Punctum Saliens

[ This is in response to a comment by Mark on my recent post: "The problem with the problem of evil" ]

I couldn’t sleep last night and picked up Volume 9ii of the Collected Works of Carl Jung. Scanning the chapter on Christ, A Symbol of the Self I came across Jung’s thoughts on evil and they are apropos of the discussion in my earlier post.

The fact that God is only good seems to be a doctrine that flies in the face of what we read about Yahweh in the Old Testament but the early church fathers seemed to think it scandalous that there could be anything but good in God. Tatian (2nd century) is the earliest authority for the axiom: “Nothing evil was created by God; we ourselves produced all wickedness.”

Basil the Great said that evil has no substance but “is the privation of good” and “arises from the mutilation of the soul.” Furthermore, “if all things are of God, how can evil arise from good?” In another passage, Basil says:

It is … impious to say that evil has its origin from God, because the contrary cannot proceed from the contrary. Life does not engender death, darkness is not the origin of light, sickness is not the maker of health. … Now if evil is neither uncreated nor created by God, when comes its nature? That evil exists no one living in the world will deny. … Each of us should acknowledge that he is the first author of the wickedness in him.

Jung says that good and evil “are a logically equivalent pair of opposites” and are the premise and co-existent halves for any moral judgment. They do not derive from each other but are “always there together.” Evil is a human value, like good.

Jung continues to say that, as Basil asserts, if evil arises from a “mutilation of the soul” and yet evil really exists then “the relative reality of evil is grounded in a real ‘mutilation’ of the soul which must have an equally real cause.” The real corruption of the originally good soul must be done by something real. Furthermore, how can man be the sole author of evil when Lucifer’s sin proves that evil was in the world before man? What was the cause of the “mutilation” of Lucifer’s heart? Jung points out the logical fallacy in Basil’s argument: “the independent existence of evil must be denied even in the face of the eternity of the devil as asserted by dogma.”

Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, says:

One opposite is known through the other, as darkness is known through light. Hence also what evil is must be known from the nature of good. Now we have said above that good is everything appetible; and this, since every nature desires its own being and its own perfection, it must necessarily be said that the being and perfection of every created thing is essentially good. Hence it cannot be that evil signifies a being, or any form or nature. Therefore it must be that by the name of evil is signified the absence of good.

Evil is not a being, whereas good is a being.

However, Jung points out, not only is darkness known through light but conversely, and as a logical equivalent, light is known through darkness. Cold is merely the privation of heat but does that make cold non-existent?

The privatio boni argument remains a euphemistic petitio principii no matter whether evil is regarded as a lesser good or as an effect of the finiteness and limitedness of created things. The false conclusion necessarily follows from the premise “Deus = Summum Bonum,” since it is unthinkable that the perfect good could ever have created evil. It merely created the good and the less good … Just as we freeze miserably despite a temperature of 230° above absolute zero, so there are people and things that, although created by God, are good only to the minimal and bad to the maximal degree.

Despite the logical fallacy of the “privation of good” argument, Jung recognizes that it is used and believed and this cannot be disposed of easily. “It proves that there is a tendency, existing right from the start, to give priority to ‘good,’ and to do so with all the means in our power, whether suitable or unsuitable.” In the end, Jung says:

The privatio boni may therefore be a psychological truth. I presume to no judgment on this matter. I must only insist that in our field of experience which and black, light and dark, good and bad, are equivalent opposites which always predicate one another.

I’m sure I have not done Jung’s argument justice, but I hope it’s at least comprehensible.