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about it?
problem as follows. How can we affirm at the same time, without any
way of posing the problem, we need first of all to get some sense of the
scope and the complexity of the problem with the help of a phenom-
*John Nuveen Professor (Emeritus) and Member of the Committee on Social Thought
at the University of Chicago and Dean of the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences
and Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus) at the University of Paris X (Nanterre), Dr.
Ricoeur presented this paper as a Plenary Address to the 75th Anniversary Annual
Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (1984).
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The whole enigma of evil may be said to lie in the fact that, at l
guilt entails, as its dark side, the feeling of having been seduced by
overwhelming powers and, consequently, our feeling of belonging to
a history of evil, which is always already there for everyone. This
strange experience of passivity, at the very heart of evil doing, makes
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rational theodicies.
assume both the dark and the luminous sides of the human condition.
great narratives of origin, as Mircea Eliade has emphasized throughout his many works on this topic. By telling how the world began, a
myth tells how the human condition came about as something generally wretched and miserable. But myth's function of providing order,
thanks to its cosmological import, has as its corollary-and its corrective-the profusion of explanatory schemes it has produced over time.
The realm of myth, as the literature of the Ancient Near East, India,
and the Far East reveals, is a vast field of experimentation, or even of
playing with hypotheses in the most varied and the most fantastic
forms. Within this immense laboratory, it appears as though no
conceivable solution to the order of the whole cosmos, and hence to
the enigma of evil, has not been essayed at some point or another.
These solutions oscillate between the level of legends and folklore,
close to the demonic dimension of the experience of evil, and that of
metaphysical speculation, exemplified by so many Hindu and Buddist
documents. The counterpart of this tremendous contribution of mythical thought to speculation on evil is that one is ceaselessly brought
back to the question of origin: From whence comes evil? Rational
theodicies will get caught up in this search for an origin, which may
finally be a blind alley.
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With this insight, myth has to change registers. It must not only
the case for each and every one of us. This shift leads us from myth to
the stage of Wisdom. Myth narrates, Wisdom agrues.
portionate. Why did this person die of cancer and not that one? Why
do children die? Why is there so much suffering, far beyond ordinary
mortals' capacity for suffering?
If the book of Job holds the place it does in world literature, it is
first of all because it provides us with a "classic" of this argumentative
mode of wisdom. It is also because of the enigmatic and perhaps even
tion that has to be deferred until the eschaton, or that Job's complaint
is displaced, even set aside, in God's eyes, as the master of good and
evil, following Isaiah 45:7 ("I form light and create darkness, I make
weal and create woe, I am the Lord, who does all these things"), or
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draws from this moral vision of evil the conclusion that most concerns
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ples of the genre. On the one hand, all the forms of evil, not
evil, are taken into consideration and put under the title "
ical evil," which is the unavoidable defect of all created being
true that God cannot create another God. On the other hand,
logic receives an enrichment through the addition to the p
non-contradiction of the principle of sufficient reason, which
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Kantian critique of rational theology: the dialectical one. By a dialectical mode of thinking I mean an attempt to use negativity as the
dynamic principle of a thought that would no longer be equated with
relation.
For Hegel the dialectic is that of the Spirit that makes the
difference between God and the human mind irrelevant, for Barth the
dialectic deepens the gap between the wholly other and the world of
creatures. For both of them, however, the "thought-work" leads to
failure, yet to a productive failure, if I may dare put it this way. I mean,
their thought leads to an aporia that calls for integration into a larger
dialectic, that of thought, action, and feeling.
Nature and of Spirit, and within the sphere of Spirit from the
greater rational hubris. Indeed, what fate is reserved for the suffering
of victims in a worldview where the pan-tragic is constantly covered
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to an end.
and Barth's broken one are both instructive in this regard. The initial
enigma is elevated to the rank of a terminal aporia by the very work of
thinking that finally fails.
our free will the raison d'etre of this radical evil is inscrutable
ground from which the moral evil in us could originally have com
Along with Karl Jaspers, I admire this ultimate avowal on Kant's
2 Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. Trans. by Theo
Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), p. 38.
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integrate the ignorance it gives rise to, the docta ignorantia, into t
work of mourning. To the tendency of survivors to feel guilty abo
the death of someone they loved, as well as to the tendency of vict
to blame themselves and to enter into the cruel game of the expiat
victim, we must reply: "No, God did not want that, even less did G
3 In this regard, the little book by Rabbi Harold S. Kusner, When Bad Things H
to Good People (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), can be a useful pastoral aid in
cases.
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renouncement of the infantile component of the desire for immortality, one which allows us to accept our own death as one aspect of that
part of the negative that Karl Barth so carefully distinguished from
indicated at the end of the book of Job when it is said that Job came
to love God for nought, thereby making Satan lose his bet. To love
God for nought is to escape completely the cycle of retribution to
which the lamentation still remains captive, so long as the victim
revealed.
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