Good and Evil: The Eternal Dualism

I was very surprised when I heard that our research was going to be focused on the angels and demons that appear in the three dominant monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. However, my reaction was such because, at the time, I was not familiar with their holy books, their folklore, or even with their popular culture.

As the project continued, and Malia and I started reading the holy books, we both began to share similar concerns regarding the origins of evil. I started to wonder if God, the creator of everything, also created evil. I meditated on my question for a while, and I noticed that we understand good and evil as concepts that cannot exist without the other. That is, we cannot understand the meaning of evil without knowing the meaning of good, just as the same way we perceive death as the absence of life. Therefore, this blog seeks to explore the “origin” of evil as an abstract concept rather than a point in time, as well as its duality with good according to famous philosophers, scholars, and religious leaders.

First of all, it needs to be understood how Neoplatonism helped the development of these concepts about good and evil by the monothestic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.   In late antiquity, in the Greco-Roman world, a new philosophical school of thought emerged, named Neoplatonism. It became dominant for that period, leaving behind Epicureanism (the idea that knowledge is found through our senses, and believing that pleasure is attained to happiness¹) and Stoicism. The new late antique philosophers called themselves “Platonists” because they held Plato’s views,² yet they also absorbed, appropriated, and harmonized almost the entire philosophy, religion, and literature from the Hellenistic³ tradition, (with the exception of Epicureanism). Thus, according to Christian Wildberg, a philosophy historian, this combination of knowledge reflected an era of intellectual culture that brought scientific and moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the ethics of Stoics into an abundant conversation with literature, myth, and religious practice.⁴

Additionally, one of the most fundamental assumptions of this school of thought is about the nous, an important sense ontologically prior to the physical realm, taken as ultimate reality, the ordering principle, and the cause of everything.⁵  In other words, Neoplatonism searched to understand everything on the basis of a single cause (often considered divine), referred to as “the First,” “the One,” and “the Good.” These assumptions about nous were shared by a vast majority of intellectuals of the ancient world such as pre-Socratic thinkers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and others after them.

However, it needs to be understood that Neoplatonists speculated the emergence of the universe from this divine entity as something that has always existed and will always continue to exist. Later in time, this general outlook of Neoplatonism was appropriated and adapted into Christian theology as well as integrated into the ancient philosophy and science of Islam and Judaism.  In these three Abrahamic religions, God is the equivalent of the One, the First, the cause of everything that provides life and gives knowledge.

Moreover, we also must consider the world of ideas according to Plato as an important topic in the creation of the concepts of good and evil in these monotheistic religions.  The world of ideas, as stated by Plato, is that realm where all the universal ideas we use to describe our surrounding reality reside. It is where the essence of everything, the immutable and eternal, dwells in.⁶ By contrast, the sensible world is just a copy of the world of ideas since it is ruled by our senses and is in constant change. This world is neither immutable nor eternal.

Plato believed, just as Socrates, Parmenides, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus did, that the human body was the worst thing that could ever happen to the soul of a being because the body’s necessity of the material (food, intercourse, and drink) tended to push away the soul from its true essence., turning the self into its own slave and living for its material necessities.⁷ Furthermore, Plato and Socrates argued that the souls of all beings lived in the world as simply animas (the irrational part of the soul)⁸ that desired with their passions to obtain the human body and forget their divine origin. Hence, happiness for men would be recovering that divine spirit and coming back to the new world of ideas. Indeed, this concept is similar to the beliefs in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, where humans look forward to going to paradise to live and be happy with God there. However, only the ones who praise the Lord and follow His path will have the opportunity of going to heaven. Therefore, the notion of evil is perceived as following our own pleasures, passions, and desires because they take us away from our true essence.⁹

As mentioned earlier, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam absorbed Neoplatonism and Platonic concepts and adapted them to their own creeds.  For instance, Augustine, who belonged to Christianity, said “If God is the creator of everything, then everything that is, must be good. Thus, evil is the malfunctioning of something that is good.”¹⁰ Augustine, similar to Plato, argued that evil emerged due to our free will, and because some people believe that life is about submitting one’s self to the pleasures of the human body through our senses.¹¹ Likewise, Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra believed that the whole world was good because from God comes only good. Hence, “evil is due to the defect object receiving higher influence.” Other Rabbis, such as Saadia Gaon, stated that evil is nothing more than the absence of good.¹²

On the other hand, in Islamic beliefs, the Qur’an establishes that God is the only authority who can define good and evil, and it can be noticed in the following verse: “Fighting is prescribed for you, and you dislike it. But it is possible that you dislike a thing that is good for you, and that you love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knows, and you know not.” (Al-Baqarah 2:216)¹³ As a result, our perceptions about those concepts may be misleading.14

Furthermore, the following describes how religious leaders conceive the origin of evil. For instance, Christian leaders have talked about the “potential of evil” as created by God; evil comes as a choice, and every time we sin, “evil is actualized.”¹⁵ Moreover, Christian leaders from our community, such as Steve Nelson, believe that evil is a choice against God and His rules.¹⁶ Alternatively, in an interview with Rabbi Zeidman, a Reform Jew, he related that God allows evil in some instances. According to Zeidman, God gave us free will so we could decide which path to follow because the only opportunity we have to make “real choices” is if we have evil forces around us, too. Evil forces are there to challenge us and give real significance to the free will God gave us.¹⁷ Similarly, Imam Yehia Ibrahim, from the Islamic Center of El Paso, related that evil was created by God in order to test and tempt weak people, to see how many of us were truly honest.¹⁸ Overall, these leaders share similar notions and perceptions about the origin of evil according to their own religions. Evil is somehow allowed or created by God in order to give importance to the “rational” decisions we make.

In addition, for scholars such as Paul Carus, religions (such as the ones mentioned in this blog) would not exist without death, merely because it is within their beliefs that there is an afterlife. If there were no going astray, then we would not be seeking the right path, and goodness would not have any merit. For him, God would cease to be God if there were no necessity of virtue.1⁹ Other scholars, like Don Thorsen, state that people can only exercise the accurate image of God if they live in a world in which evil sometimes wins, so that humans can learn to develop faith, hope, love, and other virtues where they have to struggle in order to persevere. Otherwise, individuals would have been created just as angels or demons, acting like robots with no free-will.²⁰ Therefore the capacity we own to make moral or immoral decisions plays a remarkable role in the construction of evil in these religions.

I could go for hours explaining the different notions and perceptions of evil and its duality with good since it is something that has been evolving throughout time, most recently due to subjectivism and World War II.  Yet, I think it is impossible to describe a specific point in history of when evil was created since Neoplatonism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam consider God (or the One) as the ultimate being that has always existed and will always exist. Instead, the origin of evil may be understood in terms of “where” and not “when.” It was born in the minds of great ancient philosophers, and developed by the greatest monotheistic religions. In this context, evil comes as the absence of an omnipotent figure. It misguides us from the right path and traps us into the material world, along with our pleasures and desires.²¹ Evil in religion is the spirit that gives weight to our free will, and without it, “doing good” would mean nothing.

Written by Aylin Garcia, Undergraduate Research Fellow
El Paso Community College, The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP

Header image: "Plato's Symposium" by Anselm Feuerbach via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plato%27s_Symposium_-_Anselm_Feuerbach_-_Google_Cultural_Institute.jpg

Notations and References

1.  "Epicureanism." Encyclopedia of Ancient Rome, Matthew Bunson, Facts on File, 3rd edition, 2012. Credo Reference.

2.  Wildberg, Christian. "Neoplatonism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 11 Jan. 2016

3.  The Hellenistic tradition refers mainly to the cultural/religious influences on Europe and the Near East beginning with the final decades of the fourth century BCE. The principal characteristic of the era was basically the mixture between the culture of Classical Greece and the social and cultural milieu of the peoples to the east conquered by Alexander the Great.

4.  Wildberg, Christian. "Neoplatonism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 11 Jan. 2016

5.  Lilla, S. "Nous." Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, Angelo Di Berardino, InterVarsity Press, 1st edition, 2014. Credo Reference

6.  Plato. Republic. Madrid: Gredos, 1988. Print.

7.  Plato. The Dialogues of Plato. Barcelona: Austral, 2017. Print.

8.  "Anima." Lexico Dictionaries | English. Lexico Dictionaries. Web.

9.  Beuchot, M. Manual de historia de la filosofía griega. Juárez: Colección de libros universitarios. (2010)

10.  Stephens, Scott. "On God, Good and Evil." ABC Religion & Ethics. Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 31 Aug. 2012. Web.

11.  Cantera, M. S. San Agustín y la presencia del mal en la historia. Espíritu, 228-229. (2012)

12.  "Good & Evil." Good & Evil. Ed. Jewish Virtual Library. The Gale Group. Web. 24 Nov. 2020.

13.  Al-Baqarah, 2:216.

14.  Dougan, Alphonse. "Good and Evil in Islam." The Fountain Magazine. Blue Dome Inc., 01 Apr. 2005. Web.

15.  What Was the Origin of Evil? Perf. Hank Hanegraaff. What Was the Origin of Evil? Bible Answer Man, 1 Aug. 2011. Web.

16.  Nelson, Malia. “Interview with Steve Nelson, Pastor of the Rio Church.” 28 Oct. 2020.

17.  Garcia, Aylin. “Zoom Interview with Rabbi Ben Zeidman.” 19 Nov. 2020.

18.  Garcia, Aylin. “Zoom Interview with Imam Yehia Ibrahim.” 3 Nov. 2020.

19.  Carus, Paul. “The problem of Good and Evil.” The Monist, vol. 6, no. 4, 1896, pp. 580–599.

20.  “The Problem of Evil.” What’s True about Christianity? An Introduction to Christian Faith and Practice, by Don Thorsen, vol. 1, Claremont Press, Claremont, CA, 2020, pp. 77–82.

21.  This notion does not include modern perceptions about evil.