Perhaps it is the hardest question faith knows. If God is good and powerful, why does he allow evil? Why do the innocent suffer? Why are there torturers and disasters? I want to begin with what never disappears from this question. The suffering of the innocent is real, and no explanation can undo it. Any answer that tries to justify it is suspect. What I want to speak about leads to the conclusion that the world is not a prison from which we must escape. It is a school to which we return.
Evil as the Shadow of Separation
As I see it, evil is neither a thing nor a second god. It arises from the very structure of the One becoming many. For a world of real, distinct beings to exist, the source must divide itself, move away from itself, and give each being only a part of itself. Tolkien expressed this beautifully in his mythology. The angelic beings from whose music the world arose each understood only that part of God’s mind from which they themselves had come. And precisely here lies the root of evil. Evil arises when a part takes itself to be the whole.
The sin of the greatest of the angels did not lie in being different. It lay in wanting to be the source himself, the origin, in elevating his fragment into the centre of everything. That is pride, and pride is a distortion of vision. It is a point behaving as though it were the centre of the world. This is how evil arises. A part of being closes in upon itself and forgets where it comes from.
The Price of Freedom
I find the model of four-level reality useful. At the foundation and source of everything is pure Consciousness. Above it is the layer of archetypes. This expresses itself through a vibrational, energetic layer. From that, the material world we perceive with our senses finally emerges. As consciousness divides through these levels, each further level has a weaker and weaker connection to the source. Partial knowledge is innocent in itself. Evil begins when the fragment closes in upon itself.
Why does God allow this? Because without separation and freedom there would be no others, only God himself. Love needs another who can refuse. A world of free beings who can err and cause harm has greater value than a perfect mechanism in which nothing can go wrong. This explains why evil is possible at all. For those who suffer, of course, this is not much comfort. Such people do not need explanations. They need someone to stand beside them.
The Temptation of Gnosis
The ancient Gnostics perceived this wound in the world very intensely. Today, few people know what Gnosis actually was. It was not a single religion. It was a group of currents that flourished in the first centuries after Christ around the Mediterranean, alongside the emerging Christian tradition. Most of their writings were lost. Some of them were rediscovered only in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt.
According to the Gnostics, the true God is completely unknowable and beyond this world. Somewhere in the sequence of his emanations, however, an error occurs. A lower divine being, often called Sophia, Wisdom, makes a mistake, and from her error a lower creator arises, the demiurge. He is ignorant and proud. He creates the material world. He believes he is the only god and knows nothing of the true God above him. Matter and the body are therefore, for the Gnostics, a kind of prison made by a mistaken power. Yet within the human being there is a spark of light, a fragment of the true God, which has fallen asleep and forgotten where it comes from. Salvation does not come through faith or works. It comes through knowledge, through gnosis, through an awakening in which the spark remembers who it is and can escape back to the true God. The redeemer who brings this awakening descends from the true God in order to awaken those who sleep.
It is easy to see why Gnosis remains attractive. It takes the suffering present in the world with complete seriousness. It explains evil by saying that the perfect God is not responsible for this disorder. The guilty one is the lower creator. And it gives the soul a noble, secret identity, because in its depths it is divine and in this world it is only a stranger. This speaks to everyone who has ever sensed that they do not belong here. Echoes of Gnosis can still be heard today, in the idea that we live in a matrix or a simulation, and also in forms of spirituality that teach us to rise above the world and escape from it.
I think Gnosis named the problem correctly, but did not find the right solution. When we divide reality in two, into the true God and the mistaken creator, the unity of the world is lost. When we declare matter to be an error and the body a prison, we lose something very precious. Matter is not a mistake. It is the outer face of the same song, the place where the source can, for the first time, truly see itself. The body is not a prison. It is the instrument through which the soul learns. For this reason, the world does not need to be abandoned. It needs to be healed and completed.
The Return of the Soul and Meaning as Learning
I have just begun listening to the book Why?, written by three authors: the psychologist Matthew McKay, the priest and transpersonal psychologist Seán ÓLaoire, and the psychologist Ralph Metzner. They ask why we are here, and their answer is that we are here in order to see and know, and so that our soul may mature through experience. Pain also has its place in this. It is not a punishment to be avoided. It is part of learning.
A strong argument for this view is the return of the soul. There are many testimonies suggesting that the soul returns to the world, again and again, into new bodies. The psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, and after him Jim Tucker, spent decades collecting cases of young children who described details from the life of a stranger, someone long dead. These details could be verified. Michael Newton, through hypnosis, recorded hundreds of accounts of what the soul experiences between two lives. Near-death experiences speak in a similar language.
If the purpose were to escape from the world, as Gnosis teaches, the soul would leave and not return. Yet it does return. This return is the best evidence that the world is not a prison. It is a school. The spark of light is not in matter by mistake. It is here intentionally, in order to learn to see and love, and to bring light into the world. The purpose, then, is not escape. It is growth.
Jung’s Answer to Job
The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung asked a similar question in his book Answer to Job, and he went even further. He claimed that God has his own shadow of which he is unaware, and that he encounters it only when he meets the suffering human being. God, in a sense, does not fully know what he is doing. I understand this differently. God as source, as pure consciousness, is not unfinished. He lacks nothing. What is incomplete is only his manifestation, the way in which the hidden becomes visible through creation. God does not grow and evolve. What grows is our manifestation of God. Jung perceived something true about the face that becomes manifest, but he mistakenly attributed it to the source itself.
Our Knowledge of God Also Matures
Our image of God is also in a process of development. In the Book of Genesis, Melchizedek appears as priest of God Most High and as a Canaanite king to whom Abraham, without hesitation, gives a tithe. Scholars show that Israelite religion grew out of an older West Semitic soil, that the name of God has Canaanite roots, and that the idea of one God emerged gradually. Christianity preserved Melchizedek and still remembers him in every Mass. This is not a stain on faith. It is an acknowledgement that knowledge of God shone through even before and outside a particular covenant, and that it grew over time. The history of religion is the human face of the same process: the gradual maturing of the image of God, a process that is never fully complete.
Religion as Symbol
Here we need to return for a moment to what a symbol is, because this is what my whole book Reality Speaks is about. A symbol has a double nature. It has a fixed form, an image or story that can be shown and named. At the same time, it has an inexhaustible depth into which that form opens a window. This is what distinguishes it from an ordinary sign. A sign merely points to something and is exhausted by that function. In a symbol, finite form and infinite content meet.
This applies to every religion. Religion is a great symbol. Its names and stories, its rites and sacraments, all these are form. The living reality of God to which that form opens the way is the inexhaustible depth. As long as religion is read as symbol, it remains alive. The form is a window, not a cage.
The danger arises when the symbol is taken literally. Then the form hardens and loses its content. The window becomes a wall. The believer then confuses his own idea of God with God himself and begins defending it as an idol. The critic, on the other side, shows that this form is historically changeable and has been taken from somewhere else, and believes that by doing so he has also refuted its depth. Both make the same mistake. They take the symbol literally. One divinizes the form, the other devalues it, and both fail to see what the form merely points toward.
This brings me back to Melchizedek. From the fact that Christianity and Judaism grew out of the older soil of Canaanite religion, and that this itself probably grew from something still older, and from the fact that the image of God developed through history, some conclude that Christianity has no solid foundation and therefore cannot be true. This is precisely the mistake of literalism. The development of form says nothing against depth. On the contrary, it is what makes a symbol alive. The form matures and receives into itself older layers, while the reality toward which it points remains the same and inexhaustible. The roots in the Canaanite past therefore do not refute Christianity. They show through how many layers, and for how long, the human image of God has been working its way toward the same source.
This also relates to the difference between the God we imagine and the real God. The God we imagine is form understood literally. It is an image we have created and confused with the original. The real God is the depth that no image can exhaust. The mystics knew this. Meister Eckhart prayed that God would free him from God, meaning from the overly limited image of God. One of the authors of Why?, the priest Seán ÓLaoire, later wrote a book about the need to liberate God from the caricature we have made of him, in which we have seen only our own image. Religion remains healthy as long as it keeps its forms open toward depth. Its end comes when it closes them and begins to worship itself.
Returning with Open Eyes
Evil is imperfect knowledge of the source that has closed in upon itself and forgotten where it comes from. Yet the same separation that makes evil possible is also the condition that allows the world to return to the source freely and with open eyes. The world, therefore, is not a mistake from which we must flee. It is a workshop in which the part learns to see the whole again.
Gnosis wants to escape from matter. The return of the soul says the opposite. We return precisely here in order to mature, and each life is another lesson in the same school. The aim is not to disappear. It is to mature enough to see and love the whole more fully than we could have done if we had never separated. This is also the meaning of suffering, which shapes us on that path. And this is finally our task: to bring light into the world, little by little, where we stand.
