself from the effect of the pressure of new arisings and, issuing from it by momentum, flows out of that Prime Source. " 

This is a description of the divine inflow into being in the most intimate part of the soul. It is what gives birth to being. The iteration of man as a microcosmos identical in its construction, hierarchy, and particulars to the megalocosmos is equally explicit. It’s a description of the act of creation not just of the cosmos itself but of individual beings within it. A further nuance emerges in Gurdjieff’s remark about the “pressure of new arisings”, which serves as an indicator that creation is perpetual, takes place in eternity, and is lawful (issuing from it by momentum.) One is reminded here of Meister Eckhart’s repeated insistence that if man and his ego only get out of the way, God must flow in to the void that is created. 

Gurdjieff goes on to describe the outermost part of the soul, which would be called God the Son in Christian practice:

'The second universal force is what this first force becomes when, after having spent the momentum it had, it strives to reblend with the source of its arising, according to the fundamental cosmic law "the effects of a cause must always re-enter the cause. " 

'In the general process of reciprocal maintenance, these two forces are entirely independent, and in their manifestations always and in everything keep their own properties and characteristics. " 'The first of these two fundamental forces, the one that is always compelled to manifest outside the source of its arising, must constantly involve, and the second, on the contrary, in striving to reblend with the cause of its arising, must always and in everything evolve. " 

In this description, we encounter the transformation of the highest energy of the inflow into the external powers of the soul, which in Meister Eckhart’s conception (see the commentary on sermon one) engender agency. While the first force involves —”rolls into” — the second force evolves — literally, “rolls back out of.” Agency, in its interaction with the material, re – collects the dispersed portions of the involutionary force. By this action they are re – concentrated through effort (striving,) thereby reassimilating into the original wholeness of the original. The idea is a commonplace theme in Meister Eckhart’s sermons.

Implicit in this is the idea that the more whole they are, the more successfully they can re-blend with the cause of their arising — which is, of course, a description of Gurdjieff’s cosmological engine as presented in The Holy Planet Purgatory.

There are already some notable connections between Meister Eckhart’s vision of the soul and its functions here; yet it is a mere beginning.

'Since the first of these three independent forces arises from vivifying actions proceeding in the very foundation of the Cause of everything that exists and thus receives in its presence the germ of that same power of manifesting vivifyingness, it may be considered as "Good," that is, as a factor for the actualizing of the backward-flowing effects, which in relation to this first force can and must be considered as "Evil." 

The unfortunate misunderstanding about the nature of the words “good” and “evil” arises in this single passage. The difficulty begins here with the fact that the words are labels for lawful cosmological processes. In this descriptive passage, “good” is nothing more than the involutionary or creative force, and “evil” nothing more than the evolutionary force. Their value is not moral but objective. One disseminates vivifyingness (brings life to matter by undergoing the dissolution of its nature) and the other re-gathers that force to return it to its source.

The error — and it is an egregious error indeed on the part of MK— is that his choice of words for the evolutionary force names it “bad.” Why he chose the particular word “evil” remains entirely unclear, and Beelzebub does not offer us any clues. 

It leaves us with the question: if MK is not to blame for this choice of words, who is?

The situation arises, perhaps, as an inevitable consequence of dualism: if the involutionary force is good, the evolutionary force has to be its opposite. Yet this is a function of thinking on the order of 48 laws, in which every law from the higher level of 24 laws is reflected by an inversion of itself on this one. Such inversion does not take place on the level above us; yet we’re locked into thinking of things as composed of opposites on this level. It’s by law the very nature of the level itself.

From that perspective, it was inevitable that “good”would find its counterpart in “evil” in the minds of men; and yet we can see the sheer illogic of this concept by understanding that the very action of the evolutionary force is nothing more than an effort to return to the good. (This is not how we usually understand the word “evil.”)

That effort of return embodies both subjective (egoistic) and objective (non-– egoistic) elements and actions; and from this perspective, a further (and objective) division must be made between actions which are selfish and actions which are not. That particular division actually lies at the heart of Gurdjieff’s philosophical and theological contemplations:

“The sign of the growth of emotion is the liberation from the personal element. Personal emotion fools, is partial, unjust. Greater knowledge is in proportion to fewer personal elements. The problem is to feel impersonally. Not all emotions are easily freed of the personal. Certain ones by their nature corrupt, separate. Others, like love, lead man from the material to the miraculous.” (From “The Meaning of Life,” a.k.a. Pure and Impure Emotions, page 3) 

The distinction between that which corrupts and separates as opposed to that which re-unites is clear enough here.

From a certain vulgar perspective, we do end up with an “evil” here; yet the evil lies, as Gurdjieff goes on to explain, not in the inherent nature of external things, but in the agency that engages with them. Everything turns on that agency and the choices that it makes; and we find ourselves here in a distinctly Swedenborgian territory. That same territory is by no means foreign to Gurdjieff, who bases all the great premises of his teaching on personal responsibility and the fulfillment of being-duty. Indeed, we find those concepts embedded even here in this rather pithy examination of good and evil, both as they exist subjectively and objectively.

One might sum this up with an aphorism: A selfish wish to return to the good is evil.

 May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.