Voices of Islam (93 page)

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Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Currently University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University, Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr is one of the foremost scholars and writers on Islam and Sufi in the world today. Gray Henry (Virginia Gray Henry- Blakemore) directs Fons Vitae, which publishes books on world spirituality and works with the Thomas Merton Foundation in Louisville, Kentucky.

GRAY HENRY (GH): First is the question of defining evil. Is there absolute evil, and is there relative evil?

SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR (SHN): From the metaphysical point of view, the world itself is a revelation. Revelation is not only the sacred book or an avatar or a divine descent. The universe itself is the primal revelation of God. But it is also a veiling. Only the supreme Good, which is absolute, can be absolutely good. All that is not in that supreme Reality must participate in and partake of the separation from that supreme Good. That’s why Christ said, ‘‘Only my father in heaven is good.’’ Even Christ said that he was not ‘‘the Good;’’ only his father in heaven was so. Now, this separation from the Good is necessary because we exist. To exist is to be separated from the supreme Reality, to be in the domain of relativity. Separation is the origin of all that we call evil. In
The Divine Comedy,
Dante Alighieri says that Hell is separation from God. God is real; we are relatively real. To the extent that we are relatively real, we are separated from the Divine Reality by a hiatus which itself is the origin of what appears to us to be evil. To the extent that we are real, we refl the good. That is also why the good has an ontological basis; evil does not.

GH: This is the important point.

SHN: Exactly. Evil is like shadow; the good is like the sun, like light. Now, when you sit under the shade of a tree, you say, ‘‘I feel cool.’’

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You think that the shade and the sun ten feet away are equal existen- tially. Both exist. If you go in the sun, you’re hot; if you’re under the shade, you’re cool. But actually the shade is the absence of the sun. It doesn’t have the same ontological status. In the same way, evil is real as much as we, who are relative beings, are real, but it is not real as far as ‘‘The Real’’ is concerned. That is, in God there is no evil. Then why, you might ask, did God bother to create the world? There is the Hindu doctrine of
lila
—the world is divine play. The Islamic response, I think, is most to the point when it asserts that God wanted to be known and therefore created the world so that he would be known. God is infinite. Infinity implies all possibilities, including the possibility of the negation of itself. God is also good. It’s in the nature of good to give of itself, as Saint Augustine said, like the light, like the sun. The sun cannot but give of itself. When you understand these two supreme attributes of God, you understand that the possibil- ity of divine self-negation must become realized. And that is the world.

GH: A lot of people say evil is a real force. Does it have its own life?

SHN: That’s a very important issue. As you descend down the plane of reality, the veils of darkness increase until you reach the world in which we are, in which the veil is very thick. As the history of the world fl gradually there’s a movement away from the Source, from the Principle. That is, God is not only the center and the above, He’s also the beginning and the origin. He’s the alpha. In the original creation there were higher levels of reality, closer to the sun. Light dominated completely over darkness. That’s the Golden Age, the
Kritayuga
in Hinduism, and so forth. But as the history of the cosmos and our history unfold, the darkness becomes more and more accentuated. This fl however, is interrupted by revelation and by divine descents throughout human history, each a foundation of a great religion: Christ, Muhammad the Prophet of Islam, the Buddha, Moses on Mt. Sinai, Zoroaster, Lao Tse, and Confucius. There’s an intense glow which defi the beginning of each religion, but then the cycle of degeneration begins again.

GH: Now, at the end of the twentieth century, we have the drying up of traditional forms of life.

SHN: Actually, the twentieth century has seen more horrendous forms of evil than any period of human history.

GH: It would appear so.

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SHN: There are many people who criticize Traditionalists by saying, ‘‘Oh, you idealize the old world. There were also wars in ancient times,’’ and things like that. Of course we do not deny it. But there is a great degree of difference between historical events and events today. And as the cosmic cycle unfolds, and as truths are forgotten, then for a while evil is not even recognized as such. People refuse to recognize it, and it becomes all-invading. This raises an important point of the ques- tion you asked a moment ago: Is evil a force? Now, from the
metaphysi- cal
point of view, only God is real.
Evil has no ultimate reality.
Since we live on the level of
relativity,
in our ordinary consciousness this world is relatively real.
Evil is also relatively real.
All religions speak of the battle of good and evil. It would be a great mistake to say, ‘‘Well, there is no evil in or around me.’’ In fact, evil is as real as the ego.

GH: Which is separative.

SHN: Yes. We assert the separative ego while denying evil—one of the great strategies of the modern world.

GH: That’s a contradiction.

SHN: Absolute contradiction. People don’t talk about the devil any more in polite society. Not fashionable. But the devil is the personifica- tion of the separative tendency on the human plane. To deny the devil is to deny God. Charles Baudelaire says that in
The Flowers of Evil.
A pasteurized world in which there is no evil and no devil is itself the worst kind of daydreaming and something demonic in the ultimate sense. We must understand that destiny has put us in a moment of cos- mic history in which there is a predominance of evil, and we are here to be, in fact, testament and witness to the good. In older days there were so many ways of controlling evil, through religious rites, spiritual disci- plines and teachers, through the presence of the sacred
...
today it’s so difficult. And that is the secret of why, in the traditional sources, there are sometimes indications that people prayed for those who would live at the end of the world.

GH: Then the ego is where the force of evil takes place in the human world. And can there be evil without intention?

SHN: In the animal or the plant world—

GH: When there are hurricanes that kill people and so forth.

SHN: That is not completely evil, because a hurricane also cleans up the air and so forth and reestablishes balance. What is metaphysically

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‘‘evil’’ is the gradual flow of the cosmos away from its original perfection when it was much more transparent to the archetypal real- ities. Nature, precisely because it does not have a will to act, is always innocent. Therefore there is no moral evil in nature. Pollution, the greenhouse effect, and the destruction of the coral reefs and the ecology of the oceans: it is we who are destroying nature. Is this only evil if we will it? Morally, yes. The reason we are doing this, and not, let’s say, elephants or crocodiles, is precisely because God has given us free will. In the divine plan of things, it is the crown of creation that will fi destroy creation, bring the
Kaliyuga
to an end. Which is what we’re doing.

GH: Many people ask, If God is really good, how can he create sinners and then send them to Hell?—a question of predestination and free will.

SHN: Yes, this is important. If everything is determined by God, and we have no free will, then we cannot commit evil. Everything we do is God’s will. However, the other side is the question of free will. There can be no moral responsibility without free will. Evil can only be committed if you are free to commit evil. That is why, for example, if you have a fever, that is not an act of evil committed on your part. If you deliberately take a drug which is bad for your body, then you have committed an evil act. But if you eat an apple with something bad for you inside it without knowing it—if you do it without inten- tion—then it’s not evil. So evil is always related to intention. As to whether God created sinners deliberately to commit sins and go to Hell, that is not true at all, because those sinners had free will. They were not chosen just to be sinners and sent to hell—that would be a monstrous view of God. Every person has the free will to choose. That is why, for example, in both Islam and Christianity, children or insane people are absolved from committing evil. So the question of intention, free will, and responsibility are part and parcel of reality. You might well say, however, we’re put in this world where there’s so much evil. Some- body has to commit this evil. So that means most of us have to commit evil. Isn’t that unfair? Here I will quote you the famous saying of Christ: ‘‘Trouble must needs come, but woe unto him who bringeth it about.’’ Tragedy will come, but woe unto you if you cause its coming. That does not take away our responsibility before God. Each individual, by virtue of the fact that he or she is given the freedom to act, has a moral responsibility. Nobody’s forced to become a sinner. We always have the freedom to come out of that state. If you have committed sin, it’s always possible, as long as you’re human, to eradicate evil by virtue of being human. It’s a remarkable gift

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which God has given us. We can always ask God’s pardon, God’s mercy.

GH: I have a question about the terms ‘‘evil’’ and ‘‘bad.’’ Sometimes things happen and we call them ‘‘bad’’ in our lives—an illness or something. They can be transformed spiritually by us into the good. But can something that seems ‘‘evil’’ be transformed? What is the relationship between ‘‘evil’’ and ‘‘bad’’?

SHN: Oftentimes events befall us which cause us to suffer. Those are opportunities for the soul to grow. We are in this world, as the Koran says, to be tested. ‘‘Evil,’’ however, that which is morally evil, is not only bad in the sense that it’s bad for us, but it has no redemptive quality to it unless you recognize it as evil, and perform the
tawba
(turning), and the purging aspect which that brings about. An evil that can befall us can be good for us only in that sense.

GH:
Metanoia.

SHN: That’s right—an occasion for
tawba,
for repentance, for purging something from us by recognizing it as evil. It can also be a challenge for transformation, which is quite something else.

GH: Sometimes people say when a child is born deformed or falls ill, it’s a sign of evil. How can we understand that?

SHN: Because of the separation between the material world and the intelligible world, you can never have the perfection of the spiritual world in this one. If you draw a pattern of a hexagon, the perfect hexagon exists only in the intelligible, the mathematical world. Every hexagon that you make is imperfect. It’s remarkable how the good predominates over evil. But the imperfection has to be there. We expect everything to be good, everything to be perfect. We want everything without giving anything. We don’t want to submit ourselves to God. We do not want to accept our destiny. We always want to assert ourselves as individual egos. And then we expect everything to be per- fect. And when it isn’t, we—who did not start with truly believing that God is reality and whatever good He has given us we must be thankful for—then begin to criticize God and religion: Oh, if this is a good God, why am I having troubles? But traditional people realized there were imperfections in this world. They took it as a part of terrestrial life and never expected perfection here below. Now, the fact that we are so dissatisfi is proof of our divine origin. Why is it that we expect perfection? That comes from the imprint of the divinity upon us.

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GH: Does evil exist cross-culturally? Do, for example, the Buddhists see evil the same way that Muslims do?

SHN: The spiritual and metaphysical significance of evil is universal. It has to do with the ego, with the walls that we draw around it, with the importance of breaking that wall, and with giving of ourselves. However, the forms in which acts take place in which good and evil are defi are bound by the traditions in which human beings live. Then there are formal differences which the various revelations impose as far as what actions are performed. For example, for a Muslim it is considered to be
haram
(forbidden), an evil act, to drink alcoholic beverages or to eat pork. A Jew who follows the
halakhah
will also not eat pork. Whereas for a Christian this is not the case. One might say, ‘‘Well, isn’t this making evil relative?’’ But that’s to misunderstand the fact that each religion sacralizes the pattern of life according to its own principles.

GH: Is the way we personally overcome evil in ourselves the purification of the ego?