Evil

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EVIL

EVIL . If there is one human experience ruled by myth, it is certainly that of evil. One can understand why: the two major forms of this experience—moral evil and physical evil—both contain an enigmatic element in whose shadows the difference between them tends to vanish.

On the one hand, it is only at the conclusion of a thoroughgoing critique of mythical representations that moral evil could be conceived of as the product of a free act involving human responsibility alone. Social blame, interiorized as guilt, is in fact a response to an existential quality that was initially represented as a stain infecting the human heart as if from outside. And even when this quasi-magical representation of a contamination by an external or superior power is replaced by the feeling of a sin of which we are the authors, we can feel that we have been seduced by overwhelming powers. Moreover, each of us finds evil already present in the world; no one initiates evil but everyone has the feeling of belonging to a history of evil more ancient than any individual evil act. This strange experience of passivity, which is at the very heart of evildoing, makes us feel ourselves to be the victims in the very act that makes us guilty.

On the other hand, it is also only at the conclusion of a comparable critique of mythical representations that physical evil is recognized as the effect of natural causes of a physical, biological, and even social nature: sickness, which often takes the form of great epidemics ravaging entire populations, simultaneously attacks each person in the very depths of his existence by making him suffer and is spontaneously experienced as an aggression, at once external and internal, coming from maleficent powers that are easily confused with those that seduce the human heart and persuade it to do evil. Moreover, the sort of fate that seems to lead the sick and aging to the threshold of death tends to make mortality the very emblem of the human condition. From this, it is easy to take the next step and consider suffering and death as punishments. Do not guilt and mortality constitute the same enigma?

The persistence of mythical representations of evil can be explained by a third phenomenon, namely the extraordinary way in which guilt and suffering remain intertwined with a stage of development in which the human mind believes it has freed itself from the realm of mythical representations. To declare someone guilty is to declare that person deserving of punishment. And punishment is, in its turn, a suffering, both physical and moral, inflicted by someone other than the guilty party. Punishment, as suffering, therefore bridges the gap between the evil committed and the evil suffered. This same boundary is crossed in the other direction by the fact that a major cause of suffering lies in the violence that human beings exercise on one another. In fact, to do evil is always, directly or indirectly, to make someone else suffer. This mutual overlapping of evil done and evil suffered prevents the two major forms of evil from ever being entirely separate and, in particular, from ever being entirely stripped of their enigmatic character. An essential opaqueness in the human condition is therefore bound up with the experience of evil, which is continually carried back to its darkness, its obscurity, by the exercise of violence, always unjust, and of punishment, even when it is held to be just.

This invincible connection of moral evil and physical evil is expressed on the level of language in the specific "language game" designated by the general term lamentation. Lamentation, indeed, is not confined to the moanings rising up from the abyss of suffering, announcing the coming of death. It encompasses the guilty and the victims, for the guilty suffer twice over, first by blame, which states their unworthiness, and then by punishment, which holds them under the reign of violence. With lamentation, the experience of evil becomes heard. The cry becomes a voice, the voice of the undivided enigma of evil. Lamentation forms a bridge between the evil committed or suffered and the myth. And indeed it connects suffering to language only by joining a question to its moaning. "Why evil?" "Why do children die?" "Why me?" In turning itself into a question, lamentation itself appeals to myth.

Myths of Evil

How does myth reply to the enigma of evil? It provides the first explanatory schema available to humanity. Myth replies to "why?" with "because"—which claims to fulfill the request for sense that is the mediation of lamentation. We shall discuss, in conclusion, why this claim is doomed to fail. But first we must discuss the power of myth.

Before stressing the fantastic, legendary, and even delirious side of myths, three features must be noted that define myth, at least provisionally, as an appropriate response to the "why?" that rises up from lamentation. The first characteristic of myth is to state an order indivisibly uniting ethos and cosmos. By encompassing in a single configuration celestial and terrestial phenomena, inanimate and animate nature, seasons and festivals, labors and days, myth offers a privileged framework of thought within which to link together moral evil and physical evil, guilt and mortality, violence and punishment: in short, a framework that preserves, in its answer, the unity of the enigma of evil as a question.

Next, the ambivalence of the sacred, as Rudolf Otto describes it, confers upon myth the power of taking on both the dark and the luminous sides of human existence. Many myths point to a primordial sphere of existence that can be said to be beyond good and evil. Finally, myth incorporates our fragmentary experience of evil within great narratives of origin, as Mircea Eliade has stressed in his many works on this topic. By recounting how the world began, myth recounts how the human condition reached the wretched and miserable form that we know it to take. Theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogenesis therefore form a single narrative chain that scans the "great time" of origin. Order, ambivalence, and omnitemporality are thus the major features of myth, owing to which the mythical explanation can claim to provide an all-encompassing framework for evil.

This is all we can say about myth in general, however, without running the risk of applying to one precise category of myth characters belonging solely to another. This is not to imply that we must cease to speak of myth in general: the case of myths of evil is exemplary in this respect. It appears, in fact, that myth, considered as a type of discourse, draws a certain unity from the place it assumes in a hierarchy of levels of discourse that can be organized according to stages of increasing rationality. Myth constitutes in this regard the lowest level, coming before wisdom and gnosis, which leads to the threshold of the rationalizing theodicies of philosophy and theology. One must be aware, however, that the ordering principle thus alleged is the offshoot of a certain idea of reason that was, in the West, born with philosophy itself. A purely comparativist approach could never assume unreservedly this "prejudice of reason." On the other hand, if we bracket it completely—and doubtless this must be the case in a purely descriptive history of religions—then we expose ourselves to the inverse danger, which is that the universe of myths will splinter into an infinite number of parts.

It is precisely this feature that prevails in the case of myths of evil when we bracket, at least for a while, the question of the place of myth in an ordered series of levels of discourse. Order, ambivalence, and omnitemporality then appear only as inconsequential abstract and formal elements in relation to the explanatory schemas that mythical thought has produced throughout space and time. Nowhere else as much as in the area of the explanation of evil does myth reveal itself to be this vast field of experimentation, which is unfolded in the literature of the ancient Near East, India, and the Far East. In this immense laboratory everything occurs as if there were no conceivable solution that had not been tried at one point or another as a reply to the enigma of evil. It is precisely here that the myth forms the great matrix in which are rooted the sapiential, Gnostic, and properly speculative modes of the great discourse proffered by humankind in the space opened up by lamentation between the cry and utter silence. In this sense, myth remains the schema for all subsequent speculation. The question then arises whether, outside any hierarchical order of discourses, this great phantasmagoria of evil lends itself to some typology that will not do violence to its proliferating diversity.

A prudent reply is needed to this methodological question: on the one hand, myths of evil lend themselves to classification by virtue of their narrative character, mentioned above as the third general feature of the mythical universe. Narratives of origin are presented as dramas recounting how evil began; it is therefore possible to apply a structural analysis to them that reduces them to a relatively limited number of ideal types, in Max Weber's sense—that is, of paradigms constructed by comparative science midway between the clearly transcendental a priori and empirical proliferation. The ideal types are those of an exemplary story, organizing segments of action, characters, fortunate and unfortunate events, as in the great epics that take place in our time, after the beginning.

The proliferation of myths can thus be mastered to a relative degree by a typology of dramatic paradigms. On the other hand, individual myths contain so many inconsistent elements, which convey a desperate attempt to explain the unexplainable in order to give an account of what is inscrutable, that they prove to be in large part hostile to all classification. At the most they present "family resemblances" that cause a number of overlaps between types of myth. There is no myth that, in some way or other, does not coincide with another myth. In this way we are prevented from working out a table of the strict play of differences and combinations among myths. In The Symbolism of Evil, I proposed a typology limited to the ancient Near East and to archaic Greece, that is, to the cultural memory of the European. (I shall discuss below a vaster typology that will take into account Indian and Buddhist mythology.)

The ancient Near East and Archaic Greece

The restricted typology of The Symbolism of Evil verifies the two opposing characteristics mentioned above. On the one hand, the attempt to classify myths in terms of a limited number of paradigms is relatively successful; on the other, the overlapping that occurs shows that every paradigm implies in some aspect or another a very different paradigm.

For a static analysis of the myths of evil, the myths of the cultural sphere considered can be divided fairly easily into four great paradigms.

1

In the myths of chaos, illustrated most strikingly by the Sumerian-Akkadian theogonic myths but also by the Homeric and Hesiodic theogonies, the origin of evil that strikes humans is included within the larger narrative of the final victory of order over chaos in the common genesis of the gods, the cosmos, and humanity. The great creation epic, Enuma elish, makes the appearance of man the final act in a drama that begins with the generation of the gods. One can truly speak in this connection of an epical ontogenesis to describe this sort of total narrative. As regards evil in particular, it is noteworthy that chaos precedes order and that the principle of evil is coextensive here with the generation of the divine. The poem does not hesitate to characterize as evil the hates, the plotting, and the murders that mark not only the primitive struggles among the most ancient gods but also the victory of the younger gods—Marduk, for example, in the Babylonian version of the myth.

Evil therefore precedes humankind, who finds it already present and merely continues it. Evil, in other words, belongs to the very origin of all things; it is what has been overcome in setting up the world as it now is, but it, too, contributed to this state of affairs. This is why order is precarious and its genesis must continually be reenacted by cultic rites. If, in this family of myths, the fall is mentioned, it is never in the sense of the unprecedented emergence of an evil that would be simply "human, all too human," but as an episode in the drama of creation. In the same way, the failure of the quest for immortality, recounted in the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, is tied up with the jealousy of the gods, who trace out the boundary between the sphere of mortals and that of immortals by an act of violence placed beyond good and evil.

2

An evil god and a tragic vision of existence are depicted in the second paradigm of evil in European culture. Here, evil is in a way shared by humankind and gods. It calls, on the one hand, for a figure with the stature of a hero, possessing higher qualities than ordinary men but who commits a grave error, which can be said to be neither the effect of mere ignorance, in the Socratic sense, nor the result of a deliberately bad choice, in the Hebraic sense. Moreover, the overwhelming error that precipitates his fall is deplored by the tragic chorus and by the hero himself as a blindness that has crept over him as a result of the jealousy of the gods; thus the hubris of the tragic hero is at once the cause and the effect of the wickedness belonging to the plane of the divinities. Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound is the frightening document of this tragic theology and this tragic anthropology in which the hero in a sense cooperates in a loss, the origin of which is superhuman. It is important to note that the tragic myth produced a spectacle, rather than a speculation, a spectacle that makes the spectators participate in the tragic drama through the catharsis of the emotions of terror and pity.

3

The third type is illustrated by Archaic Orphic myths, which are continued in Platonism and Neoplatonism. This can be termed the myth of the exiled soul, imprisoned in a foreign body. It assumes a radical distinction between a soul, akin to the gods, and a body, perceived as a prison or a tomb. Life itself appears as a punishment, possibly for some fault committed in a previous life. Evil is therefore identified with incarnation itself and even, in certain Far Eastern mythologies, with reincarnation. The model of the body-as-prison, extended by that of the repetition of reincarnations, is further darkened by the model of infernal punishment, as if life in the body were the image of hell. Life is then a death, which calls for a death that will be true life. Only through purification, at once ethical, ritual, and meditative, can the soul be delivered from this quagmire of bodily existence, which itself mirrors hell. In a sense, this myth alone can properly be termed a myth of the fall, for the incarnation itself marks the loss of an infinitely superior condition and so a loss of height, of altitude, which is precisely what the word fall signifies.

4

Compared with these three paradigms, the biblical myth of paradise lost differs in three ways. First, the Adamic myth is purely anthropological, excluding any drama of creation in which evil would originally be included: creation is good, very good; humankind alone initiates evil, although tempted, to be sure, by the serpent (an important feature discussed below); but the serpent too is a creature. Next, evil is clearly ethical, in the sense that it results from an act of disobedience. It therefore cannot be a matter of hubris, which like disobedience would represent a blindness sent down by jealous gods, although "Second Isaiah" does not hesitate, after the difficulties of exile, to make his confession in the form of God's own self-presentation, as in prophesy: "I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create war, I am the Lord, who does all these things" (Is. 45:7). Finally, evil is not the result of the fall of the soul into a body; it consists of a gap, a deviation of humankind as a whole, of the flesh, which is unaware of the body-soul dualism.

The Adamic myth is therefore anthropological in the strongest sense of the term, to the extent that Adam is Man, neither a Titan nor a captive soul but the ancestor of all humankind, of the same nature as all the generations springing from him. If the Adamic myth nevertheless deserves the title of myth, this is inasmuch as the narrative in which it consists is incommensurate to the historical time in which the exemplary adventure of the people of Israel takes place. The myth elevates to the level of exemplary and universal history the penitential experience of one particular people, the Jewish people. All the later speculations about the supernatural perfection of Adam before the Fall are adventitious interpretations that profoundly alter the original meaning; they tend to make Adam a superior being and so foreign to our own condition. Hence the confusion over the idea of the Fall.

The intention of the Adamic myth is to separate the origin of evil from that of good, in other words, to posit a radical origin of evil distinct from the more primordial origin of the goodness of all created things; humanity commences evil but does not commence creation. However, it is in the form of a story that the myth accounts for this catastrophe at the heart of the goodness of creation; the passage from innocence to sin is narrated as something that took place. That is why the explanation given here of the origin of evil is not yet elevated to the plane of speculation, as will later happen with the dogma of original sin, but remains an etiological myth involving legendary characters and fabulous events.

With respect to its structure, the myth takes on the form of a twofold conflict: on the one hand, that between the central figure, Adam, and the Adversary, represented by the serpent, who will later become the Devil, and on the other hand, that between the two halves of a split figure, Adam and Eve. From this complex configuration the Adamic myth receives an enigmatic depth, the second pair adding a subtle psychological dimension and an internal density that would not have been attained by the confrontation between Man and his Other alone. In this way the myth universalizes the penitential experience of the Jewish people, but the concrete universal that it forges remains caught up in the gangue of the narrative and the symbolic.

The protohistorical myth is the only vehicle for a speculation akin to sapiential literature. In order to state the discordance between a creation that is fundamentally good and a historical condition that is already bad, the myth has no other resources than to concentrate the origin of evil in a single instant, in a leap, even if it stretches out this instant in a drama that takes time, introduces a series of events, and involves several characters. In this way the myth reflects in its very structure, in which the concentrated instant and the extended drama confront one another, the structure of the phenomenon of evil as such, which at one and the same time commences with each evil act and continues an immemorial tradition.

The etiological character of the myth is further reinforced by the narrative of the maledictions that ensue, following the initial act of disobedience: every human dimension—language, work, institutions, sexuality—is stamped with the twofold mark of being destined for the good and inclined toward evil. The power of naming all beings is so deeply perverted that we no longer recognize it except in reference to the division of speech into different tongues. Work ceases to be a sort of peaceful gardening and becomes hard labor that places man in a hostile relation to nature. The nakedness of innocence is replaced by the shame that casts the shadow of concealment over all aspects of communication. The pain of childbirth tarnishes the joy of procreation; death itself is afflicted by the malediction of the awareness of its immanence. In short, what the myth recounts is how it happened that human beings are obliged to suffer the rule of hardship as we know it in our present condition. The myth's "method" is always the same: stretching out in the time of a narrated drama the paradoxical—because simultaneous—aspects of the present human condition.

This is the restricted typology that we can construct in the limited sphere of the archaic state of the European. Before attempting to move into other cultural spheres, it is important to do justice to the contrary aspect stressed above concerning the level of the typology of myths of evil: the paradigms, we said, are not simply distinct from one another in the sense of Weberian ideal types but they overlap with one another to such an extent that we can discover in each one some aspect that lends it a family resemblance to the others. The danger of the structural approach we have followed up to now lies in giving an exaggerated cohesiveness to narratives of origin that also possess a composite, paradoxical, even extravagant character, well suited to the heuristic function of myth, when myth is considered as a thought experiment that unfolds in the region of the collective imagination. This is why the static analysis of myths, governed by the search for and the description of ideal types, must be completed by the addition of a dynamic approach to myths, attentive to the internal discordances that make them overlap in places and in this way outline a vast narrative and symbolic cycle.

If we take the Adamic myth as a point of reference, we find in it the muted echo of all the others and vice versa. We can therefore speak of a tragic aspect in the Adamic myth, expressed in the deep and shadowy psychology of temptation. There is a sort of fatalistic side of the ethical confession of sins. But there is also an irreducible remainder of the theogonic combat, which can be seen in the figure of the serpent and in other biblical figures related to the primordial chaos. What is more, the essentially ethical affirmation of God's saintliness can never entirely rid us of the suspicion that God is somehow beyond good and evil and that for this very reason he sends evil as well as good.

This is why later speculation will continually return to what is at once an unthinkable and an invincible possibility, namely that the deity has a dark and terrible side, in which something of the tragic vision and also something of the myth of chaos is preserved and even reaffirmed. If this admission shows itself to be so persistent it is precisely because the human experience of evil itself contains the admission that, in positing the existence of evil, humankind discovers the other side of evil, namely that it has always existed, in a paradoxical exteriority that, as stated above, relates sin to suffering within the undivided mystery of iniquity. The acknowledgment of a nonhuman source of evil is what continually gives new life to theogony and to tragedy alongside an ethical vision of the world.

The same thing should be said with respect to the typological distance between the Adamic myth and the myth of the exiled soul. It is not by sheer chance that, under the influence of Platonism and of Neoplatonism, the Adamic myth has almost fused with the myth of the Fall. There was most likely in the original myth a tendency that led it to confuse the quasi-external character of evil as already present with the body, understood as the sole root of evil. In the same way, the Babylonian exile provided the model of banishment, which continues with that of the expulsion from the garden of paradise. The symbols of captivity and of exodus that underlie the Adamic myth thus lend themselves to contamination by the symbolism, coming from another source, of a fallen "soul." Elevating the figure of Adam above the condition of ordinary mortals doubtless facilitated the reinterpretation of the myth of disobedience in terms of a myth of the Fall: when Adam is represented as a sort of superman endowed with all knowledge, beatitude, and immortality, his degradation could be represented in no other way than as a fall.

This play of overlappings could be considered from the perspective of each of the four myths that structure the symbolic imagination in the Western world: there is no myth of chaos that, at one moment or another, does not include the confession of sins by a repentant sinner; there is no tragic myth that does not admit the deep fault tied to a hubris for which humankind recognizes itself to be guilty. And would the fall of the soul be such a misfortune if humankind did not contribute to it at least through consent?

Hindu and Buddhist mythologies

The division into four great paradigms that we apply to the vast—although restricted—domain of Semitic archaism and Hellenic archaism, which, together, structure the cultural memory of the West, itself constitutes only a restricted typology. What happens when Westerners attempt to extend their vision to a wider field? Does the typology offer the same features of relative order and of multiple overlappings when we try to pass from the restricted form to a generalized form? For anyone who undertakes the perilous task of incorporating into his or her own vision the universes of thought that entertain complex relations of distance and proximity with one's own cultural memory, two warnings should be taken into consideration: first, it is senseless to seek to be exhaustive; there is no Archimedes point from which one could attempt to raise the totality of mythical universes. We must always confine ourselves to limited incursions into the regions that we intuitively suspect will contain treasures likely to enrich our cultural memory, and from this results the unavoidably selective nature of the itinerary of these incursions.

Second, we must give up the hope of any simple taxonomy, such as a distribution into monisms, dualisms, and mixed forms of these. These distinctions are practically useless on the mythical level itself, assuming they have a less debatable validity on the level of more speculative discourse. The two examples we have chosen, Hindu mythology and Buddhist mythology, taking into account the first warning, also raise issues related to the second warning: Hindu mythology perhaps more than Buddhist mythology confronts us with a profusion of explanatory frameworks requiring a taxonomical refinement that challenges any classificatory principle. Buddhist mythology, perhaps more than Hindu mythology, shows us how the same "solution" can oscillate among several planes of expression, from the level of legend and folklore to that of a metaphysical speculation. This profusion and this variation of levels constitute fearsome challenges for any attempt at typology.

If we admit that theodicy is not restricted to monotheism but forms the touchstone of all religions, when the existential need to explain suffering and moral evil is brought to the level of language, then we can seek and find theodicies in all of them. If, moreover, we admit that Vedantic Hinduism, in which the problem of evil is dismissed rather than resolved by a refined speculation on the relation between suffering and ignorance, is not the same as all systems placed under the vast heading of Hinduism, we can, following Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty in The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley, 1976), class the expression of theodicies on the clearly mythological level as Puranic Hinduism. These figurative and narrative theodicies lend themselves to a certain classification of different conceptual attitudes toward evil, a classification that struggles with the proliferation of myths to the point of succumbing under their weight.

O'Flaherty, our guide through this labyrinth, observes that four characters can assume the role of the villain in the drama: mortals, fate, demons, and gods. The first type of myth, which recalls the Adamic myth, seems surprising if one considers the doctrine of karman, according to which our present experience is the direct result of the good or bad actions of previous existences to be the Indian solution to the problem of evil. Neither gods nor demons are then to blame, and even blame itself is obliterated by the recognition of an eternal cycle in which everything is justified and finds its recompense. The paradox lies in the fact that the feeling generated by rumination on past faults opens the way for all sorts of speculation on the moral responsibility of humankind for the origin of evil, nuanced by the attitude that human beings are always as much victim as guilty party (as we see in the myths of the loss of a golden age).

After all, the very doctrine of karman posits that the links in the endless chain of evil are our desires and our sins; Buddhism takes this as its starting point. The paradox, however, is reversed when a primordial fall is evoked; then it is fate rather than humankind that is to blame. This forms a second cycle of myths, where we see God or a god create evil as a positive element in the universe, whether he acts as a willing or unwilling instrument of fate or whether he himself decides that evil must come to be. Logical thought tends to see a contradiction here between being constrained or deciding freely to create an ambivalent universe; Hindu thought, however, moves effortlessly between what ultimately appears to be two variants of a dharma that abolishes the distinction between what is and what ought to be.

The opposite is no less true: it is because a doctrine like that of karman proves to be emotionally unsatisfactory in certain ways while remaining valid in the eyes of the wise that mythology continually reworks the variants, producing new divergences. It is then not surprising that mythical speculation turns toward gods and demons. Myths placing guilt on the shoulders of gods or demons proliferate, all the more so as ethical and cosmic dualism, illustrated in its purest and most coherent form by Manichaeism, was never victorious in India: the ambiguous nature of the demons, and even of the gods, served to thwart this clear and radical distinction. India prefered to struggle with the paradox of superhuman entities, which are almost all of the same nature and which are distinguished and opposed to another only by their combat. Those who always win are gods, but because their adversaries are never really eliminated, the kinship of the gods and the demons always resurfaces.

Here the guide we have chosen to follow remarks with irony that as a consequence of these reversals the gods reputed to be good are more wicked than we might expect and that the demons reputed to be evil prove to be good demons. This gives rise to a reflection on the demonic as such, in which power overrides benevolence, thus verifying the extent to which myths operate as depth probes sounding the ambivalence of the human condition itself, while on the surface they seem to operate as explanations. By recounting our origins, where we come from, myths describe in a symbolic way what we are: the paradox of the good demon and that of the evil god are not merely playful fantasies but the privileged means of unraveling the tangled skein of passions belonging to the human heart. When the myth tells, for example, how the gods corrupted the demons, something is said about the hidden perversity of the "higher" part of ourselves. When the myth recounts the birth of death, it touches the secret thread of our fright in the face of death, a fright that in fact closely links together evil and death and confronts death as a personified demon.

The fact that myths are indifferent to logical coherence is attested to by another cycle of myths, characteristic of bhakti spirituality, where we see a god create evil (for example, a fallacious heresy) for the good of humanity, a lesser malediction freeing a graver one. The cycle is then complete: submitted to this stringent economy, humankind is carried back to the problem of its own evil, as in the theory of karman. This cycle, however, is considerably vaster than that of the restricted typology with which we began. It is also more loosely knit. And it is truly in the mythic theodicies of India that we see verified the notion suggested at the beginning of this article, namely that the mythical world is an immense laboratory in which all imaginable solutions are tried.

This acceptance of multiplicity by the same culture confirms one of the conclusions arrived at by our restricted typology (restricted to the archaic Semitic and Greek worlds)—namely, that in every myth, owing to its own incoherence, we discover a sketch in miniature that another myth will develop on a much larger scale. The feature that has not received sufficient attention, however, has to do with the difference in level that allows us to go beyond a lower truth (for example, the struggle between gods and demons or the corruption of demons and mortals by the gods) by means of a higher truth (for example, karman ), which, far from eliminating the prior truth, confirms it in its subordinate place. This is what Buddhism forcefully demonstrates.

Buddhism poses a singular problem for any careful investigation, not only with respect to the multitude of mythical figures of evil, but also to the oscillation between different levels of discourse. On the one hand, indeed, no religion has gone so far toward a speculation stripped of any narrative or figurative element on behalf of a doctrine of inner illumination. On the other hand, Buddhism seldom appears in a form completely cut off from popular beliefs and from their characteristic demonology, especially in the cultural universes previously shaped by Hinduism. What is more, Buddhism has generated within its own midst, if not a new demonology, at least a mythical figure of evil, Māra, somewhat comparable to Satan in late Judaism and in early Christianity. Buddhism reinforces in this respect the hypothesis according to which one can speak of the origin of evil only by way of myths. At the same time it appears to constitute a counterexample to this hypothesis, because mythology seems at first to be so incompatible with the purified form of spirituality characteristic of Buddhism. It is, to be sure, in the Pali canon and not in the Mahāyāna documents that T. O. Ling, in his Buddhism and the Mythology of Evil (London, 1962), finds the most striking illustration of this phenomenon, which at first sight seems paradoxical.

To begin with, one must admit that a wide gap exists between pure Buddhist doctrine and popular mythologies concerning the origin of evil. The latter are characterized basically by the radically external nature they attribute to demonic powers, represented as threatening, terrifying, devouring creatures. In addition, as is not the case in Iranian dualism, these demons form a swarm in which it is difficult to distinguish the forces of evil from the forces of good. Finally, the principal resource of humans in defending themselves against these external forces is an action itself turned toward the outside, whether this is a propitiatory sacrifice, an invocation addressed to higher powers or the manipulation of hostile forces through magical actions, or even the constraint that is supposed to be exerted on the gods by self-mortification.

On the other hand, if, following T. R. V. Murti in The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (London, 1955), we take as our criterion for Buddhism the "philosophical" section of the canon, that is the Abhidhamma Pitaka and, more precisely, Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification), which in the Theravāda school is at once its conclusion and compendium, then we are correct in speaking of a Buddhism without mythology, as Ling does. The thinking behind this radical position is easy to understand. In the first place, the doctrine is entirely directed toward the purely mental conditions of the evils of existence. These conditions are analyzed, catalogued, and hierarchized with the most extraordinary care; they are also submitted to an exploration of the "dependent origination" of the lines of interdependence, which allows the sources of evil to be tracked down in their deepest hiding places. What the analysis exposes are not external forces but, basically, ignorance, which itself results from false views of the world, generated in their turn by an overestimation of the self. Popular demonologies are precisely the crudest sort of expression of these false points of view.

The second reason for incompatibility with mythology is that the analysis itself, in certain schools, is confined to scholasticism, due to the subtlety of its distinctions and derivations, and is placed in the service of a wisdom aimed at establishing a state of emptiness, a void. This state is entirely separate from the familiar realities of everyday existence and wholly unrelated to the fantastic creatures produced by desire and, even more so, by fear. Demons vanish along with all external reality as a result of the purifying meditation that deserves the name of enlightenment.

And yet, it is not simply a matter of making concessions to popular beliefs if the Pali canon assigns a place in its teachings to the Evil One and gives him the name of Māra. This entity can be termed mythical due to his resemblance to the demons of popular belief and, more precisely, due to his personification of original evil. Ling confirms here the earlier analysis of Ernst W. Windisch in Māra und Buddha (Leipzig, 1895). According to both of them, this figure is finally not foreign to the central core of Buddhism to the extent that it is part of the very experience of the Buddha's enlightenment, as a force that threatens, attacks, and seeks to distract the individual from contemplation—a force that the wise person must address, confront, and finally conquer.

Specialists in this field argue whether this confrontation with the threat of distraction is characteristic only of the first stage in the spiritual adventure or whether it is present up to the end; they argue whether the proliferation of legends that attribute to this figure of evil the status of a demon result from subsequent contamination by the surrounding demonologies or whether they develop a mythical core inherent in the pure doctrine. The essential point is that the figure of Māra in its barest signification is the product of Buddhism. Ignorance driven out by knowledge; shadows dissipated by that enlightenment, are experienced as an inner adversity that is spontaneously personified in the figure of an adversary. As is not the case in popular demonology, however, Māra is personified by a single figure, symbolizing the internal enemy, namely the adversary of meditation.

If Buddhism seems to confirm in such a paradoxical fashion the thesis that one can speak only in mythical terms of the origin of evil, this is because the source of evil, however much it may be interiorized, retains a certain hostile nature that calls for a figurative approximation in terms of externality. Expressed in external terms, the myth gives a symbolic expression to the interior experience of evil.

Beyond Myth?

Myth, however, is not alone in using language to deal with the enigma of evil. I mentioned above that there exists a hierarchy of different levels of discourse within which myth takes its place. We can go beyond myth in two directions, that of theodicy and that of wisdom. These two paths often intersect but they conform to two distinct series of requirements.

The path of theodicy

Theodicy replies to a demand for rational coherence. This requirement stems from lamentation itself, inasmuch as it carries within it an interrogation: "Why? Why must my child die? Why must there be suffering and death? How long, O Lord?" But it also stems from myth itself, inasmuch as it brings the reply of a vaster and more ancient order than the miserable condition of humankind. This reply, however, suffers at once from an excess and from a defect: an excess resulting from a proliferation that staggers the imagination (the mythical world, Lévi-Strauss observes, is a world that is too full); its defect is due to the mutual incompatibility of myths, to their internal contradictions, and, finally, to their narrative form itself: to tell a story is not to explain. Rationalization has taken a number of different forms: in India, this involves the grand speculations on karman, on the degrees of being, on the order of things placed beyond good and evil. In Buddhism, this concerns speculation on the tie between ignorance and suffering and, above all, on the tie between wisdom, which I shall discuss below, and suffering. In Greece, myth was surpassed by philosophy, which essentially separates the question of origin in the sense of foundation from the question of the beginning in the sense of theogonies and genealogies. By virtue of this fundamental clarification, Plato prefers to say that God is the cause of good alone rather than to say, along with myth, that the gods are bad or that they are beyond good and evil.

In the Christian sphere, rationalization takes place within theology, mainly at the time of the confrontation with gnosis, which is still no more than a rationalized myth, and in connection with an overall hellenization of speculation. In this regard, the doctrine of original sin in Augustine offers at once the features of an antignosis as a result of what its conceptual framework borrows from Neoplatonism (being, nothingness, substance, etc.) and the features of a quasi gnosis, and hence of a rationalized myth, due to the way it mixes together the legal model of individual guilt and a biological model of contamination at birth and of hereditary transmission. This is why such rationalization was continued beyond this quasi gnosis in onto-theologies to which we owe the theodicies as such, in Leibniz and, finally, in Hegel. To these theodicies we owe, if not a solution to the enigma of evil, at least the transformation of the enigma into a problem, namely whether or not we can maintain the following three propositions at once: God is all-powerful. God is absolutely good. Evil exists. This is not the place, however, to weigh the success or failure of rational theodicies.

The path of Wisdom

Assuming that a coherent reply could be given to the enigma that has been raised in this way to the level of a rational problem, there could still be no exclusive means for explaining it. The question of evil, indeed, is not simply "Why does evil exist?" but also "Why is evil greater than humans can bear?" and, along with this, "Why this particular evil? Why must my child die? Why me?" The question is also posed, then, to wisdom.

It is Wisdom's task first to develop an argument on the basis of this personal and intimate question that myth does not treat, since it invokes an order that does not concern individual suffering. Wisdom thus forces myth to shift levels. It must not simply tell of the origin in such a way as to explain how the human condition reached its present miserable state; it must also justify the distribution of good and evil to every individual. Myth recounts a story, Wisdom argues. It is in this sense that we see the Book of Job question explanation in terms of retribution in the name of the just man who suffers. If the Book of Job occupies a primary place in world literature, it does so first because it is a classic of Wisdom's argumentative mode. But it is so because of the enigmatic and even perhaps deliberately ambiguous character of its conclusion. The final theophany gives no direct reply to Job's personal suffering, and speculation must be made in more than one direction. The vision of a creator whose designs are unfathomable may suggest either consolation that has to be deferred until the eschaton, or that Job's complaint is displaced, even set aside, in the eyes of God, the master of good and evil, or that perhaps the complaint has to stand one of the purificatory tests to which Wisdom, itself grafted on a certain docta ignorantia, must submit so that Job can love God "for nought" in response to Satan's wager at the beginning of the tale.

This final suggestion reveals the second function of Wisdom, which is no longer to develop arguments or even to accuse God but to transform, practically and emotionally, the nature of the desire that is at the base of the request for explanation. To transform desire practically means to leave behind the question of origins, toward which myth stubbornly carries speculative thought, and to substitute for it the question of the future and the end of evil. For practice, evil is simply what should not but does exist, hence what must be combated. This practical attitude concerns principally that immense share of suffering resulting from violence, that is, from the evil that humans inflict on their fellows. To transform desire emotionally is to give up any consolation, at least for oneself, by giving up the complaint itself. It is perhaps at this point that Job's wisdom coincides with that of Buddhism. Whatever can be said of this meeting of two such remote traditions of wisdom, it is only at this point that myth can be surpassed. But it is not easy to give up the question "why?" to which myth attempts—and fails—to reply.