The History of Evil in Antiquity

“We think we know what evil is, since we’ve all had some experience with the
subject. Yet it has been understood in very different ways across various cultures
and times. The History of Evil series bids fair to deepen our grasp of how various,
and how variously conceived, evil is. The diversity examined in this first volume
of the series is already enough to raise the fundamental question of whether
we’re really talking about the same thing when we talk about conceptions of evil
in West and East, antiquity and modernity. It’s a mind-expanding volume.”

Phillip Cary, Eastern University, USA

“The History of Evil in Antiquity would be a very useful volume to employ in a

college course on the problem of evil. It should also prove of great interest to the
many members of the general public who wrestle with the tension between the
claim that the world is rooted in divine goodness and the existence of obvious
and often horrendous evils.”

William J. Wainwright, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

This first volume of The History of Evil covers Graeco-Roman, Indian, Near
Eastern, and Eastern philosophy and religion from 2000 BCE to 450 CE. This book
charts the foundations of the history of evil among the major philosophical
traditions and world religions, beginning with the oldest recorded traditions: the
Vedas and Upaniṣads, Confucianism and Daoism, and Buddhism, and continuing
through Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian schools of thought. This cutting-
edge treatment of the history of evil at its crucial and determinative inception
will appeal to those with particular interests in the ancient period and early
theories and ideas of evil and good, as well as those seeking an understanding of
how later philosophical and religious developments were conditioned and shaped.

Tom P. S. Angier is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cape

Town, South Africa.

Chad Meister is Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Bethel College, USA.

Charles Taliaferro is Professor of Philosophy at St Olaf College, USA.

The History of Evil
Series Editors: Chad Meister and Charles Taliaferro

Available:
Volume The History of Evil in Antiquity: 2000 BCE–450 CE
I,
Volume The History of Evil in the Medieval Age: 450–1450
II,
Volume The History of Evil in the Early Modern Age: 1450–1700
III,
Volume The History of Evil in the 18th and 19th Centuries: 1700–1900
IV,
Volume The History of Evil in the Early Twentieth Century: 1900–1950
V,
Volume The History of Evil from the Mid-Twentieth Century to
VI, Today: 1950–2018
The History of Evil in Antiquity
2000 BCE–450 CE

Volume I

Edited by Tom P. S. Angier Series editors: Chad

Meister and Charles Taliaferro
First published 2019
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business ©
2019 selection and editorial matter, Tom P. S. Angier, Chad Meister, and Charles
Taliaferro; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editors to be
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the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Angier, Tom P. S.,
editor.
Title: The history of evil / edited by Tom Angier, Chad Meister, and Charles
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Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge-Taylor & Francis, 2016. | Includes
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015048701 | ISBN 9781138642300 (v. 1 : hbk) Subjects: LCSH:
Good and evil—History.
Classification: LCC BJ1401 .H57 2016 | DDC 170.9—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048701
ISBN: 978-1-138-23716-2 (Set, hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-64230-0 (Vol I, hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-63005-2 (Vol I, ebk) ISBN:
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138-23682-0 (Vol III, hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-13848-2 (Vol III, ebk) ISBN: 978-1-138-
23683-7 (Vol IV, hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-13840-6 (Vol, IV, ebk) ISBN: 978-1-138-
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Contents

List of contributors
Series introduction
CHAD MEISTER AND CHARLES TALIAFERRO

Introduction
TOM P. S. ANGIER

1 Ancient Israel
RÜDIGER SCHMITT

2 The Book of Job

KATHARINE J. DELL

3 Early Christian thought

CHARLES TALIAFERRO

4 Saint Paul
TIMOTHY GOMBIS

5 Early Zoroastrian thought

JENNY ROSE
 6 Manichaeism
MICHAEL MENDELSON

7 The Gnostics
GIOVANNI FILORAMO

8 The Presocratics
VICKI L. HARPER

9 Socrates and Plato

SOPHIE GRACE CHAPPELL

10 Aristotle
TOM P. S. ANGIER

11 Epicureanism
THOMAS A. BLACKSON

12 The Stoics
JOHN SELLARS

13 Scepticism
RICHARD BETT

14 Neoplatonism
KEVIN CORRIGAN

15 Philo of Alexandria
MARIAN HILLAR

16 Evil in Graeco-Roman religion and literature

 ROCKI WENTZEL

17 Vedas and Upaniṣads

SHYAM RANGANATHAN

18 Buddhism
PETER HARVEY

19 Ancient China
RANDALL L. NADEAU

20 Representations of evil
DALE JACQUETTE

Index
Contributors

Tom P. S. Angier is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cape Town.

Richard Bett is Professor of Philosophy and Chair at Johns Hopkins University.

Thomas A. Blackson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State

University.

Sophie Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University.

Kevin Corrigan is Director of the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts and
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Emory
University.

Katharine J. Dell is Reader in Old Testament Theology and Fellow and Director
of Studies in Theology and Religious Studies, St Catharine’s College,
University of Cambridge.

Giovanni Filoramo is Professor of History of Christianity at the University of

Turin.

Timothy Gombis is Associate Professor of New Testament at Grand Rapids

Theological Seminary.

Vicki L. Harper is Professor of Philosophy at St Olaf College.

Peter Harvey is Emeritus Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of

 Sunderland.

Marian Hillar is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies and Biochemistry

and the Director of the Center for Philosophy and Socinian Studies at Texas
Southern University.

Dale Jacquette is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Bern.

Chad Meister is Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Bethel College.

Michael Mendelson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lehigh University.

Randall L. Nadeau is Chair of the Department of Religion and Professor of East

Asian Religions at Trinity University.

Shyam Ranganathan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at York University,

Toronto.

Jenny Rose is Associate Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate School.

Rüdiger Schmitt is a member of the Faculty of Theology at the University of

Münster.

John Sellars is Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London,

a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, King’s College London,
and a member of Wolfson College, Oxford.

Charles Taliaferro is Professor of Philosophy and Department Chair at St Olaf

College.

Rocki Wentzel is Associate Professor of Religion at Augustana College.

Series introduction
Chad Meister and Charles Taliaferro

This massive project, with dozens of original essays in six volumes, in

collaboration with six distinguished scholars as volume editors, is intended to be
an accessible, international contribution to the philosophical study of evil in
multiple cultures and times. In this project, ‘evil’ is understood in the broadest
sense to cover the widest spectrum of what different philosophical and religious
persons and traditions have identified as wrong or bad or unfitting or
impediments to the good. More specifically, the concept of ‘evil’ in the History of
Evil includes but is not restricted to the concepts of (and thus the history of) sin,
pain, and suffering, the violation of the good, actions or events that are not in
harmony with the Dao, the pursuit of dangerous illusions accompanied by a
refusal to seek enlightenment, states of character that are malicious, the
desecration of that which is sacred, and more. The work, as a whole, is
philosophical insofar as it engages historical and contemporary events (involving
social and political history, the history of science, religion, and art) in an effort to
articulate and assess philosophically the thought, reasons, values, and emotions
involved in thinking about evil in different times and places. The project has not
been forged to support a particular account of evil or to support a particular
proposal for the defeat (or elimination) of evil, but three salient themes have
emerged in the process of our work on this project that we convey in this brief
introduction to all six volumes.
First, we believe that there is some wisdom in not thinking of ‘evil’ narrowly
as a special category of profoundly heinous wrongdoing. It may seem quite
natural to reserve the term ‘evil’ for genocide, outrageous displays of violence,
demonic possession, and so on, and not to lessen its potency if used for minor,
human failings. Arguably, it seems odd to use any single term (especially ‘evil’) to
cover both petty, personal wrongdoings, with their minimal long-term harms
(perhaps a wrongful lie to achieve short-term social gain such as getting a good
night’s sleep rather than experiencing a stodgy party), and such horrific actions
as sadistic torture and serial killing. But there is some sense in pulling together, in
a single multi-volume work, a diverse set of chapters with a full spectrum of
what persons have found to be wrong (or bad or wicked or sinful or abominable
or unfitting). This allows us to take stock of an important question that arises in
the study of evil: how ‘ordinary’ or ‘natural’ is what many of us call evil and how
might the (comparatively) minor acts or events that we deem merely wrong
relate to the acts or events that we find monumentally and unredeemably evil?
Second, the very structure and composition of this project provides some
reason to accept a version of the idea that the good (broadly conceived) has a
kind of primacy over what is (broadly conceived of as) evil. We do not mean that
this six-volume work provides evidence for the privation of the good account of
evil which may be found in various Platonic traditions, according to which evil is
parasitic on the good (that which is evil is what causes good beings to
dysfunction or to not enjoy their positive powers). Still, let us assume that the
following are marks of what most of us would consider to be the good in
scholarship: fairness, impartiality, being collaborative in terms of the giving and
receiving of criticism, eschewing professional jealousy and envy, sharing a love
for the reliable and charitable treatment of sources and shunning recklessness in
scholarship, and so on. This undertaking has been marked from the outset and
throughout by a positive goal of doing good scholarship about evil. The opposite
(the goal of doing evil scholarship about evil?) would be absurd and a more
moderate indebtedness to evil (the goal of producing an account of evil that is not
marred with evil) is too anaemic to motivate any of us to do what you are
reading now. Oddly, each scholar’s work on what may be deemed (most broadly)
evil in different times and places has been motivated to share what is good work.
Third, while it will not be surprising that, because the editorial goal has not
been to promote a particular account of evil (Kant’s notion of radical evil, for
example), we (as editors) have not set out to promote a particular solution or
remedy or piece of advice about how we should address evil. And yet this project
itself has involved a commitment to the kinds of virtues relevant to any
international project of this scope when it comes to addressing evil. Such virtues
include those we have just noted: seeking to work impartially, being open to
criticism, being charitable to views and thinkers with whom we may not share
much initial sympathy, and the commitment not to succumb to the vices of
vanity, professional jealousy, envy, and so on.
A further, refined statement of this third point will lead us into controversy
about what is (sometimes) called communication or discourse ethics, or the ideal
observer theory, and might even require comments on the Enlightenment versus
tradition-constituted inquiry, and so on. In keeping with our general editorial
policy of not advancing some specific account of evil, we will leave open-ended a
further refinement of our third theme. We will be satisfied, and count this project
as partly successful, if it helps foster impartial, international collaborative
engaged inquiry into the vexing problem of evil.
Introduction
Tom P. S. Angier

All schemas are schematic – that is, they sacrifice various details and a raft of
qualifications in order to provide a broad topology of a certain area of enquiry.
Our topic is evil in the ancient world (roughly, 2000 BCE to 450 CE), and the
schema I propose is threefold. First, there is evil as conceived in and imagined by
cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East – centrally, Jewish and
(later) Judaeo-Christian cultures. These cultures have bequeathed us the idea of
the one God, who is a locus of absolute perfection and hence infinite aspiration,
and who thereby lends a peculiar fascination to the notion of evil. For evil not
only stands in antithesis to God, it is also difficult to rationalize on monotheistic
premises (how could a perfect God create or allow evil in the first place?)
Characteristic of monotheism is a rich narrative conception of evil: it comes in
the form of a snake, for example, or ‘the Satan’, or the sea-creature Leviathan, or
St Paul’s sarx (‘the flesh’). At its limit, this tendency to personify or embody evil
renders it a supernatural or transcendent force, which beguiles, tempts, threatens,
and sometimes crushes human beings. Thus later we see the development of
Manichaeism and Gnosticism, which present evil not as subordinate to God but
as a power coeval and on a metaphysical par with Him. Evil takes on a life of its
own in all these traditions. It is never reducible to the mundane realities of
human actions or natural events.
Our second cultural ‘tectonic plate’ has its origins in the Western
Mediterranean, in ancient Greece and Rome. Like ancient Israel, these vastly
influential cultures generated narrative conceptions of evil, at least in their
literature, art, and popular religion. But, because they were polytheistic, they did
not provide a foothold for any supremely evil force or figure. Instead, individual
gods and literary characters display evil passions, dispositions, beliefs, etc.,
alongside better or even admirable ones. Because Greek and Roman sources
acknowledge no perfect creator God, they do not view human and natural evils
as essentially problematic or mysterious; rather, they see them as the outcome of
strife among the gods or ascribe them to an inscrutable fate. Again in contrast to
ancient Israel, Western philosophy, born in ancient Greece, generates analyses of
evil which prescind completely from narrative, and more particularly from
religious narrative. What we see, in other words, in the Presocratics, Plato, and
Aristotle (and their successors) is the elaboration of what are arguably purely
psychological and naturalistic theories of evil. Granted (and as we shall see),
these theories – owing to their sophistication and high degree of articulation –
were later adapted and used by Jewish and Christian philosophers. But there is
nothing essentially theistic, let alone monotheistic, about them. In this way,
Greek and Roman philosophers brought evil firmly ‘down to earth’.
The third cultural matrix covered by this volume has its roots in Asia and the
Far East. For those raised on Western texts – namely those rooted in ancient
Israel, Greece and Rome – the shift to the East is challenging, but no less
fascinating for that. It is challenging because it requires that we leave behind the
intellectual habits of monotheism, not least the notion of evil as a transcendent
yet pervasive force or power. We must also leave behind Western philosophy,
with its general intolerance, on the one hand, of the impressionistic and
aphoristic and, on the other, of detailed discussions of practice. Once we have
made these moves, however, a whole new world opens up for us. Whether with
regard to the Vedas and Upaniṣads, Buddhism, Confucianism, or Taoism, we find
a world in which evil thoughts and desires, although acknowledged, are typically
not hypostatized or viewed as beyond human control. Rather, they are subject to
various techniques and skills, whether individual or social. We can navigate the
evils present in ourselves and others by practices such as Yoga, or through
inhabiting the ritual and institutional structures of the Chinese family and state.
Most striking, perhaps, is the idea that avoiding evil is not so much a matter of
cultivating the right desires as of distancing oneself from importunate desires
altogether. Here the East offers what may be its sharpest challenge to generically
Western conceptions of evil.
 ****

Let us begin with Rüdiger Schmitt’s chapter on ancient Israel. Schmitt is aware of
the dominant tradition of God as morally perfect or as excluding all moral evil.
But, even if this is true of God’s essence (as theologians put it), Schmitt alerts us
to how the Hebrew Bible presents a humanly more realistic God, who has certain
‘dark sides’ (without ever being the source of evil). This is a theme taken up by
theologians, such as Rudolf Otto, who speak of the God of Abraham not as ‘all
good’ but, rather, as a mysterium tremendum, who is ultimately unfathomable by
human beings. And that God is morally complex stands to reason, Schmitt
suggests, given the influence on ancient Jewish thought and practice by
surrounding Near Eastern cultures. God’s struggle with evil often mirrors, or at
least echoes, Near Eastern mythological tropes: take, for instance, His interaction
with the dragons Leviathan and Tanannu. The invocation of demonic spirits by
biblical writers has distinct parallels in Zoroastrian and other Mesopotamian
sources (NB the Mesopotamian evil spirits Lamashtu and Lilitu). In the best
tradition of German scholarship, Schmitt carefully details such parallels and
influences, giving us a picture of evil in the Hebrew Bible which is far from
culturally insulated or cut off.
The moral ambiguity of God is also highlighted in Katharine Dell’s chapter on
the book of Job. This book is arguably the epicentre of biblical reflection on evil.
As Dell notes, Job is likely not a historical character; the inspiration for reflection
on evil is rather the experience of exile. And God’s treatment of Job (or His
people), at the instigation of ‘the Satan’ (meaning ‘accuser’ or ‘adversary’), does
not cast Him in an unequivocally good light. As Dell shows, God never directly
defends Himself, providing Job with clear justification for his suffering or a
definitive theodicy. Instead, He displays His creative power – as if Job’s worries
were grounded in God’s impotence rather than in His lack of justice. This
suggests that God somehow transcends justice, that His presence alone is a
sufficient answer to Job, or (more devastatingly) that humans are simply not that
important in the overall scheme of providence. Dell argues that the book’s
narrative emphasis is on God’s knowledge as opposed to human ignorance. But
of course this raises the problem of what divine knowledge consists in and how
humans can maintain a relationship with such a seemingly morally disordered
divinity. In the end, Dell adjures, the book of Job leaves evil and human suffering
deliberately mysterious.
Moving on from the Hebrew Bible to early Christian thought, evil and
suffering are arguably at its very core. For, according to Charles Taliaferro, Jesus’
mission was precisely to restore a once good creation by overcoming the forces of
evil. This is accomplished, in the view of New Testament writers such as Mark,
by Jesus’ death and resurrection, and perhaps also by His second coming. This
leads Taliaferro to detail various theories of Jesus’ accomplishment, such as the
‘Christus Victor’ theory (Christ pays the ultimate ransom for our sins) or the idea
that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross satisfies divine justice. Unlike Schmitt or Dell,
then, Taliaferro approaches the Bible in the light of the history of theology. And
part of his approach involves distinguishing Christian theology from its rivals. He
singles out Gnostic theology, in particular, which locates evil not so much in
human desire and will as in human embodiment and matter per se. Not that the
Christian theology of evil is without its own internal divisions and controversies.
As Taliaferro details, Christians were (and are) still faced with crucial choices
concerning theistic voluntarism, the precise nature of Christ’s atonement, and
whether salvation is to be achieved in this life alone (or also in an afterlife).
The final excursion into purely biblically inspired conceptions of evil is taken
by Timothy Gombis, who explores the thought of St Paul (Saul of Tarsus). Paul,
like Jesus and most of His early followers, was saturated with Jewish notions and
narratives of evil. Hence he recurs to the Garden of Eden, where humans were
thought to have betrayed God’s call to shalom (Hebrew for perfect harmony and
peace). For Paul, the history of Israel recapitulates this ‘fall’, since the Jewish
people continually failed to live up to their divine calling. By their own
admission, they worshipped idols, imitated the vices of the gentile nations, and
used certain artificial customs to keep those nations at bay. Paul sees Jesus
(Yeshua) as offering a way out of this impasse: He is the Messiah, who will bring
the gentile nations into the Jewish fold and thereby transform both. Paul is
nevertheless painfully aware that this divine plan is opposed by the Satan, who
has made sin into a cosmic power, along with death. He rules the ‘air’, the realm
of prejudice, ideology, and manifold cultural practices. Here Paul draws on the
Jewish tradition of archangelic powers, which now become evil ‘gods’, or
‘princes’ of this world. Humans – although highly vulnerable to such Satanic
powers – still remain answerable for their evil deeds.
At this juncture, we should pause to look at Jenny Rose’s intriguing treatment
of early Zoroastrian thought. For, although very different from the culture of
ancient Israel, Zoroastrianism was one of its neighbouring cultures, supplying (as
Schmitt shows) certain tropes to Jewish and Christian thought. Indeed,
Zoroastrian demonology may well have directly informed Paul’s conception of
various cosmic powers intent on opposing God’s work in Christ. Rose details a
panoply of Zoroastrian ‘daevas’ – false gods who embody and bring death and
disease to humans. Old Avestan texts describe how Angra Mainyu, a key daeva,
opposes the creative work of the ‘Wise Lord’, Ahura Mazda. And Angra Mainyu
is accompanied by a host of other deceivers and instigators of chaos. Take, for
example, Druj (‘The Lie’), Azi Dahaka (a triple-headed, serpentine figure), and
certain daevic beings associated with supposedly noxious influences
(Jahi/menstruation, Azi/sensual craving, and Apaosha/drought). On the wider
issue of the relative powers of good (creation) and evil (destruction), Rose judges
that some Zoroastrian texts present them as equally primordial, while others
suggest evil is parasitic on the good. But Zoroastrianism affords no clearly
worked-out views on the matter.
Before moving on to Greek and Roman materials, we should tackle two closely
related cultural movements: Manichaeism and Gnosticism. Both stood opposed to
orthodox forms of Judaism and Christianity. Manichaeism, as Michael Mendelson
documents, originates with Mani (216–276/7 CE), a Southern Babylonian
visionary. Despite his formation in Jewish Christianity, Mani embraced a stark
form of dualism, believing in two divine principles: light/good and dark/evil.
These he took, contra monotheism, to be equally fundamental. It follows that, for
the Manichees (of whom St Augustine was once one), there is no omnipotent God
who ensures the ultimate victory of good. On the contrary, matter, and especially
the body, is the abode of darkness, discord, and violence, in a perpetual struggle
with the light. Indeed, humans themselves are particles of light, trapped in ‘dark’
bodies. Our task is thus to escape the body and its lures and embrace the ascetic
life. The Manichaean ‘elect’ excel at such austerity, while so-called hearers supply
their needs and are held to less exacting standards. According to Manichaean
eschatology, most particles of light will eventually be rescued, though some will
remain behind, subject to an ‘eternal’ death.
 This strongly dualist movement, hostile to the body and all matter, finds
distinct echoes in Gnosticism, a movement of the second century CE. As Giovanni
Filoramo recounts, this salvation religion posited an ‘ignorant demiurge’, the
creator of the world, who is associated with the God of the Hebrew Bible,
alongside a transcendent, good god, known through the ‘gnosis’ of an elite few.
This elite is graced with salvific ‘pneuma’, or spirit; hence their title – the
‘pneumatics’. Because their knowledge is esoteric, gained through inner
illumination, neither the Old nor the New Testament is held to provide privileged
access to knowledge of divinity. But, despite such esotericism, gnostics such as
Marcion, Valentinus and Heracleon agree on several fronts. This world, they
claim, is the domain of evil and death, and humans need to be liberated from it.
They can assist their liberation by radically curtailing their own sexuality. Such
self-liberation is nonetheless insufficient, and there is need for an external
saviour figure. One central Gnostic tradition identifies this figure as a divine
‘Son’, no doubt influenced by Christian theology. But, unlike Christianity, and
true to its anti-corporealism, Gnosticism equates the divine Son not with an
actual, historical person but with Nous, namely reason, mind or intellect.

We enter now into very different territory, beyond the bounds of monotheism
and typified by more systematic, less supernatural conceptions of evil (as several
contributors point out, the Judaeo-Christian connotations of ‘evil’ must be
bracketed when we approach Greek and Roman sources). At the dawn of Greek
philosophy, we find the Presocratics. As Vicki Harper holds, the Presocratics’
determination to construct theories of nature that prescind from ambient Greek
polytheism means they do not engage strongly with moral questions. Still, they
are not silent on good and evil. Anaximander, for instance, identifies injustice
with cosmic strife, as opposed to cosmic harmony. But neither notion is clearly
related to human desire and action. Heraclitus, for his part, postulates a divine or
cosmic logos (‘reason’) which orders all things for the best. In some sense, then,
he thinks the distinction between good and evil is a pseudo-distinction: all things
are ultimately just. Xenophanes is epistemically too cautious to affirm Heraclitus’
divine perspective, while the Atomists approximate modern views that reduce
good and evil to pleasure and pain respectively. Overall, however, the Presocratic
material on evil is fragmentary and, by common admission, rather abstruse.
The same cannot be said of the Platonic dialogues, in which we find the first
systematic engagement with moral philosophy in the Western tradition.
According to Sophie Grace Chappell, although the Greek hamartia means ‘sin’ in
later Christian writings, in Plato it is better translated as ‘mistake’. This is
because evil, for Plato, never consists in a positive malevolent force. Rather, it
consists, centrally, in either ignorance of the good or a form of psychic defect.
The Protagoras puts forward the former view, not in the sense that vicious action
is wilfully ignorant but, rather, in the sense that vice can be remedied through
teaching (virtue being a form of knowledge). The Republic puts forward the latter
view, to the effect that vice is a function of disharmony of the soul (with reason’s
role being usurped by unruly desire). It follows that the evil tyrant, say, is far
from grand and is better characterized as confused or suffering from mental
conflict. Finally, Chappell identifies a third conception of evil in Plato, namely
that it is a necessary (albeit the lowest) feature of a full creation. This third view
is elaborated in the late dialogue Timaeus and amounts to a theory of ‘plenitude’
(cf. Heraclitus above). The trouble is, it thereby makes evil both difficult to blame
and impossible to eradicate.
Plato’s pupil Aristotle has given us what is perhaps the most systematic theory
of good and evil, or (better) virtue and vice, in the ancient period. I begin my
exploration of his theory by expounding the structure of vice. This amounts, in
effect, to Aristotle’s theory of the ‘mean’, in which he elucidates each virtue as a
mean between two contrary vices. Courage, for example, is a mean between
cowardice (the vice of deficiency) and rashness (the vice of excess). Although this
theory is pleasingly neat, I outline where I take it to fall short of a fully accurate
picture of vicious disposition, passion and action. I then elaborate Aristotle’s
complex theory of voluntary, involuntary, and non-voluntary action, the upshot
of which is that, no matter how bad our upbringing, we are ultimately
responsible for our vices (because we could have refused to act viciously to begin
with). My third section is on Aristotle’s metaphysics of vice, in which I argue that
his moral psychology is embedded in a wider and deeper metaphysics, which
stretches all the way to the ‘prime mover’. It is only given this metaphysics,
moreover, that we can resolve the apparent inconsistency between Aristotle’s two
portraits of vicious character – as integrated and disintegrated – in Nicomachean
Ethics VII.7–8 and IX.4 respectively.
Among the post-Aristotelian Hellenistic philosophers, Epicurus is perhaps the
furthest from the thought patterns of Judaeo-Christianity (something reflected in
the Jewish term ‘Apikorus’, meaning ‘apostate’). As Thomas Blackson argues,
although Epicurus’ notion of an atomic ‘swerve’ is often interpreted as a
grounding for free will, in fact it serves merely to show that humans are capable
of action. Contra the Abrahamic (and most Greek) traditions, Epicurus denies the
value of theoretical contemplation, except insofar as it rids people of irrational
fear of the gods. Such fear is necessarily irrational, moreover, because the gods
are wholly removed from human life and take no interest in it. Epicurus’ whole
project, indeed, can be construed as giving humans the cognitive and practical
tools to live free from fear of (supposed) evils. Even death, according to a series of
celebrated Epicurean arguments, is no evil, and it is certainly not to be feared.
For, in brief, when we are alive, death is not yet with us, while when death is
upon us we no longer exist. At most, we might have reason to fear the process of
dying. As Epicurus summarizes his position in a ‘fourfold remedy’: ‘God presents
no fears, death no worries, and, while good is readily attainable, evil is readily
endurable’.
While the Stoics affirm the existence of virtue and vice, they do not accept the
existence of objectively good or evil states of affairs. This is because, as John
Sellars makes clear, they take all such states to be ‘indifferent’ (adiaphoron). True,
some states of the world are objectively preferable, and virtue (or rationality, or
‘following nature’) amounts to choosing these states over others. But, in and of
themselves, they are neither good nor evil. It follows that the man on the rack,
although his experience is highly unpleasant, can be happy – he is experiencing
nothing objectively evil. For the Stoics, we all have an instinctual tendency to
virtue, even if it is sometimes perverted by mistaken judgements of which
‘indifferents’ to prefer. Such mistaken judgements are tantamount to vice. But,
equally, we are never forced into vicious choices or behaviours. When divine
providence (which is identical to nature) throws seeming ‘evils’ in our path, these
are simply opportunities to train the imperfect and to test the perfect. It follows,
then, that we should view adversity as beneficial – not in the sense that it is
objectively good but in the sense that it is instrumental to virtue. By parity of
reasoning, a life of what the non-Stoic would call ‘good fortune’ is actually
detrimental to our moral fibre.
Whereas the Stoics back away from moral ontology, the Pyrrhonian Sceptics
back away from moral epistemology. That is, as Richard Bett holds, they refuse to
make any knowledge-claims about good and evil. For Sextus Empiricus, their
most prominent representative, any moral claim can be paired with an equally
strong (or weak) opposite claim. The rational reaction to such ‘equipollence’
(isostheneia) is, he claims, suspension of judgement (epochē), which in turn will
generate tranquillity (ataraxia) (a goal held equally dear by the Epicureans).
Indeed, it is only if we disavow the whole project of moral knowledge, with its
obsessive attempt to identify genuine goods and evils, that peace of mind will be
within our grasp. To the objection that such moral scepticism makes action
impossible, the Sceptics reply that action requires having only ‘preconceptions’,
which fall short of knowledge. In general, Sextus and his school recommend
thinking and acting according to tradition and unreflective habit, so as to
minimize the hankering for full-blooded moral knowledge. But whether this
epistemic minimalism is satisfactory remains unclear. The danger is that it will
licence a conservative, passive ethos, unable to navigate moral controversy and
unable, even, to resist (especially new forms of) evil.
The last major philosophical movement emanating from the Greek world was
Neoplatonism, its main protagonists being Plotinus (204–270 CE) and Proclus
(412–485 CE). As Kevin Corrigan maintains, the inspiration for this movement is
only roughly Platonic; its actual origins lie in a mélange of Greek thought, and
even in various Gnostic sources. Plotinus presents matter as evil, in virtue of its
privation of form, and hence indeterminacy. Matter, as a consequence, lacks
order, and in this sense it is ugly or deformed. Matter/evil, for Plotinus, is
unproductive and weakens both soul and intellect. By contrast, Proclus, along
with later Neoplatonists such as Iamblichus and Simplicius, abandons the idea
that matter is the principle of evil. Instead, he views evil as an uncaused by-
product (parhypostasis) of the outpouring of being, affording it a merely
parasitical existence. In other words, evil amounts to a failure or defect of being,
a mere privation or absence. In this sense, evil is (for Proclus) derivative from
good and disappears as a positive reality. For all Neoplatonists, then, evil is never
fully explicable, falling below the level of reason or logos; it corrupts form, and
hence violates the identity of things. In sum, it remains a permanent challenge to
genuine, intelligible being.
Neoplatonism’s eclectic approach to the history of Greek philosophy finds a
parallel in the work of the Hellenized Jewish thinker Philo of Alexandria. But
whereas Neoplatonism comes close to Gnostic and Manichaean patterns of
thought, Philo draws on Greek philosophy to uphold Jewish orthodoxy. As
Marian Hillar shows, this leads to some rather strained positions. On the one
hand, Philo maintains that Greek (particularly Platonic and Stoic) ideas are
deductions from Moses’ claims and actions in the Bible. In fact, he holds that
Moses ‘taught’ all the Greek thinkers, poets and lawgivers – for the summit of
wisdom, and thus philosophy, lies in the Torah. But on the other hand, Philo
equates the Torah with the logos of nature – in line with Stoic thought – and
presents the Stoic sage as the epitome of virtue. Evil consists, then, in
transgressing the ‘ordinances of nature’ and is tantamount to irrationality.
Drawing on Greek sources more widely, Philo argues that ideal happiness is
intellectual – i.e., founded in theōria or contemplation – and that the body is ‘an
evil and a dead thing’, a plotter against the soul. But these heavily Hellenized
beliefs sit very uneasily with the Jewish tradition. Indeed, the suspicion remains
that, in trying to equate Judaism and Hellenism, Philo ends up betraying both.
Our last guide to the world of Greece and Rome is Rocki Wentzel, who unveils
the fascinating treasures of Graeco-Roman religion and literature. As we have
seen, the Greek and Roman gods were often badly behaved, committing acts such
as incest and parricide. But humans are not seen as paragons of virtue either, least
of all the plebs (kakos, ‘bad’ or ‘vicious’, is often a class term, since commoners
were portrayed as unheroic and dishonourable). The core vice is hubris, going
beyond just limits, which in turn can generate atē (ruinous blindness), and thence
nemesis (just deserts). A key example of hubris is the contravention of xenia,
hospitality. More generally, whenever humans transgress the natural order – e.g.,
when men behave like gods, animals, or women – they undermine society, and at
worst unleash pollution (miasma) upon it. Another vital theme in Graeco-Roman
literature is moral degeneracy, with each age being worse than its predecessor.
Latin literature develops the idea of the underworld as a place of punishment, fit
for those who botch religious rites, but also for fanatics – i.e., those who show
excessive religious devotion (superstitio). Literary conceptions of evil thus show a
variety and richness of texture not found in the regimented theories of
philosophers.

We come finally to evil as reflected in the traditions of the East. Shyam

Ranganathan introduces the Vedas, compiled in South Asia between 1500 and 500
BCE. ‘Veda’ means ‘knowledge’, and the fourth (or last) Veda contains the
Upaniṣads. Ranganathan divides the Vedic approach to evil into two. First, there
is a ‘naturalistic’ approach, according to which evil is reducible to certain natural,
quasi-divine forces. The task of the believer is to appease such forces via ritual,
and especially sacrifice. Second, there is a ‘non-naturalistic’ approach, which
enjoins practitioners to combat evil (or ‘fault’, pāpa), not in nature but in
themselves. They must take control of their wayward and selfish desires, using
the techniques of Yoga, and thereby attain self-governance. Various interpreters
accuse such yogic techniques of being life-denying and needlessly ascetic. But
this is itself a needless interpretation, argues Ranganathan. For Yoga is rather a
call to self-responsibility, a refusal to project evils onto external natural forces.
Indeed, it is a realistic conception of the self’s powers: the self is neither intellect
nor body but transcends these, and is hence able to harness them in service of the
good. This is a bracing vision, Ranganathan concludes, affording true ‘Brahman’
or self-development.
Buddhism, unlike the brahmanic religion above (which it partly repudiated),
stems from a single person – Siddhārtha Gautama (c. 484–404 BCE), a nobleman
from north-east India. As Peter Harvey relates, Gautama became a Buddha or
‘enlightened one’ through becoming a ‘renunciant’, giving up sensual indulgence
on the one hand and extreme asceticism on the other – both associated with the
evil demon Māra – in order to develop jhāna, a state of ‘concentrated calm’. At
its limit, this state becomes one of nirvāna, a kind of deathlessness or
unconditionedness. Not only is this a worthwhile state per se, it also extricates
one from dukkha, namely mental and physical pain. Such pain is caused by the
self’s grasping or craving, which is a central form of evil. Liberation lies in letting
go, not clinging to things, even to the idea of self. Such evil clinging is grounded
in ignorance – i.e., seeking fulfilment in the impermanent and conditioned.
Hence the ‘four noble truths’ about life consist in dukkha, craving, nirvāna and
the ‘eightfold noble path’ to the cessation of dukkha. This path involves right
speech, right action, right livelihood and five other forms of correct conduct.
Such conduct will ward off not only Māra but also the yakkhas, evil spirit-beings
who stalk the earth for human prey.
We come lastly to ancient China and the Confucian and Taoist conceptions of
evil. As Randall Nadeau elaborates, although the Chinese character wù (or è) can
be used nominally, it never picks out an abstract, metaphysical entity called ‘evil’.
If Chinese has any cognate concept, it is always embedded in concrete, relational
contexts. Wù can thus mean nasty, discordant, unsavory, ugly, or hateful (to cite
only a few usages). The second Confucian sage, Mencius, argued that humans are
naturally inclined to benevolence (rèn), righteousness (yì), propriety (lĭ), and
wisdom (zhĭ), with vice always a result of external influence. Xunzi (the third
sage), by contrast, disputed such natural goodness and insisted that human
turpitude could be kept in line only by artificial ‘moulding’, strict social roles and
hierarchies. In reaction to this, early Taoism condemned rèn and lĭ as forms of
hypocrisy, false cultivation, and damaging differentiation. The Taoist ‘Way’
advocated returning to an original purity by overcoming the antithesis between
good and evil, along with the rigid social codes imposed by the Confucian state.
Here we see, in ancient Chinese form, what is perhaps a perennial tension
between the desire to pin evil down, as it were, and the desire for a more liberal,
all-embracing morality.

We have seen the great variety of ways in which evil has been analysed and
represented in the ancient world. Dale Jacquette offers some thoughts on the
structure of representation in general, and, although he does not apply them to
ancient sources in particular, it is worth reflecting on what the cross-cultural
journey embodied by this volume can tell us about the very concept of evil. Is it
ineliminably tied to a specific cultural milieu, perhaps Judaeo-Christian in nature,
so that mapping it onto pre-Christian Greek and Roman cultures, for instance,
becomes impossible? Is ‘evil’ inevitably grounded in the Indo-European language
group, so that trying to understand Eastern moral concepts in its terms is simply
misleading? Is ‘evil’, although applicable to the moral cultures of the ancient
world, no longer applicable to the more liberal, secularized, and individualistic
moral cultures that have developed since the eighteenth century? These are
profound questions and ones that cannot be settled without a wealth of material
and interpretative expertise at one’s disposal. It is the purpose of this volume to
supply that material and expertise, so that, whatever the particular questions we
bring to them, we will be in a better position to arrive at our own answers.
1 Ancient Israel
Rüdiger Schmitt

Introduction
Writing a history of evil in the Hebrew Bible faces the problem that the
polyphonic biblical texts do not contain a systematic or coherent treatment of the
origins of evil or the way humans and God deal with it. The problem of evil in
the Hebrew Bible, as well as in other ancient Near Eastern literary traditions, is
linked to the realm of ethics and law and to the problem of mythological and
demonic representations, as well as to the problem of a divine origin of evil (cf.
Dohmen 2004). It is not the task of a historian of religion to outline a ‘theology of
evil’, as this is the realm of systematic theology; rather, it is to reconstruct the
different ways the biblical writers dealt with the problem in their historical and
socio-religious contexts and to avoid apologetic or heavily theologically biased
reasoning (as in Dietrich and Link 1995–2000) or (conversely) anti-theological
polemics (cf. Dawkins 2006; Lüdemann 1997). Thus, the problem of evil has to be
approached from different viewpoints: the semantics of evil, the history of
Israelite religion in its ancient Near Eastern context, and the various kinds of
biblical literature dealing with it.

The Hebrew term rā‘ā, ‘evil’

In the texts of the Hebrew Bible, the term rā‘ā, ‘evil’, and its derivatives occurs
787 times and denotes various aspects of the bad and negative, such as misfortune
and bad luck, including the quality of things like fruit and water. Rā‘ā is most
frequently found in the deuteronomistic history work (184 times in Deuteronomy
to 2 Kings) and the strongly deuteronomistic reworked book of Jeremiah (146
times). The antonym of rā‘ā is tôb, ‘good’. In constructions together with ’āśāh,
‘to do’, rā‘ā can be applied to human as well as – less frequently – divine actions.
In the human realm, rā‘ā denotes both the evil done and the evil or misfortune
suffered by humans, whereas divine actions are mostly linked to punishment.

Yahweh as origin of evil

According to Augustine, God is the bonum solum simplex (De civitate Dei 11,10)
or simply the summum bonum (Questiones 83,21). For Thomas Aquinas, God is
the essentially good (Summa Theologiae VII.3). Martin Luther (Großer
Katechismus, WA 30.1, 135–6) also stands in this tradition when he explains the
etymology of the German word Gott (God) from gut (good). According to Luther,
the deus absconditus, the hidden God, may be angry about human sins, but wrath
is no part of the essence of the divine. Divine wrath is a deprivation of God’s
essence as a reaction to human sin, but not the divine essence. That deities in
general or the biblical Yahweh are essentially ‘good’, or even the summum
bonum, is a conception which is not shared, however, by ancient Near Eastern
sources, including the Hebrew Bible, where conceptions of the divine are much
more ambivalent. As shown above, doing rā‘ā or ‘evil’ is attributed not only to
humans but also to Yahweh, who is perceived in Isaiah 45:7 as the one ‘who
creates peace/wholeness (shālôm) and evil (rā‘ā)’ and in 1 Samuel 16:14 and 18:10
torments Saul with his evil spirit.
That Yahweh himself is the origin of evil was first proposed in the history of
scholarship by the French orientalist Ernest Renan (1858). According to Renan,
monotheism was a natural outcome of life in the desert (‘le désert est
monothéiste’), and the gods of the desert, like Yahweh, have a harsh and
sometimes cruel character. Likewise, Paul Volz, a German Old Testament scholar
of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, explained the dark side of Yahweh in his
book Das Dämonische in Jahwe (The demonic in Yahweh, 1924), detailing the
animistic origins of the deity. According to Volz, Yahweh was originally a
demonic force of the desert and – following Renan – shows the qualities of the
desert. He is a destroyer, terrible, frightening, full of wrath, punishing, hard, and
merciless. He is a deity who demands atrocities and creates evil. The demonic
character of Yahweh has agglomerated evil, so that the later Yahweh religion was
not in need of demons or gods related to evils such as plagues. Volz’s theory of
the demonic origins of Yahweh is nevertheless based on outdated evolutionary
assumptions and is considered historically obsolete by most scholars (as early
Yahwism was polytheistic, and demons play a role). It nonetheless has still had
some influence on recent scholarship (Frey-Anthes 2007). The most influential
figure of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule is without doubt Rudolf Otto, who
made a distinction between the mysterium tremendum and the mysterium
fascinosum (Otto 1987: 13–37). Otto picks up Schleiermacher’s theology of
religious experience and develops his theory from the irrational perception of the
frightening, the mysterium tremendum, of which the ‘emāt (‘wrath’) of Yahweh
in Exodus 23:27 is an example. This ‘absolute unapproachability’ (schlechthinnige
Unnahbarkeit) and ‘holy horror’ finds its clearest expression in Jacob’s outcry in
Genesis 28:17: ‘And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is
none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”’ According to
Otto, the wrath of God has nothing to do with moral qualities but is the very
essence and natural expression of the holy. Rational and moral explanations for
sin and punishment are secondary to this original experience of the divine.
Otto´s approach was widely received among Old Testament scholars, and in
particular by Albrecht Alt. In his epoch-making article ‘Der Gott der Väter’ from
1929 (Alt 1968: 26), he describes the type of religious experience, the mysterium
tremendum, as typical for the gods of the fathers, which found its expression in
the name of the numen pachad jizchak, ‘Terror of Izaak’, which threw terror over
Izaak and thereby bound him into his sphere of influence. Following Otto, Mircea
Eliade (1984: 105–9) finds in the experiences of the tremendum and the majestas
the typical mode of epiphany of the weather-god. Likewise, Thorkild Jacobson
(1981: 151–8) has applied the ideas of divine majestas and mysterium tremendum
to the storm- and weather-gods of Syria and Mesopotamia. The methodological
problems with and shortcomings of Otto’s theory, principally its subjectivism,
and the speculative identification of religious feelings and experiences in ritual
and mythological texts are obvious. However, the dark, even evil sides of Yahweh
have nothing to do with his proposed origin in the southern deserts and cannot
be explained either by the theory of the accumulation of evil or by universalistic
theories like Otto’s conception of the mysterium tremendum. The Hebrew Bible
itself does not contain systematic reflection on the divine; thus the relation
between Yahweh and evil is much more complex and is described in different
ways according to the type of literature (myth, historical writings, laws, prayers,
and wisdom texts) and the function of the deity described in these works. The
negative aspects attributed to Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible are in most cases
related to different functions of the deity, in particular his roles as creator (and
destroyer) and divine king, divine judge, and divine warrior. As the national god
of Israel and Judah in pre-exilic times, Yahweh also has the function of a god of
war. ‘Yahweh is a warrior’ (Exodus 15:3) and, as a god of war, he has strongly
violent aspects: he commands to go to war, and in deuteronomistic literature he
demands utter destruction (chērem). Moreover, he himself participates in war,
smashing the enemy by throwing stones from heaven (Joshua 10:11). These
aspects are shared in particular with other warrior gods, the fierce Mesopotamian
war-goddess Ishtar and her West-Semitic ‘sister’ the Ugaritic warrior-maiden
Anat, the Assyrian national god Assur, the Mesopotamian pestilence-god Erra,
who tries to reverse the cosmic order, or the Egyptian goddess Hathor (cf. Schmitt
2011a: 217).
In the view of the priestly theology (P) of Genesis 1:31, God’s creation is
entirely good (tôb mĕ’od), and the creation of men and animals stands under his
blessing (1.28: wayebārek ’ōtām ’ēlōhîm). Yahweh’s decision to extinguish his
creation by the flood in P is seen as a punishment for human evil (Genesis 6:5)
and violence (Genesis 6:11: chamas), and he is perceived as the one who is able to
reverse his creation by bringing back the chaotic powers of the flood. The
statement in Isaiah 45:7 that Yahweh is the one who creates peace/wholeness
(shālôm) and evil/misfortune (rā‘ā) has to be understood as an expression of the
universal power of the creator-god. In the prophetic writings, the evil caused by
Yahweh is often perceived in the context of divine judgement for his unfaithful
people and the call to repentance. In some cases, it is said that Yahweh regrets the
rā‘ā or ‘evil’ he has done or has decided to do to his people (Jeremiah 18:10; 26:3–
13; 29:11; 36:3; 42:10; Jonah 3; also Exodus 32:14). The evil is not restricted to
Israel, however; it comes also as a divine judgement on other nations – for
instance, the Babylonians in Isaiah 47:11:
 But evil shall come upon you,
which you cannot charm away;
disaster shall fall upon you,
which you will not be able to ward off;
and ruin shall come on you suddenly,
of which you know nothing.

Thus it is clear that the ‘evil’ coming from Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible is in most
cases perceived as a divine reaction to human misbehaviour and is closely related
to Yahweh’s functions as god of war, creator, and divine judge. Nevertheless,
Yahweh could be seen as ambivalent, and with dark sides (like many other
ancient Near Eastern deities), without being perceived as the source of evil.

Human evil-doers
The non-priestly strain of the primeval history contained in Genesis 2:4b–11
(formerly attributed to the so-called J (Yahwist) source) can be read as the
continuing growth of human wickedness from the first sin (Genesis 3:1–24) to the
decision of God to extinguish his creation and his final promise after the flood
not to curse humankind again, because ‘the inclination of the human heart is evil
(rā‘ā) from youth’ (Genesis 8:21; cf. Schmitt 2010: 196–201). The first sin
committed by Adam and Eve, namely their attempt to become like God by eating
from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, caused their expulsion from paradise
and God’s curse (’ārūr) on the soil on which they have to live (Genesis 3:17). The
curse as a Leitmotiv is found throughout the non-priestly strain of the primeval
history and is found in Genesis 4:11, 5:29, and 8:21. After the first sin the
wickedness of humans increases dramatically: Cain kills his brother Abel
(Genesis 4:1–16) and is cursed from the ground (4:11) to be a wanderer on earth.
The short story of Lamech in Genesis 4:23–4 gives both an aetiology of cultural
techniques (Jabal as father of the shepherds, Jubal as father of the musicians, and
Tubal-Cain as father of the smiths) and the Lamech song, which praises
boundless bloody revenge even on small boys, which is in the light of the lex
talionis (Exodus 21:23–5: wound for wound) incompatible with biblical and extra-
biblical law, and has been seen as an increase of violence – worse than Cain
murdering his brother. Thus it is human wickedness that leads to God’s decision
to unleash the flood over humankind. The non-priestly strain of the primeval
history may originally have served as an explanation for the catastrophe of the
exile, but in the final composition it became an aetiology of the negative
conditions of humankind in general. The perception that the flood is a
punishment for human evil and violence is shared by the priestly strain (Genesis
6:5–11); nevertheless its Leitmotiv is that humankind, with its evil ambitions,
stands under divine blessing (Genesis 1:28; 9:1). In the post-priestly addition of
the story about the marriage of the ‘sons of God’ with human daughters (Genesis
6:1–4), which is placed right before God’s decision to initiate the flood, human
sin is exculpated by the introduction of the angelic marriages which have caused
a disturbance of the cosmic order by transgressing the borders between heaven
and earth (Schmitt 2011a: 202–3).
Notably, the term rā‘ā is missing in the priestly law codes and is most
frequently used in the book of Deuteronomy (41 times): in the deuteronomic law
texts Yahweh demands that ‘you shall purge the evil from your midst’ (13:6; 17:7–
12; 19:9; 21:21; 22:21; 22:24; 24:7; cf. Judges 20:13). The evil addressed in these texts
ranges from cultic to legal and social offenses: instigation to apostasy by prophets
and seers, veneration of astral deities, disobedience to a priestly law decision,
false testimony at court, disobedient sons, adultery, sexual intercourse with
unmarried women, and kidnapping. These deeds are conceived of as being a
violation of the social and divine world order, which can be annulled only by the
death of the perpetrator. In the epilogue to the law in Deuteronomy 28, it is
explicitly said that the evil Israel will do, in particular the disobedience to the law
and thereby the breaking of the covenant with God, will bring a curse upon the
people, disaster, consumption, and exile. It is widely acknowledged by scholars
that this conception of covenant has close parallels with Assyrian vassal treaties;
nevertheless, there is discussion among scholars whether these parallels result in
a direct literary dependence or are based on more general similarities with
ancient Near Eastern treaties (cf. Steymanns 1995; Otto 1999). Another phrase
often found in deuteronomistic literature is ‘to do evil in the eyes of Yahweh’
(Deuteronomy 4:25; 9:18; 17:2; 31:29; Judges 2:11; 3:7–12; 4:1; 6:1; 10:6; 13:1; 1
Samuel 15:19; 2 Samuel 12:9, and more than 20 times in 1 and 2 Kings). In these
texts, evil is related mostly to apostasy from Yahweh and to idolatry. In the books
of Kings, it is related particularly to veneration of foreign gods, idolatry, and
cultic atrocities, such as offering children to Molech (which seems to be a
deuteronomistic chimera, not a real practice), as well as to general disobedience
to Yahweh (attributed to the kings of Israel and Judah). From the viewpoint of the
exilic and post-exilic authors and redactors of the deuteronomistic history,
committing these sins has caused Yahweh’s wrath and the loss of the land.
As already noted above, in prophetic literature, evil suffered by humans is
mostly perceived as Yahweh’s judgement for the evil done by his people in not
obeying his commands. This is reflected in Isaiah 31:8:

Yet he too is wise and brings disaster;

He does not call back his words,
But will rise against the house of evil-doers,
And against the helpers of those who work iniquity.

The evil addressed in Ezekiel 6:9 is the practice of idolatry: ‘Then they will be
loathsome in their own sight for the evils they have committed, for all their
abominations.’ Thus, deuteronomic/deuteronomistic and prophetic literature
coincide in their (retrospective, mostly exilic and post-exilic) view that the evil
done by the Israelites is a distortion of the relation with Yahweh, which thus has
to be punished.
In the Psalms, the term rā‘ā occurs 80 times. In the psalms of complaint, the
evil suffered by humans is attributed to human enemies (Psalms 34:16; 35:12;
38:20; 109:5, etc.). The evil caused and suffered by humans is often not specified,
as the Psalms provide general templates for prayers against any kind of evil: envy,
jealousy, malicious gossip, defamation, the evil tongue (Psalm 140:12, literally
‘man of the [evil] tongue’), the evil eye (Psalm 35:19), and other kinds of
witchcraft such as curses (Psalm 10:7; 109:18). In some Psalms (in particular Psalm
22:16 – see below) demons are the reason for human suffering. Suffering by
humans can be ‘without cause’, as in Psalm 35:7, but equally the sins of the
sufferer may be seen as a cause (Psalm 38:18).
The ethical dimension of evil is found throughout Old Testament wisdom
literature, often expressed by the dualism between tôb wārā‘, ‘good and evil’, as
in Proverbs 17:13: ‘Evil will not depart from the house of one who returns evil for
good.’ In the ‘classical’ strain of biblical wisdom literature, such as Proverbs and
Sirach, personal welfare and divine mercy is linked to doing good, whereas evil-
doers have to face bad luck or divine punishment. Human behaviour is thus
linked to a chain of cause and effect (cf. Koch 1983). In the tradition of ‘sceptical’
wisdom, in Job and Ecclesiastes/Qoheleth (and ancient Near Eastern traditions
about the ‘righteous sufferer’), this principle is questioned: in particular, the book
of Job deals with the problem that a righteous man is suffering while the wicked
prosper. In the prologue to the book, Job’s patience does not break down; instead
he says to his wife (Job 2:10): ‘Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and
not receive the bad?’ In the dialogues with his friends, Job’s lamentation is
challenged by confronting him with arguments based on the chain of causes of
‘classical’ wisdom: ‘Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or were
the upright cut off?’ Job replies to his friends that the wicked often go
unpunished (Job 21) and is answered by his friends Bildad and Elihu that God
cannot pervert justice (Job 8:32–7). However, Job carries on defending his
righteousness (Job 29–31). In the concluding speech by God himself, he criticizes
the arguments of Job and his friends because his concerns and ways are far
beyond the reach and acknowledgement of humankind. Job finally has to admit
that his fate is of small account (Job 40:4). Likewise, Qoheleth questions the chain
of causes with the argument of human experience: ‘In my vain life I have seen
everything; there are righteous people who perish in their righteousness, and
there are wicked people who prolong their life in their evil-doing’ (Ecclesiastes
7:15); ‘Because sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the human
heart is fully set to do evil’ (8:11). However, Qoheleth also expresses his faith that
‘it will not be well with the wicked … because they do not stand in fear before
god’ (8:13). Both in Job and in Qoheleth we find the view that, in dealing with the
problem of human evil and human suffering, there will always be unanswered
questions, that human fate is unpredictable, and that it is only God who knows.
The reasoning about the righteous sufferer in the tradition of ‘sceptical wisdom’
contrasts with the thinking of the chain of cause and effect in ‘classical’ wisdom
literature. It is not to be perceived as the outcome of a ‘crisis of wisdom’, as
postulated in older scholarship; rather, the two main strains of wisdom literature
are to be found in Mesopotamian and Egyptian literature alike. Thus, the two
strains in wisdom literature should be perceived as a ‘frozen’ discourse between
different wisdom schools about the evil humans have to suffer.
 A special kind of evil (not denoted as rā‘ā, however) is witchcraft (Hebrew
kāshap; cf. Schmitt 2004, 107–22; 283–8; 335–81; Schmitt 2011b). Like its
Mesopotamian and Ugaritic cognates, kāshap denotes ritual practices that were
prohibited by biblical law (Exodus 22:17; Deuteronomy 18:10) and were used to
stigmatize certain persons, such as Queen Jezebel (2 Kings 9:22), or to brand alien
religions and their religious practice (Isaiah 47:9–12; Nahum 3:4). The central
biblical verdict is Exodus 22:17: ‘You shall not permit a witch to live.’ Likewise,
Mesopotamian law codes demand the execution of performers of witchcraft
(Schmitt 2004: 335–7). As in many cultures, witchcraft in the Hebrew Bible is in
most cases gender-specific and is addressed against women (cf. Schmitt 2011b,
2012). In particular, Ezekiel 13:17–21 is addressed polemically against freelance
female healers ‘who are tying knots on all wrists, and make veils for the heads of
persons of every height, to hunt down human lives’ (13:18). Witchcraft is
perceived as an illegitimate ritual praxis distorting the world order, both on the
level of society and at the cosmic level (cf. Job 3:8).

The pattern of divine world order and chaos

The history of evil in the development of Israelite religion begins not with Adam,
Eve and the snake, in the story of the First Sin in Genesis 3, but with the
mythological aspects of evil. Ancient Israelite religion, as witnessed both by the
texts of the Hebrew Bible and by extra-biblical evidence from ancient Israel, was
deeply embedded in the symbolic system of ancient Near Eastern religions. Thus
Israelite religion in pre-exilic times (the first half of the first millenium BCE until
the Exile in 586 BCE) and afterwards shares basic mythological patterns with the
religions of neighbouring peoples, in particular from the West Semitic realm. One
of these basic patterns is the struggle of the main male deity of the pantheon with
the dragon, which represents an incorporation of the chaotic forces opposed to
the principle of divine world order (Schmitt 2004: 67–100). This struggle of the
main male deity against the forces of chaos can be linked with the topic of the
establishment of divine kingship, as in the late second millenium BCE Ugaritic
texts’ account of Baal’s struggle with Yammu (the sea), his dragons Tanannu and
Leviathan, and Mot (death), or the divine kingship and establishment of the
divine world order in the first millenium BCE Mesopotamian Enuma Elish epic,
where Marduk slays the dragon Tiamat and builds the world out of her carcass.
As in Mesopotamia, Yahweh’s creation and kingship can be related to a primeval
struggle with chaotic forces, which are represented by the dragons Tanannu and
Leviathan. Psalm 74:12–17 reads:

12 God is my king from old,

doing works of salvation on the earth.
13 You have divided the sea by your might;

you broke the heads of the Tanannu dragons in the waters.

14 You crushed the heads of Leviathan;

you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.

15 You cut openings for springs and torrents;

you dried up ever-flowing streams.

16 Yours is the day, yours also the night;

you established the luminaries and the sun.

17 You have fixed all the bounds of the earth;

you made summer and winter.

Psalm 74 envisions the struggle of Yahweh with the dragons as a macrocosmic

event preceding the establishment of the world order. The dragons, as
representatives of chaos, have been slain by Yahweh, and after the combat he
establishes the spatial and temporal order of the world. The question whether the
combat with the dragon in Psalm 74 could be read as a repeated battle – as often
assumed for the Ugaritic Baal myth – is a matter of discussion (cf. Podella 1993;
Tsamura 2005). Although the combat with the dragon in the narratives originated
in primeval times, the powers of chaos can also be envisioned as a present or
future threat. Thus Isaiah 27:1 reads: ‘On that day Yahweh will punish with his
cruel and great and strong sword Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan, the
twisting serpent, and he will kill Tanannu who is in the sea.’ In Job 3:7–8, it is
assumed that the chaotic forces can be evoked by magicians to curse the day of
Job’s birth, thereby reversing the order of the world on a microcosmic level:

Yes, let that night be barren;

Let no joyful cry be heard in it!
 Let the ‘curser of the days’ curse it,
Those who are skilled to evoke the Leviathan.

Nevertheless, the cited texts are difficult to date. Like the Job passage, the
mythological struggle between Yahweh and the dragon (as a representative of
chaos) is an old mythological topic. The combat with the dragon is already
depicted on a terracotta cult stand from Taanakh dating from the tenth century
BCE (Keel and Uehlinger 1998: 182c). Thus an important strain of ancient Israelite
religion relates evil to counter-divine chaotic forces, notwithstanding that, in the
symbol system of ancient Near Eastern religions, demonic forces sent by deities
themselves are also thought to produce evil.
In the human realm, according to Psalm 2’s coronation hymn for the king, the
office of the king as son of God and vicarius dei is to fight the enemy, who is
conceived both as the enemy of Israel and its God, and is therefore a
representative of chaotic forces (cf. Psalms 46, 48). The conception of the king as
having to maintain the divine world order against evil forces is a feature of royal
ideology that ancient Israel shares with its Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Syrian
neighbours (Schmitt 2004: 2–34).

Demons as the origin of evil

In the ancient Near East, demons were considered superhuman and semi-divine
beings, associated mostly with the realm of chaos, and as being of dangerous,
destructive and evil character. They are regarded as the source of sickness in the
body, insanities, child death and other forms of distress. Cosmologically they are
believed to be the direct offspring of chaos (as in Mesopotamia) or as part of
contra-divine evil forces (as in Persian Zoroastrianism). The canonical writings of
the Hebrew Bible do not contain explicit mythological or cosmological
speculations about demons; nevertheless the story about the marriages of the
‘Sons of God’ with human daughters in Genesis 6:1–4 may be read as an
aetiology of evil in the light of later traditions about the fallen angels (see below).
In the Hebrew Bible, demons are in most cases the tool of Yahweh’s punishment
for sin, bringing distress, sickness, or even death, like the ‘destroyer’ or ‘angel of
death’ (Hebrew: mashchīt) in Exodus 12:21–3 (this demon causing the death of
new-born children is similar to the Mesopotamian Lamashtu). In 1 Samuel 16:14
and 18:10 an evil spirit from God is tormenting Saul, whose kingship has been
rejected by Yahweh. Other disease-bringing demons acting on Yahweh’s
command are Qetep and Deber, ‘consumption’ and ‘pestilence’ (Deuteronomy
32:24; Habakuk 3:5; Psalm 78:50; Psalm 91:5; Job 5:7), as well as Reshep
(‘pestilence’), the old West-Semitic god of sickness and healing (Deuteronomy
32:24; Habakuk 3:5; Psalm 78:48; Job 5:7). In Habakuk 3:5, Yahweh is described as
the divine warrior, with Deber walking in front of him and being followed by
Reshep. Deber and Reshep are also addressed as ‘Angels of Evil’ in Psalm 78:48–
50. Other demonic beings were seen as related to the chaotic realm of the desert,
such as the ‘hairy ones’ (Leviticus 17:7; 2 Kings 23:8; Isaiah 13:21, 34:14) and Lilith
(sometimes understood as a night demon, but most likely identical to the
Mesopotamian storm-demon Lilitu; cf. Hutter 1999), mentioned together with the
‘hairy ones’ in Isaiah 34:14. A real night-demon is the pachad laylâ, the ‘terror of
the night’, mentioned in Psalm 91:5. Other demonic creatures are represented by
the pair of ʾiyyîm (‘desertlings’) and zîyyim and ʾochîm (‘howlers’) dwelling in
ruins (Isaiah 13:21, 34:14; Jeremiah 50:39), perhaps to be thought of as canine
demons. The imagery of canine demons is also invoked by the ‘pack of evil’
(‘ādat mĕrē‘îm) in Psalm 22:16. Canine demons are witnessed iconographically on
an Aramean amulet from Arslan Taş. The figure of Azazel (mentioned in
Leviticus 16:8) is understood both in the biblical and the post-biblical tradition as
a demonic being residing in the desert, to which the scapegoat is sent (cf.
Janowski 1999). In the book of Tobit in the Greek Old Testament, there appears a
demon with the Persian name Asmodeus (from Persian aēšma daēuua, ‘demon of
wrath’), who is explicitly characterized in Tobit 3:8 as ‘evil’ (πονηρός), and who
brings death to seven husbands of the female protagonist, Sarah (cf. Ego 2003:
312; Ahn 2003: 131–2; Albertz and Schmitt 2012: 419–20). The demon is finally
exorcised by Tobias (Tobit 8), using the secret recipe of burnt liver and heart of
fish, revealed to him by the angel Raphael (‘God Heals’). The demon flees and is
finally bound by Raphael in Egypt.

Personified evil in the later writings of the Hebrew

Bible
As shown above, personified evil was perceived in the symbolic systems of
ancient Near Eastern religions as embodying chaos, namely the chaos dragons
and demons. In the later biblical and post-biblical traditions, the Satan (Hebrew
śātān, ‘adversary’, ‘accuser’) is the most prominent figure related to evil. In the
canonical writings of the Hebrew Bible, the Satan does not appear as a demonic
being but, rather, as a functionary of the divine council, a kind of ‘heavenly
public prosecutor’. In Numbers 22:22–35, an angel, the malāk of Yahweh, is
described as a śātān, and in the frame chapters of the book of Job (1:6) one of the
‘Sons of God’ meeting in the divine council is addressed as ha-śātān, ‘the
accuser’. In the book of Job in particular, where the figure of Satan is a secondary
addition by a later redactor, it is clear that the figure of the ‘accuser’ functions to
exonerate God from having caused evil. The same functionary of the divine
council is mentioned in Zechariah 3:1, but is distinguished from the malāk of
Yahweh. In 1 Chronicles 21:1, a śātān provokes David to number Israel, which
perhaps reflects the beginning of the later demonic interpretation of the Satan.
However, because of the sparseness of the occurrences of Satan in the biblical
texts, the reconstruction of a conceptual development of the figure of Satan into a
personification of evil is hardly possible (Breytenbach and Day 1999: 730). The
identification of Satan with the snake from Genesis 3 is late and is found in the
‘Life of Adam and Eve’ (§§10, 30), as well as in Revelation 12:9, where it is called
‘that serpent of old, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole
world’ (cf. Charlesworth 2010).

The fallen angels as origin of evil in the post-biblical

literature
In post-biblical Jewish writings from the Hellenistic period, the problem of
Yahweh and evil was resolved by introducing an elaborate demonology with the
myth of the fallen angels, whose disobedience to Yahweh brought evil into his
creation. In 1 Enoch VI–IX (the ‘Book of the Watchers’, from the end of the
third/beginning of the second century BCE), we find an elaborate version of
Genesis 6:1–4, in which the sons of heaven under their leader Semyaza demand
human daughters and make a conspiracy among them, knowing well that there
will be divine punishment. They went down and had intercourse with the human
daughters and taught humankind every kind of evil, witchcraft, divination, the
production of weapons and cosmetics (!), etc. The human daughters bore giants to
the angels, which began to consume the humans and had intercourse with
animals. The text finally states that all human ways became evil, and that the
world was full of wickedness and fornication (V.III:2). The story was adopted
from Enochic literature in the book of Jubilees V from about the middle of the
second century BCE as the reason for God’s bringing the flood (cf. VanderKam
2003). In Jubilees X, demons molest the sons of Noah. They are characterized here
as evil, and, created for destruction, they seduce humans and are responsible for
diseases. After Noah’s plea to God, he agrees that the demons should be bound
and sent to the place of judgement. Nevertheless, the lord of the demons,
Mastema (V:8; in V:11 called Satan), succeeds in asking God to let a tenth of the
demons free because of human wickedness. To counteract the demons, Noah is
taught the art of exorcism by God. Thus in Hellenistic Jewish literature the fallen
angels/demons are the very origin of evil, owing to their disobedience to the
Lord. The aetiology of evil in 1 Enoch and Jubilees explains both the origin of evil
by the transgression of the boundaries between heaven and earth and the uneven
mixture of humans and angels. Persistent evil and the demonic threat to the
world is then further explained in Jubilees V as a punishment for human sin, with
Mastema/Satan and his demons as the tools to punish human wickedness. It has
been a matter of scholarly discussion whether this development was influenced
by Persian dualism or not. Scholars today agree that it shows no contemporary,
direct influence from the Achaemenid period but, rather, a later (Hellenistic) and
very specific adoption and transformation of some features into the religious
symbol system, in particular into the apocalyptical strain of Second Temple
period Judaism (cf. Ahn 1997: 3–6; 2003: 131–2). In the Dead Sea Scrolls, in
particular the War Scroll (1QM) dealing with the battle of the ‘sons of light’
against the ‘sons of darkness’, the leader of the demonic forces and their human
followers is Belial (cf. Sperling 1999). He leads the ‘people of the lot of Belial’ into
the last battle between him and the ‘people of the lot of God’, but is finally
annihilated by God and his angels. The apocalyptic scenario, with the final
annihilation of evil on the day of judgement, or the final battle found in the War
Scroll and other texts from Qumran, is also the background of New Testament
demonological conceptions.
To sum up, conceptions of evil in the Hebrew Bible are rooted in common
second and first millenium BCE West-Semitic cosmological ideas of an antagonism
between the deities (usually the weather-god and his associates, but also Yaweh)
and the forces of chaos (with which the demons were also associated). The
influence of chaos on the divine world order is experienced by humans as death,
illness, bad luck, etc. Chaos is associated also with witchcraft and its effects. The
late Persian and Hellenistic period saw the new idea of an integration of evil
forces into a new apocalyptic paradigm, in which the fallen angels become the
source of evil, and which imagines a final battle between Yahweh and his angels
against the evil powers and their leader.

Further reading
Bergmann, M., Murray, M. J., and Rea, M. C. 2013. Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Charlesworth, J. H. 2010. The Good and Evil Serpent: How a Universal Symbol became Christianized. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Coogan, M. D. 2011. A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament: The Hebrew Bible in its Context. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Levenson, J. D. 1988. Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Reventlow, H. Graf, and Hoffmann, Y. (eds) 2004. The Problem of Evil and its Symbols in Jewish and
Christian Tradition. London: Continuum.

References
Ahn, G. 1997. ‘Grenzgängerkonzepte in der Religionsgeschichte: Von Engeln, Dämonen, Göttern und anderen
Mittlerwesen’, in Engel und Dämonen: Theologische, Anthropologische und Religionsgeschichtliche
Aspekte des Guten und Bösen, ed. G. Ahn and M. Dietrich. Münster: Ugarit, pp. 1–48.
——2003. ‘Dualismen im Kontext von Gegenweltvorstellungen’, in Die Dämonen/ Demons: The Demonology
of Israelite-Jewish and Early Christian Literature in Context of their Environment, ed. A. Lange, H.
Lichtenberger, and K. F. D. Römheld. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 122–34.
Albertz, R., and Scmitt, R. 2012. Family and Household Religion in Ancient Israel and the Levant. Winona
Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
Alt, A. 1968. Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel I. 4th ed., Munich: Beck.
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Augustine 1955. De Civitate Dei. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina Vol. 47. Brepols: Turnhout.
——1980. Questiones Evangeliorum. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina Vol. 44b. Brepols: Turnhout.
Breytenbach, C., and Day, P. L. 1999. ‘Satan’, in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. K. van der
Toorn, B. Becking, and P. W. van der Horst. 2nd ed., Leiden: Brill, pp. 726–32.
Charlesworth, J. H. 2010. The Good and Evil Serpent: How a Universal Symbol became Christianized. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Dawkins, R. 2006. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Dietrich, W., and Link, C. 1995–2000. Die dunklen Seiten Gottes, Vols 1–2. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchner.
Dohmen, C. 2004. Exodus 19–40. Freiburg: Herder.
Ego, B. 2003. ‘“Denn er liebte sie” (Tob 6,15 Ms. 319): Zur Rolle des Dämons Asmodäus in der Tobit-
Erzählung’, in Die Dämonen/Demons: The Demonology of Israelite-Jewish and Early Christian Literature
in Context of their Environment, ed. A. Lange, H. Lichtenberger, and K. F. D. Römheld. Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, pp. 309–17.
Eliade, M. 1984. Das Heilige und das Profane: Vom Wesen der Religionen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Frey-Anthes, H. 2007. Unheilsmächte und Schutzgenien, Antiwesen und Grenzgänger: Vorstellungen von
‘Dämonen’ im alten Israel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Hutter, M. 1999. ‘Lilith’, in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. K. van der Toorn, B. Becking,
and P. W. an der Horst. 2nd ed., Leiden: Brill, pp. 520–21.
Jacobsen, T. 1981. ‘Mesopotamien’, in Alter Orient-Mythos und Wirklichkeit, ed. H. Frankfort et al. 2nd ed.,
Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, pp. 136–42.
Janowski, B. 1999. ‘Azazel’, in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. K. van der Toorn, B.
Becking, and P. W. an der Horst. 2nd ed., Leiden: Brill, pp. 128–31.
Keel, O., and Uehlinger, C. 1998. Göttinnen, Götter und Gottessymbole. 4th ed., Freiburg: Herder.
Koch, K. 1983. ‘Is there a Principle of Retribution in the Old Testament?’, in Theodicy in the Old Testament,
ed. J. L. Crenshaw. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Lüdemann, G. 1997. The Unholy in Holy Scripture, trans. John Bowden. London: SCM Press.
Luther, M. 1910. D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe) Vol. 30.I. Weimar:
Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger.
Otto, E. 1999. Das Deuteronomium: Politische Theologie und Rechtsreform in Juda und Assyrien. Berlin and
New York: De Gruyter.
Otto, R. 1987. Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum
Rationalen. Munich: Beck.
Podella, T. 1993. ‘“Der Chaoskampfmythos” im Alten Testament: Eine Problemanzeige’, in Mesopotamica –
Ugaritica – Biblica: Festschrift für Kurt Bergerhof, ed. M. Dietrich and O. Loretz. Kevelaer: Neukirchner,
pp. 283–329.
Renan, E. 1858. Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques. 2nd ed., Paris: Impériale.
Schmitt, R. 2004. Magie im Alten Testament. Münster: Ugarit.
——2010. ‘Perspektiven einer Anthropologie des Alten Testaments’, in Religion und Menschenbild, ed. M.
Dietrich et al. Münster: Ugarit, pp. 177–215.
——2011a. Der ‘Heilige Krieg’ im Pentateuch und im deuteronomistischen Geschichtswerk. Münster: Ugarit.
——2011b. ‘Magic, Ritual Healing, and the Discourse on Ritual Authority’, in Reflexivity, Media, and
Visuality: Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual,Vol. IV., ed. U. Simon et al. Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, pp. 61–80.
——2012. ‘Theories Regarding Witchcraft Accusations and the Hebrew Bible’, in Social Theory and the Study
of Israelite Religion: Essays in Retrospect and Prospect, ed. S. M. Olyan. Atlanta: Society of Biblical
Literature, pp. 181–94.
Sperling, S. D. 1999. ‘Belial’, in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. K. van der Toorn, B.
Becking, and P. W. an der Horst. 2nd ed., Leiden: Brill, pp. 169–71.
Steymanns, H. U. 1995. Deuteronium 28 und die adê zur Thronfolgeregelung Asarhaddons: Segen und Fluch
im Alten Orient und in Israel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Tsamura, D. 2005. Creation and Destruction: A Reappraisal of the Chaoskampf Theory in the Old Testament.
Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
VanderKam, J. C. 2003. ‘The Demons in the Book of Jubilees’, in Die Dämonen/Demons: The Demonology of
Israelite-Jewish and Early Christian Literature in Context of their Environment, ed. A. Lange, H.
Lichtenberger, and K. F. D. Römheld. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 339–64.
Volz, P. 1924. Das Dämonische in Jahwe. Tübingen: Mohr.
2 The Book of Job
Katharine J. Dell

The book of Job raises the problem of evil in a profound way. Its central theme is
the question as to whether human beings are able to have a meaningful
relationship with God, given the nature of God’s activity and power, on the one
hand, and human suffering, on the other. The existence of God is not questioned;
indeed, God appears to Job in a whirlwind in a physical manifestation, a form of
theophany that is unusual in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (to which canon
the book belongs). Job is a test case, in many ways a construct, in the way that he
is ‘set up’ as the wholly pious man to whom unexplained suffering comes. In one
sense he is ‘everyman’ who experiences suffering, but in another he is an
impossibility, since no real person can be said to be totally without sin. Job is
unlikely to be a historical figure, and it is interesting that he is from the ‘land of
Uz’ – thought to be Edom – and hence not an Israelite patriarch, even though the
scene is set in patriarchal times. This leads us to see this tale as having a
primarily theological purpose – specifically, the purpose of theodicy – that is,
how a human being can have a meaningful relationship with God in the light of
innocent suffering, and given the premise of God’s justice.
The issue of disinterested righteousness is raised in the book. Do human beings
worship God with some hope of reward, and is there still a reason for worship
when severe suffering replaces any such hope? Furthermore, the problem of
retributive justice is raised: Does the ‘good behaviour leads to reward/ evil
behaviour leads to punishment’ nexus work in practice? What happens if evil
people are rewarded and the good are punished? How does this work out on an
individual level? Finally the most profound issue of the God–human relationship
is raised: How can suffering by Godfearing, good people be understood in
relation to faith in God? What is the nature of a God who can allow suffering to
occur? Can or should Job continue to have faith in God despite the loss of
everything?
The book of Job is a product of the postexilic period in Hebrew Bible/Old
Testament thought, probably compiled between the sixth and fourth centuries
BCE, but possibly with older roots. It may have arisen partly out of the questions
raised during the exile about just punishment for sin (cf. in particular the
prophecies of Jeremiah, Ezekiel) but on a more individual basis. It may also have
been written as a challenge to the easy answers of traditional proverbial wisdom
and its system of retribution as found in the book of Proverbs. Influence may
have come from the ancient Near East, especially from Babylonian protest
literature, and indeed there are close parallels in the Ludlul bel Nemeqi (I will
praise the Lord of wisdom) and the socalled Babylonian Job (texts in Lambert
1960). Its author is likely to be a sage from wisdom circles – or indeed a renegade
sage standing on the edge of the wisdom tradition, prepared to mount a critique
from within.
Although a literary whole as it stands, the book of Job is clearly the product of
two disjointed literary parts that were eventually brought together. The first
consists of the Prologue and Epilogue, written in prose and offering the ‘story’ of
Job’s calamity and eventual restoration to good fortune. This story is likely to
have existed separately in some form before the main author saw the potential of
turning a rather trite story into a more profound exploration of key theological
themes. The evidence for there having been some knowledge of a character called
Job before the postexilic period is in Ezekiel 14:14, 20 where Job is mentioned
alongside Noah and Daniel as a ‘righteous man’. This suggests that there was an
older tradition about Job that saw him in terms of the pious figure of the
Prologue and Epilogue. The second part consists of the Dialogue and God
speeches, the Dialogue a more abstract discussion about the nature of human
behaviour and divine punishment, and the God speeches containing God’s
climactic appearance. In the opening chapter of the Dialogue, Job the pious
becomes effectively Job the impious, as he rails against God concerning his
plight, lamenting both the day of his birth and the night of his conception. The
very different tone of these sections suggests a main author who made this book
into the profound exploration of human suffering that it is in its final form.
Following the book itself, I will divide this chapter into these two parts, as in each
part God appears in a rather different role, which raises different issues to do
with the problem of evil.
The Prologue and Epilogue: God in council
The tale of Job is ostensibly a simple one of a Godfearing man whose piety was
scrupulous. The first thing we are told about him is that he was ‘blameless and
upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil’, and the priority of this
statement is clearly intentional. According to ancient ideas of reward and
punishment, Job is, as a result of his piety, a rich and prosperous man with plenty
of possessions and offspring. In 1:5, his scrupulosity is such that he even makes
sacrifices on behalf of his children, in case they might have sinned (cf. 5:4; 8:4;
20:10). It is this pious man whose faith is tested by God by a series of calamities:
first, the withdrawal of his wealth and security in raids upon his property and
then, devastatingly, the sudden death of his children; and, second, his affliction
by a serious skin disease. These calamities are apparently the result of a heavenly
encounter between God and ‘the Satan’, who use Job as a test case of
righteousness – Will Job still retain faith in God if everything is taken away from
him?
This ‘wager’ between God and ‘the Satan’ raises the first problem about the
God portrayed in Job – as Oesterley and Robinson remark, ‘Is God justified in
torturing a perfectly good and innocent person, merely to prove that he is good
and innocent?’ (Oesterley and Robinson 1934: 176). God is portrayed as in council
with ‘the Satan’ as a member of that council. ‘The Satan’ figure is a precursor of
more developed ideas about a dualistic force of evil that opposes God – here he is
probably one divine being of the heavenly council, and yet he has the freedom to
roam the earth and is given the power of wily argument (cf. the snake in Genesis
3). It is he that poses the challenging question to God: ‘Does Job fear God for
nothing?’ (Job 1:9). This is to raise the question of Job’s motives – is he simply
Godfearing because of the rewards he receives, or is the relationship at a more
profound level? If the prosperity–reward principle remains unchallenged, God
can never be sure of human motives for fearing him. The Satan appears to touch
a nerve with God here, as God decides to expose his most faithful servant, Job, to
calamity in order to prove that his motives are purer than simply material ones.
Carl Jung famously wrote on this point that ‘It is amazing to see how easily
Yahweh, quite without reason, had let himself be influenced by one of his sons,
by a doubting thought, and made unsure of Job’s faithfulness’ (Jung [1954] 1979:
19). He continues, ‘This doubting thought is Satan, who after completing his evil
handiwork has returned to the paternal bosom in order to continue his subversive
activity there’ (ibid.: 26). Whybray, more charitably, lists possible motives for
God’s action:

God’s decision to test Job could be for any number of reasons; to gain the
information about Job’s character that he lacked; to salvage his dignity and
reputation for omniscience, or for idle entertainment. In any case, the picture
presented of God in these chapters is hardly a flattering one.
(Whybray 2000: 15)

So we read God saying to the Satan, on two occasions, ‘Very well, he is in your
power’ (Job 1:12; 2:6).
Job knows nothing of the heavenly wager and so is simply struck down for no
apparent reason. The killing of his children in the course of this wager raises the
difficult moral issue of the apparently arbitrary removal of other human beings
as part of a ‘witchhunt’ against Job. As Crenshaw writes of Job’s children – they
are ‘no more than extras in a biography of God’s favourite’ (Crenshaw 1984: 58).
Job’s wife is not killed but remains to advise him to ‘Curse God and die’ (Job 2:9).
Once Job has been stripped of everything and is sitting on a dunghill scratching
the loathsome sores that have come out all over his body, the reader is poised to
hear his reaction. And his first reaction seems to be exactly what God was hoping
for: ‘The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away: blessed be the name of the
Lord’ (Job 1:21), followed shortly after by a second, similarly pious reaction (after
the infliction of the skin disease): ‘Shall we receive the good at the hand of God,
and not receive the bad?’ (Job 2:10). Job here seems almost gratefully to accept
whatever comes to him – it certainly does not affect his faith in God. As Hoffman
writes, ‘Job’s reaction [in the Prologue] clearly illuminates his view that God
owes him nothing, and does not even need to justify his deeds, since he only took
away what he had previously voluntarily given’ (Hoffman 1981: 163). Job
chastises his wife for speaking ‘as any foolish woman would speak’ (Job 2:10)
and, in a short phrase, reveals that his righteousness is indeed disinterested,
thereby turning the doctrine of retribution on its head.
After this seemingly arbitrary test of piety in the Prologue, the irony of the
situation comes in the Epilogue, when Job is restored to health and prosperity is
‘rewarded’ with twice as many goods, mainly in the form of camels and sheasses
and with a new set of children. Again the problem of the children being used as
‘extras’ arises: Would it ever be satisfactory to obtain a fresh set of children as a
‘replacement’? But, further than that, Job’s simple acceptance and disinterested
piety are now reversed with a lavish change of fortune that seems simply to
affirm the doctrine of retribution. The Satan figure does not reappear here, and it
seems to be God alone who is seen as the author of good and bad, as is the case in
the Dialogue. To appreciate the full irony of the Epilogue, we need to delve into
the rest of the book, where the airing of the problem of retribution takes place,
and look at Job’s responses to God’s appearance.

The Dialogue and God-speeches: Job in discussion

The Dialogue is essentially between Job and three friends who come (ostensibly)
to ‘comfort’ him. They are joined by a fourth friend, the young Elihu, who
reinforces much of what they say and anticipates some of what God later says,
and whose speeches in chapters 32 to 37 could be a later addition to the book. The
friends argue throughout that Job must have sinned, otherwise he would not
have been punished by God in the way that he has. Job, on the other hand,
defends his innocence and protests his treatment at the hand of God. The striking
aspect here is that there is a complete change of character on Job’s part. The
opening chapter of this section – chapter 3 – contains a lament that comes from
the depths of his despair: ‘For my sighing comes like my bread, and my groanings
are poured out like water’ (Job 3:24). He dramatically curses the day of his birth
and the night of his conception (cf. Jeremiah 20:14–18). This is where the
character of Job becomes more interesting and more realistic, rather than the
‘cardboard cutout’ pious character of the Prologue. This is a person brought to
the brink of despair by a cruel set of blows inflicted upon him by a seemingly
cruel and arbitrary deity. Job is not afraid to challenge God throughout the
Dialogue. He blames God directly for his suffering and does not mince his words
in protesting his treatment (see, for example, Job 13:24–8; 16:9–14; 19:5–15; 19:5–
12, 22). He cries out in his final lament,
 He [God] has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes. I
cry to you and you do not answer me; I stand and you merely look at me.
You have turned cruel to me; with the might of your hand you persecute me.
(Job 30:19–21)

As Tsevat writes,

He [Job] is compelled to affirm that the cause of the terrible atrocities that
God has unleashed against him lies not in him but in God. God wants to
torment him, torment him without reason, because God is cruel … In ever
repeated and diverse ways Job accuses God of wanton cruelty.
(Tsevat 1976: 345)

Although Job at first engages with the friends in dialogue, it soon becomes
apparent that it is with God that he is chiefly at odds. As Weiss remarks, ‘[Job]
refuses to accept what he sees and he cannot accept what his friends say. He
therefore searches and beseeches God, demanding to be shown the whole truth,
the world’s eternal truth’ (Weiss 1983: 82). However, it is clear that Job is not
going to give up on God and, despite his complaint, will continue to suffer and
retain his faith. As Greenberg states, ‘The true believer practises the most heroic
defiance in the world. His logic may be most strange and paradoxical, as in the
case of Job who declared, “Even though He slay me yet will I believe in Him”
(13:15)’ (Greenberg 1969: 224). It comes down, ultimately, to whether God’s
behaviour is morally acceptable to human beings or not, and whether they can to
continue to believe given their changed experience of God.
At the end of the Dialogue, we are poised to hear what God has to say in
defence of himself and in reply to Job. In a sense, neither a defence nor a direct
response is forthcoming. Rather, God appears and speaks to Job, mainly in words
of chastisement, but does not answer Job on his level and addresses his points
only indirectly. In chapters 38 to 41, there is a long digression about God’s role in
the creation of the world and long descriptions of its wild animals in particular.
As Crenshaw writes, ‘The divine speeches seem to imply that God plays by
different rules from those projected on the deity by human rationality. God does
not always reward goodness and punish wickedness’ (Crenshaw 2005: 189). The
emphasis on animals is interesting – Crenshaw labels it ‘a corrective for the
selfimposed poverty of anthropocentricity’ (ibid.: 178) – and he continues: ‘The
author of the book of Job excels as an iconoclast, removing human beings from
centre stage and rejecting all forms of idolatry. His God refuses to appear in the
palace of justice, choosing instead the arena of creation’ (ibid.). It is interesting
that the stress falls on God as creator in these speeches. A picture is given of his
creative power that, as Tsevat remarks, ‘is not retributory and egalitarian but
allotting, spending, freely flowing’ (Tsevat 1976: 362). The problem here is not in
the portrayal of God per se but in the way the portrayal relates to Job in
particular, and human beings in general. Not only has God arbitrarily imposed
intense suffering on a human being, but now, when appearing to Job, rather than
engaging with any of the issues that he has raised about justice, there is little
more than a display of power.
God’s opening accusation to Job is, ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words
without knowledge?’ (Job 38:1). God then proceeds to overwhelm Job with a
series of rhetorical questions, asking where he was at creation: Does Job know the
answers to the ways of God in his creative and sustaining acts within the created
world? Of course, the answer is ‘no’, but the issue is that these were not the
questions Job was asking. As Miles writes, ‘The Lord presents himself with
withering sarcasm and towering bravado as an amoral, irresistible force. But Job
has never called the Lord’s power into question. It is his justice of which Job has
demanded an accounting’ (Miles 1995: 321). Miles also writes, ‘God “changes the
subject” carefully leaving out the issue of his justice because he has no choice –
he has just subjected a just man to torture on a whim’ (ibid.: 315). Miles argues
that Job, in a sense, gets the upper hand, because God cannot face up to the truth
about his justice. He writes, ‘After Job, God knows his own ambiguity as he has
never known it before’ (ibid.: 328). Job has spoken truth, and ultimately Job is the
winner: ‘Ultimately Job wins; the Lord bows, in a way, to Job’s characterisation of
God, abandons his wager with the devil and after a vain attempt to shout Job
down atones for his wrongdoing by doubling Job’s initial fortune’ (ibid.: 327).
There is a question whether Miles is right in his analysis – arguably the book
does not present Job as the winner, especially not when he responds to the God
speeches in obeisance, and in acknowledgement that ‘I lay my hand on my
mouth’ (Job 40:4) and ‘have uttered what I did not understand’ (Job 42:3).
However, it is interesting that scholars have found this depth of engagement with
the problem of evil in Job, even to the point of accusing God of being evil. As
Jung expressed it, ‘He [Job] has seen God’s face and the unconscious split in his
nature. God was now known’ (Jung 1979: 54). And Robertson writes, ‘God is a
charlatan God, one who has the power and skill of a god but is a fake at the truly
divine task of governing with justice and love’ (Robertson 1973: 464). Tsevat
argues, somewhat more charitably, that it is clear that God falls short. But, in the
final analysis, God is not characterized simply by justice. He writes, ‘God says:
“No retribution is provided for in the blueprint of the world, nor does it exist
anywhere in it. None is planned for the nonhuman world and none for the
human world”’ (Tsevat 1976: 368). Ultimately, human beings cannot expect
anything for good or bad behaviour – ‘He Who speaks to man in the Book of Job
is neither a just nor an unjust god but God’ (ibid.: 373).
The problem of evil, then, as expressed in the book of Job, revolves around the
nature of God and his propensity to engage with issues of justice raised by
human suffering. Jung writes,

Job had noticed during this harangue [the God speeches] that everything
else had been mentioned except his right. He has understood that it is at
present impossible to argue the question of right, as it is only too obvious
that Yahweh has no interest whatever in Job’s cause but is far more
preoccupied with his own affairs.
(Jung 1979: 26)

The irony is that Job had called on God to appear because he could not accept his
friends’ answers and relied instead on his own experience. He knew that God was
the ultimate source of truth, and so only an answer from God would suffice. But
God, although he appears, which for some interpreters (for example, Rowley
1970) is enough of a positive answer in itself, he gives no answer except to say
that all power resides with him, and that human beings are never going to
understand everything. As Tsevat remarks,

God made and is upholding the world according to his plan, but Job
misinterpreted it in his words, i.e. according to the light of his own
conceptions. Now Job has become wiser. He sees that nothing God purposes
is impossible.
 (Tsevat 1976: 359)

Kraeling sees Job’s experience in a positive light, remarking that ‘Such an

experience deters from onesided emphasis on the intellectual, and gives
importance also to the realms of feeling and of the will’ (Kraeling 1938: 213).
Peake sees the God speeches as doing little more than putting Job, and humanity
as a whole, into his place alongside the rest of the created world: ‘All those
glorious pictures of the animal creation that God flashes before his eyes are
meant to show him that man’s importance may easily be overrated’ (Peake 1904:
203).
There is a question whether the issue of justice is really the central concern of
the God speeches. I would suggest, instead, that the issues of power and
knowledge are centre stage here. God asks, ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by
words without knowledge?’ (Job 38:1). The speeches are about power rather than
justice and also concern human ignorance of the ways of God’s creation. The
speeches are a celebration of God’s creation of a strange world of wild animals,
about which humans know little. They also describe the powerful monsters
Behemoth and Leviathan, overcome by God at creation, of which humans have
no knowledge (although they seem to be modelled on the hippopotamus and
crocodile respectively) yet which remain part of the wonder and complexity of
the created world. The point is, perhaps, that the order that God has set up does
not, after all, correspond exactly to human ideas of order, and in the same way
God’s justice and wisdom cannot be constrained by human expectations. There is
an element of whim and caprice in God’s delighting in what he has made – ‘a
playful, festive note in the portrayal of creation’ (Whedbee 1977: 24) – and yet it
serves chiefly, perhaps, to express God’s otherness. The nature of knowledge and
understanding are of key concern in the natural order that underpins the wisdom
worldview of retributive justice, and so the speeches are not primarily about that
justice but about those underpinnings. So the concern for knowledge forms a
bridge between human attempts to understand and God’s reply. There is much
that humans do not know – humans are unable to pin God down to a known set
of rules, because God’s wisdom is greater than the more minor concern of justice.
This approach may exonerate God and stress his otherness and power, but it still
raises the problem of the possibility of human relationship with God. If God’s
realm is beyond human comprehension, and there are different ‘rules’ for
different occasions, where does that leave God when human beings try to
interrogate him ethically? Perhaps the answer is that God is beyond any human
concepts of good and evil and is simply wise and powerful, so that human beings
can expect only an arbitrary God. Maybe justice in human terms cannot be
expected: all human beings can do is live with the paradox of hoping for ethical
treatment by God, but without the expectation of it. This is a view that stresses
the freedom of God to act as he wills and explains why he doesn’t react
automatically to human conduct in ways that humans can predict. If God desires,
he can act capriciously. This viewpoint takes us back to Job’s initial response in
the Prologue – ‘Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the
bad?’ (Job 2:10). This becomes a problem only when one realizes that this same
God desires relationship with humanity, as expressed throughout the Hebrew
Bible. If this is the case, why treat his faithful servants in this way? This is where
the Job of the Dialogue triumphs in his arguments against God.
This raises a related issue regarding the constraints on God’s behaviour and
human expectations of a relationship with him. One might use the language here
of ‘natural’ versus ‘revealed’ law. Natural law expects there to be some order to
the world, with God as the creator and sustainer of that world, both instigating
and preserving that order and moving it towards some final goal or destination.
This is the presupposition of much of the Wisdom Literature – God orders the
world and human society, and indeed the natural world – according to a plan.
The opposite is chaos and lack of structure. Order involves relationship with
humans and the wider world, thereby giving them meaning and purpose. From
the human side, this order gives shape to society and individual lives and makes
sense of relationship with God. Thus, when chaos and disorder reign, known
parameters of order are threatened. Evil and suffering occur along this
dimension, most clearly when natural disasters are experienced. These are
moments of disorder in an otherwise regular pattern. Such moments were
regarded as divine punishment for sin, and so, in Job, two natural disasters (Job
16, 19) – fire from heaven and a great desert wind, both of which cause the
destruction of property and animals – feature in the Prologue section when
everything is being stripped from Job.
Thus a link is made between order and justice, both within human society and
in relationship with God. If disaster is divine punishment, then good fortune must
represent divine approbation. Thus creation is essentially ‘good’ (Genesis 1), and
that which threatens this good, in the form of disorder, is evil (for example, the
flood in Genesis 6–9). If God is maintaining order, then he is looking for just
behaviour from the human side, and that is the human side of the ‘bargain’ of
being in relationship with the divine. Similar ‘norms’ of justice are expected on
both sides. On this model, the book of Job can be seen to overturn the idea that
there is an expectation of justice from God, and that there is a knowable order
being sustained by God. The God speeches state that God has an order that is
known to him – largely characterized, however, by wildness when it comes to
animals and by power and might when it comes to sporting with primeval
creatures – but this order is not accessible to human beings, nor is it expected to
be. This gives God a freedom from the constraints of natural law that challenges
the very ground of his relationship with human beings.
A second model found in the Hebrew Bible is that of revealed law. This refers
to the special relationship forged between God and Israel, instigated by God in
covenant. The nature of covenant is to set boundaries to the behaviour of both
God and human beings in order to seal the agreement between the two parties.
On this model, it becomes deeply problematic when God does not appear or
seems to be hiding, absent, or even malevolent towards his people. As Crenshaw
writes, ‘In a word, the covenant relationship exacerbated the problem of theodicy,
for the Lord confessed a personal interest in Israel’s destiny’ (Crenshaw 1983: 5).
It was when that personal interest appeared to be lacking, however, that the
people tended to take the blame and stress their own shortcomings and sinfulness
in relation to God. This can be seen in Job in the reactions of the ‘friends’ to Job’s
misfortunes, with their insistence on Job’s sinfulness and indeed arrogance in the
face of divine punishment. The corollary of human beings taking the blame or
making allowances for God, though, involves a lessening of human integrity.
Job’s own capitulation to God after the God speeches has the effect of lessening
his own integrity in the face of an awesome and powerful God. For God, the
expectations that go with relationship limit his action and make human justice
the arbiter of order. This decreases the sense of his ultimate unknowability,
superiority, freedom and power. As Crenshaw writes, ‘Is … God … free or not[?]
Are human notions of justice the ultimate arbiter of God’s actions?’ (Crenshaw
1983: 10).
These two models of natural and revealed law both show how problematic
divine behaviour ultimately seems to be in relation to Job’s plight. On a natural
law view, just behaviour might be expected of God, given his upholding of order.
But is justice necessarily a corollary of order? Is God obliged to act justly because
he has set up an order in which human beings feel comfortable if their society is
controlled and governed by law? On this model, God can choose to be free of
such concerns, and the book of Job indicates the wider dimensions of the order
God has set up – one that is greater than simply a humancentred order. However,
on the revealedlaw model, God’s behaviour is more problematic, given the
expectations of his behaviour among the covenant people. Of course, one could
argue that, since Job is from the land of Uz (Job 1:1), and clearly not an Israelite,
the debate is taking place outside such parameters. However, both the friends and
Job show that they have previously espoused a worldview that has strong
connections with ethical values found in key parts of the Israelite legal tradition.
On this model, God’s treatment of Job is arguably even more problematic.
Therefore, in conclusion, the problem of evil is raised most acutely by the
portrayal of God in the book of Job. Not only does God subject Job to a seemingly
arbitrary test in the Prologue, but later, after a long dialogue, humiliates Job in
two speeches that consist mainly of a tirade of rhetorical questions, which ask
him whether he was at creation to know all the answers. God as creator humbles
Job in a display of power and concern for all creatures and appears to address
directly neither any of Job’s specific questions about the nature of the God–
human relationship nor those concerning his own suffering. Is this kind of God
simply sporting with human beings for selfinterested purposes? Is there no
system of retributive justice and no order in the universe? Can God and
humanity even have a meaningful relationship? How does one explain suffering
if God is simply capricious about who is chosen to suffer and who is chosen to
prosper? These questions and more are opened up by this profound biblical book.

Further reading
Geeraerts, D. 2003. ‘Caught in a Web of Irony: Job and his Embarrassed God’, in Cognition in Context, ed. E.
van Wolde. Boston and Leiden: Brill, pp. 37–55.
Gordis, R. 1965. The Book of God and Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lambert, W. G. 1960. Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Murphy, R. 1981. ‘Biblical Insights into Suffering: Pathos and Compassion’, in Whither Creativity, Freedom,
Suffering? Humanity, Cosmos, God, ed. F. A. Eigo. Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, pp. 53–75.
Penchansky D., and Redditt, P. L. 2000. Shall Not the Judge of all the Earth do what is Right? Studies on the
Nature of God in Tribute to James L. Crenshaw. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
Williams, J. G. 1978. ‘Deciphering the Unspoken: the Theophany of Job’, Hebrew Union College Annual 49:
59–72.

References
Crenshaw, J. L. (ed.) 1983. Theodicy in the Old Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press; London: SPCK.
——1984. Whirlpool of Torment: Israelite Traditions of God as an Oppressive Presence. Philadelphia: Fortress
Press.
——2005. Defending God: Biblical Responses to the Problem of Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Greenberg, H. 1969. ‘In Dust and Ashes’, in The Inner Eye, ed. H. Greenberg. New York: Jewish Frontier, Vol.
2, pp. 185–92.
Hoffman, Y. 1981. ‘The Relation between the Prologue and the SpeechCycles in Job: A Reconsideration’,
Vetus Testamentum, 31(2): 160–70.
Jung, C. [1954] 1979. Answer to Job. 2nd ed., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Kraeling, E. G. 1938. The Book of the Ways of God. London: SPCK.
Lambert, W. G. 1960: Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Miles, J. 1995. God: A Biography. London: Simon & Schuster.
Oesterley, W. O. E., and Robinson, T. H. 1934. An Introduction to the Books of the Old Testament. London:
SPCK.
Peake, A. S. 1904. The Problem of Suffering in the Old Testament. London: Robert Bryant.
Robertson, D. 1973. ‘The Book of Job: A Literary Study’, Soundings, 56: 446–69.
Rowley, H. H. 1970. Job: New Century Bible Commentary. London: Thomas Nelson.
Tsevat, M. 1976. ‘The Meaning of the Book of Job’, in Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom, ed. J. L. Crenshaw.
New York: Ktav, pp. 341–74.
Weiss, M. 1983. The Story of Job’s Beginning. Jerusalem: Magnes Press.
Whedbee, J. W. 1977. ‘The Comedy of Job’, Semeia 7: 1–39.
Whybray, R. N. 2000. ‘”Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth Do What Is Just?” God’s Oppression of the
Innocent in the Old Testament’, in Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth Do What Is Right? Studies on the
Nature of God in Tribute to James L. Crenshaw, ed. D. Penchansky and P. L. Redditt. Winona Lake, IN:
Eisenbrauns, pp. 1–19.
3 Early Christian thought
Charles Taliaferro

Christianity is inconceivable without taking seriously its Jewish roots and

evolution in the early centuries of the Common Era. In this light, Christianity is
monotheistic, professing belief in an all-good, powerful creator who made and
sustains a good cosmos into which sin has entered through disobedience. Some of
the changes between emerging Christianity and rabbinic Judaism are subtle. For
example, early Christianity tended to give greater weight to an Adamic fall
(Genesis 3) than in Judaism, because the fall was considered to be the mirror
opposite of Jesus Christ’s obedience to and reconciliation with God (Romans
5:12–21; all citations of passages from the Christian Bible in this chapter are from
the Revised Standard Version). But some differences will be far more radical, as
we shall see. Jesus, his disciples, and the apostle Paul were all Jewish. Only
gradually did Christianity achieve an independent religious life, though it was
always indebted to the Hebrew Bible (incorporated in the Christian Bible as the
Old Testament), the tradition of prophecy and revelation, its liturgy animated
most centrally by the Psalms, and the Jewish tradition’s ethical monotheism, with
its sapiential tradition (from the Latin sapientia, ‘wisdom’) as found in the book
of Proverbs and its guidance on avoiding evil and pursuing the good.
The most important point to note at the beginning of early Christian thought
concerning evil is that, in keeping with Jewish teaching, creation was not the
result of violence and combat between good and evil or between amoral
supernatural powers (as with Babylonian cosmology, for example, in the Enuma
Elish, in which gods battle each other and the earth is formed out of a god’s
corpse). But while, for Jews and Christians, creation did not emerge out of
combat, the life of Jesus Christ in the four Gospels does involve combat with evil,
especially the demonic. Jesus is tempted by a supernatural adversary, ‘the Satan’
(Matthew 1; Mark 1; Luke 4). Furthermore, Jesus performs multiple exorcisms
during his ministry (Mark 5:1–13; Luke 8:27–33). In the Gospel of John, in Jesus’
farewell discourse, Jesus prepares for his passion and observes ‘the ruler of this
world coming’, which suggests the ruler is, again, an evil agent (John 14:50). Early
Christian teaching shows Jesus Christ fighting not only the demonic but also
diseases (Mark 8) and ultimately fighting and overcoming death (Luke 8, and all
accounts and witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus). The fight against evil, then,
was a fight to restore a once good creation and to bring it into a new, redeemed
relationship with God.
However much subsequent, even contemporary Christian theology has sought
to ‘demythologize’ scripture (eliminating or reinterpreting the supernatural), any
form of Christianity in continuity with its origin must take seriously the belief
that there are life-denying forces, vice, cruelty, suffering, death itself, all of which
are deemed (from a traditional Christian point of view) to be evil or bad.
References to Satan may be reinterpreted by Christians today as references to the
spirit of pride, or illegitimate power, and what is described as demonic possession
in the New Testament may be reinterpreted in terms of any number of
pathologies, or disease, which Christ expels or eradicates. But a historically
informed, recognizable Christian view of evil cannot fail to take evil seriously.
From time to time, Christians have thought some of these phenomena (which I
am referring to as ‘life-denying forces’), such as some forms of illness, are now
blessed through Christ: Julian of Norwich prayed for an illness that would allow
her to be closer to Jesus, and St Francis of Assisi referred to Sister Death,
implying that even death may serve a divine purpose (alongside Brother Sun and
Sister Moon). These, however, are not representative of the bulk of Christian
tradition. According to the latter, God has not abandoned us to illness, vice,
victimization, and extermination, but, just as God sent prophets to the children of
Israel, so God has sent Jesus Christ to teach, heal, comfort, challenge, and call
people to a renewed life of reconciliation with God in a fashion that death itself
cannot defeat (Romans 8:35–9). This core vision has evolved over time.
This chapter is divided into three sections that examine the concept of evil
through specific historical moments in early Christianity. The first considers evil
in the New Testament, the second examines evil in the immediate post-apostolic
era, as different Christian views of Christ’s person and work are developed, and
the third considers the ‘orthodox’ or credal form that Christianity took shortly
after Emperor Constantine made it the official religion of the Roman Empire.
After this narrative history, some themes are highlighted that Christians will
continue to wrestle with throughout the mediaeval, Renaissance, and
Reformation eras.

Evil in the New Testament

This chapter will follow the conventional, current practice of beginning with
Mark, moving to Matthew and Luke, and then finally to the Gospel of John, as
this is now most commonly judged to be the historical sequence of composition.
Mark is the first, Matthew and Luke came later (supposedly relying on the same
or similar source material about Jesus, referred to as Q, a source that has not yet
been discovered), and John represents a later, independent tradition. A small
caveat: the Gospel of Matthew was believed by some in the early Church to be
the first composition, and there is a case that can be made for the primacy of
Matthew (Wenham 1992). One reason (among many others) for dating some of
the Gospel material late is that Jesus is described as foreseeing the destruction of
the Temple during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, which occurred in 70 CE. This is
seen by some scholars as vaticinium ex eventu (literally, prophecy after the event)
– an attribution of foreknowledge after the event occurred – but this conclusion
is not forced on us by the evidence. It may be that Jesus made a sound prediction
(Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21). This chapter will not, however, engage issues of
dating or cover the so-called quest for the historical Jesus (for debates among
scholars surrounding which passages of the New Testament are reliable or more
reliable than others; see Evans 1992). Some sceptical secular philosophers
(famously, in the early modern era, the nineteenth-century British philosopher
Jeremy Bentham) regard the historical reliability of the New Testament as very
tenuous, whereas Christians have varied from treating it as inerrant (free of
error) in its inception (containing Jesus’ very words, ipsissima verba) to believing
it is inspired and contains Jesus’ core teachings and acts (it contains perhaps not
Jesus’ exact words in every incident, but his voice, ipsissma vox); in its most
liberal form, self-identified Christians see scripture as providing a ‘Jesus of faith’
that may or may not be historically veridical (see Wright 1999 for an excellent
overview). Be that as it may, let us begin with evil in what is traditionally
referred to as the Gospel according to Mark.
Mark begins with the theme of the prophetic call to repentance, first espoused
by John the Baptist and then taken up by Jesus: ‘God has come near, repent, and
believe in the good news’ (Mark 1:15). The good news is that Jesus gathers
disciples to proclaim an era or time of repentance and forgiveness; he engages in
exorcism (1:21–8) and heals multiple maladies, including leprosy and paralysis.
He subordinates ritual observances to healing, repudiates any alliance between
himself and demonic power, and recognizes a familial tie between those who
follow his teaching. Despite such abundant proclamations, the feeding of
thousands from what seems to be an impossibly small food source (loaves and
fishes) and acts of healing, Jesus is not accepted by the religious leaders of his
day. Peter recognizes Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus foretells his death and
resurrection. There is a transfiguration scene in which Jesus is glorified with
Moses and Elijah. There is great healing, a cleansing of those who corrupt the
temple, Jesus’ betrayal, suffering, and death, and the discovery of the empty
tomb. In some ancient manuscripts, Mark ends with a resurrection appearance.
Of the four Gospels, Mark is not as obvious as the next three in revealing a Jesus
who is clearly aware of himself as both human and divine. Although Jesus is
called Lord, Adonai, the traditional term for God (in lieu of the tetragrammaton,
or the name of God, often transliterated in English as YHWH, which, for reasons
of piety, is not to be pronounced), Jesus forgives the sins of others (often thought
to be a prerogative of God alone), and he seems to understand that his death and
resurrection has a role in bringing about the kingdom of God in apocalyptic
terms (Mark 13:24–7). In summary, Jesus’ whole mission in Mark seems to be the
exposure, challenge to, and overcoming of evil.
In the interest of space, many details in Mark are omitted, and the same is true
in the combined, telescoped portrait of Matthew and Luke. From a literary point
of view, there is a fierce urgency to Mark, whereas Matthew and Luke seem less
hurried. As far as evil is concerned, both Gospels portray Jesus as perpetuating
and fulfilling the promise of God to deliver the people of God from evil. The
births of John the Baptist and Jesus are told in Matthew and Luke, and both births
herald a new period in the salvation of God’s people. Matthew and Luke see Jesus
as fulfilling older prophecies as Messiah and saviour, crucified and raised from
the dead. Jesus combats the evil of others by calling them to repentance and
sharing with them the values to live by (e.g., live a life of forgiveness and mercy,
Luke 7:36–50; live in light of ‘the Sermon on the Mount’, Matthew 5:1–7, 28).
Jesus condemns the evil not just of certain acts (adultery), but also of sinful desire
(lust) (Matthew 5:27–8). The hoarding of wealth is not commended (Matthew
6:24; 19: 23–4), but instead generous living is blessed (Matthew 5:42; Luke 18:25).
Both Matthew and Luke see Jesus in deep opposition to a Pharisee-led Judaism. In
Luke 13:1–5, it seems Jesus claims that specific calamities (a tower collapses
killing eighteen people) are not because of the victims’ sins, but because all
people are in need of repentance (‘I tell you … unless you repent, you will all
likewise perish’, v. 5). This appears to place Jesus theologically in line with the
Covenant of Noah, in which God promises not to bring all wrongdoers to
punishment in this life, as well as the book of Job, in which an innocent person
suffers. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus triumphs over evil by suffering, death, and
resurrection. It must be noted that, in all four Gospels, there is a theme of
judgement (e.g., Mark 9:47; Matthew 12:36; Luke 13:5), and, while there are
parables of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10) and the Prodigal Son (Luke 15) that
value mercy and reconciliation respectively, there are also warnings of
punishment for those who refuse God’s call to repentance and neglect the poor
(e.g., Luke 16:19–31).
The Gospel of John is the most explicit in recognizing Jesus as God made flesh,
from its prologue in which God and Jesus are seen as one, to Jesus’ proclamation
of oneness with the Father (John 14). John identifies Jesus as the Lord of both this
life and the life to come: ‘Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he
who believes in Me shall live even if he dies”’ (John 11:25–6). In John, the conflict
between good and evil is cast between life and death, lightness and darkness. In
the Gospel of John and the three Johannine epistles, the term for ‘life’ (and its
cognates) occurs 67 times. (This compares well with the Pauline literature in
which ‘life’ and its cognates occur 96 times.) In John, Jesus as the Lord and giver
of life confronts the darkness of this world, providing a way of salvation through
his life, teaching, death, and resurrection.
Hints of the Trinity are displayed in Matthew 28:19, which proclaims: ‘Go
therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the
Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ The Trinity is nowhere explicitly
endorsed in the New Testament, but there appears to be a recognition that God
the Father is personal, if not a person, to be addressed in praise, prayer, and
worship. Jesus is a person who is said to be at one with the Father and is
worshipped. The Holy Spirit also seems personal, if not a person (e.g., Luke 11:13;
12:12; John 14:26; 20:22; Acts 2:4; Romans 9:1; 1 Thessalonians 4:5). So it appears
(at least there are hints) that evil is opposed to a Triune God – a thesis that will
be clarified in the credal era. But it should be noted that, however much (if at all)
the divinity of Jesus is recognized in the Gospels, they nowhere claim Jesus is
entirely divine. This is the difference that was later expressed by claiming that
Christ is totus deus (or wholly God) but not totum dei (the whole of God). (For an
excellent overview of the debate on the philosophy of the Trinity, see McCall
2010.)
The rest of the New Testament, from the book of Acts to the Revelation of John
(Apocalypse), includes accounts of the teaching, persecution, and history of the
early Church, instruction concerning baptism and what would come to be known
as the Eucharist, the Lord’s supper, communion, mass, and so on, teaching about
faith and works, redemption, salvation, prayer, virtue and vice, heaven and hell,
and the ‘end times’. Without underestimating the diversity of the New Testament,
such teaching appears to be articulated in the context of a good world, corrupted
by sin, and yet a saviour or Messiah has appeared in Jesus Christ to call persons
from a life of sin to a life of fulfilment in relationship to God. As the New
Testament unfolds, there is the suggestion that, while Jesus triumphed over death
and evil, the full defeat of evil will not occur until Jesus returns (I Thessalonians
4:13–18; Revelations 22:20).
The ‘canon’ (from the Greek meaning ‘measuring rod’), which refers to the
New Testament text recognized by the Church, was substantially in place by the
fourth century, though some texts still remain unsettled. The Apocrypha, for
example, is recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as divinely inspired, while
Protestant denominations tend to acknowledge it as worthy of study only
concerning the divine, not as authoritative as the rest of scripture. For many
Christians, scripture itself functions as a guide to what is evil and good. Even if
Satan himself can cite scripture (Matthew 4), scripture itself has been seen by
Christians as holy and an instrument for doing good (Colossians 3:16; Hebrews
4:12, 2; Timothy 3:16). However, Christians have differed as to whether they see
scripture itself as the revelation of God or as containing the revelation of God. On
the former model, scripture would be disclosive and revelatory of God, as an
honest letter would be written by someone perfectly trustworthy. On the latter,
scripture is the means by which God and the ways of God may be revealed to
persons. On this model, scripture can serve as a portal or perhaps even a
doorway; under some conditions (perhaps under the inspiration of the Holy
Spirit), one may come to encounter the divine through it. So, on the first view,
scripture is revelation whereas, on the second, it is a means for persons and
communities to come to divine revelation.
In the first two to three centuries of the Church, great energy was directed to
clarifying the role and the nature of Jesus Christ in overcoming evil. The New
Testament contains abundant claims and implications calling for systematic
reflection. Even so, in this first section we may see that early Christians fully
recognized both the reality of evil and the central role of Jesus in overcoming evil
and offering a life of abundance and love of God and neighbour. The clarion call
concerning evil can perhaps best be summarized as: ‘Do not be overcome by evil,
but overcome evil with good’ (Romans 12:21).

Post-apostolic thought
The Apostolic Age refers to the era of Jesus’ original disciples, and it comes to an
end with their deaths. According to tradition, two of the greatest followers of
Jesus, Peter and Paul, were martyred in Rome. The extent of the early persecution
of the Church is much debated, but there is little doubt of the prevalence of
martyrdom in the early stages of Christianity. Saint Ignatius of Antioch, who was
probably killed in 110 CE during the reign of Emperor Trajan, wrote, ‘Allow me to
be eaten by the beasts, which are my way of reaching to God. I am God’s wheat,
and I am to be ground by the teeth of wild beasts, so that I may become the pure
bread of Christ’ (see Frend 1967). But it was at last recognized as permissible to
practise the religion of Christianity in 313 CE with the Edict of Milan, and it
became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 391 CE.
Let us consider four vital matters leading up to Christianity becoming the
religion of the empire: reflection on the role of Jesus in overcoming evil; the
initial stages of distinguishing orthodoxy (literally, right belief) and rightful
authority from heresy; the relationship between Jews and Gentiles; and the
difficulties of evolving from a persecuted minority faith to the official state
religion. Each of these have a bearing on early Christian thought on evil.
Who was Jesus and what did he do? Disputes raged in the early years about
whether or how Jesus was human and divine. Because this is a book on the
history of evil and not on Christology (theories about Jesus Christ), suffice it to
say that most self-described Christians (NB: ‘the disciples were first called
Christians in Antioch’, Acts 11:26) recognize that the person Jesus Christ (‘Christ’
being Greek for ‘Messiah’, the anointed one) was an agent of divine goodness
(blessed by God the Father) who died and rose again to overcome the sins of the
world. This appears to be the key teaching of the earliest recorded sermons (Acts
2, 7). While some early professing Christians stressed the humanity of Jesus over
his divinity (some held a view termed adoptionism, according to which Jesus, as a
man, was adopted by God the Father to bring about salvation), others stressed the
divinity of Jesus over his humanity (docetism). Eventually a balance was
achieved (as we shall see in the next section), but, without settling the matter
here, note several of the early ways in which Jesus was thought of as overcoming
sin, Satan, and death: by paying a ransom; by satisfying a divine demand for
justice; or by showing us an awesome, nearly irresistible love, through which his
followers are reborn or regenerated as new persons in Christ.
In what has become known as the Ransom Theory or the Christus Victor
tradition, when persons sinned they came under the dominion of sin, death, and
Satan. In order for us to be freed, a ransom had to be paid. In a simple version of
this account, Satan is the holder of the hostages, and he agrees to release sinners
if Jesus takes our place. Jesus agrees to this and is killed. But Satan’s scheme is
undone, for Jesus rises from the dead, destroys Satan, and frees the captives to
new life.
This position has always been a minority position in Christian thought, but it
can be defended against some common historical objections. Consider three
historically significant objections and replies in rapid succession. Objection: why
would God pay Satan a ransom and not just break sinners out of prison? Reply:
imagine that sinners are willing prisoners and would not leave captivity without
a witness of God’s costly self-giving love. Objection: surely this theory gives too
much prominence to Satan? As we shall see, none of the Church’s creeds call for
belief in Satan. Reply: true, but, even if Satan does not exist, might the Ransom
Theory still house something intuitively plausible? Practicing wickedness can
seem very much like being under some stronger power. Objection: alright, let
Satan be a metaphor. Why pay a metaphor a ransom? Reply: if you carry the
metaphor through, sinners are the ones who are paid the ransom. By witnessing
God’s love, sinners willingly walk out of their self-exile.
How might Jesus overcome death through a satisfaction of divine justice? One
of the main ideas here will take centuries to refine, but the root theme is that
Jesus died in our place. By his dying, he frees us from death (see, for example,
Saint Ignatius of Antioch’s ‘Letter to the Trallians’: ‘Jesus Christ … died for us,
that through faith in His death you might escape dying’ (Ignatius 1970: 20)).
Ignatius goes on to articulate Jesus’ suffering as a substitute (he suffers in our
place), Jesus’ vicarious suffering freeing us from the yoke of sin, and paving the
way for regeneration, in which repentant sinners come to a life united with God.
In a related strand in this view of redemption, Jesus frees us from sin through
love and regeneration. St Clement writes:

Who is able to explain the bond of the love of God? Who is equal to the
telling of the greatness of His beauty? The height to which love lifts us is
unutterable. Love unites us to God. Love covers a multitude of sins. Love
endures all things, is long-suffering in everything. There is nothing vulgar in
love, nothing haughty. Love makes no schism; love does not quarrel; love
does everything in unity. In love we are the elect of God perfected; without
love nothing is pleasing to God. In love did the Master take hold of us. For
the sake of the love which he had for us did Jesus Christ our Lord, by the
will of God, give His blood for us, His flesh for our flesh, and His life for our
lives.
(Clement 1970: 11)

On this view, Jesus in some sense transforms the life of his followers through
forgiveness, leading to a kind of regeneration and adoption:

Since, then, He has renewed us by the forgiveness of sins, He has put a

 different stamp upon us, so that our souls might be like the souls of children,
as they would be if He were creating us anew.
(Barnabas 1970: 14)

Orthodoxy, authority, and heresy

It has been said that history is written by the victors, and, if there is truth to that,
we should be cautious in accepting an official history that makes the transition
from the post-Apostolic Age to the credal era too smooth. Some early Christians
described the Apostolic Age as one of purity, with errors and disagreements
emerging only later. Tertullian argued (in a clever analogy) that it made no sense
for a forgery to exist before that which is authentic. But many scholars (Christian
and non-Christian) opt for a different image to forgery and authenticity and refer
instead to a kind of trajectory, or a movement from a diverse beginning with
many sources in dispute, not to some perfect unity but to various distinctively
Christian alternatives (see Dunn 1977 for an excellent overview). Although
controversial today, what emerged as the Christian consensus was distinct from
all forms of Gnosticism, even those forms of Gnosticism which, in Christian
terms, affirmed Jesus as the saviour, delivering us from evil.
There are a great variety of Gnostic philosophies, either just before or after the
emergence of Christianity around the Mediterranean, but one version was of
special interest to defenders of what would emerge as ‘orthodoxy’. In this version,
the creation was not the result of a good God’s free act of creation but the
outcome of an errant divine being, sometimes called Sophia. On this view, the
material world is itself base, perhaps even evil, and we are trapped in our
material bodies, requiring liberation. For Gnostics with a Christian orientation,
Jesus was sent by the God beyond the god of this world in order to give us the
sacred knowledge (or gnosis) that will lead us to enlightenment and out of the
entrapment of this world. In its common form, Jesus is not fully incarnate as
human, but he seems human and has been sent to outwit the evil powers of this
world and lead us heavenward.
Against this, polemicists such as the Christian theologian Irenaeus argued
forcefully that the New Testament requires Christians fully to recognize the
reality of the incarnation. In the Gospel of John, for example, which would seem
to be very close to a Gnostic gospel, given the ostensible ‘otherworldly’ origin of
Jesus, it is evident that Jesus is fully subject to human bodily life: he eats (John 6),
tires (John 4:6), bleeds (John19:34), and dies (John 19:30).
The struggle with Gnosticism was to clear the path for the credal affirmation
of Jesus’ human nature. While some of the New Testament has a Gnostic tone (3
John), the New Testament as a whole stresses that the incarnation is a real,
tangible event (Luke 24:39–40; Matthew 26:67). Note especially the humanity of
Jesus in the crucifixion narrative of John 19. Moreover, Irenaeus and other
Christian polemicists repudiated the idea that the material, created order was not
good.

Jews and gentiles

While Jesus and his disciples were all Jewish, there are hints in the New
Testament that the Jews who reject Jesus are no longer blessed by God. In John
8:44, Jesus addresses Jews who reject him and are (he believes) seeking to kill
him. ‘You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your
father. He was a murderer from the beginning.’ The New Testament also contains
explicit claims of equality between Jews and gentiles: ‘There is neither Jew nor
Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for
you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28). Still, some of the reasons that
were offered both in the New Testament and in the post-Apostolic Age for the
authenticity of Jesus Christ as the Messiah included fulfilled prophecy from the
Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. If many, but not all, Jews knew of these prophecies,
why did they not recognize the lordship of Christ and become Christians (see
Bickerman 1990; Ferguson 2003)? Sadly, Jews and Jewish and gentile Christians
drifted apart, and the grounds for the long legacy of persecutions of the Jews
were laid in the post-Apostolic Age. One of the classic representations of the
Christian case against non-Christian Judaism is Justin Martyr’s second-century
book Dialogues with Trypho. In the dialogue between a Christian and an
observant Jew, the Christian argues that Christianity is the true completion or
fruition of Judaism, whereas Jews who refuse Christ are now clinging to an old
covenant which is no longer divinely sanctioned (see Dunn 1991).
From a persecuted minority to public sponsorship
In the earliest stages of Christianity, there was great ambivalence about the
legitimacy of using lethal force, and thus of the permissibility of serving in the
military. The New Testament itself teaches that one should love one’s enemies:
‘do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who
mistreat you’ (Matthew 5:43–6; Luke 6:27–8). If the emperor is a Christian, can he
authorize the killing of those whom he is supposed to love, namely his enemies
and the enemies of the empire? Gradually, the Church formulated conditions of
when it is permissible to use lethal force individually (to protect the innocent)
and as an empire or state. Some scriptural authority was appealed to, stressing
God’s providence in appointing world leaders (King David, who was anointed
king in the Old Testament, and the Pauline appeal to God’s hand in establishing
governing authorities in Romans 13). Suffice it to note that some Christians today
still debate the theological implications of Christianity (or, more specifically, the
Church as an institution) achieving state sponsorship. Christian pacifists, in
particular, lament the rise of what is sometimes disparagingly referred to as
‘Constantinian Christianity’.
The highly institutional form of Christianity that evolved is in contrast to the
early monastic, ascetic practice by the desert fathers and mothers in small
monastic communities in Northern Africa and the Near East. In these contexts,
the battle against evil was seen in terms of spiritual warfare, in which the monk
or nun would resist temptation and seek a life of contemplative, even unitive
prayer and union with God. These early monastics also sought to aid the
overcoming of evil through petitionary prayers (see Chadwick 1958).
Let us briefly consider some of the themes in the New Testament and post-
Apostolic Age that culminated in what is perhaps the most widely acknowledged
statement of faith in early Christianity.

Credal Christianity
As early Christianity continued to evolve, different statements of the faith called
creeds were developed. Probably the most important is the Nicene Creed, still in
use in both the West and (with a minor but significant change in reference to the
Holy Spirit) in the East (the Eastern Orthodox Church as opposed to the Roman
Catholic Church). The Nicene Creed (the result of the Council of Nicea, 325 CE)
affirms Jesus Christ’s becoming incarnate, his crucifixion, suffering, death, burial,
resurrection, ascension, and second coming ‘for our salvation’. This puts the
deliverance from evil as the central claim of the Christian Church. The creed
begins with the affirmation of God as the ‘creator of heaven and earth, of all
things visible and invisible’. This strong commitment to creation as stemming
from God implies that it is indeed worthy of God, and the subsequent references
to Jesus being ‘begotten from the Father before all time, Light from Light, true
God from true God, begotten not created of the same essence as the Father’,
implies that the one who is to save us from sin, or bring about ‘our salvation’, is
divine. The Holy Spirit is then affirmed as ‘the Lord and life-giver Who proceeds
from the Father’, and is explicitly identified in terms of revealing God to us, for it
is the Holy Spirit ‘Who spoke through the prophets’. The creed also affirms the
ultimate overcoming of evil at the end of time, for Jesus ‘will come again with
glory to judge the living and the dead. His kingdom shall have no end.’ The last
line indicates that Christian believers should live in anticipation of this future
event: ‘We look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world
to come. Amen.’

Remaining questions
Many questions about the nature and scope of evil became of enduring
importance in later Christian reflection on evil. Here is a short list of the
questions that still remained open after early Christian reflection on evil and, to
some extent, have purchase on the work of current Christian philosophical
theologians. How exacting is divine providence? Granted that both the Old and
the New Testament provide us with a God who brings guidance and acts in
human history, does God’s providential action extend so far as to predetermine
who will be saved? Debates between theistic voluntarism and Platonism will be
played out in the subsequent centuries, with some Christians holding that
something is evil because God condemns it (voluntarism) opposing those who
hold that God condemns something because it is evil. Competing theories of the
atonement between God and creatures will be subject to ongoing debate within
the Christian tradition. The arena in which evil may be renounced will also be
vexing: Is it essential that a person be saved by becoming a follower of Christ in
this life, or might Christ’s redemption extend to ‘unbelievers’, those too young or
impaired, or those who are not exposed (properly) to Christ’s offer of
redemption? This short list illustrates just some of the questions that will mark
subsequent Christian thinking about evil. Such questions are evidence that
Christianity emerged from the Apostolic Age not as a stagnant system of
questions and answers but as a dynamic tradition with multiple strands and
opportunities (ones, moreover, which were not ignored) for speculation and
revision.

Further reading
Bingham, D. J. (ed.) 2010. The Routledge Companion to Early Christian Thought. London: Routledge.
Dunn, J. 1977. Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
Ferguson, E. 2003. Backgrounds of Early Christianity. 3rd ed., Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Meister, C., and Stump, J. B. 2010. Christian Thought: A Historical Introduction. London: Routledge.

References
Barnabas 1970. ‘Letter of Barnabas’, in The Faith of the Early Fathers, ed. W. A. Jurgens. Collegeville, MN:
Liturgical Press, pp. 13–16.
Bickerman, E. 1990. The Jews in the Greek Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chadwick, O. (ed.) 1958. Western Asceticism. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
Clement of Rome 1970. ‘Letter to the Corinthians’, in The Faith of the Early Fathers, ed. W. A. Jurgens.
Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, pp. 6–13.
Dunn, J. 1977. Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
——1991. The Parting of the Ways between Christianity and Judaism. London: SCM Press.
Evans, C. A. 1992. Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.
Ferguson, E. 2003. Backgrounds of Early Christianity. 3rd ed., Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Frend, W. H. C. 1967. Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church. New York: New York University
Press.
Ignatius of Antioch 1970. ‘Letter to the Trallians’, in The Faith of the Early Fathers, ed. W. A. Jurgens.
 Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, pp. 20–21.
McCall, T. H. 2010. Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism? Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Wenham, J. 1992. Redating Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
Wright, N. T. 1999. The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is. Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity Press.
4 Saint Paul
Timothy Gombis

Saul of Tarsus – a first-century Jew who became the Apostle Paul – is perhaps
the most well-known figure from the first generation of the Christian church. He
is known as the church’s first theologian, and the one who spread the Christian
message most widely. The Christian church, initially a Jewish movement made
up of Jewish Jesus/Yeshua followers, gained followers who were non-Jewish
through the work of Paul, who went on at least three missions to Asia Minor and
Europe. While he was not the main leader of the early church, his writings
constitute a significant portion of the New Testament. He did not write a Gospel
– a narrative of the life of Jesus – so we do not know what he thought of Jesus
Christ and the church in the abstract. However, he wrote thirteen letters to
churches, mainly in response to hearing of troubles or needs in those that he
founded or with which he was familiar.
Because of the character of Paul’s writings, then, we do not have any
dispassionate account of abstract theological ‘topics’. He nowhere addresses the
origin and character of evil as a theological or philosophical problem, analysing
its origin and effects. In this chapter, I will discuss the general shape of the
religious narrative that shapes Paul’s thought. I will then discuss the cosmic
dimensions of evil according to Paul and demonstrate how this is integrated in
his worldview. In addition to its being a cosmic phenomenon with several
aspects, I will demonstrate that evil is also something that affects individual
humans. Finally, I will discuss how Paul envisions the triumph of the God of
Israel over evil in all its aspects through God’s action in Jesus Christ.
Paul’s religious heritage
Israel’s scriptures, which narrate Israel’s relationship to the God of Israel and his
calling of the nation as his special possession, strongly shapes Paul’s thought. The
God of Israel created the world and everything in it. Seizing control of a primeval
condition of chaos and disorder, God spoke a creative word, ordering the world
and placing humanity within the Garden of Eden. God had designed the world as
an arena for his joyful encounter with humanity – in the persons of Adam and
Eve – and for the life-giving and fruitful engagement of Eve with Adam. God
charged Adam and Eve to fill the entire earth and to cultivate it. They were to
rule over creation in such a way that brought forth its fruitfulness. Further, they
were to cultivate shalom or true peace – i.e., the flourishing of humanity and of
creation. In carrying out their commission to be stewards together over God’s
creation on God’s behalf, they carried out their roles as made in the image of
God. Theologians have debated this description throughout Christian history, but,
for Paul, the ‘image of God’ (tselem elohim in Hebrew) indicates human dignity
and humanity’s representation of God’s rule over creation.
Humanity was tempted to reject its proper role within creation as the ‘glory of
God’ – another term Paul uses to speak of humanity in the image of God.
Humanity was deceived ‘by the lie’ and surrendered the role of being in the
image of God, preferring idolatry (Romans 1:23). This meant that humans no
longer either ruled over creation in the name of the one true God who created all
things or sought to cultivate shalom, looking after God’s good world in harmony
with others. They now deny the truth that creation belongs to God and no longer
live for the praise and enjoyment of God. Rather, they exploit the creation for
short-term and selfish pleasures, seeking to dominate it and exploit fellow
humans. Believing the lie of the serpent and seeking to take the place of God,
humanity has set off on a course of self-destruction.
God responded to this by calling on Abraham, promising to make of his
descendants a great nation and through it to redeem the world (Genesis 12:1–3).
During a long sojourn in Egypt, in which they were enslaved and oppressed by
the Egyptians, the people of Israel grew into a large nation. God called them out
of Egypt to make Israel a ‘holy nation’, God’s unique possession. Through Israel,
God intended to fulfil his promises to Abraham, making them a blessing to the
nations. They were to be a people of justice and compassion, looking after the
poor, the orphan, and the widow. There was to be no one needy among them,
since they were all brothers and sisters, and the one true God whose world is one
of plenty was to dwell among them uniquely. Further, they were to welcome the
other nations, developing relationships of mutual sharing in order to lead them in
the way of the God of Israel, who was also the Great King over all the earth. If
they carried out this risky mission, God would be their security, and they would
have no need of treaties.
Israel, however, failed to fulfil this mission. Rather than being a light to the
other nations, they wanted to be like them, cultivating practices of injustice,
exploiting the weak and defenceless, and adopting the worship of the gods of the
nations. They turned the practices of the Mosaic Law into a set of distinctive
markers that would cut them off from other nations, cultivating an arrogant and
judgemental posture toward them. Rather than being agents of the life of God,
they sought the destruction of the nations, imagining that God regarded outsiders
with the same attitude of disgust.
The God of Israel sent Israel into exile with a heavy and broken heart, though
he promised that this was not the end of the story. He promised that he would
send them an anointed one (a ‘Messiah’) through whom he would establish his
kingdom on earth once again. The nation would be brought back into the land
from its exile, and God would return once again to give life to his people. God
would make them finally become the just nation that he originally intended.

Sin as a cosmic power

The narrative of Israel’s scriptures informs Paul’s conception of evil in several
ways. First, Paul conceives of Sin (chata in Hebrew; hamartia in Greek) as a
cosmic power. This likely has roots in God’s conversation with Cain in Genesis 4.
In that passage, Cain and Abel both bring sacrifices to God, who prefers Abel’s
over Cain’s. While many interpreters have looked for some reason why Abel’s is
preferred, it may simply be that this text displays God’s pattern throughout the
Bible of subverting human expectations. That is, God preferred the younger over
the older, though he ultimately intended for his blessing to be shared by both of
them. God’s intentions are for universal flourishing and for the mutual
enjoyment of God’s blessing along with others.
But Cain is jealous of Abel and becomes increasingly overcome by anger. In
this state, God encounters him, asking, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your
countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not
do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it’
(Genesis 4:6–7). In this text, sin isn’t merely something that humans can commit,
some breach of a standard or stipulation. Sin has aims and desires, intentions. It
has a will, and it intends to capture Cain in some way. That is, sin is a cosmic
power set loose on creation with intentions to dominate, enslave, and oppress
humanity. Sin aims to prevent humanity from enjoying the flourishing of
creation according to God’s intentions.
It may be that this text informs Paul’s discussion in Romans 5, a passage in
which Paul speaks of sin and death as more than static realities. While Paul often
speaks of people sinning and dying, here these entities are spoken of differently.
For Paul, sin and death are active agents of evil, ruining God’s good world and
holding humanity enslaved. Paul speaks of sin and death as entering the world
and of both as reigning over a corrupted creation:

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came
through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned – sin was
indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no
law. Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those
whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one
who was to come.
(Romans 5:12–14)

In a similar and very well-known text, Paul discusses the helplessness of

humanity in the face of enslavement under sin’s reign. In Romans 7, he speaks
autobiographically, even though the identity of the ‘I’ in the history of
interpretation has been regarded variously:

I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own
actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I
do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer
I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good
 dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot
do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells
within me.
(Romans 7:14–20)

The frustration of the individual in the face of good intentions that work out
badly is the result of the cosmic power of Sin’s utter sinfulness (Romans 7:13).
This text speaks again of Sin as having intentions and aims, seizing opportunities
(vv. 8, 13) and producing in us the fruit of death (vv. 10–11). The frustration of the
human person – doing what one does not want to do, not doing what one desires
to do – comes from the fact that sin dwells ‘within me’ (v. 20).
For Paul, then, Sin is a cosmic power that is at work within the world to
enslave humanity and ruin God’s blessing of humanity. It is in league with the
cosmic power of death, and these powers together destroy human community
and ruin individuals.

Satan: a chief agent of evil

Though ‘the Satan’ (haSatan in Hebrew) is a highly developed character in
Western myth, there is less said about him in the biblical tradition than one
might assume. He shows up as part of the divine council that appears before the
Most High God in the book of Job, and he is God’s cosmic enemy and the chief
agent of evil. In Paul’s letters, he plays much the same role as he does in Israel’s
scriptures and Jewish texts of the Second Temple period. He has a leading part in
holding humanity enslaved to oppressive ideologies and patterns of life that can
be characterized only as ‘spiritual death’.
According to Paul, Satan is called ‘the god of this age’, who keeps humanity
from seeing the truth about God in Jesus Christ:

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In
their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to
keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is
the image of God.
 (2 Corinthians 4:3–4)

Later in this same letter, Paul excoriates his readers for failing to be discerning
about those who visit the community and teach a gospel different from Paul’s. He
claims that they are being deceived in the same way that the serpent deceived
Eve:

I feel a divine jealousy for you, for I promised you in marriage to one
husband, to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I am afraid that as
the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning, your thoughts will be led astray
from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and
proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a
different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one
you accepted, you submit to it readily enough.
(2 Corinthians 11:2–4)

Only several lines later does Paul make the parallel explicit between Satan and
his strategies and the teachers that have arrived in Corinth:

For such boasters are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves
as apostles of Christ. And no wonder! Even Satan disguises himself as an
angel of light. So it is not strange if his ministers also disguise themselves as
ministers of righteousness. Their end will match their deeds.
(2 Corinthians 11:13–15)

His second Corinthian letter also contains another well-known passage in

which Paul discusses his ‘thorn in the flesh’. In the midst of a larger context in
which he compares his sufferings as an apostle with those claiming to be apostles
in Corinth, Paul notes that he had unparalleled privileges, including a heavenly
visit:

It is necessary to boast; nothing is to be gained by it, but I will go on to

visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a person in Christ who fourteen
years ago was caught up to the third heaven – whether in the body or out of
the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person –
whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows – was
 caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no
mortal is permitted to repeat.
(2 Corinthians 12:1–4)

According to the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, those who had heavenly visits
were not supposed to speak of what they heard and saw unless they were
explicitly told to do so. And Paul notes that his heavenly journey would have
been a temptation for him to grow in pride. In order to prevent this, he was given
a ‘thorn in the flesh’, which also had a Satanic origin:

Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given to me in the
flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated.
Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he
said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in
weakness’. So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the
power of Christ may dwell in me.
(2 Corinthians 12:7–9)

This passage has provoked a wide range of speculation about just what this thorn
in the flesh might be. Was it a physical malady? Was it a persistent human
opponent who dogged Paul’s steps relentlessly? There’s no way of knowing just
what Paul meant here, and settling the matter is beyond the purpose of this
chapter anyway. We may note, however, that the role Paul assigns to Satan in this
passage is continuous with his portrayal in Israel’s scriptures. Satan is the
opponent of God, the oppressor of humanity, who seeks to prevent the
flourishing of creation. Yet his aims can be subverted by God to demonstrate
God’s superior power and wisdom. In this instance, Paul notes that God uses this
‘messenger of Satan’ both to foster humility in himself and to increase his
experience of God’s empowerment.
Satan’s rule over this present evil age, and God’s subversion of his action for
God’s own purposes, can be seen in another passage that Paul writes to the
Corinthians. In his first letter, Paul confronts the church’s toleration of a man
who has an inappropriate relationship with his father’s wife (i.e., his stepmother).
Paul again criticizes the church for not dealing with the situation by removing
the man from their fellowship. In a striking passage, Paul announces his own
verdict:

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a

kind that is not found even among pagans; for a man is living with his
father’s wife. And you are arrogant! Should you not rather have mourned, so
that he who has done this would have been removed from among you? For
though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present I have already
pronounced judgement in the name of the Lord Jesus on the man who has
done such a thing. When you are assembled, and my spirit is present with
the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to hand this man over to Satan for the
destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the
Lord.
(1 Corinthians 5:1–5)

As in Paul’s subsequent letter, Satan is once more ‘the god of this age’, one who
has hijacked creation and is holding it in his enslaving grip. Paul imagines the
church as a sort of protective sphere in which the power of God and the presence
of the Spirit provide protection from Satan’s destructive power. Paul commands
the church to expel the sinning person in order that Satan’s work of destruction
might be unleashed on that person. His hope is that this person’s self-sufficiency
and self-orientation will be chastened, bringing about a repentance and joyful
return to the church.
Satan’s role as opponent of God’s purposes is apparent in Paul’s first letter to
the Thessalonians. He notes that he had made plans to visit them in the past but
was thwarted in carrying them out: ‘For we wanted to come to you – certainly I,
Paul, wanted to again and again – but Satan blocked our way’ (1 Thessalonians
2:18).
In Ephesians 2, Paul develops a bit more explicitly just how Satan is an
opponent of God and how he holds humanity enslaved:

You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived,
following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the
air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us
once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of
flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone
 else.
(Ephesians 2:1–3)

In accordance with common Jewish assumptions of his day, Paul portrays Satan
as ruler over this present age – the age destined to be destroyed on the future day
of judgement, when the fullness of the Kingdom of God will be consummated.
Satan has authority over ‘the air’, which is the realm of ideologies, prejudices,
cultural patterns, and assumptions. Because of his rule over this realm, cultural
attitudes are enslaving and oppressive. Further, Paul notes that Satan is a ruler
over ‘the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient’ (v. 2). It
seems that Paul envisions a spirit that Satan has at his command, who does his
bidding and works in league with him to enslave humanity. It may just be that
Paul is again reflecting an assumption present throughout the Jewish literature of
his day, that Satan works with a variety of demonic spirits and is in some sort of
position of authority over them.
An essential component of Paul’s conception of evil includes his assumption –
which draws on his pharisaic heritage in Israel’s scriptures and reflects common
Jewish assumptions of his day – that Satan is God’s cosmic enemy, the chief
agent of evil in creation, and is opposed to God’s purpose that creation should
enjoy universal flourishing.

Evil cosmic powers

Perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of evil in Paul’s theology consists of
the cosmic powers that hold creation enslaved. Western readers of the Bible
typically pass over their appearance in Paul’s letters as the relic of a bygone
worldview. But, throughout his letters, Paul refers to them using a variety of
terms. They are called ‘powers’, ‘authorities’, ‘rulers’, ‘principalities’, and
‘cosmos-graspers’.
These figures show up in prominent places throughout Paul’s correspondence.
In the poetic climax to his argument in Romans 8, he asks if anyone or anything
can separate Christians from God’s love:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor
 things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor
anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God
in Christ Jesus our Lord.
(Romans 8:38–9)

In 1 Corinthians, Paul refers to the rulers of this present fallen age:

Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of

this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak
God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our
glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they
would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
(1 Corinthians 2:6–8)

The rulers of this age are not human rulers but cosmic figures of authority whom
God has appointed over various realms within creation. Like other aspects of
Paul’s thought, the origins of these figures are spoken of in Israel’s scriptures.
Paul is drawing on a scriptural tradition in which God had appointed over
various realms within creation a range of archangelic figures of authority. In the
same way that God mediated his rule over creation through humanity, God chose
to mediate his rule over the nations through cosmic figures of authority. This
tradition is reflected in a passage in Deuteronomy: ‘When the Most High
apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of
the peoples according to the number of the gods; the Lord’s own portion was his
people, Jacob his allotted share’ (32:8–9). While the God of Israel took Israel for
his own special possession, he mediated his rule over the nations of the world
through cosmic figures of authority that are called ‘gods’. In Daniel 10, a few of
these figures appear – namely, the prince of Persia and the prince of Greece.
According to this biblical tradition, these figures were appointed to rule over
their realms on behalf of the Most High God, seeing to it that the nations under
their charge had national lives characterised by shalom. These figures, however,
have rebelled and now hold their nations enslaved. According to this biblical
tradition, the fall of these figures into rebellion is recorded in Genesis:

When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters
 were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took
wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, ‘My spirit
shall not abide in mortals for ever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one
hundred and twenty years’. The Nephilim [possibly a race of giants] were on
the earth in those days – and also afterwards – when the sons of God went
in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the
heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
(Genesis 6:1–4)

These archangelic rulers rebelled by leaving their appointed realms, embodying

themselves, and having sexual relations with women, giving birth to a race of
giants. Rather than ordering the lives of nations according to God’s order of
flourishing, they shape their cultures after their own corrupted characters,
leading nations into idolatry, captivity to patterns of sensuality and overpowering
lust, and cultural dynamics of oppression and exploitation. In Psalm 82, the God
of Israel enters the divine council – the heavenly council filled with these figures,
even in their rebellion – and confronts them for failing to uphold justice among
the nations. Because exploitation and oppression characterize the lives of the
nations, God judges these ‘gods’ and condemns them to ‘die like men’.
This tradition was the source of extensive speculation in the literature of the
Second Temple period. The Book of Jubilees (second century BCE) reflects the
conviction, first stated in Deuteronomy 32, that Israel was God’s special
possession, but these figures are now leading the nations astray into idolatry:

And he sanctified them [Israel] and gathered them from all of the sons of
man because (there are) many nations and many people, and they all belong
to him, but over all of them he caused spirits to rule so that they might lead
them astray from following him. But over Israel he did not cause any angel
or spirit to rule because he alone is their ruler and he will protect them and
he will seek for them at the hand of his angels and at the hand of his spirits
and at the hand of all of his authorities so that he might guard them and
bless them and they might be his and he might be theirs henceforth and
forever.
(Jubilees 15:31–2)
Many other texts could be cited along these lines, forming the backdrop of the
‘powers and authorities’ to which Paul refers.
Paul avoids the more speculative and spectacular aspects of this tradition, but
this is the worldview within which he operates. The present evil age is dominated
by these archangelic cosmic figures that have rebelled against God and are
opposed to his purposes for creation. They prevent human flourishing and
oppress humanity in a variety of ways, while also fostering idolatry. In addition
to the Pauline texts cited above, they appear throughout Paul’s letters.
In the 1 Corinthians text cited above, the rulers of this age were not aware of
God’s way of working. Throughout the biblical tradition, God subverts human
expectations so that he wins by losing, and triumphantly accomplishes his saving
purposes through Jesus’ shameful death. In the death of Christ, God has struck
the decisive blow to these rulers, breaking their enslaving and dominating grip
over creation. They now no longer rule creation as they formerly did and are
headed for ultimate destruction. God has installed Jesus as cosmic lord to begin
subjugating and defeating his enemies and, in the end, will complete it by finally
defeating all his enemies:

Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father,
after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he
must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to
be destroyed is death.
(1 Corinthians 15:24–6)

This list of enemies includes the cosmic rulers who have rebelled and resist God’s
purposes for his world.
It appears that the manner in which these figures enslave humanity is through
destructive and oppressive ideologies. In Galatians 4, Paul portrays the practices
of paganism as the manner in which these rulers enslave humanity, keeping them
from flourishing and from worshipping God:

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by
nature are not gods. Now, however, that you have come to know God, or
rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and
beggarly elemental spirits? How can you want to be enslaved to them again?
 You are observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am
afraid that my work for you may have been wasted.
(Galatians 4:8–11)

Much the same conviction is reflected in Colossians 2, a text in which Paul warns
his readers about ideologies and mundane social patterns that are manipulated by
the cosmic powers for the purposes of human oppression: ‘See to it that no one
takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human
tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to
Christ’ (Colossians 2:8–15).
Paul’s conception of evil, therefore, is multifaceted, even apart from
considering its human aspects. In continuity with his Jewish heritage, a chief
agent of evil has authority over and works through a range of archangelic ruler-
figures to hold God’s creation enslaved and oppressed, preventing it from
experiencing universal flourishing. These figures are in alliance with the cosmic
forces of sin and death, forming what some Pauline interpreters have called ‘the
apocalyptic power alliance’, a matrix of forces hostile to God and his purposes for
humanity.

Human evil
Because he interprets reality through the lens of the Jewish scriptures, Paul
envisions humanity as responsible for the spread of evil throughout God’s good
world. The scriptural diagnosis of the condition of creation as being subject to
‘the present evil age’ (Galatians 1:4) is complex. All of creation is in rebellion
against God and is not currently enjoying the sort of flourishing that God
intended for it. It is not that biblical writers blame angelic sources rather than
human, or human more than angelic. The problem of evil is greater and more
complex than anyone can grasp.
In concert with the scriptural narrative, humanity is to blame for rebelling
against God’s original intentions. In Romans 1:18–32, Paul indicts all of humanity
for failing to live up to God’s intentions:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and
 wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what
can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to
them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine
nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through
the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew
God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they
became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.
Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the
immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-
footed animals or reptiles.
(Romans 1:18–23)

Humanity is corrupted through its descent into idolatry and is therefore

blameworthy before God and in need of rescue and redemption. And this is not
merely a static condition. Humanity is stuck in a dynamic of degradation, in
which it is moving further away from God’s will. In Ephesians 4, Paul constructs
the lives of outsiders in stark terms in order to highlight the mode of life outside
the church:

Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the
Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their
understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and
hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned
themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practise every kind of impurity.
(Ephesians 4:17–19)

Humans are not merely victims, therefore, of the cosmic forces of evil that
have been unleashed on creation. According to the scriptural narrative, which
Paul would affirm, humanity is responsible for the entrance of sin and death into
the world. Paul would also take pains to describe fully the enslaved situation of
creation to a range of cosmic forces in an effort to portray evil more completely
and to speak of the robust salvation provided by the God of Israel through Jesus
Christ. Many treatments of Paul’s theology in Western contexts bracket these
cosmic dimensions, but Paul’s theology of salvation accounts for the pervasive
effects of evil in God’s good world.
The triumph of God over evil
According to the ‘gospel’ Paul proclaimed, God sent his Son Jesus Christ into the
world to take on humanity’s enslaved condition. In Galatians 4, Paul notes that,
just as humanity was enslaved under the cosmic rulers, Jesus was sent by God to
take on a condition under their corrupted rule (Galatians 4:4–5). In being
crucified, Jesus set free his followers from the enslaving grip of the present evil
age (Galatians 1:4). Because of this, Paul can say that the world has been crucified
to him, and he to the world (Galatians 6:14).
For Paul, God has acted powerfully in Christ to break the enslaving hold over
creation that the fallen powers exercise and has freed his people from the realm
called the ‘present evil age’. All of this is in anticipation of God’s ultimately
freeing creation from enslavement and oppression ‘into the freedom of the
children of God’ (Romans 8:21). In that day, God’s reign will once again be
manifest, and creation will finally enjoy universal flourishing.

Further reading
Arnold, C. E. 1992. Powers of Darkness: Principalities and Powers in Paul’s Letters. Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity Press.
Beker, J. C. 1980. Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Caird, G. B. 1956. Principalities and Powers: A Study in Pauline Theology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Campbell, D. A. 2009. The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Collins, J. J. 1987. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to the Jewish Matrix of Christianity. New
York: Crossroad.
Dunn, J. D. G. 1998. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
——2003. The Cambridge Companion to St Paul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Elliott, N. 2006. Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle. Minneapolis: Fortress
Press.
Gombis, T. G. 2010. Paul: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: T. & T. Clark.
Gorman, M. J. 2004. Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul and His Letters. Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Noll, S. F. 1998. Angels of Light, Powers of Darkness: Thinking Biblically about Angels, Satan, and
Principalities. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
Rowland, C. 1982. The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity. London:
SPCK.
Thiselton, A. C. 2009. The Living Paul: An Introduction to the Apostle’s Life and Thought. Downers Grove,
IL: IVP Academic.
Westerholm, S. 2004. Understanding Paul: The Early Christian Worldview of the Letter to the Romans. 2nd
ed., Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.
Wink, W. 1984. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress
Press.
5 Early Zoroastrian thought
Jenny Rose

The Zoroastrian religion is one of the oldest surviving religions. Its most ancient
texts, composed in an Old Iranian language known as Old Avestan, appear to
have originated around the late second millennium BCE.1 These, along with Young
Avestan texts relating to the religion, dating from the early to mid-first
millennium BCE, were finally committed to writing around the late sixth century
CE – that is, toward the end of Sasanian Persian rule. During that lengthy period
the theology of the religion evolved, so that the Middle Persian discourses of the
late Sasanian and early Islamic periods present a developed, systematic approach
to the classification of good and evil.
From the outset, however, the religion presented a distinctive aetiology of good
and evil. Its particular perspective has been alluded to by external commentators
since the time of the ancient Greeks, beginning with the historiographer
Herodotus. Although both Zoroastrians and non-Zoroastrian scholars
acknowledge the uniqueness of the Zoroastrian schema, opinions are divided as
to whether its understanding of the origin of evil derives from a ‘monotheistic’ or
‘dualistic’ perspective. Recent discussion has recognized that these polarized
(although, in fact, not mutually exclusive) terms originate in Jewish and Christian
theologies and are inadequate to capture the complexities of Zoroastrianism.2
In the few extant Old Avestan texts, including the most central, the Gathas
(‘songs’ or ‘poems’) attributed to the eponymous founder of the religion,
Zarathushtra, the essence of evil is identified as being completely other than that
of good. The former is designated with the adjectives ‘bad’ (aka), ‘dark’, or
‘destructive’ (angra), ‘maleficent’ (duzdah) and ‘inherently deceptive’ or
‘possessed by the lie’ (drugvant), leading to the ‘worst things’ (acishta).3 By
contrast, the latter is ‘life-giving’ or ‘beneficent’ (spenta) and ‘good’ (vohu),
realizing the ‘best thought’ (vahishta manah) and ‘good reward’ (vohu ashi).4
A key focus of the Gathas is the elevation of Ahura Mazda to the status of the
one who is most deserving of praise and worship (Y 30.1). The Gathas and
another substantial Old Avestan text, the Yasna Haptanghaiti (the ‘worship in
seven sections’), both acclaim Ahura Mazda as the ‘engenderer’ or ‘lord’ (Av.
ahura) of both the conceptual and corporeal elements of the extant world (Y 28.2,
31.11, 43.3, 35.1) and as the epitome of ‘one who is wise’ (Av. mazdā: see Y 44.2–4,
37.3).
Despite the obvious tension between good and evil throughout the Gathas,
there is no Old Avestan expression for an immediate negative parallel to Ahura
Mazda, the ‘Wise Lord’. Several Old Avestan passages suggest, however, that the
original perfection of the visible and invisible worlds established by Ahura
Mazda has been corrupted by the intrusion of a destructive force that has a
separate source. On the one hand, Ahura Mazda is praised as engendering all
living beings (gaetha), religious insight (daena), and guiding wisdom (xratu)
through his thought (Y 31.7–8, 11) and as ‘birthing’ the foremost (or primary)
existence (Y 48.6). On the other hand, he is entreated that ‘the one whose
instructions are bad’ (dush.sastis) may not ‘destroy this existence a second time’
(Y 45.1), and his worshippers lament that this same ‘one of bad teaching’ has
diverted the guiding wisdom of life and has deprived good thought of its power
(Y 32.9). Such statements concerning the depredation of the ordered and orderly
existence generated by Ahura Mazda point to a cosmogonic schema in which
there are two opposing forces at work, the one creatively good, life-giving, and
life-sustaining, the other evil and counter-creative.5

The daevas
Reference in the Gathas to a group identified as daevas provides a cogent
example of a source of evil that is separate from Ahura Mazda. The Avestan form
daeva comes from the same root as a word used for ‘god’ throughout the Indo-
European language family, namely Old Indic deva, Greek ‘Zeus’, and Latin deus
and divus. In Iranian languages, however, the term becomes applied to gods who
are ‘false’ and not to be followed.
The Iranian denigration of the daevas begins textually with the Gathas, where,
in one section, these gods are collectively condemned as deriving from the
negative abstractions ‘evil thought’ (aka manah), ‘deceit’ or ‘the lie’ (druj), and
‘distraction’ (pairimaiti) and as bringing harm to the ‘good life and undyingness’
(hujyaiti-ameretatca) generated for humanity by Ahura Mazda (Y 32.3–5).
Elsewhere in the Gathas, the unnamed daevas are reproached for being incapable
of clear discernment and of being so deceived in their decisions that they would
choose the ‘worst thought’, which would cause them to race together to ‘violence’
(aeshma), with which mortals then sicken the existence generated by Ahura
Mazda (Y 30.6).6 The daevas are not, then, on the side of Ahura Mazda but follow
and promote deceit and chaos (expressed in the term druj), which threatens the
cosmic order and true reality (Av. asha) of existence. They do not participate in
the beneficent ordering of life but represent and cause disease and death, partly
through human agency. This notion of the corruption of life from within,
threatening the continuity of existence for humans and the rest of the living
world, offers a profoundly original understanding of evil.7
The daevas stand outside the system of Mazda worship as represented in the
Gathas, but the fact that they and their worshippers are described in terms
similar to those used in the Old Indic Rig Veda indicates that, at some point, these
gods belonged to an Iranian religious and social structure deriving from an earlier
Indo-Iranian system.8 In no Avestan text, however, are the daevas ascribed to the
creative work of Ahura Mazda: rather, their attempts to ally with Ahura Mazda
are firmly rejected, and they, and ‘the one who worships them’, are castigated for
perpetuating duplicitous thought and actions (Y 32.3). Since they cannot, by their
nature, be responsible for any positive manifestation of existence, the daevas are
not considered to be equal in power or status to Ahura Mazda.9
The daevas do not receive any mention in the Old Avestan liturgy of the Yasna
Haptanghaiti, but they do feature in several Young Avestan yashts, or ‘hymns of
praise’, directed toward individual yazatas – ‘beings who are worthy of worship’.
The Young Avestan designation of the daevas as ayesnya, ‘not worthy of
worship’ (Yt 19.81), separates and distinguishes them from the yazatas, who are
allied with Ahura Mazda: for example, the hymn to the yazata Mithra states that
he is ‘as worthy of worship and praise’ as Ahura Mazda (Yt 10.1). The yazatas
belong to both existences established by Ahura Mazda – that of ‘thought’
(manah) and that of ‘having bones’ (astvant).10 The corresponding Young
Avestan terms are mainyawa, denoting ‘that which is accessible through thought
or inspiration’, and gaethiya, that which concerns ‘living beings’.11
By contrast, the daevas belong only to the world of thought.12 It has been
argued that, if the ontological status of the daevas is confined to the mainyawa
sphere alone, the term should be interpreted not so much as ‘false gods’ but as a
kind of ‘virtual enemy’ within the Gathic context of binary opposition.13 The
impact of the daevas can be seen to extend beyond the limits of the thought
world, however, since their bad thought, bad words, and bad actions are brought
to bear through the agency of bad people, including some religious leaders (Y
32.11–12, 44.20, 49.11).14
Those humans who choose to follow the deceptive and injurious way of the
daevas will end up in the ‘house of worst thought’ (Y 32.13) and the ‘worst
existence’ (Y 30.4). The Young Avestan Aban Yasht, the ‘hymn to the waters’,
states that the night-time offerings of those who worship the daevas, the
daevayasnas, are not acceptable (Yt 5.94–5), presumably because they work
against the establishment of Mazda worship (Av. mazdayasna). The Young
Avestan Fravarane, sometimes referred to as the Zoroastrian ‘Credo’, includes the
injunction to those who choose Mazda worship to ‘foreswear the daevas’ (Y 12.1).
The statement of faith continues: ‘I reject the authority of the evil daevas, the
anti-order, evil-bringing, the most druj-like of beings, the most foul of beings’ (Y
12.4).
The concept of daevas as a group of divinities worshipped by some Iranians
but rejected by those who worship Mazda endured into the Ancient Persian
period, as evidenced in an inscription of the Achaemenid king Xerxes (486–465
BCE). In the so-called daivadana text, Xerxes upholds the worship of Ahura
Mazda and condemns that of the daivas:15

Among these countries there was a place where previously the daivas were
worshipped. By the favour [or ‘greatness’] of Ahura Mazda, I destroyed that
house of the daivas [daivadana] and I proclaimed: ‘The daivas are not to be
worshipped’. Where previously the daivas had been worshipped, there I
 worshipped Ahura Mazda.
(XPh 35–41)16

In this case, imperial religious ideology appears to be in line with the Avestan
rejection of the daivas as gods not worthy of praise and worship (or their own
cultic centres), alongside the elevation of Ahura Mazda as the supreme god.
Several Old Persian inscriptions of Xerxes’ predecessor, Darius I (522–486 BCE),
including that on his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, designate Ahura Mazda ‘the Great
God’ (baga vazarka). This epithet is repeated in the inscriptions of subsequent
Ancient Persian kings, among them Xerxes’ anti-daiva report.

Who were the daveas/daivas?

It is generally understood that the Old Iranian usage of daevas/daivas refers to
the ‘old gods’ common to the Indo-Iranian cosmology of pre-Zoroastrian times,
rather than to ‘foreign gods’ who originate from outside the Iranian cultural
sphere.17 Scholars mostly assume that, sometime after the separation of Indian
and Iranian speakers around the end of the third millennium BCE, the daevas
became redefined within an Iranian context.18 Discussion persists as to whether
this differentiation and redefinition happened suddenly, as a result of innovative
reforms introduced into Iranian religion – either by Zarathushtra, or other early
proponents of Mazda worship – or occurred gradually, without apparent
stimulus.19
One approach proposes a progressive change, in which the Iranian rejection of
the ‘old gods’ was accelerated by the elevation of Ahura Mazda as developed in
the Gathas and later Avestan texts.20 The Gathic presentation of the daevas as the
cultic competitors of Ahura Mazda suggests, however, a deliberate, decisive break
with the ‘old’ cult.21 That the daevas comprise some but not all of the ‘old gods’
of an earlier Indo-Iranian pantheon is supported by a list of named daevas in the
Young Avestan Videvdad, which includes Indra, Saurwa (OInd. Sarva, an epithet
of Rudra), and Naunghaithya (OInd. Nasatya).22 All three rejected gods reappear
in the ninth-century Middle Persian Bundahishn, where they are identified as
‘arch-dews’ who, along with Akoman (‘bad thought’), Tauri (‘arrogance’), and
Zairi (‘yellowing’), are the direct opponents of the six Amesha Spentas, the ‘Life-
Giving Immortals’ – here identified as the guardians of the elements of the world,
acting in accord with the will of Ahura Mazda.23
The ‘demonization’ of this triad, along with that of the collective daevas, seems
to have taken place too late to have begun in the common Indo-Iranian period.24
It is not clear, however, why some of the old Indo-Iranian pantheon was rejected,
but other divinities became identified as yazatas in the Zoroastrian schema. Such
is the case with Mithra, Vayu, and Apam Napat.25 This problem is addressed by
some with the claim both that Zarathushtra’s reform of Iranian religion
introduced a strict monotheism and that such pantheistic elements represent a
later accretion.26
By the early Sasanian period, the Middle Persian form dew/dewan was
apparently more commonly understood as ‘demon/demons’, which is the
prevalent interpretation (as is the later New Persian form div/divan). However,
when the word appears in the Middle Persian inscriptions of the influential early
Sasanian priest Kerdir, in the context of a Zoroastrian priesthood confronting
daeva worship (MP dewasnih), it is often taken to refer to non-Zoroastrian
Iranian ‘paganism’ – that is, to the gods of ancient Iran who were worshipped
before the reforms attributed to Zarathushtra.27 Kerdir’s reference to his
destruction of ‘abodes of the dews’ – nisemag-i dewan – indicates the existence
of contemporary cultic centres dedicated to these entities, but it is uncertain
where or what these were.

Druj: the cosmic lie

Apart from the named daevas, another cosmic element is identified, from the
earliest texts, as antithetical to the activity of Ahura Mazda. In the declaration of
the Fravarane, the reciter not only foreswears all daevas but ascribes all good to
Ahura Mazda, declares reverence for asha, and renounces the company of all
those under the influence of the druj (Y 12.1, 4). This statement of belief and
intent mirrors the choice that constantly faces humans between the two opposing
principles of ‘order’ and ‘chaos’, between ‘right thought and action’ and ‘deceit’,
such as expressed in the respective Gathic terms asha and druj.28 The Gathic
affirmation that Ahura Mazda is not to be deceived (Y 43.6, 45.4) asserts that the
impact of druj will not directly affect Ahura Mazda. This avowal is reiterated in
the Young Avestan hymn to Ahura Mazda, with the added specification that the
nature of druj is completely other than that of the Wise Lord: ‘My name is “He
who does not deceive”, my name is “He who is not deceived”’ (Yt 1.14).29
Unlike asha, which exists and operates in both the mainyawa and the gaethiya
spheres, druj, like the daevas, seems to exist only in the former.30 But its impact is
felt in the material world. In the Videvdad, just as the daevas relate only to dead
matter, not living,31 so druj is inimical to living beings: it is a cosmic principle
from which comes destruction and maleficence, through its own activity as well
as through its offspring (Y 51.10).32 Druj is also manifest in other forms of evil
that are thought to corrupt physical existence: several vivid passages describe the
Druj Nasu – ‘deceitful one of dead matter’ – that descends upon humans who
have been polluted by contact with the corpse of a human or a dog (Vd 5.27–32)
and that rushes from the corpse of a dead person to pollute the living, ‘buzzing’
in the form of a fly (Vd 9.15–26, 10.1).
Another manifestation of evil is in the form of the triple-headed, serpentine
being Azi Dahaka, described as the ‘mighty, strong, daevic druj’, who is struck
down by the legendary Iranian hero Thraetaona in an ancient, archetypal Iranian
dragon-slaying myth (Y 9.8).
The concept of druj – ‘the Lie’ – as an aspect of the metaphysical reality of evil
that corrupts the physical world also appears in some Ancient Persian texts. In
what is thought to be the earliest Old Persian inscription, high up on the cliff face
at Behistun, Darius I notes that it was the Lie (OP drauga) that had made various
lands of the empire rebellious: he warns that those who are ‘possessed by the Lie’
(OP draujana) will be well punished, so that the country may be healthy.33 This
notion that the Lie has a negative impact on the smooth running of the empire
and the happiness of its people is found in another inscription of Darius, at his
homeland capital of Persepolis, where he asks for Ahura Mazda’s help against an
enemy army, a ‘bad year’ (OP dushiyara – that is, a season of drought and
famine) and the Lie.34 The king’s mandate requires that he protect his subjects,
their homes, and their livestock from such social, natural, and moral disruptions,
including the Lie that proliferates under his political opponents (DB 1.34–5, 61).
That the Ancient Persians thought the incursion of evil operates at both the
external (that is, material) and internal (that is, mental) spheres is seen in Darius’
presentation of his own ethic: he claims that he did not follow the Lie or do
anything crooked (OP zura kar-) but held to the straight path (OP arshta).35 In
the inscription over his tomb, Darius states that he approves of what is right (OP
rasta), not that which is wrong, and that he is ‘not one who favors the followers
of the Lie.’36 Such an expression echoes the Gathic passage in which Zarathushtra
declares that, if he is able, he will be an enemy of those who follow the Lie, a
supporter of order/right (asha), and a strength for the upholder of order (ashavan:
Y 43.8).

Ethical choices
Darius claims that it was because he was able to keep his thought (OP manah) in
check that he was slow to anger (DNb 13–15). This concept of the human mind as
a locus for the disruption of evil corroborates the Gathic depiction of humans as
possessing ‘good religious insight’ (Av. daena vanghui: Y 53.4) or ‘bad religious
insight’ (Av. duz-daena: Y 49.11). In the Gathas, although each individual man
and woman, as part of the existence generated by Ahura Mazda, is naturally
endowed with the wisdom to discern good from evil (Y 30.2, 31.11), he or she may
also be deceived and deluded and choose badly, like the daevas. In one Gathic
passage the choice is presented as between the two ‘spirits’ or ‘inspirations’ (Av.
mainyu) of existence, the one good, the other bad: those who are motivated by
good choose rightly, whereas the maleficent do not (Y 30.3). A person’s choice in
this matter determines not only his or her own future existence (Y 30.4, 48.4; cf. Y
71.16) but also the existence of the world, and whether ‘the worst things’ will
happen (Y 30.5–6). Those who uphold the Lie are opposed to asha, but their
deception can be overcome.37 Several passages in the Gathas refer to ‘delivering
druj’ ‘into the hand of asha’ (Y 30.8, 44.14) and the defeat of druj by asha (Y 31.4,
48.1, 49.3). The upright religious practitioner38 is one who is allied with asha and
motivated by the ‘best inspiration’ (vahishta mainyu: Y 33.6).
A new dimension of the human commitment to defeat evil appears in Young
Avestan cosmology, with the introduction of the fravashis or ‘pre-souls’ of each
man and woman. In the ‘hymn to the fravashis’, the Farvardin Yasht, the
fravashis of those who adhere to asha – from the primal human (gaya maretan)
to the victorious saoshyant at the end of limited time – are presented as choosing
to aid Ahura Mazda in preventing the Lie from taking over the world at its
inception and then in containing the ‘destructive spirit’ (Av. angra mainyu)
within the world, and so limiting the damage wrought by evil (Yt 13.1–12, 76–8).
The fravashis are referred to collectively as feminine-gendered beings that fly to
defend the material world against assault from evil (Yt 13.45, 69–70). In this sense,
they seem the antithesis of the Druj Nasu, which buzzes around spreading
pollution.
The Middle Persian Denkard presents the decisive action of the fravashi of
Zarathushtra prior to his birth as a prototype for his followers to emulate in the
struggle against evil (Dk 7.1.41–3). In Young Avestan texts, Zarathushtra is
depicted as the first to denounce the daevas and as the originator of the ‘law
rejecting them’ (Y 2.13), as well as the first to praise the ‘order that is best’ (asha
vahishta) and to worship Ahura Mazda (Yt 17.18). Zarathushtra’s action as the
first mortal to chant the words of the Yatha ahu vairyo prayer serves to drive all
the daevas under the earth (Y 9.14–15; Vd 19.46–7).
This Old Avestan prayer, also known as the Ahuna Vairya, is said to
encapsulate the whole Zoroastrian religion and to combat the forces of evil
directly.39 It is one of the prayers recited on a daily basis by many Zoroastrians
and is chanted while the kusti, the sacred cord, is wrapped around the waist and
the first reef knot is tied in front.

A cosmogonic split
Within the context of religious aetiology, the origin of evil cannot be discussed
without reference to the origin of good. The Gathas denote various aspects of the
world as related to Ahura Mazda by ‘birth’ or ‘begetting’40 and, by implication, as
sharing in the same substance: these include order/right (asha), good thought
(vohu manah), the beneficent spirit (spenta mainyu),41 and right-mindedness
(armaiti).
The life-giving spirit is also said to be instrumental in the generation of
existence (Y 44.7, 31.3, 51.7). One Gathic passage relates how the ‘most beneficent
spirit’ (spenishta mainyu), which, as an offspring of Ahura Mazda, possesses the
same power of giving life (gaya), is completely other than the deceitful one,
which brings ‘not-life’ or ‘un-life’ (ajyaiti) – that is, death (Y 30.4).
There is here no paternal relationship between Ahura Mazda and the
destructive spirit, nor any sense that evil originates from the same source as good.
The origins of this destructive spirit are, then, unclear. This lack of clarification
hinges partly on the translation of the Avestan mainyu, which is rendered
variously as ‘inspiration’, ‘spirit’, ‘impulse’, and also ‘mentality’.42 In the context
of the individual Mazda worshipper, it could be understood as ‘divine inspiration’
– that is, as the means of communication with Ahura Mazda.43
A customary interpretation of this passage mentioning the two spirits – the
one more life-giving (Av. spanyah), the other destructive (Av. angra) – is that it
refers to two separate, primordial forces of creation and destruction in the world
of thought.44 Here, the use of the comparative adjective spanyah to denote
competition between the two impulses is supported by a reference to them as
‘twins’ (yema) in an antithetical relationship (Y 30.3). Such ‘pairing’ does not
imply, however, that the two are in any way equal. This Gathic verse states that,
‘in thought, and in word, and in action, they are two, the one good (vohu), the
other bad (aka).’ Another passage declares that there is no coherence of the two
mainyu at any level, whether of thought, proclamation, guiding wisdom, choice,
words, actions, religious insights, or essential nature (Y 45.2).
This construct of the religion is not, then, that of a straightforward dualism,
with the two forces operating on a par with each other. In the structure of the
Gathas, it is spenta mainyu that is in opposition to the ‘evil one’ (Y 45.2), so that
Ahura Mazda retains ontological superiority, with no direct rival. Evil, in this
respect, is secondary in the cosmic order. This notion is prefaced – and supported
– by the suggestion that evil is not creative in its own right but only destructive
of the positive creation of Ahura Mazda (Y 45.1).
By the time of the Young Avestan texts, however, spenta mainyu, as a creative
force or function, has merged with Ahura Mazda. A corollary of this merger is
the positioning of the Wise Lord in direct opposition to Angra Mainyu, at both a
metaphysical and a physical level. This mirroring of activity is seen in the initial
chapter of the Videvdad, where the sixteen good lands that have been ‘carved
out’ or ‘fashioned forth’ (Av. fra + thwars) by Ahura Mazda for the Iranians are
afflicted by plagues and human vices, which Angra Mainyu ‘counter-creates’ or
‘whittles forth’ (Av. fra + keret).45 Here, the deliberate use of different verbs for
the respective positive and negative activity of each entity serves to emphasize
the separation between the two and reinforces the superior ontological status of
the former.
The function of Angra Mainyu can be only that of a ‘bad arranger’
(duz.daman) of ‘anti-creations’ (paitiara), whereas Ahura Mazda, as dadvah, ‘the
one who sets in place’, establishes the (good) arrangement (daman). In the final
section of Videvdad, Angra Mainyu sends the ‘counter-fabrication’ of 99,999
diseases against Ahura Mazda, ‘the establisher of good things’ (Vd 22.1–2). The
two impulses, the one creative, the other destructive, remain clearly separate,
setting in place their particular elements in the world, good and bad respectively
(Y 57.17; Yt 13.76). The world moves between these two states of creation and
destruction as good and evil struggle with each other. This tension plays out in an
Avestan myth concerning the fight between the two spirits and their ‘messengers’
for the possession of the xwarenah, the divine fortune or glory that has flown
away from the ruler Yima (Yt 19.45–6).46 Eventually, the ‘Aryan xwarenah’
enables the overcoming of evil – of Angra Mainyu, Druj, Aeshma, and all other
manifestations of ‘bad spirits’ (Yt 19.95–6).
Humans who are allied with Ahura Mazda also play their part in dispelling
Angra Mainyu: one hymn describes how Zarathushtra chases Angra Mainyu to
smash him with the Ahuna Vairya prayer, to melt him with best asha, and to
make him flee from the good earth (Yt 17.20). In keeping with this Avestan
imperative to promote the good, the Ancient Persian king Darius I states that he
does not ‘side with the evil one’ but has exerted himself to keep order throughout
the homeland (DB 1.20–22, 68–714.62; DNb 16–24).47
The ramifications of choosing good over evil are described in sensory terms in
Old Iranian texts, both Avestan and Old Persian. In the eschatological schema of
both the Gathas and the Young Avestan Hadokht Nask, the soul of one who is
‘bad in action, word, and thought’ tastes only foul food when in the ‘house of the
Lie’ (Y 49.11, 31.20; HN 3.36). In contrast, the soul of the ashavan is met by a
‘sweet smell’ as it travels toward the place of accounting, where it is given ‘spring
butter’ as ‘the food after death’ (HN 2.18). Old Persian inscriptions of Darius I,
Xerxes, and Artaxerxes II refer to evil as ‘foul-smelling’ (OP gasta), like food that
has spoiled.48
A cognate word denoting the stink of putrefaction that attaches to evil is
retained in the Middle Persian commentary on the Yasna (the Avestan liturgy of
worship), where the two spirits of the Gathas are identified as Ohrmazd (Ahura
Mazda) and the ‘foul spirit’ (MP gannag menog).49 The term is also used in the
Middle Persian eschatological myth (cf. Bd 34.27). In the Pahlavi Rivayat, the
name of Ahriman (Angra Mainyu) is often written upside down, as in some other
Middle Persian texts.
An awareness of two cosmic principles in direct opposition to each other is
reflected in several Greek references to the Persian religion. According to
Diogenes Laertius, Aristotle identified these two first principles (archai) as
ancient, original to the Persians, and as substantively different from each other:
he related that the magi (the religious experts of the Ancient Persians) held that
there is a good spirit (daimon) called Oromasdes, who was to be identified with
Zeus, and a bad spirit called Areimanios, identified with Hades.50 Diogenes notes
that these two universal principles were also mentioned by Aristotle’s
contemporary Eudoxus (the astronomer and friend of Plato), in his Voyage Round
the World, and by Theopompus of Chios in the eighth book of his Philippika. In
his essay On Isis and Osiris, Plutarch adumbrates Theopompus’ account of the
Magian teachings concerning these two opposing powers, culminating with
Hades being ‘left behind’ (On Isis 47).
Plutarch, maintaining that the wisest of men understand that the principles of
good and evil are distinct, points to the teaching of ‘Zoroaster the Magus’
concerning the cosmic division between the ‘better divinity’, who is ‘god’ (theos),
named Oromazes, and the other a ‘spirit’ (daimon) named Areimanios.51 The
former was said to be ‘more like light than anything else apprehended by the
senses’ and ‘born from the purest light’, whereas the latter was ‘more like
darkness and ignorance’, originating ‘from darkness’.52 In Plutarch’s narrative,
these two are constantly at war with each other, until the ‘destined time’ when
the plague and famine brought by Areimanios will bring about the demise of evil
itself.53 Many centuries before the Videvdad was written down, Plutarch
remarked that Oromazes was described as creating six good ‘gods’, and
Areimanios as creating an equal number of rivals.54
A hierarchy of evil
In the Gathas, the daevas appear as a collective group, not as individuals, but, in
the Young Avestan hierarchy of evil, Angra Mainyu is at the apex of daevic
beings, who are individually named and whose characteristics are described.
Although Angra Mainyu is referred to as the ‘daeva of the daevas’ who runs out
from ‘northern regions’ and rallies the daevas, including the Lie, in order to
destroy Zarathushtra (cf. Vd 19.1, 43–4), nowhere is it implied that the daevas are
generated through him. He coordinates and commissions the daevas but is not
their source. Curiously, the epithet ‘most daevic’ (daevo.temo) is not applied to
Angra Mainyu but is attributed to the daeva Paitisha, a name meaning ‘opponent’
(Vd 1.43).
The introduction of a hypostatized ‘destructive spirit’ at the head of a
hierarchy of evil beings is original to the Zoroastrian schema. Passages in the
Young Avesta trace the thwarting of evil within the confines of the material
world, from the moment of the initial incursion of Angra Mainyu to the final
retreat of evil. This offensive is effected by Ahura Mazda and the Amesha
Spentas, by Zarathushtra, by the fravashis, and, at last, by the saoshyant, the
‘future bringer of benefit’ named Astvat-ereta, who will be born of the seed of
Zarathushtra. Just as Ahura Mazda dispelled the evil spirit at the beginning of the
generation of the material world (Y 19.7–15), so Zarathushtra dispels Angra
Mainyu, the Lie and a daeva named Buiti with the recitation of the Ahuna Vairya
prayer (Vd 19.2; Yt 17.20). The action of the fravashis impedes Druj from
achieving power in both the thought world and material existence (Yt 13.12–13),
although Druj continues to rule in the domain of Angra Mainyu (Y 9.8). With the
aid of fire (atar) and good thought (vohu manah), the impact of the fravashis is
presented as effective both synchronically and diachronically, preventing Angra
Mainyu from bringing drought to the land and withering the plants, but also
trapping the evil spirit inside the material world, surrounded by the hard shell of
the sky, and so containing the scope of its negative action (Yt 13.76–8) until the
arrival of the saoshyant, who will render evil powerless (Yt 13.129, 19.96).
Several forces of destruction associated with the daevas in the Gathas take on
hypostatized form in Young Avestan texts, where a more systematic binary
division develops between those beings who are worthy of worship and those
who are evil and not to be worshipped. The latter group includes aeshma, the evil
quality condemned as the ‘violence’ operating through both human psychological
disturbance and within the corporeal world, particularly the cow pastures of the
Mazda worshippers (Y 29.1–2, 44.20, 49.4). In later texts, aeshma becomes the
personification of Fury, one of the daevic messengers of Angra Mainyu (Yt 19.46).
The general Avestan abhorrence of aeshma is expressed several times in the Mihr
Yasht, the ‘hymn to Mithra’, where aeshma is castigated as drugvant, duzdah
(‘maleficent’), and peshotanu (‘with forfeited body’; Yt 10. 93, 95, 97). The actions
of aeshma ‘of the bloody club’ (xrvi.dru-; Yt 19.46) are countered by the yazata
Sraosha, who has the ‘bold club’ (darshi.dru-) and will, at the end, overthrow the
daeva.55 The Talmud and the Zohar, as well as the apocryphal Book of Tobit,
make reference to a demon named Ashmedai or Asmodaios respectively,
indicating that this hypostatized being had become part of Iranian Jewish lore as
one of the many ‘demons’ from Babylonia. The compound name appears to
derive from an Avestan form *aeshmo.daeva.56
The enumeration of individually named daevic beings, beginning with Angra
Mainyu, is found in the Videvdad (10.9–10, 13–17, 19.1–2, 40–47) and several
Yashts (such as Yt 19.40, 43, 46).57 After describing at the outset the defeat of the
‘dangerous, destructive and deceitful’ daeva Buiti by Zarathushtra, Videvdad 19
ends with a gathering of daevas ‘possessed by the Lie’, including the Vedic gods
mentioned earlier, as well as aeshma, winter, and destruction. These are all sent
running by Zarathushtra to the dark depths of hell.58 One small Avestan
fragment mentions a female daeva named Bushyasta, meaning ‘torpor’ or ‘sloth’,
who comes from the north (the locus of Angra Mainyu and the other daevas),
babbles, and wants ‘little people to sleep’ – that is, to function without clarity of
thought.59
Other significant female daevic beings include Azi, the embodiment of ‘sensual
craving’, or ‘greed’, who is daevo.data – ‘established by the daevas’ (cf. Y 16.8).
Just as the pollution of ‘dead matter’ (nasu) attaches to the female Druj Nasu, so
another female daeva named Jahi is associated with the onset of menstruation.
Because Jahi’s gaze dries up rivers and plant life and her touch weakens the
ability of a righteous person to tackle evil, it is incumbent upon a woman in
menses to maintain a certain distance from water, fire, and humans in order not
to affect them with her glance or touch (Vd 18.63–4, 16.1–4). The negative actions
of Jahi are the antithesis of the beneficial works of the female yazatas Spenta
Armaiti, who purifies women’s wombs after birth (Y 48.5), and Anahita, who
purifies ‘the seed of males and the wombs of females’ in preparation for
conception and childbirth (Yt 5.2).60 In Middle Persian texts, Jahi – now ‘Jeh’ –
personifies the pollution of menstruation, epitomizing uncontrolled female
sexuality and testing all virtuous women (Bd 5.3).
The opposition between daeva and yazata – as noted earlier in the case of
aeshma and sraosha – indicates that, although they are functionally and
essentially antithetical, they both belong to and compete within the same
mythological landscape. A clear example of this is the struggle between the daeva
of drought, Apaosha, and the yazata of the rains, Tishtrya: the former takes the
appearance of a black stallion to engage in combat with the latter, who is
zoomorphised as a white stallion (Yt 8. 21–9). ‘Apaosha’ means ‘not thriving’ and
is described as ‘numbing frost’, in keeping with the idea of evil residing in and
perpetuating the bitter, dark, northern winter (Vd 1.2, 19.43; Aog. 28).61
Just as the mixture of good and evil occurs across both aspects of existence – of
thought and of physical being – so individualized evil forces, including the
daevas, form a continuum of evil that occurs at all levels. This notion is
exemplified by the daeva named Ashemaoga, meaning something like ‘one who
deceives or obscures asha’ (Yt 3.7; Vd 5.35, 18.9). The Middle Persian form
ahlomog is applied to priests within the religion who subvert either ritual or other
clergy: it is usually translated ‘heretic’.
Middle Persian texts of the ninth or tenth centuries retain lists of daevas (MP
dewan) according to their characteristics and function. The longest such list,
consisting of thirty-six dewan, is found in the Bundahishn (Bd 27.14–50).62 In
such inventories, each dew is paired as a negative counterpart to a yazata.

Metaphysical evil
Gathic references to the negative consequences of evil indicate that the existence
of evil is not just a philosophical or ethical conundrum but involves the
disruption of material existence, an affliction of the living world. This conception
of evil is more than the absence or privation of good: it is a ‘metaphysically real,
negative power’.63
Whereas Ahura Mazda and the yazatas are portrayed in the Avesta as able to
exist and generate in both the ‘thought’ and the ‘living’ realms, it seems that evil
is able to have an impact on the physical world only through bringing
‘nonexistence’, disease, and harm. The tradition, however, is somewhat
ambiguous concerning whether evil exists only in the thought world. Young
Avestan texts describe Angra Mainyu as establishing aspects of the living world
(Y 44.3–7; Vd 1) and evil as being physically manifest in ‘noxious animals’
(xrafstra), including snakes and wolves, as well as in disease, fever, discord, and
carnage (Yt 3.8).64 The fravashi of the mythological hero Thraetaona is described
as combating such evil manifestations as hot or cold fevers and itching, as well as
‘the fear instigated by the serpent’ (Yt 13.131). The killing of certain animals such
as ants, snakes, and other flying and creeping beasts is recorded as a practice of
the Magi by Herodotus (Histories, 1.140).
The notion that the daevas and Angra Mainyu exist only in the thought world
led to the reality of evil being questioned by some, as reflected in Middle Persian
texts that discuss the ‘non-reality’ of these entities.65 Bundahishn (meaning
‘foundation’ or ‘creation’) attributes no material creation to Ahriman, except for
a list of dewan that penetrate external, material forms.66 The Denkard (‘Acts of
the Religion’) addresses the matter by stating that these ‘demons’ rush about,
embodied in creatures such as wolves, and that these separate forms, once
disconnected from the host creatures, will be broken and annihilated together
with the origin of the demons, as will all deception that has attached to human
nature (Dk 3.105). Since Ahriman is able to live parasitically inside every human,
each person must strive to expel this source of evil from their bodies in order to
bring about the extermination of the evil spirit from the whole world (Dk
6.264).67
In such texts, the evil impulse is a negative but real, non-material essence that
causes metaphysical, but measurable, harm to the creatures of Ohrmazd. One
ninth-century Zoroastrian apologist, Mardanfarrokh, addresses the matter of the
non-reality of Angra Mainyu, remarking that the difference between good and
evil, light and darkness, and other essentially antithetical elements is a difference
not of function (MP jat-kari) but of substance (jat-gohari).68 Mardanfarrokh
claimed that the two substances are of separate origin, incompatible, and
injurious to each other, being limited by each other’s existence and power. This
status exculpates Ahura Mazda from any responsibility for evil.
Such an interpretation of the form and function of evil was apparently
stimulated by the desire to counteract Jewish and Christian ideas regarding the
origin of evil. This Zoroastrian perspective was challenged in the mid-nineteenth
century by the German philologist Martin Haug, whose translation of the Gathas
was published between 1858 and 1860. Haug’s identification of the Zoroastrian
religion as monotheistic and its Wise Lord as omnipotent led to his further claim
that both of the ‘twin spirits’, and ‘all that is created good or evil, fortune or
misfortune, is the work of Ahura Mazda’.69 This position, which has since
informed both internal and external understanding of the religion, was referred
to by another author as ‘the European heresy’.70 Its challenge to the absolute
goodness of Ahura Mazda is weighed against the challenge to the omnipotence of
Ahura Mazda.71
It seems that, apart from Mardanfarrokh’s approach, another solution to this
problem of the origin of evil had developed through an alternative myth, in
which both Ohrmazd and Ahriman were said to have been ‘fathered’ by a
divinity of Time, Zurvan (from Av. Zruwan).72 In this myth, as it is related in
Armenian Christian polemical sources from the mid-Sasanian period, Ohrmazd
and Ahriman are twin brothers who grow in the womb of Zurvan.73 Syriac and
Arabic Christian texts from the same period also record versions of this
Zurvanite myth. One suggestion is that its source may be found in the Greek
conception of Kronos, the father of Zeus and Hades, which had been
etymologically fused by pre-Socratic philosophers with Chronos, a divinity of
time, and which then became syncretized with cosmic elements identified as
Zoroastrian.74 The Denkard denounces this ‘twinning’ of Ohrmazd and Ahriman,
in the sense of their being brothers of the same paternity, claiming that light and
darkness are of separate origin (Dk 9.30.4–5).

A few more Middle Persian perspectives

A physical representation of Ahriman is depicted on one of the four investiture
reliefs of the first Sasanian king, Ardeshir I (reigned c. 224–240 CE). In a carving
at Naqsh-e Rostam, Ardeshir, on horseback, is shown receiving the ring of power
from Ohrmazd, who also rides a horse and who is identified, in a trilingual
inscription, on the flank of his mount. Under the hooves of Ardeshir’s horse is the
last king of the Parthians, and under Ohrmazd’s horse is the snaky-haired head of
Ahriman. An inscription on Ardeshir’s horse describes the king as ‘seed of the
gods’ (MP chihr az yazdan) and ‘Mazdean’ (mazdesn) – in other words, he is the
epitome of one who is equipped to combat evil in both the material and the
‘spiritual’ world. In subsequent inscriptions, Ardeshir’s successor, Shapur I (c.
240–270 CE), the long-lived priest Kerdir, and another king, Narseh (293–303 CE),
reiterate some of the Old Iranian tropes in their emphasis on the separation of
Ohrmazd and the yazatas (MP yazdan) from Ahriman and the dews; of those
who are righteous and pious from those who succumb to falsehood; and of an
existence that is peaceful and happy from one marred by oppression and
rebellion.75 One of Kerdir’s inscriptions from the mid-third century CE asserts
that, as the good acts of Mazda worshippers increased, there was also great
increase for Ohrmazd and the yazatas, while Ahriman and the dews felt great
distress.76
Middle Persian Zoroastrian books from the ninth or tenth century CE explore
the impact of evil in both the conceptual and the material world from the
perspectives of theological interpretation, ritual activity, and philosophical
discourse. The final defeat of evil and the restoration of the world, which are
adumbrated in Avestan texts, are clearly articulated in these later books. In the
Middle Persian texts Wizidagiha-i Zadspram (‘Anthology of Zadspram’) and
Mardanfarrokh’s Shkand Gumanig Wizar (‘Doubt-Dispelling Exposition’),77 the
world is considered to have been established by Ahura Mazda as a deliberately
limited spatio-temporal sphere in which to ensnare and overcome Ahriman (Zds
3.23; SGV 4.63–79). According to these texts, this is possible only because evil is
not omniscient. Zarathushtra’s birth heralds the turning point, when the daevas
realize that they will be defeated, and from this point on evil begins to lose its
power (Dk 7.3.1–5; Zds 14, 17.5).

Abbreviations
Aog. Aogemadaeca
Av. Avestan
Bd (Greater) Bundahishn
DB Darius I inscription, Bisutun
Dd Dadestan-i Denig
Dk Denkard
DN Darius I inscription, Naqsh-e Rostam
DP Darius I inscription, Persepolis
HN Hadokht Nask
MP Middle Persian
MX Menog-i Xrad
OInd. Old Indic
OP Old Persian
SGV Shkand Gumanig Vizar
Vd Videvdad
XPh Xerxes’ daiva inscription, Persepolis
Y Yasna
Yt Yasht

Notes
1 See Hintze 1998: 139; Skjaervø 2011a: 317. Some scholars dispute this early date, however, adhering to a
date of the late seventh or early sixth century BCE; cf., more recently, Gherardo Gnoli in his Zoroaster in
History (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 2000).
2 See, for instance, Hintze 2012: 63–4. In the same volume, Stausberg (2012) provides further insights into
the debate concerning the categorization of Zoroastrian theology.
3 Y 30.5, 31.20, 49.11.
4 Y 30.3–5, 51.10.
5 Cf. Skjaervø 2011b: 58.
6 Cf. ibid.: 73.
7 Cf. Panaino 2001: 104.
8 Herrenschmidt and Kellens 1993: 599; Skjaervø 2011b: 64.
9 Panaino 2001: 101–2; Herrenschmidt and Kellens 1993: 599.
10 Y 28.2, 43.3.
11 Skjaervø 2011b: 62. These concepts are echoed in the Middle Persian terms menog and getig.
12 See Schmidt 1996: 83.
13 Panaino 2001: 100; see also Kellens 1994: 86–7.
14 Y 44.20 refers to three groups of people – the karapan, usij, and kavi – who are allied with the daevas
and who bring cruelty to the cow. Reprobate kavi and karapan are also mentioned in Y 51, stanzas 12
and 14 respectively. In this context, all three titles probably refer to ritual functionaries of some kind.
15 Daiva is the Old Persian form of Avestan daeva.
16 Cf. Skjaervø 2005: 63; Malandra 1983: 51.
17 See Herrenschmidt and Kellens 1993: 599.
18 The redefinition of the term daeva/deva is often connected with the elevation in status of the ahuras
(OInd. asuras); see De Blois 2000: 3; Skjaervø 2011b: 59 n.18, 64–5; and Panaino 2001: 101–2, who also
discusses the problems involved with this approach.
19 See Herrenschmidt and Kellens (1993) for an in-depth discussion of the various problems involved in
trying to discern at what point the term begins to be used pejoratively. Skjaervø ascribes this
“demonization” to the development of Indo-Iranian concepts of good and evil among Iranians (see
Skjaervø 2011a: 334).
20 Herrenschmidt and Kellens 1993: 601.
21 See Hintze 2012: 75; also Hintze “Change and Continuity in the Zoroastrian Tradition” in the Further
reading section below.
22 Vd 10.9, also 19.43. The term Videvdad comes from an Avestan form vi-daevo-data, meaning “laws to
keep the daevas away” (see Skjaervø 2011b: 61 n. 27).
23 Bd 1a.55, 27.5–12.
24 See note 19 above.
25 The name of the yazata Verethragna, however, relates to Indra’s OInd. epithet, vritrahan.
26 See, for instance, Haug 1978: 302ff. Panaino (2001: 100) points out the problems inherent in this
perspective.
27 Skjaervø (2011a: 331–5) addresses this and other matters, such as the evolving concept of “religion”
among the Iranians.
28 As, for example, in Y 32.12.
29 See Boyd and Crosby 1979: 578.
30 See Schmidt 1996: 83.
31 Vd 17.2–3 refers to the improper disposal of dead matter such as cut hair or fingernails, leading to the
emergence of both daevas and creeping animals (Av. xrafstra), which devour both harvested grain and
 human clothing in their respective storage places; see Schmidt 1996: 84.
32 Panaino 2001: 103.
33 DB 4.33–5, 37–40, 67–9; see Skjaervø 2005: 62, 70.
34 DPd 12–20; Skjaervø 2005: 66.
35 DB 4.63–5; Skjaervø 2005: 63.
36 DNb 5–12; Skjaervø 2005: 64.
37 Skjaervø 2011a: 339–40.
38 Here, the Avestan word zaotar indicates ritual authority and is often translated as “priest”.
39 See Y 19.6, 10.
40 Y 44.3, 31.8, 45.4, 47.2–3. The Avestan word is zatha; Hintze 2012: 70.
41 Spenta derives from a verb meaning “to swell” or “to increase”; Skjaervø 2011a: 338. It is sometimes
translated as “holy” or “virtuous”.
42 See De Blois 2000: 4; Skjaervø 2011b: 58 n. 16, 62.
43 Skjaervø 2011a: 340.
44 Ibid.
45 See Schmidt 1996: 82; Skjaervø 2011b: 61.
46 The notion of possessing the xwarenah as an attribute of divinely authorized rule was an Iranian topos.
An inscription of the Sasanian king Narseh at Paikuli details the punishment of an Iranian called
Wahnam, who had been “driven by Ahriman and the dews” to place the regal diadem on the head of a
false ruler; Skjaervø 1983: 21f., 29.
47 Skjaervø 2005: 63, 67.
48 For instance, DNa 52, XPh 57f.
49 See Choksy 1996: 99; also Boyd and Crosby 1979: 560.
50 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, 1.8. De Blois notes: “Within the Aristotelian system, the
use of [the] word [archai] implies that the two are at the beginning, that one is not derived from the
other, nor do they come from a common source, but are co-eternal” (De Blois 2000: 5).
51 Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, 46; see Vasunia 2007: 44–5.
52 Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, 46–7.
53 Ibid., 47.
54 Ibid.
55 See Srosh Baj, Y 57.10, 25, and MX 8.14.
56 Asmussen 2011: 480.
57 Cf. Yt 3.5–17, which has a generic list of evil-doers.
58 Vd 19.47. The Avestan term translated here as “hell” is duzh.ahu, meaning “bad existence”. Elsewhere,
 evil rushes up from hell (Yt 19.44). For a more detailed discussion of the Zoroastrian concepts of hell,
see Michael Stausberg’s article “Hell in Zoroastrian History” in the Further reading section below.
59 Fragment Westergaard 42; see Lincoln 2012: 152 n. 38. Humans are warned to be aware of the long hand
of Bushyasta, who puts the “world of bones” to sleep and encourages sloth in human beings (Vd 18.16,
24).
60 For more information on gendered evil in the Zoroastrian religion, see J. Rose, “Gender”, in The Wiley
Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism, ed. M. Stausberg and Y. Sohrab-Vevaina (Oxford: Wiley
Blackwell, 2015), pp. 271–87; also Choksy, Evil, Good and Gender, in Further reading below.
61 Brunner 1987: 161. In one Middle Persian text, hell is marked by extremes of cold – “like the coldest ice
and snow” – and heat, “like a burning fire” (MX 6.27).
62 Cf. also Bd 5.1–3, 34.27; Dd 36.31, 37–46.
63 Boyd and Williams 2013: 81.
64 Panaino (2001: 102) addresses the early concept of the existence of the daevas as limited to the thought
world. Shaked (1967: 228, 234, and n. 15) argues for the non-materiality of Angra Mainyu as being
original to the Avesta. Schmidt (1996: 84), however, maintains that the “non-existence” of Angra
Mainyu “has no antecedent in the Avesta”. Boyd and Crosby (1979) discuss some of these differences in
interpretation.
65 See, for instance, Dk 6.98; Dd 19.2–3; Shaked 1967: 227–8.
66 Shaked 1967: 228.
67 Ibid., 230.
68 SGV 8.18–23, 8.89–102.
69 Haug 1978: 302–4.
70 Boyce 1990: 132.
71 For further discussion of these two positions, see Farhang Mehr’s chapter on “Good and Evil” in the
Further reading below.
72 The concept of “limited time” (zruwan akarana) is compared with that of “time of long duration”
(zruwan darega; Vd 19.9; Yt 13.53). In Bundahishn, finite time is the first creation of Ohrmazd and the
chief means of rendering Ahriman powerless (Bd 1.1–8).
73 The myth is delineated in Elisaeus (Elišē) Vardapet’s response to the edict of Mir Narseh; see Skjaervø
2011b: 67; Thomson 1982: 78–9.
74 De Blois 2000: 6.
75 The first and last of these inscriptions may be found online at the UCI Sasanika website:
http://sasanika.org/library-categories/primary-sources/middle-persian-inscriptions/.
76 Boyce 1990: 112.
 77 An apologetic treatise refuting the beliefs of non-Zoroastrians, including Jews, Christians and
Manichaeans.

Further reading
Boyce, M. 1982. ‘Ahura Mazda’, in Encyclopaedia Iranica. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Vol. 1, pp.
684–7.
Choksy, J. K. 2002. Evil, Good and Gender: Faces of the Feminine in Zoroastrian Religious History. New York:
Peter Lang.
Gnoli, G. 1998. ‘Evil in Ancient Iranian Religions’, in Encyclopaedia Iranica. New York: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, Vol. 9, pp. 79–85.
Hintze, A. 2013. Change and Continuity in the Zoroastrian Tradition, lecture given at the School of Oriental
and African Studies, London, 22 February 2012,
http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/16952/1/073%202013%20Change%20%26%20Continuity.pdf.
——2014. ‘Monotheism the Zoroastrian Way’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 24(2): 225–49.
Mehr, F. 1991. ‘Good and Evil: Principles of Moral Dualism and Freedom of Choice’, in Mehr, Zoroastrian
Tradition: An Introduction to the Ancient Wisdom of Zarathustra. Shaftesbury: Element Books, pp. 71–
89.
Mendoza Forrest, S. K. 2011. Witches, Whores and Sorcerers: The Concept of Evil in Early Iran. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Rose, J. 2007. ‘Jeh’, in Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, ed. F. Malti-Douglas. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan
Reference.
——2011. Zoroastrianism: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum.
Stausberg, M. 2009. ‘Hell in Zoroastrian History’, Numen, 56(2–3): 217–53.

References
Asmussen, J. P. ‘Aēšma’, in Encyclopaedia Iranica. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Vol. 1, pp. 479–80.
Boyce, M. 1990. Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Boyd, J. W., and Crosby, D. A. 1979. ‘Is Zoroastrianism Dualistic or Monotheistic?’, Journal of the American
Academy of Religion, 47(4): 557–88.
Boyd, J. W., and Williams, R. G. 2013. ‘The Nature and Problem of Evil in Zoroastrianism: Some Theological,
Philosophical and Ritual Perspectives’, in Gifts to a Magus: Indo-Iranian Studies Honoring Firoze Kotwal,
 ed. J. K. Choksy and J. Dubeansky. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 7–98.
Brunner, C. J. 1987. ‘Apōš’, in Encyclopaedia Iranica. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Vol. 2, pp. 161–2.
Choksy, J. K. 1996. ‘Doctrinal Variation within Zoroastrianism: The Notion of Dualism’, in Second
International Congress Proceedings of the K. R. Cama Oriental Institute, ed. H. M. Desai. Mumbai: K. R.
Cama Oriental Institute, pp. 96–110.
De Blois, F. 2000. ‘Dualism in Iranian and Christian Tradition’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 10(1): 1–
19.
Haug, M. 1978. The Parsis: Essays on their Sacred Language, Writings and Religion. New Delhi: Cosmo.
Herrenschmidt, C., and Kellens, J. 1993. ‘Daiva’, in Encyclopaedia Iranica. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, Vol. 6, pp.
599–602.
Hintze, A. 1998. ‘The Migration of the Indo-Iranians and the Iranian Sound-Change s>h’, in Sprache und
Kultur der Indo-Germanen: Akten der X. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, Innsbruck, 22.–
28. September 1996, ed. W. Meid. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, pp. 139–53.
——2012. ‘Monotheismus zoroastrischer Art’, in Echnaton und Zarathustra: Zur Genese und Dynamik des
Monotheismus, ed. J. Assmann and H. Strohm. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 63–92.
Kellens, J. 1994. Le Panthéon de l’Avesta ancien. Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert.
Lincoln, B. 2012. Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Malandra, W. W. 1983. An Introduction to Ancient Iranian Religion: Readings from the Avesta and the
Achaemenid Inscriptions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Panaino, A. 2001. ‘A Few Remarks on the Zoroastrian Conception of the Status of Angra Mainyu and of the
Daevas’, Res Orientales, 13: 99–107.
Schmidt, H.-P. 1996. ‘The Non-Existence of Ahreman and the Mixture’, in Second International Congress
Proceedings of the K. R. Cama Oriental Institute, ed. H. M. Desai. Mumbai: K. R. Cama Oriental Institute,
pp. 79–95.
Shaked, S. 1967. ‘Some Notes on Ahreman, the Evil Spirit and His Creation’, in Studies in Mysticism and
Religion presented to Gershom G. Scholem, ed. E. E. Urbach et al. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, pp. 227–34.
Skjaervø, P. O. 1983. The Sassanian Inscription of Paikuli, Part 3.1: Restored Text and Translation.
Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert.
——2005. ‘The Achaemenids and the Avesta’, in Birth of the Persian Empire, ed. V. S. Curtis and S. Stewart.
London and New York: I. B. Tauris, pp. 52–84.
——2011a. ‘Zarathushtra: A Revolutionary Monotheist?’, in Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary
Monotheism, ed. B. Pongratz-Leisten. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, pp. 317–50.
——2011b. ‘Zoroastrian Dualism’, in Light Against Darkness: Dualism in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and
 the Contemporary World, ed. A. Lange et al. Göttingen and Oakville, CT: Vandehoek & Ruprecht, pp. 55–
76.
Stausberg, M. 2012. ‘Zoroastrische Unterscheidungen’, in Echnaton und Zarathustra: Zur Genese und
Dynamik des Monotheismus, ed. J. Assmann and H. Strohm. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 93–118.
Thomson, R. W. (trans.) 1982. Elišē, History of Vardan and the Armenian War. Cambridge, MA, and London:
Harvard University Press.
Vasunia, P. 2007. Zarathushtra and the Religion of Ancient Iran: The Greek and Latin Sources in Translation.
Mumbai: K. R. Cama Oriental Institute.
6 Manichaeism
Michael Mendelson

With the discovery of new source materials, and owing to the rapidly evolving
nature of Manichaean studies,1 there is little about Manichaeism that is not
subject to some degree of controversy, and even some of the most agreed-upon
points are at times subject to quite subtle qualifications. Hence, in what follows,
we shall focus upon the larger contours of the tradition and confine ourselves to
those points upon which there appears to be a large degree of consensus, with
major points of disagreement relegated to the footnotes.
Within the context of what has come to be known as ‘Manichaeism’, the
nature of ‘evil’ and its relation to ‘good’ is more than simply one feature among
others; it is, in fact, the central concern that lies at the heart of the Manichaean
account of the human condition. While it is arguable that most religious
traditions involve a deep concern for the relation between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and
the nature of each, Manichaeism is conspicuous, though not unique, in the
overriding emphasis that it places upon the issue. Of equal significance is that,
although Manichaeism has often been viewed as a relatively obscure form of
‘heretical Christianity’, it was in fact a widespread, substantial movement that
served as a major alternative to what are now regarded as more familiar and
more orthodox forms of Christianity.
There is a similar issue with respect to Manichaeism’s relation to ‘Gnosticism’.
There is increasing controversy surrounding the category of Gnosticism in
general,2 but, even allowing for such a rubric, there are reasons to be cautious
about viewing Manichaeism as a form of Gnosticism.3 Foremost is the fact that
Manichaeism, unlike most groups that are regarded as ‘Gnostic’, was very much
an ‘evangelical’ movement that deliberately engaged in proselytism. Related to
this feature is Manichaeism’s view of itself as a ‘universal’ religion and its
corresponding willingness to incorporate and accommodate itself to the local
beliefs it encountered.4 In addition, Manichaeism was hardly a secretive
organization that provided knowledge, gnosis, to a privileged group of adherents.
It is notable for its inclusivism: it allowed both public participation and the
possibility of advancement to a higher level within the hierarchy of the
Manichaean community.
There are, however, features that Manichaeism shared with many ‘Gnostic
sects’ in its opposition to some of the main contemporary varieties of Judaism
and Christianity. It rejected the legitimacy of the Hebrew scriptures, owing to
what it regarded as a dangerously and deliberately misleading presentation of the
goodness of the material world. Of equal significance, there is the denial of divine
omnipotence, which is a consequence of the dualism of Manichaeism and its
account of the battle between Light and Darkness.5 With respect to more
mainstream versions of Christianity, there is also the matter of Christology.
While the issue is a complex one, the Manichaeans rejected the idea that Jesus, as
understood in any of his three roles as ‘Jesus the Splendor’, ‘Jesus patibilis’ (the
symbol of universal suffering), or ‘Jesus the Apostle’,6 was actually incarnated in
a human body, was crucified, and underwent ‘the Passion’ – all three of these
being central to orthodox Christianity.
Against this background, we can now turn to the central features of the
Manichaean view of evil: its dualism, the three-phase cosmology, including its
account of our existential predicament, and the eschatology. Before proceeding to
these topics, however, it is worth briefly providing some historical context by
discussing what is known of the historical figure Mani, the founder of
Manichaeism, and his relation to the disparate texts that constitute ‘the
Manichaean canon’.

Mani and the Manichaean canon

Manichaeism can trace its origins to an actual historical figure, Mani, a Southern
Babylonian visionary who was born in 216 CE and was martyred in 276/7 CE,
having fallen into disfavour with Bahram I, the son of his original patron Shapur
I.7 However, while sources agree that he was executed after a period of
imprisonment, accounts of the nature of his death and the subsequent desecration
of his body vary considerably (Tardieu 2008: 30). This is not the only instance
where caution is needed regarding the details of both Mani’s life and his
teachings. This is largely on account of problems with the extant sources.
On the one hand, there is a considerable body of anti-Manichaean literature,
much of it originating from sources grounded in more ‘orthodox’ and
mainstream versions of Christianity. Not surprisingly, much is done to paint
Mani in an unflattering light and to present him either as a dangerous heretic or
as a fanatic who employed Christian allusions to snare the unwary. On the other
hand, there are texts internal to Manichaeism that also have to be treated with
caution, owing to an understandable tendency to engage in hagiography,
presenting Mani as a reverential figure engaged in a divinely ordained mission.
What can we say of the historical Mani with reasonable confidence? The two
most reliable sources are, first, the Shabuhragan, composed by Mani himself for
the benefit of Shapur I,8 and, second, the Cologne Mani Codex (CMC),9 dating
from sometime in the fourth or fifth centuries CE, but discovered only in the
1960s.10 Both of these sources exist in only fragmentary condition, and, needless
to say, they also have to be treated with a degree of caution. However, given their
historical proximity to the life of Mani and the fact that he played some role in
the composition of each (quite likely more in the former than the latter), they
arguably take us closer than other sources to how he conceived of himself and his
mission.
While Manichaean dualism bears striking affinities to Zoroastrianism, the
evidence suggests that this was only one of many influences, and arguably not
the most important one. At the age of four, Mani followed his father in joining
the Elchasai, a group of evangelical baptismal Jewish-Christians, and he remained
a member of this sect until the age of twenty-four (CMC 11–12). This suggests
that his relationship to a variant form of Christianity began early and is not a
later, syncretic addition. However, his relation to this sect seems hardly to have
been harmonious. The source of this tension is attributed to two visions, one at
the age of twelve and another at the age of twenty-four (Gardner and Lieu 2001:
4; Tardieu 2008: 9–13). In both these visions he was instructed by his divine zygos
(Greek for ‘twin’), and it was the final revelation at the age of twenty-four that
prompted his final departure from the sect and his embarking upon a
(supposedly) divinely ordained mission.
According to the CMC (19–20), Mani later recounted that, in this second vision,
his zygos came to him to ‘redeem me from the error of the sectarians’ and
revealed to him the manner in which he had been divinely sent, after having
fallen into ‘this loathsome flesh’ and ‘put on its intoxications and its habits’
(CMC 22; trans. Gardner and Lieu 2004: 50). Though these two visions are given
prominence in the hagiographical accounts, the CMC suggests that they were
hardly the only visions during Mani’s time with the Elchasai, thus explaining
some of his problems with the sect:

Very many are the visions and very great the marvels which he [his zygos]
showed me throughout all the period of my youth. Yet I remained silent,
except [lost lines] whilst I with wisdom and cunning wandered in their
midst and observed the ‘rest’ and did no wrong, [but?] neither did I cause
distress or follow the rule of the Baptists or engage with them in the
dialogue in the same way (as they do).
(CMC 5; Gardner and Lieu 2004: 48)

From this it is clear that Mani’s spiritual development occurred within the
context of Jewish Christianity, and we can see intimations of the evangelical
universalism which is such a conspicuous element of Manichaeism.11 In his
reference to his ‘fall’ into the ‘intoxication of the flesh’, we can also see early
signs of the dualism that will, in the eyes of many, be the defining characteristic
of Manichaeism.
Another important aspect of Mani’s mission is the manner in which he
depicted his apostolic lineage. In a passage cited by the tenth-century Islamic
scholar al-Bruni, which appears to be from Mani’s own Shabuhragan, Mani
writes:

Wisdom and knowledge are what the apostles of God constantly bring in
one period after another. Thus [these things] appeared in one of the past
centuries through the apostle called [Buddha] in the lands of India, and in
another through [Zoroaster] in the lands of Persia, and in another through
 [Jesus] in the lands of the West. Then in the present century there came
down this revelation and appeared this prophecy through me, Mani, sent by
the God of truth in the lands of Babel.
(Translation from Tardieu 2008: 14)

Thus we can see that Mani did not view himself as a lone prophet conveying a
fundamentally new message. If we are to take the Shabuhragan at face value,
Mani saw himself as the culmination of a geographically and religiously diverse
lineage, consisting of Buddha, Zoroaster and Jesus. This lineage was most likely
constructed during Mani’s missionary travels (between leaving the Elchasai and
writing the Shabuhragan for Shapur I), and it indicates that he conceived of his
mission in a strikingly ecumenical manner. Although Manichaeism went on to
adapt itself to the religious orientations of its mission territories, its religiously
inclusive nature is something that originates with Mani himself.
Another point worthy of note is the nature of the Manichaean ‘canon’. Unlike
many religious traditions, where a canon begins with an oral tradition that
gradually comes to be written down and is eventually codified, Mani himself was
the author of nine of the principal works that constitute the canon, including a
work of ‘pictorial art’12 that is believed to represent his cosmology. Although
none of these works survive intact, and some of them are lost in their entirety,
fragments of many are extant in quotations by later authors, thus providing
insight into some of Mani’s own views. In addition, there is a considerable body
of later Manichaean literature, consisting of hagiographical accounts,
commentaries, hymnals, psalms, and various sorts of practical guidance.13
In addition to these two components of the Manichaean canon, there is another
salient body of writings. These are writings external to Manichaeism – often of a
critical and, in some cases, a strongly polemical anti-Manichaean orientation. Of
principal importance in the non-Manichaean accounts are the Acta Archelai and
the writings of the Neoplatonist Alexander of Lycopolis, both from the fourth
century. Also of note is the large body of anti-Manichaean writings by Augustine,
who was himself a follower of Manichaeism for nine years preceding his
conversion to what was then orthodox Catholicism. While these three sources are
highly critical and, at times, somewhat relentless in their sardonic approach to
Manichaeism, they nonetheless provide quite lucid accounts of Manichaean
doctrine that are consistent with the canonical sources. They can thus serve as a
helpful guide to some of the major contours of the Manichaean view of evil, most
notably with respect to its dualism, the cosmological battle which serves as the
context of the Manichaean view of our predicament, and the eschatology that is
the culmination of the cosmological battle.

Dualism
One feature of Manichaeism is, relatively speaking, well known: its strong
dualism between the ‘Forces of Light’ (goodness) and the ‘Forces of Darkness’
(evil). Indeed, the very term ‘Manichaeism’ has become virtually synonymous
with an uncompromising moral dualism. As we shall see, this view is not
mistaken.
In the anti-Manichaean Homiliae Cathedrales CXXIII, by Severus of Antioch
(fifth century), we find the following – which appears to include quotations from
Mani’s own writings:

From where did the Manichaeans, who are more wicked than any other, get
the idea of introducing two principles, both uncreated and without
beginning, that is good and evil, light and darkness, which they also call
matter? … he (Mani) says: ‘Each of them is uncreated and without
beginning, both the good which is light, and the evil, which is darkness and
matter. And there is no contact between them.’
(Gardner and Lieu 2004: 161)

In a passage from one of Mani’s epistles, cited by Augustine in Contra epistulam

Manichaei quam vocant ‘fundamenti’, Mani is quoted as saying:

hearken to what was before the world came into being and how the struggle
started, so that you may be able to distinguish the nature of the light and the
darkness. In the beginning there were two substances separated from one
another … Near one section and the side of that glorious holy land is situated
the land of darkness, deep and of immeasurable extent … Here, emanating
out of the same principle, came a boundless and incalculable darkness …
 (Ibid.: 169)

In addition to citations from Mani’s own writings, there are extant testimonies by
others who give a similar account. In Contra Manichaei opinions disputatio, the
fourth-century Neoplatonist Alexander of Lycopolis reports: ‘This is a summary
of Mani’s doctrine as we know from members of his circle: he established as
principles God and matter. God is good, matter is evil’ (ibid.: 179). And we find a
similar account in the fourth-century Acta Archelai, which, in spite of its
virulently anti-Manichaean nature, is consistent with the citations from Mani’s
own writings: ‘He reveres two unbegotten, eternal gods originating from their
own nature, of whom one is the adversary of the other. He introduces the one as
good, the other as evil. To one he gives the name light, to the other darkness’
(ibid.: 182). It would thus seem that, by all accounts, Manichaeism has at its heart
a ‘moral dualism’. However, to appreciate fully the nature of Manichaean
dualism, some qualifications are in order.
First, one would be hard pressed to find a religious tradition, or any kind of
moral theory, that does not posit some kind of division between basic moral
categories, whether couched in terms of ‘good versus bad’, ‘right versus wrong’,
‘good versus evil’, or, as in the case of Manichaeism, ‘light/good’ versus
‘darkness/evil’. What seems distinctive of the Manichaean view is the stark
nature of the dualism. ‘Evil’ is clearly not regarded as standing in a derivative or
parasitic relation to ‘good’. ‘Evil’ is not presented, for instance, as the result of
some primal act of disobedience to an antecedent ‘good’, nor is it some kind of
movement away from an antecedent ‘good’ that involves a ‘downward’
movement through hierarchical levels, as we find, for example, in Neoplatonic
and subsequent Augustinian accounts of ‘evil’. Equally, ‘evil’ is not presented as a
necessary conceptual contrast required to render the nature of the ‘good’
accessible and intelligible. To put the point in philosophical terms, for the
Manichaean, the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ embodies a fundamental,
radical contingency, for which no further explanation or grounds can be given.
More than a ‘moral dualism’, therefore, we should speak of an ‘ontological
dualism’ that is inherently contingent and moral in its nature.
Secondly, the ontological dimension of Manichaean dualism is extreme. Useful
points of contrast can be found in two more familiar forms of ‘dualism’: Platonic
and Cartesian. Throughout the Platonic dialogues, one finds various
presentations of the ‘Theory of Forms’, in which eternal and unchanging ‘Forms’
are related to the changing world of particulars, the latter deriving their being
from the ‘Forms’, which, in turn, are knowable only insofar as we can discern
their relation to particulars. The problem is how this relation is to be understood
and just what count as ‘Forms’. Different dialogues – the Phaedo, Republic,
Symposium, and Timaeus, for example – suggest varying approaches to these
questions, and in the Parmenides one even finds an explicit challenge to the
possibility of such a relation. The significant point is that, however the details
may vary, and whatever the difficulties may be, some such relation is both
intended and necessary for the ontology to be viable. Thus the ‘dualism’ here is
best construed as a problem in need of resolution; it is certainly not intended to
erect the kind of unbridgeable ontological gulf we find in Manichaeism.
What has come to be known as ‘Cartesian dualism’ also provides a useful point
of contrast, for here we do, initially, seem to have a dualism that is closer to that
of Manichaeism. In the Meditations and The Principles of Philosophy, Descartes
emphasizes the incommensurability of extended substance and thinking
substance, for in the former we have extension without thought and in the latter
we have thought without extension. Upon closer inspection, however, we find
that, even here, we have something less than the absolute dualism of
Manichaeism. For Descartes asserts that these two substances interact, and,
borrowing an analogy from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, he tells us in Part 6 of
the Discourse on Method that the union of mind and body is of such intimacy
that ‘it is not enough for [the soul] to be lodged in the human body like a sailor
in a ship’, for the union needs to be stronger in order to constitute ‘a true man’.14
Descartes’ dualism is further tempered in his Principles of Philosophy Part 1,
section 51, where he writes that only God can satisfy the definition of a
‘substance’, for, in order for something to qualify as a substance, it must exist ‘in
such a way that it does not depend upon anything else for its existence’, and any
other ‘substance’ can exist ‘only with God’s help’. Thus, while there are
differences between Platonic and Cartesian dualism, in each case there is some
kind of unity that is supposed to render the dualism less than absolute. This,
however, is clearly not the case with Manichaean dualism.
The contrast of Manichaean with Platonic and Cartesian dualism helps to
highlight not only the absolute, unqualified nature of Manichaean dualism but
also the thoroughgoing and unalloyed nature of evil within the Manichaean
tradition. Manichaeism presents evil as wholly autonomous and confers upon it a
degree of menace that far exceeds those accounts that depict it as parasitic upon,
or subordinate to, that which is other than evil. The evil we find in Manichaeism
dualism is sui generis, an evil that conveys a sense of darkness that is at once
unfathomable and incapable of assimilation. However, the fact that it seems so
unfathomable and incapable of assimilation does not mean that it cannot touch
us, and it is precisely this latter point that renders the three-phase cosmology
such a haunting drama and so troubling for the Manichaean.

The three phases and life within the battle

If Manichaeism is widely known as a form of ‘moral dualism’, it is also widely
regarded as a ‘theodicy’ that provides a conceptually possible, if not especially
popular, solution to ‘the problem of evil’. This is the problem of how to reconcile
the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent deity with the
existence of ‘evil’. The more obvious of the conceptual possibilities consists in
denying one or more of the three divine attributes in order to account for the
seemingly incontestable fact that ‘evil’ does indeed exist. In the case of
Manichaeism, the solution is that of denying the first of the attributes –
omnipotence.
There is arguably nothing wrong in using Manichaeism as an example of this
conceptual alternative, and early adversaries would indeed invoke such a
maneuver as a criticism of the movement, for it seems to present us with a
conception of deity that overtly conflicts with the divine omnipotence which is a
nonnegotiable aspect of the emergent, eventually orthodox variant of the
Christian tradition.15 There are, however, three principal reasons why this is a
misleading approach.
First, there is nothing in the early extant texts that suggests this conceptual
puzzle was of concern to Mani and his followers. A second, related problem is
that, as we will see below, this approach tends to obscure the real nature of the
problem with which Mani and his followers were concerned. Finally, approaching
historical Manichaeism by means of this conceptual approach tends to distract
our attention from the haunting cosmological drama of the three-phase
cosmology and our place within it.
Let us begin with the first two of these three problems. There is no question
that Manichaeism is concerned with a ‘problem of evil’ – that, as we have seen, is
one of its most conspicuous characteristics. But it is worth attending to the
precise nature of the ‘problem’ with which Mani and his followers were
concerned. Rather than being a conceptual puzzle, the ‘problem’ is of a more
visceral and existential sort. In this respect, Manichaeism is well within the
matrix of other religious traditions,16 and, while there is no evidence of influence,
it also fits well with the concerns we find in such roughly contemporaneous
Hellenistic philosophical movements as Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Pyrrhonian
Scepticism. The ‘problem’, very generally construed, is that we find ourselves
situated within a moral landscape of fragility, vulnerability, and intimate loss.
Also relevant here is that, as we have seen, Manichaeism, in its origins, is
intertwined with various traditions that share these concerns, so it is hardly
surprising that it should reflect them too. And it is important not to forget that
Manichaeism has at its heart the personal experience of Mani, namely a series of
(what he regarded as) revelations that provided insights and truths otherwise
inaccessible. Thus it is hardly surprising either that Manichaeism, in its historical
origins, lacks the kind of reflective, conceptual strategy that we tend to identify
with a more recognizably ‘theological’, ‘philosophical’ project. Not only are the
concerns of historical Manichaeism different from the systematic concerns of
‘theodicy’, but the canons of adequacy are correspondingly different. In place of
concerns with logical argumentation and conceptual precision, there are complex
and intertwined issues of personal charisma, cultural and religious traditions,
religious psychology, and a circumstantially rooted, visceral sense of disquiet.
With respect to the third point above, namely the haunting and sombre nature
of Manichaean cosmology, these latter points are of considerable significance. As
in the case of dualism, there is a radical contingency that permeates this aspect of
Manichaeism. There is no ‘necessity’ of a recognizably philosophical kind that
governs the drama, and thus the kind of comfort and certainty such ‘necessity’
might provide is not to be had. In its place there is confidence, one that is born of
conviction concerning what has been revealed, and, for the Manichaean, this
confidence is quite real: although light/good is vulnerable to the encroachment of
darkness/evil, and while an encroachment of the latter upon the former has in
fact occurred, and we are in the midst of it, light/good will in the end prevail, so
that those who live a life in accord with what has been revealed will be rescued
from the cosmological battle. However, absent the kind of necessity to which
philosophers are accustomed, there is the possibility that the contours of the
drama could well have been otherwise. This adds a heightened degree of urgency
and personal immediacy which a view grounded in logical necessity does not.
The haunting, sombre nature of Manichaeism is nowhere more evident than in
the depiction of the ‘three phases’, which serve as the contingent, foundational
backdrop against which all else happens. This is all the more conspicuous given
that the ‘myths’ of Manichaeism are not allegorical or symbolic representations
of some underlying, concealed ‘reality’. They are, rather, a literal account of the
cosmological drama within which we find ourselves.17
It is precisely in such a spirit that we should take Mani’s account of the initial
state of the two co-eternal principles. So, for example, in the passage from
Severus of Antioch’s Homiliae Cathedrales CXXIII, regarded by Gardner and
Lieu as recounting what Mani himself says in The Pragmateia, we find:

But he (Mani) says: ‘Each one of them is created without beginning, both the
good, which is light, and the evil, which is darkness and matter. And there is
no contact between them …’ The good, which they call the light and the tree
of life, occupies the regions in the east, west, and north; but the tree of death
they also called matter, being very wicked and uncreated, occupies the
regions towards the south and the meridian.
(Gardner and Lieu 2004: 161)

So too we find in Augustine’s Contra epistulam Manichaei quam vocant

fundamenti:

Near one side of that glorious and holy land was situated that land of
darkness, of deep and immeasurable extent; in it resided fiery bodies,
baneful breeds. Here emanating out of the same principle came a boundless
and incalculable darkness, together with its own progeny … Inside lived a
breed with gloom and smoke …
(Ibid.: 169–70)
Such graphic imagery should not surprise us, since (as mentioned above) there is
included here a work of pictorial art by Mani himself. What is potentially
misleading, however, is the implication, for the modern reader, that ‘matter’, the
principle of darkness and evil, is to be equated with the ‘physical’, for this could
imply that within Manichaeism there is a distinction between the ‘material’ and
the ‘immaterial’ equivalent to what we find in Platonically influenced variants of
Judaism and Christianity. As the imagery strongly suggests, one needs to proceed
with caution in this respect, for, whatever the operative contrast between ‘matter’
and the nonmaterial, it does not seem to involve the kind of ontological
dichotomy that Augustine invokes in Book VII of the Confessions, where he tells
us it was his reading of the ‘books of the Platonists’ that enabled him to
overcome a pre-reflective disposition to ‘materialism’ and to conceive of the
purely non-physical (see, for example, Augustine, Confessions, VII.v.7 and
VII.x.16).18 Granted, the distinction in question here may well lack conceptual
clarity, but it is misleading to think of it in terms derived from Platonic and
Cartesian dualism.
The second phase of Manichaean cosmology is fairly straightforward: it is the
world we presently live in, a world fraught with dangers and enticements to
snare the unwary. As many religious traditions hold, much of our predicament
remains unrecognized, and our lives are thus rendered all the more vulnerable
and prone to deep moral failure. Furthermore, our blindness to our predicament
breeds an attraction and attachment to the very things that serve only to
exacerbate our condition and render it progressively worse.
The solution to this predicament is to recognize it for what it is, and the heart
of this recognition is to understand that we are in the midst of an ongoing battle:
darkness/evil has succeeded in encroaching upon light, and trapped some of the
light, thus generating the visible world. Indeed, not only are we in the midst of
this battle, but we ourselves are a part of it, for the true self is in fact a particle of
light that has been trapped within the material body; what holds true at the
cosmological level is equally true at the level of the individual. Needless to say,
this is no minor point, for the individual is not merely a spectator of a conflict
beyond his or her control; the individual is a participant in the battle. Granted,
this way of putting it somewhat simplifies the grand architectonic of Mani’s
revelation. Complementing the overarching dualism of the two co-eternal
principles, there is a complex response on the part of light to this encroachment
and entrapment, one that graphically emphasizes the agonistic nature of the
second phase.19 For the Manichaean believer, though, it is at the level of the
individual that the war is waged.
Before proceeding to the details of this, it is worth pausing to note a transition
in our depiction of evil. Thus far, in accordance with Mani’s revelation, evil has
been portrayed in rather abstract and general, if nonetheless graphic terms. Now,
however, we are in a position to link Mani’s cosmological revelation with the
more existential problems discussed above: it is the body, the domain of ‘matter’,
which poses the problem, and it is our attachment to the material realm that
serves as the bond that keeps portions of light trapped and imprisoned by
darkness. In short, we now have a link between Mani’s dualistic ontology and the
existential disquiet that prompts us to believe that evil is a real feature of our
moral landscape, a feature that serves as the source of conflict, adversity, and
tragedy. It is the body and our attachment to it that keeps the light imprisoned,
and it is our attachment and attraction to the domain of matter that exacerbates
and reinforces our predicament, thus enabling darkness to possess light for its
own.
This provides the key to how we are to handle our predicament. We are
particles of light entrapped in the ‘matter’ of darkness, and we must live in such a
way as to liberate these now isolated particles of light, so that they return to the
larger whole of which they are parts. It is the revelation of Mani that makes us
aware of this predicament, but, for those fortunate enough to have heard of his
revelation, there is the further, crucial question: How are the entrapped particles
of light – our true self being one of these – to be liberated?
A life of asceticism is central to the solution. Here, once again, there is a
dualism to be found, this time within the Manichaean community. On the one
hand, there are the ‘Elect’, those who are fully apprised of the complex details of
the battle in the second phase, and to whom fall the primary responsibility of
liberating as much of the entrapped light as possible. Living a life of extreme
austerity, they avoid all forms of killing, eat only fruits and vegetables, avoid all
forms of sexual activity, own no property, lead largely itinerant lives, and serve as
moral exemplars for those who are not yet ready to pursue such a rigorously
ascetic life. However, what is most significant and distinctive of the Elect is the
role they play in the liberation of the entrapped particles of light. As curious as it
may sound, it is by means of digesting fruits and vegetables that the Elect are
able to distil the light from the matter in which it is trapped, thus making it
possible for the particles of light to return to the larger body of light from which
they have been separated.20 This oddity is tempered if one thinks of the Elect not
as individuals possessed of miraculous powers but as existing within the larger
context of Manichaean cosmology. For they are, so to speak, on the front line of
the cosmological battle, and they are engaged in the crucial and indispensable
task of repelling the darkness, recapturing as much of the entrapped light as
possible, and maintaining the light’s dominant position.
This is not a role that the Elect can perform without the aid of others who are
not held to such rigorous and austere standards. Someone has to harvest the food
from which the Elect liberate the particles of light, and, given the prohibition
against killing, this is not something the Elect can do for themselves. This brings
us to the second part of Manichaean ‘social dualism’: the ‘Hearers’. They too live
an ascetic life that is designed to promote detachment from ‘matter’, but it is not
nearly as austere. They are allowed to own property and engage in monogamous
relationships, and, while it is strongly discouraged, procreation is not forbidden.
Especially relevant for present purposes, the Hearers are the ones who tend to the
needs of the Elect, providing them with the food that the latter consume in order
to release the particles of light entrapped within it. The Hearers thus perform a
central and indispensable role in the cosmological drama, and this point is further
reflected in the transmigratory dynamics of Manichaeism. Upon the death of the
material body, the true selves of the Elect, the entrapped particles of light, will
return to the larger whole of which they are isolated parts. The Hearers, too, will
undergo a transition upon the death of the material body, in this case being
reborn as members of the Elect, thus complementing and continuing the process
by means of which the light is disinterred from the darkness of the material
world. As time goes on, evil is thus thwarted in its attempt at the total captivation
of good.
Given these transmigratory dynamics, ‘social dualism’ is not nearly as absolute
or unmitigated as the ontological dualism of the two principles. ‘Social dualism’
is also not exhaustive: there is still all that lies outside the Manichaean
community, be it other humans, who have either not responded or heard of the
revelation, or other living beings who, while also bearing entrapped particles of
light, are not capable of partaking in the process of redemptive return. For these
latter two classes, the transmigratory dynamics are of a reverse sort: rather than
returning to the original light, they become even more immersed in the
darkness.21
This latter point is haunting, for the cosmological drama does not go on
without end. As already noted, there are three phases to the drama, and thus far
we have covered only the first two. Eventually, the conflict will come to an end,
and the initial state of separation of the two principles will be reinstated. As we
are told in the Acta Archelai at XI.31, there will come a point when ‘fire has
consumed the whole world; within how many years I was not able to discover.
And after that, the restoration of the two natures will take place’ (Gardner and
Lieu 2004: 187).
So too Augustine writes, in De Haeresibus XLVI.19: ‘that substance of evil,
after being disjoined and separated for us, even at the end of this world, upon the
conflagration of the universe, will live in a “lump”’ (ibid.: 191).22 As these
passages indicate, while the initial state of separation will be reinstated, and the
cosmological drama will come to an end, it would be a mistake to think that there
will be a return to a state of equilibrium. Here, in the end, light/ good will
manage to repel the encroachment of dark/evil, but that is not to say that all will
be as it was in the initial phase. The conflict will be over, but not all of the light
will have been recaptured; there is still the issue of what becomes of the particles
of entrapped light that did not make it into the right part of the transmigratorial
dynamic. There is, as it were, an ‘appendix’ to the three-phase cosmological
drama. To get a full sense of the overall contours of the Manichaean drama, one
needs briefly to attend to the eschatology that completes the picture.

Eschatology and the second death

In the Kephalaion 39, part of the extensive commentary tradition internal to
Manichaeism, there is the following passage at 104.5–20, recounting the doctrine
of the ‘second death’:

Now, the second death is the death in which the souls of sinful men shall die;
 when they shall be stripped of the shining light that illuminates the world.
And also they are separated from the living air, from which they receive
living breath; and they are deprived of this living soul … These are the two
deaths. The first death is temporal; but the second death is eternal. It is the
second death!
(Gardner and Lieu 2004: 204)

The text is fragmentary, and there is much in it that is obscure. The central point,
however, is a significant one: for those who fail to partake or are incapable of
partaking in the redemptive process provided by Mani’s revelation, there is an
eschatological point of no return. As we have seen, for the duration of the second
phase of the cosmology, the period of encroachment and conflict, there is a
transmigratorial process through which some of the entrapped particles of light
are liberated, and others are immersed even deeper in the domain of the material.
Presumably, however, throughout the duration of this second phase, there is still
some possibility of ultimate reintegration into the light. But, when the
unspecified time comes for the final and permanent separation, there is a final
denouement, where some particles of the entrapped light are forever lost, trapped
in the darkness, becoming part of the ‘lump’ referred to in our preceding passage
from Augustine’s De Haeresibus. The ‘first death’ – ‘temporal death’ – occurs
within the second phase; the ‘second death’ – ‘eternal death’ – is the final and
absolute loss of whatever light has yet to be reclaimed. It is this feature of the
Manichaean drama that suggests it solves the ‘problem of evil’ by sacrificing the
absolute power of the divine. More to the point, however, this feature of
Manichaeism highlights its sobering conclusion: good may prevail, but its victory
is hardly unqualified.

Legacy and conclusion

In spite of its ecumenical nature, Manichaeism never had an easy time of it. This
is due in part, no doubt, to the politically and religiously volatile nature of the
time in which it arose, but it suffered especially in the Latin West, and by 372 CE
we find edicts being issued against it by the Roman Emperor Valentinian I, with
harsher measures to follow.23 It was not long before it seems to disappear from
the Latin West, though there is evidence that it did persist as an underground
movement. With the rise of orthodox Roman Catholicism, the fate of
Manichaeism, at least in name, was sealed, for it was listed as an official heresy.
Throughout the mediaeval period, however, there persisted groups accused of
Manichaean dualism – for example, the Paulicans, the Bogomils, and the Cathars,
these last being the target of the ‘Albigensian Crusade’ of 1209–29. There is no
evidence, though, of direct influence. In the East, Manichaeism managed to fare
somewhat better, especially in what is now regarded as the ‘Middle East’, and
even in China, where there are records of Manichaean communities as far east as
present-day Zaitun as late as the thirteenth century.
Whatever the fate of Manichaeism as a more or less formal and doctrinal
movement, it is hard to deny that it captures a powerful and recurring view of
the radical disparity between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. As history shows, the sharply
delineated nature of this distinction, owing to its uncompromising and hence
divisive nature, can often have far from salutary effects. And yet, leaving aside
the aspects of Manichaean cosmology that strike the modern reader as quaint or
odd, there is arguably an admirable quality to its account of ‘evil’. In contrast to
many other accounts, there is a forthrightness in its attempt to acknowledge and
deal with the adversarial and often tragic nature of our lives, a forthrightness that
can easily make other accounts look overly optimistic and evasive.

Notes
1 For discussions of recent discoveries of ancient texts and their impact on Manichaean studies, see
Gardner and Lieu 2004: 25–45; Klimkeit 1993: xvii–xix; Baker-Brian 2011: 24–32; Tardieu 2008: xvii-xx.
2 For an extended discussion of the controversy surrounding “Gnosticism” as a general category, see
Williams 1996. Note especially his comments on Manichaeism on p. 6.
3 There is a division of opinion regarding Manichaeism’s relation to “Gnosticism”. Klimkeit (1993) takes a
positive stance on the issue; Gardner and Lieu (2004) take a more guarded approach; and Baker-Brian
(2011) is strongly critical of classifying Manichaeism as a form of “Gnosticism”.
4 For maps depicting the spread of Manichaeism, see Tardieu 2008: 100–01. See also Klimkeit 1993: xxi–
xxiii.
5 This point will be explained in more detail below.
6 For extensive discussion of these three aspects of Jesus, see the relevant index entries in Baker-Brian
 (2011).
7 More detailed accounts of Mani’s life can be found in Gardner and Lieu (2004: 3–8) and Tardieu (2008:
1–30). Baker-Brian (2011) provides an especially intriguing discussion of the various accounts of Mani’s
life.
8 See Baker-Brian (2011: 25–8) for a discussion of the nature and background of this text.
9 Cameron and Dewey 1979. For more background on this text, see Tardieu (2008: 50–52); Baker-Brian
(2011: esp. 46–54); and Gardner and Lieu (2004: 40–43).
10 Although the text was not composed by Mani himself, it apparently recounts what he told various
disciples about his religious experiences and the nature of his evangelical mission.
11 For an extended passage from the CMC regarding the universalism of Mani’s mission, see Gardner and
Lieu 2004: 66.
12 Tardieu (2008: 34–48) provides a detailed discussion of what is known about Mani’s writings.
13 See Tardieu 2008: 49–56. For an extensive collection of these texts, see Klimkeit 1993.
14 The analogy is employed in the Sixth Meditation of Meditations on First Philosophy.
15 See, for example, Lieu 1985: 150–51; Coyle 1999: 522.
16 See, for example, Puech 1949: 70.
17 See, for example, Gardner and Lieu 2004: 11; Baker-Brian 2011: 96–122.
18 This example is especially significant in that, as Augustine recounts, the distinction played a major role
in enabling him to overcome the thoroughgoing “materialism” of the Manichaeans.
19 The details are far too complex for our present discussion, but they are treated in great detail in Tardieu
2008: 75–90.
20 The prohibition of meat seems to be related to both the suffering involved and the fact that the light is,
in such instances, more immersed in matter.
21 See the passage from the Acta Archelai, X.28, and from Augustine’s De Haeresibus, XLVI.12, in Gardner
and Lieu (2004: 184 and 189 respectively).
22 Acta Archelai XI.30 also makes reference to this “lump”.
23 For a detailed and helpful synoptic chronology of the history of Manichaeism from the third century CE
to the thirteenth century, see Tardieu 2008: 91–9.

Further reading
Alexander of Lycopolis [1869] 2006. On The Tenets of the Manichaeans, in Ante-Nicene Christian Library:
Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to AD 325, vol. 14. Boston: Elibron Classics.
Augustine 2007. Answer to Faustus, a Manichean, trans. R. J. Teske. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press.
BeDuhn, J., and Mirecki, P. A. (eds) 1997. Emerging from the Darkness: Studies in Recovery of Manichaean
Sources. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Hegemonius 2001. Acta Archelai, trans. M. Vermes. Turnhout: Brepolis.
Lieu, S. N. C. 1994. Manichaeism in Mesopotamia and the Roman East. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
——2013. Manichaeism in Central Asia and China. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Mikkelsen, G. B. 1997. Bibliographia Manichaica: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Manichaeism through
1996. Turnhout: Brepolis.
Van Den Broek, R., and Mermaseren, M. J. (eds) 1981. Studies in Gnosticism and Hellenistic Religions. Leiden:
E. J. Brill.

References
Augustine, 1991. Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Baker-Brian, N. J. 2011. Manichaeism: An Ancient Faith Rediscovered. New York: T. & J. Clark International.
Cameron, R., and Dewey, A. J. (trans. and eds) 1979. The Cologne Mani Codex. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press
[CMC].
Coyle, K. J. 1999. ‘Mani, Manichaeism’, in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. A. D. Fitzgerald.
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Descartes, R. 1985–91. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gardner, I., and Lieu, S. N. C. 2004. Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Klimkeit, H.-J. (ed.) 1993. Gnosis on the Silk Road: Gnostic Texts from Central Asia. San Francisco: Harpers.
Lieu, S. N. C. 1985. Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China: A Historical Survey.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Plato 1997. Plato: Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Puech, H. C. 1949. Le Manichéisme: son fondateur, sa doctrine. Paris: Musée Guimet.
Tardieu, M. 2008. Manichaeism, trans. M. B. DeBevose. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Williams, M. A. 1996. Rethinking ‘Gnosticism’: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
7 The Gnostics
Giovanni Filoramo

Gnosticism is a religious movement centred around salvation which took hold

during the second century CE. Some believe it to have Christian roots, others
Jewish, and, according to yet others, even a general pagan background. What sets
it apart is its pervasive dualism. The cosmos is intrinsically wicked, because it
was created by a second god or ignorant demiurge, unjust and wicked, generally
identified as the god of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). Gnostics set this god
against the unknown and absolutely transcendent god who may be known only
through gnosis, a revelation granted to an elite few. Man is formed by the
demiurge and made up of the breath of life (the soul) and matter; he would be
destined to corruption if it were not for the greater god who graced him with a
spiritual substance, the pneuma. Gnostics are those who – in virtue of a
revelation or interior illumination transmitted by the gnostic revelator – are able
to feel the presence of this divine substance within themselves. Humanity is
divided into three categories: the pneumatics or spiritual people, who by nature
are destined to be saved; the psychics, identified as the Christians of the Great
Church, who can reach salvation only to a certain extent; and, lastly, the material
men or hylics (i.e., Jews or pagans), destined by nature to corruption.
Even in light of new documents, such as the texts discovered in 1945 at Nag
Hammadi (see Meyer 2007), the gnostic worldview appears quite fragmentary,
particularly owing to its principle of interior illumination. Can we speak of a
‘gnostic philosophy’ in this context? To respond to this question, one should keep
in mind that the gnostics of the second century, such as Valentinus and his
school, must be read within the context of the more general transformations that
philosophy went through in the first imperial age. This was one in which
philosophy harked back increasingly to a primordial knowledge of sacred origin,
revealed by a divinity to extraordinary men or divine beings, such as Hermes,
Orpheus and Pythagoras, and was passed down by an uninterrupted tradition.
Philosophy aspired to embody the way of life of the philosophers who researched
and practised it. Only given this can we answer questions about the mystery of
the all-encompassing divinity, the ways it manifests itself, its relationship with
the cosmos and with men, and the mystery of the cosmos itself.
Philosophy at this time was shaped to a large degree also by Platonism, which
linked the origins and nature of evil to the chaotic and disorderly nature of
Matter (see chapter 14 in this volume). The gnostics of the second century locate
themselves in this Platonic context, on the one hand, bent on defending the
transcendence of the First Principle and, on the other, seeking an answer to the
problem of evil which keeps the absolute goodness of this god intact. As opposed
to contemporary Middle Platonic thinkers such as Plutarch and Apuleius,
however, they assume that evil is something radical. It is not une quantité
négligeable; it cannot be expelled from the world as if it were nothing. In a
certain sense, evil coincides with the world, or is the world: it is something we
are faced with and cannot avoid. It is precisely for this reason that it becomes the
starting point for every type of gnostic reflection. From this point of view, it is
something radically opposed to good, something that good therefore cannot
encompass. Starting from good, as optimistic theodicies do, means evacuating the
problem of its force; in the end, all that is left is good – as, for example, in the
Christian Platonism of Origen and, according to the tradition, inspired by him.
These optimistic forms of thought, which attribute evil to man’s lack of will-
power and his exercise of free will, either invert the problem or don’t see it. For
the gnostics, evil is deeply rooted in human life, and as such, it may at most be
recounted or elaborated rather than ultimately grasped or understood.

Non-Christian gnostics and Christian gnostics

The answer to the question unde malum?, ‘whence evil?’, lies at the foundation of
gnostic myths. These myths fall into two types, according to whether or not they
are the product of gnostic Christian thinkers such as Valentinus or Basilides (see
Markschies 1992; Löhr 1996). Both were Christians who accepted the Hebrew
scriptures and the New Testament as revealed sources. But neither of them
viewed these sources as unique, fixed, or interpretable according to regulative
criteria. Indeed, gnostic thinkers set private traditions – personal revelations that
constitute new gospels and holy texts – against the public revelations of the Great
Church. What lies behind this proliferation of sources of truth is not just zeal or
wishful thinking. If it’s true that ‘the spirit breathes where it wishes’ (John 3:8),
for gnostics it is also true that gnosis is a form of definitive and total revelation
that, as such, stands in opposition to the faith and subordinates it. This means
that the criteria for truth are found not in the scriptures but in the gnostic
himself. In fact, the illumination received from above from the celestial saviour is
a form of anamnesis, or recollection, which allows one to remember one’s divine
origin. This is a process of spiritual rebirth, after which the person becomes that
which he was since the very beginning – a part of divine life. Far from being
imposed from the outside, the rule of truth reflects one’s true nature – it allows
the gnostic to discover the consubstantiality between himself as an interpreting
subject and the object interpreted. That is, his true, inner self is identified with
divinity itself, and thus theological reflection becomes the path to redemption.
Even if gnostic theology is deeply nourished by the philosophy of its time,
particularly by the school of Plato, the gnostics are not philosophers but, rather,
theologians. The experience of revelation, the fruit of divine grace, ends up being
decisive; in line with those who see a via salutis in philosophy, gnostics believe
that rational research is not an end in itself, but a tool. One must not forget that
at the base of their theology lies a typically religious experience – the experience
of radical evil, and the firm belief that it is impossible to escape it through mere
reasoning. Evil is a mystery with roots in the divine life. To understand its
origins, one must therefore sound out the abyss and identify its origins –
something the gnostics do, whether Christian or not, by using philosophical
myth. First, however, it is important to remind ourselves who the gnostics were
and about their brief yet important trajectory in history, which spanned the
second and third centuries of the common era.

A history of Gnosticism
The heresiologists have identified the initiator of Gnosticism as Simon Magus
(Acts 8:9–25), a magician called by his disciples ‘the great power of god’, and
whose thaumaturgic power is said to have seduced the masses in Samaria. It is
necessary to wait approximately a century, however, to find the presence of a
true and genuine gnostic myth – one transmitted to us by Justin (died c. 165 CE)
and centred around the redemption of a First Thought (Ennoia) that fell prisoner
to the body and is identified as ‘Elena’. Scholars dispute whether this gnostic
myth (created around the middle of the second century) was present in the action
and preaching of Simon in Acts, or whether it resulted from the influence of
Valentinianism. Behind this debate lies a more general conflict of interpretation –
to be precise, whether and to what extent Gnosticism, far from being a religion of
non-Christian origins, is actually a Christian heresy, as the ancient heresiologists
would have claimed.
It is only during the first half of the second century that we find testimonies to
the founders of gnostic schools practicing in cities such as Alexandria and Rome.
Basilides was the first, active under emperors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius (117–
161 CE). He lived in Alexandria and wrote many texts, among which was an
exegetical work in 24 volumes. Of this vast opus, heresiologists have left us only a
few excerpts, which testify to two versions of his system that are not easily
reconcilable.
In Rome, around mid-century, Marcion and Valentinus also practised
Gnosticism. As for the former (who died around 154–160 CE), debate continues
concerning the nature of his system – if, or to what extent, it may be classified as
one of the gnostic systems of the second century. Some place him in relation to
the great contemporary gnostic systems such as ditheism, which sets the ‘foreign
god’ of love, who comes to announce Jesus, against the just god and creator,
identified as the god of the Old Testament. But, at the same time, Marcion lacks a
mythology and the theme of the awareness of Self, which sets him apart from
Gnosticism and tends to confirm the interpretation of his system made by Adolf
von Harnack, who reads it as a form of radical Paulinism.
As for Valentinus, who practised in Rome around the middle of the second
century, he was the founder of the most original and important school of
Gnosticism in the second century, characterized by an attempt to re-read the data
of the Christian faith in light of theosophic, mythical speculation. Thus the
Valentinians, such as Ptolemy and Heracleon, made fundamental contributions to
the rise of Christian theology, whose most important representatives – from
Irenaeus to Tertullian, and from Clement of Alexandria to Origen – have
elaborated their theological systems via polemics, fuelled by their own
speculation.
This school was divided into two branches: ‘Anatolian’ or Eastern, centred in
Alexandria, and ‘Italic’ or Western, centred in Rome. The first was active not just
in Egypt but also in Syria and Asia Minor: from this come gnostic masters such
as Marcus Magus, who re-read the system of Valentinus from the viewpoint of
esoteric arithmology, even favouring the establishment of cult practices that
appear to be a gnostic reinterpretation of the Christian sacraments, as well as
Theodotus, whose teachings we know partially through the rebuttals of Clement
of Alexandria. The second branch, active not only in Rome but also in Gaul,
counted Ptolemy among its representatives. His system is known to us through
Irenaeus, in his written work against heresies, and Heracleon, who wrote the first
commentary on the gospel of John, which has come down to us partly owing to
Origen’s subsequent critique. Valentinianism still seemed to be active in the first
half of the third century, and its traces may be found even later on; it is possible
that the gnostics whom Plotinus had in his school were Valentinians and that it
was with them that he argued in the second of his Enneads. The strengthening of
the Great Church in the second half of the third century, and – towards the end
of the century – the appearance of Manichaeism, would contribute decisively to
the eclipse not only of this school but also of other gnostic currents.
The second gnostic ‘family’ is made up of groups of Sethians, who identified
the biblical character Seth as their forefather. According to the Jahwist genealogy
in Genesis 4:25, Seth is Adam’s third child (but the first according to priestly
tradition in Genesis 5:3), destined to confront the corrupt and violent lineage
started by Cain. We know of these Sethian groups thanks to certain gnostic
writings discovered at Nag Hammadi, specifically the Apocryphon of John
(Layton 1987: ch. 1; see also Logan 1996). The mythical story told by these texts
constitutes a parallel version – free from Christian influence – to that typically
found in the Valentinian school.
The nature of gnostic myth
Gnostic myth arises from the need to lay a bridge between the one god, who is
entirely transcendent, and a cosmos and body that are intrinsically wicked,
radically separated from god, to the point that their creation is attributed to a
second god. It is a myth that helps us understand how the One, the foundation of
being, unfolds (while maintaining his uniqueness) in a changing yet
fundamentally evil world.
The origins of this myth are reflected in special concepts of god and man. God
is potentially us, and, at the same time, we are potentially god. This is because
god is conceived as Anthrōpos, man, and, as a consequence, the ontological abyss
between creator and creature is no more: the gnostic is only seemingly a creature
of the second god. In fact, gnostic myth is essentially a theogony. That is, it is a
narration of the becoming of god or, rather, of a god whose absolute
transcendence is made manifest in the wide variety of worldly entities.
There is an important aspect of this process which relates to its mythological
dimension. The ancient nature myths were stories that narrated the special
relationship between man and the cosmos. The gnostic myths, by contrast,
narrate the relationship between man and that special god who is the primordial
Anthrōpos, a tragic relationship which involves the breaking of the divine unity.
In this way, the great problems faced by man, right up to the evils inflicted by the
relationship between men and women, have a mythical foundation, in the sense
that they re-create an ‘original conflict’ lived by the divinity itself in the timeless
time of myth.
It follows that, for the gnostic, myth is reality, because reality itself is of its
nature symbolic, referring to the next world, to an otherness that founds it. This
overlapping of reality and symbol, of explanation and narration, stems from the
fact that the foundation of the self is the foundation of the transcendent god. If it
is true that lived experience may only be narrated, then it is also true that this
story, the myth, is not an ‘allegory’, because it speaks not of something beyond
itself but, rather, of the Self’s own experience of suffering and liberation. The
negative knowledge of god and the positive explanation of the world and history
come together in the knowledge of Self, the very apex of gnosis.
Transmitted by a revelator or saviour figure, guaranteed by a certain esoteric
heritage and often accompanied by instructions by which the follower is initiated
into the mysteries, Gnosticism is founded on the transmission of myth, which in
its different versions constitutes a patrimony common to the various gnostic
families. At the root of this myth is a profound experience, the experience of evil:
not the many concrete physical and moral evils that afflict humanity, but evil
that has taken on an ontological dimension previously unknown, covering (in
general) the cosmos and (in particular) the human body. In the gnostic texts, the
recurring examples of ‘evil’ involve a conflict between different parts of the body:
the conditioning that the soul undergoes, ‘imprisoned’ in the body, deformed by
‘appendages’ that lead it to sin, inhabited by evil demons. We may add to this the
tyrannical management of the world by astral powers and the disorder that
reigns in the sphere of nature, where beings devour each other. Again and again,
like an obsessive litany, the theme of the vanity of all earthly existence – seeing
that generation is inevitably followed by death – comes up, along with the
injustices and violence perpetrated by worldly institutions (under the guise of
ensuring social order). The sum of these negative experiences is never
exhaustively described, precisely because it constitutes the gnostic’s sense of
psychical and physical, individual and social unrest, thereby both motivating his
meditation and alienating him from his environment. This is why the gnostics
believe that evil is not the mere absence of good, or simply the result of human
fault, but rather a ‘thing’ that exists autonomously, something we find before us
in the form of a ‘labyrinth’ or ‘chaos’, or, to use an ancient Egyptian word
borrowed by the Coptic texts, ‘Amente’, the domain of death.
Marked by the deeds of that special god who is the Anthrōpos, gnostic myth
includes a theology that is both theogony – because it narrates the ‘eternal birth’
of the unknown god – and theosophy – given that, by virtue of myth, it is
possible to trace the origins of this god. It also includes a cosmogony, the anti-
biblical, gnostic version of the genesis of the cosmos, namely the seat of evil,
which is created by the wicked demiurge. The demiurge and his court of evil
angels also create the transient, psycho-physical mixture into which the demiurge
blows the pneuma of light (a gnostic reinterpretation of Genesis 2:7). This
pneuma is transmitted to him, without his realizing it, by the Mother or Sophia.
According to gnostic eschatology, the demiurgic world is destined to final
destruction, which only the immortal soul or (alternatively) the spiritual,
pneumatic principle will survive. As for the destiny of the individual gnostic, he
may finally return to his heavenly home, reuniting with his double or true Self.
This occurs through a psychanodia, or heavenly voyage of the soul, which
ascends to those celestial spheres (governed by evil archons) that it had already
crossed in its descent into this world of darkness. In conclusion, gnostic myth
reminds the gnostic of his origins, revealing the causes that catapulted him into
this world of darkness while, at the same time, showing that gnosis opens up the
road to liberation from evil.

Family resemblances
In the last few years, some scholars have tried to dismantle the category of
‘Gnosticism’, a modern concept much indebted to those ancient ‘hunters of
heretics’ – heresiologists such as Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian – who gathered
together to fight different religious groups and currents (Williams 1996; King
2003). This radical critique, which comes from the epigones of deconstructionism,
should, however, be rejected.
Deconstructionists insist that we will never discover genuine gnostic myth,
namely myth that pre-exists subsequent variations generated by different gnostic
schools. What is important to note here, however, is that – if one wishes to get an
overall sense of such variations – it is necessary to shed light on the special ‘sense
of family’ that gnostic texts still impart today. This consists first and foremost in
the presence of at least two doctrinal elements that distinguish Gnosticism from
other religious movements of the period. These may be summed up as the con-
substantiality between the absolutely transcendent god and the gnostic Self, on
the one hand, and, on the other, an original interpretation of the origins of evil.
Around this doctrinal nucleus a number of recurring themes fan out:

1 The true god is not the creator of the universe in which we live.
2 The structure of divinity is hierarchical.
3 The creators or dominators of the world are negative cosmic powers
characterized by astrological elements.
4 Man’s Self (soul or spirit) is a particle of the divine world to which he
wishes to, and must, return.
 5 The salvation of the Self requires the intervention of a saviour-revelator.
6 The presence of the divine in the world, and the origin of the world itself,
depends on an ‘accident’, a ‘fault’, a ‘sin’ that takes place inside the
plenitude of the divine (plērōma) itself.
7 The appearance of the image of god as man and the creation of man in the
image and likeness of god constitute the mythological foundation of the
creation of man.
8 Salvation is only for an elect, predestined ‘lineage’.
9 To attain salvation, one must estrange oneself from the world, giving up
worldly goods, starting with sexuality.

We must nevertheless not be deceived by this list, which includes just a few
examples. Indeed, not all of these themes are present in any one gnostic cult –
rather only some or most of them. What is it, then, that allows us to define
various groups as gnostic? Rather than material content, it is a special outlook
permeated by certain attitudes regarding the meaning and origin of evil, nature,
and the divine mystery. Perhaps they can be summarized as follows:

the sense of estrangement before the worldly dimension of existence;

an acute understanding of the radically negative forces that dominate us
(using the deceitful frame of order), and therefore the disgust at nature,
whose biological mechanisms do nothing more than perpetuate violence
and death;
the indifference, or even the aversion, to the world of history and society
founded on the lie and injustice;
the infinite distance of god and, together with this, his extreme closeness,
precisely to the innermost self of he who perceives this distance;
the ambivalence towards positive religions, in which, in a certain sense, all
is right but, at the same time, all is wrong;
a submissive, reticent attitude and the tendency to dissimulate.

These are some marks of the gnostic school of thought, problems and ideas that
guide its particular interpretation of existence and drive it to seek the origin of
the radical evil that characterizes the eternal genesis of god.
Two types of dualism
To explain the origins of evil beginning with the divine world, the gnostic texts
invoke two different types of dualism (Jonas 1972). The first – which seems to
borrow from Zoroastrianism and will return in Manichaeism – posits, under the
good or superior principle, the ab aeterno existence of the inferior world of
darkness and materiality. The second postulates the existence of a superior,
transcendent principle – which goes by different names – from which an entity is
formed on account of an ‘accident’ that occurs at some point in the divine life,
and which is then expelled from the perfect world of its origins. This creature is
generally identified with the extra-pleromatic Sophia, the proof and product of
the negativity inherent in the life of the divine world of fullness (or plērōma). It is
from this entity that we get this second god, seen as the creator god of the Old
Testament. In this second version, evil takes root in the life of the plērōma itself.
The best example of the first type of dualism is represented by the so-called
triadic systems (see Foerster 1972: chs 14–19). Between the superior world of god
and light and the inferior world of materiality and darkness there is an
intermediary principle, which acts as a mediator between these two ontological
levels. While, in the Manichaean myth, the problem of how the two opposite
levels enter into contact is explained by the aggression of darkness against the
superior reign, in these systems the intermediary principle is more reminiscent of
the demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus. The darkness can know and desire the superior
principle, but it is this intermediary that comes into contact with it. It is the
intermediary principle that transmits the light of the superior principle to the
inferior world, saving it from direct contact with darkness. In this way, while the
problem of transmission of the formal principles to shapeless matter is solved
thanks to the mediation of the intermediary principle, evil stays confined to dark
and chaotic matter. It is not possible to speak strictly of a fall of the superior
principle but, rather, of its being captured by the darkness. And when it is the
intermediary principle that intervenes, it is not a consequence of a drama inside
the pleromatic world.
The second type of dualism is represented by the Sethian systems and the
Valentinian school. Evil originates in the life of the divine world itself, which
expels it from itself, giving rise to inferior levels of reality, psychic and hylic,
through a complex process of transfer. The divine reality needs purification,
which helps definitively eliminate any remaining negativity. This is why a part of
light – the spiritual seed present in every potential gnostic – falls prisoner to the
cosmos and the body, setting off a process of purification that ends with its
recovery and final redemption. The process of gnosis is an individual process of
saving knowledge, which pursues the more general goal of recovering the various
light particles dispersed in the cosmos – that is, gathering and rebuilding the
scattered limbs of the body of the primordial Anthrōpos. Another consequence of
this reading is that the one responsible for the fall – and therefore, in some way,
for the negativity inherent in the pleromatic life – is a female entity (see Buckley
1986; King 1988). The Gnostics use the biblical theme of a muliere initium factum
est peccati (Sirach 25:24): the origin of evil is the first woman, Chavah (Eve). This
biblical cue is re-read against the backdrop of a traditional philosophical theme.
As the Neopythagorean tradition teaches, for instance, the ‘feminine’ represents
the dark face of the dyad, a dark face that, according to the characteristic gnostic
manner of applying the dialectics of gender to the life of the plērōma, tends to
assign the function of generator, with its innate negativity, to the female, and
therefore to Sophia.
This re-reading runs parallel to the Platonic theme of the fallen soul; and
naturally, given the influence that Platonism exercised on many gnostic texts
(Turner 2001; Turner and Majercik 2000; Wallis 1992), this theme must be taken
into consideration to better understand the gnostic re-reading. It is precisely
Plotinus’ polemic against the gnostics (Ennead II.9) that helps us understand the
difference between the two readings. For the Platonic philosopher, the theme of
the fall concerns only the destiny of the individual souls who – victims of their
own boldness – fall and take on bodily form (it does not concern the Soul of the
world that coexists eternally with divine intelligence). In gnostic myth, the fall of
individual souls is a consequence of the fall of extrapleromatic Sophia. But, as
Plotinus objects, doesn’t this mean that the origin of evil resides in the first
principle itself? As he says,

Thus, the Intelligibles, and not the cosmos, will be the cause of evil; and it is
not the cosmos, but they [i.e., the Intelligibles] that will be the cause of evil;
and the Soul will not acquire evil from the world, but will itself be the
 instrument of bringing evil, and the argument will derive the imperfection of
the world from the first principles.
(Ennead II:9,12)

The origin of evil therefore has a ‘prologue in heaven’, owing to the way in
which these gnostics portray the eternal genesis of the god Anthrōpos.

The god before god

The most concerted attempt to place the origin of evil in the mystery of divine
life itself is made by Valentinus and his school during the second half of the
second century CE. He identifies four fundamental levels of being. At the top,
there is the absolutely transcendent god, from which the world of the plērōma is
generated after a process of emanation during which, as opposed to the creation
ex nihilo of the Jewish/Christian tradition, the emanator is present in the object
emanated. The second level consists in the world of the divine plērōma (cf. the
noetic cosmos of Philo, or the second god of contemporary Platonic systems). The
third level of being coincides with the psychic dimension that the gnostics
identify with the sphere of the demiurge. Finally, there is the level of materiality
or hyle. If one wishes to appreciate the originality and depth of gnostic
philosophical theology, it is necessary to consider the way in which the gnostics
have conceived both the nature of the supreme god and the formation of the Son,
because it is within this conception that the ‘sin of Sophia’ is found and in which
evil becomes concrete in the life of the plērōma.
The distinctive characteristic of the gnostic god, which distinguishes him from
both the Christian god and the pagan god of contemporary Platonic philosophy,
is his androgynous nature (in him, a male and a female dimension coexist). The
gnostic, like the Christian god, has a personal dimension: between god and man,
consequently and according to biblical dictates, a deep relationship of similarity
exists (Genesis 1:27). The gnostic god, however, as opposed to the biblical god,
possesses a female dimension that represents, so to speak, the element able to
suffer, and which constitutes the cause of the tragedy of the gnostic plērōma that
will lead to the origin of evil. In common with the first principle posited by
Platonic thinkers such as Numenius, the gnostic god reveals the divine energy;
but, contra the biblical logic of creatio ex nihilo, which places an ontological
abyss between creator and creature, Gnosticism conceives of man as a
manifestation of divine energy, therefore as an impoverished god. Gnostic
theology is thus a processual theology, not a creationist one.
The gnostic god shows his unending energy through emanation, a special
process that implies a progressive loss of power as it moves further from its
origin. As opposed to the conception of the divine typical of a philosopher such
as Plotinus, according to which the ‘hypostasis’ or divine realities – namely the
Intelligence and the Soul that eternally proceed from the One, the font of being –
do not constitute an impoverishment of the energy of the One, gnostic emanation
involves a process of decline, after which the psychic substance and the hylic or
material substance will form. Furthermore, as opposed to the Platonic, impersonal
god, the gnostic god is, like the biblical god, a provident and saving Anthrōpos,
revelatory and gracious. The formation of the world – an ever more hostile and
dangerous world, created by an ignorant and wicked demiurge – consists in
making the spiritual substance, which emerged from the plērōma after the
pleromatic tragedy, and is now in a state of abandon and oblivion in the cosmos,
both formed and complete, thanks to its condition of temporary exile.
The gnostic god is, above all and essentially, deus; that is, he is a shapeless,
infinite substance that must be described negatively (per viam negationis), since
there is nothing determinate in him. That is why the Valentinians define him as
‘Pre-existent’, ‘Pre-principle’, or ‘Pre-father’; he is not an entity but, rather, the
source of entities, possessing an exclusive existence in which no one participates.
He is not the principle of anything, nor is he the father of a child, which would
take him beyond perfect self-subsistence. As such, the gnostic god is time/place/
world, in and of itself, but without being any of these things. The Valentinians
therefore also define him as ‘Abyss’, to indicate the earlier stage of the divine that
precedes any form. In a sense, what the cosmogonic abyss represents (i.e., prior to
the created world (Genesis 1:2)) is what the Prefather god represents in his
absolutely transcendent, shapeless substance.

The generation of the Son

What interrupts this eternal self-sufficiency? While the Christian god creates, and
the One of Plotinus proceeds, the gnostic god emanates (proballei) as a
consequence of the coexistence of a male and a female dimension within himself.
The ways to define this female dimension vary; the underlying structure,
however, does not change. The conception of the Son, or Nous (mind, reason,
intellect), is a result of the fecundation of the female dimension by the Father (the
masculine dimension). In mythical terms, the Father is reflected in the waters of
life that surround him – i.e., in the spiritual and female substance. This process of
self-contemplation is necessary, since god is god precisely because he eternally
contemplates, by virtue of a special ‘gaze’, or peculiar ‘vision’, the infinity of his
own substance. In mythical terms, this self-contemplation is symbolized by the
Ennoia, a thought inside god himself, in which the subject and the object coincide
entirely, even if indeterminately – or, better, by the Protennoia, an internal
primordial thought, preceding any multiplicity, any duality between subject and
object. It is a virginal self-contemplation, because infertile, where the substance
of god remains within itself, a contemplation that takes place in perfect solitude,
since the presence of any other substance is excluded, and in silence, since god –
having perfect self-understanding – has no need to express anything using
language or logos.
Why, then, does this perfect and self-subsistent circle break? According to the
Valentinians, next to Ennoia and Silence, Charis, Grace, coexists with the Abyss.
The presence of this dimension in god indicates the passage from the divine
internal economy, self-subsistent but infertile, to an ad extra economy, limited
but fertile. This decisive passage is the consequence of a free choice by the Father,
an unfathomable act of freedom by virtue of which god decides to show the outer
world his infinite richness. In this way, the will of the Father becomes the power
or dynamis that, ‘in the beginning’, decides to interrupt the eternal circle of self-
sufficiency to conceive the Son ‘in his breast’:

and eventually the aforementioned deep took thought to emit a source of the
entirety. And it deposited the emanation that it had thought to emit, like
sperm, in the womb of the silence that coexisted with it. And the latter
received this sperm, conceived, and brought forth intellect, which was like
and equal to the emitter and was the only being that comprehended the
magnitude of the parent. And this intellect they call also the only-begotten,
 parent, and source of the entirety.
(Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, I:1, 1, in Layton 1987: 281)

The conception of the Son is represented as a process of spiritual fertilization

inside the divine substance. This has three consequences. The first is that we have
not a trinity of self-subsistent ‘persons’ but a triad, since the ‘Father’ and
‘Mother’ do not constitute two different substances. The second is that – as
opposed to the Logos of Philo of Alexandria, which is created, or to the Son of
Christian theology, which is generated, or to the Nous of contemporary Platonic
theology, which is posited owing to theoretical necessity – the Nous of the
primordial gnostic triad is emanated by the will of the Father. The third
consequence is that the Son, despite being similar to and consubstantial with the
Father, is not, nor can be, identical to him. Unlike the Christian generation, or the
procession of Plotinus, gnostic emanation in fact implies a progressive loss of
pneumatic substance in the passage from the emanator to the emanated. The Son,
thus made, unlike the unmade Father, represents the ‘scale’ of the Father, his
formal outlining, the limited and definite manifestation of the infinite potential
present in the Father. Consequently, the Father can be known only through the
Son. To expound this relation, Gnosticism uses a theology of the ‘image’ (the Son
as perfect image of the Father) or arithmologic reflections (the generation of the
dyad from the One), or the Son as the Name of the Father (according to the
Valentinian School).
In the view of Christian gnostics such as the Valentinians, the Son initiates a
saving economy – the possibility that others, too, through him, can have access to
the Father. The epithets with which the Valentinians define him, though at first
glance paradoxical, are explained thus: ‘Father’, since only with him does the
generation of the divine world truly begin; ‘archē’ (or ‘starting point’), since all
things have their beginning and foundation in him. In this way, the Son is the
receptacle of all those forms which the shapeless Abyss has transmitted to him.
And since the Son, like all gnostic entities, is androgynous, the Son too has a
female counterpart: Alētheia, the Truth. Joining with her, together they emanate
the rest of the plērōma.
The sin of Sophia and the origin of evil
The story of Sophia brings to light the dialectic of knowledge according to late
antique mysticism. In the beginning, Knowledge, desiring to create itself, falls
into its opposite, the emptiness of ignorance, and gives rise to a status quo that,
on the one hand, is a positive reality opposed to the divine reality and, on the
other, having its root in a ‘defect’, is positive only in giving rise to a world of
‘lack’ (hysterēma) that is opposed to the dimension of ‘fullness’ (plērōma). To
return to itself, Knowledge, which gathered the message of gnosis, must work to
wipe out its deformed product, which should never have come into existence. In
this manner, the stories of the plērōma already contain their eschatological
conclusion.
According to Ptolemy, a disciple of Valentinus of whom we learn through
Irenaeus, the fall of Sophia constitutes the final expression and internal life of the
plērōma, where only the Son can know the Father. This passion

originated in the region of intellect and truth; but it collected in this [last
aeon] which has been diverted – ostensibly out of love, but really out of
recklessness – because it had not communicated with the perfect parent as
intellect had. The passion consisted in the search for the parent; for – they
say – she wanted to comprehend the magnitude.
(Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, I:2, 2, in Layton 1987: 283)

That which moves Sophia is, in keeping with her nature, a passion for knowledge
that is nonetheless destined to fail. Unlike the other aeons that are androgynous
and form couples or syzygies, Sophia has no partner, underlining the fact that the
pathos for knowledge that drives her is specific to the female dimension. She sins
out of boldness, not out of love; this theme, that of tolma or boldness of
knowledge, is not unknown to the Platonic tradition (see Baladi 1971). But Sophia
also sins out of liberty: in this type of system, the reason for the fall is traced back
to a free choice by Sophia, which is written in the mystery of the plan of god. For
only by determining itself in the finite through the Fall may the plērōma – being
an absolute Self – become fully aware of its potential, and thereby reach it.
The author of another text of heresiological rebuttal, entitled Elenchos,
includes a different version of the reason why Sophia fell, which is worthy of
note. It is an example of how gnostic schools, starting from the identification of
Sophia as responsible for the origin of evil, read her actions in different ways.
According to this branch of the Valentinian school, the Father is not – as Ptolemy
also claims – androgynous but an absolutely lone monad ‘which is unbegotten,
imperishable, inconceivable, incomprehensible, productive, and a cause of the
generation of all created things’ (Elenchos, VI:29, 2, in Foerster 1972: 186).
Interpreting gnostic language, this means that the Father provides form and
substance at the same time, as opposed to the system of Ptolemy in which –
according to widespread epigenetics of Aristotelian origin – the male element
gives form to the female substance. Wanting to know the Father and imitate him
not only represents a sin of knowledge for Sophia but also violates the limits of
her female dimension, which is destined to generation. In this way, the
dialectically negative value that gnostic systems tend to assign the female
element comes out more clearly, since it is seen as a necessary generator within
the life of the plērōma, enabling the outlining of the infinite and shapeless
substance of the Father, but, at the same time, it is potentially negative and
therefore in need of purification.
This gnostic variant helps shed light on the reasons which motivate Ptolemy’s
Sophia to act. According to Irenaeus, Sophia would have been lost in the
inscrutable substance of the Father had a force not intervened, namely Horos or
Limit, set in place by the Father for purposes of defense, and to guard the
boundary of his inscrutability. Sophia therefore expels the force that drives her,
the enthumēsis or intention to know the Father; as is typical in myth, this force
generates a new entity, the extrapleromatic Sophia, that falls out of the plērōma,
and, following the passions she undergoes, gives rise to the psychic substance and
the demiurge and the hylic substance and materiality. It is thus that the history of
the world begins, in which Sophia makes the evil cosmos itself a prisoner, a
pneumatic substance awaiting liberation by gnosis.

Further reading
Filoramo, G. [1990] 2005. A History of Gnosticism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Layton, B. (ed.) 1978–81. The Rediscovery of Gnosticism, 2 vols. Leiden: Brill.
Magris, A. 1997. La logica del pensiero gnostico. Brescia: Morcelliana.
Pearson, B. A. 2007. Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Pétrement, S. 1984. Le Dieu séparé: les origines du gnosticisme. Paris: Cerf.
Puech, H.-C. 1978. En quête de la gnose. Paris: Gallimard.
Rudolph, K. 1983. The Nature and History of Gnosticism, trans. R. M. Wilson. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Tardieu, M., and Dubois, J.-D. 1986. Introduction à la littérature gnostique. Paris: Cerf.
Wallis, R. T. (ed.) 1992. Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. Albany: State University of New York Press.

References
Baladi, N. 1971. ‘Origine et signifiance de l’audace chez Plotin’, in Le Néoplatonisme. Paris: Editions du
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, pp. 89–90.
Buckley, J. J. 1986. Female Fault and Fulfilment in Gnosticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.
Foerster, W. 1972. Gnosis: A selection of Gnostic Texts, in R. W. Wilson and R. McLachlan Wilson (eds),
Patristic Evidence, Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Harnack, A. von 1888–90. Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 3 vols. Freiburg im Briesgan: Mohr.
Jonas, H. 1972. The Gnostic Religion. Boston: Beacon Press.
King, K. L. 2003. What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
——(ed.) 1988. Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Layton, B. 1987. The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions. London:
Doubleday.
Logan, A. H. B. 1996. Gnostic Truth and Christian Heresy: A Study in the History of Gnosticism. Peabody,
MA: Hendrickson.
Löhr, W. 1996. Basilides und seine Schule: Eine Studie zur Theologie- und Kirchengeschichte des zweiten
Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr.
Markschies, C. 1992. Valentinus Gnosticus? Untersuchungen zur valentinianischen Gnosis mit einem
Kommentar zu den Fragmenten Valentins. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr.
Meyer, M. (ed.) 2007. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures. New York: HarperCollins.
Plotinus 1989. Enneads, 9 vols, ed. A. H. Armstrong. Loeb Classical Library. 2nd rev. ed., Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Turner, J. D. 2001. Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition. Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval.
Turner, J. D., and Majercik, R. D. (eds) 2000. Gnosticism and Later Platonism: Themes, Figures, and Texts.
Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.
Williams, M. A. 1996. Rethinking ‘Gnosticism’: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
8 The Presocratics
Vicki L. Harper

Presocratic philosophers develop rational cosmologies and explain the origin of

the cosmos without appealing to traditional mythology. Concepts related to good
and evil emerge from this context; more precisely, by the time of Heraclitus there
has emerged a conception of cosmic goodness which allows one to infer what evil
would be for human beings situated in such a cosmos.

Milesians: the well-ordered world-system

The earliest Presocratic philosophers lived in the Greek colony of Miletus in the
sixth century BCE. There are no extant writings of Thales, merely anecdotes and
later reports about him; indeed, he probably did not write books at all. For the
purposes of this volume, the most intriguing Milesian philosopher is
Anaximander, though his younger contemporary Anaximenes is of interest as
well. According to Diogenes Laertius, Anaximander was reported to be 64 years
old in 547–46 BCE and to have died shortly thereafter (DK12A1). The Suda
(DK12A2) reports that he wrote a book called On Nature – a title routinely
assigned to works on this topic. One fragment of Anaximander’s book is extant
because it was quoted by the commentator Simplicius (sixth century CE), who had
at least indirect access to the scholarship of Aristotle’s student Theophrastus, if
not necessarily a copy of Anaximander’s book itself (KRS 105). Fragments of
Anaximenes’ writings also survive, preserved by later commentators. Both
Anaximander and Anaximenes supplant mythological accounts by naturalistic
explanations of the origin, structure, and workings of the cosmos, the ordered
system of the natural world. In this context, a surviving fragment of a sentence
by Anaximander introduces evaluative language: cosmic strife is characterized in
terms of injustice. This is embedded in an account of the origin of the cosmos
from an originative source (archē) called the apeiron (boundless). Here is the
relevant passage from Simplicius’ commentary on Aristotle’s Physics; it reports
Theophrastus’ account of Anaximander’s cosmogony and includes Simplicius’
brief quotation from Anaximander’s own work, though the exact scope of the
quotation is uncertain:

Of those who say the source is one and in motion and boundless,
Anaximander, the son of Praxiades, of Miletus, the successor and student of
Thales, said the source [archē] and element of existing things was the
boundless [apeiron], being the first to apply this term to the source.1 And he
says it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some
other boundless nature, from which come to be all the heavens and world-
orders in them:2 [F1] From what things existing objects come to be, into
them too does their destruction take place according to what must be: for
they give recompense and pay restitution to each other for their injustice
according to the ordering of time, expressing it in these rather poetic terms.
(DK12A9, including DK12B1; G 51, #9)

The meaning of the term apeiron is open to interpretation, and even its
etymology is a topic of some debate. It begins with an alpha privative, meaning
not; the rest of the word probably comes from the root (per) of the nouns peras
and peirar, meaning limit or boundary. The same root forms the stem of verbs
meaning ‘to cross a boundary’, or ‘traverse’. Thus the originative source would be
boundless in extent, or indefinitely large, although a technical concept of infinity
would be anachronistic here.3 Anaximander’s apeiron is not identified with any
one of the familiar substances that make up our world; it is not fire, for example,
or water or air. In Book III of his Physics, Aristotle reports that ‘some posit a
boundless, not air or water’, as the originative cosmic source ‘in order that other
things may not be destroyed by the infinite amount of their opposite’ (DKA16).
Thus the apeiron is qualitatively indefinite as well. The relation between
Anaximander’s apeiron and the opposites that define our world-order is not
certain, nor is it clear by what means the opposites are generated from the
apeiron4 (according to Pseudo-Plutarch’s Miscellanies, that ‘which is generative
of hot and cold separated off at the coming to be of the world-order’ [DK12A10]).
Neither the apeiron itself nor the cosmic opposites should be thought of as mere
matter or inert stuff; they are self-moving and, in some sense, alive. Some modern
commentators resort to the term hylozoism – aptly, even if the term itself is
anachronistic (Guthrie 1962: 64; Algra 1999: 53–4). The apeiron is characterized
not only as ‘in motion’ (DK12A9) but also as ‘divine’, for it, unlike the opposites,
is ‘deathless and imperishable’ (reported in Aristotle’s Physics, DK12A15). In the
same passage, Aristotle says that the apeiron, as the originative source of
everything else, seems to ‘contain all things and steer all things’. These
descriptions associate the originative source with divinity and life (see Robinson
2008: 486–7) but do not entail a designer god who consciously governs all things;
it could ‘steer all things’ through natural processes. (Anaximander’s successor
Anaximenes posits a regular, natural process of condensation and rarefaction
(DK13A5) to explain the relation between his originative source, which he
identifies as air, and the diversity of things we see in our ordered world: fire, air,
wind, cloud, water, earth, stones.) Anaximander speaks of cosmic strife between
opposites and a process of recompense and restitution, which is ‘according to
what must be’ and ‘according to the ordering of time’. It is the inevitability and
regularity of the process of recompense and restitution that is important here.5
Such regularity does not entail teleology.
For Anaximenes, the regular, law-like, natural process of condensation and
rarefaction sustains cosmic order. In the case of his predecessor Anaximander, the
question of whether there could be a plurality of ordered world-systems is an
added complication, especially if these are successive worlds.6 On the simplest
interpretation, there would be one everlasting cosmos, sustained by the inevitable
process of reciprocal restitution. The opposites, or existing things, would pay
penalty to each other; the transgression of the cold (as in winter) would be
penalized by the restitution of the hot (in summer), whose transgression, in turn,
would be penalized by a restitution of cold. Thus injustice would be associated
with a disruption of proper proportions among opposites. The rather legalistic
language of recompense and restitution could suggest a judicious restoration of
order, in which cosmic order, as such, is seen as fitting.7 The same point could
apply to a plurality of ordered world-systems, if these were concurrent. If there
were successive world-systems, each as a whole subject to generation and
destruction, a somewhat different interpretation would be needed. In that case,
the law-like process would be merely the inevitable repetition of the generation
and destruction of successive world-systems – a focus on regularity and
inevitability, but not on the value of maintaining order as such.
The Milesians are relevant for our purposes not because they develop a concept
of evil, but because they can plausibly be interpreted as introducing a conception
of cosmic good. This sets the stage, so to speak, for the development of other
concepts related to both good and evil. The Milesians do not address the human
condition within such a cosmos. Although Anaximander pondered the origin of
human and animal life (Aëtius reports that the first animals developed in
moisture, protected by a prickly bark or shell, from which they emerged when
they moved onto land [DK12A30]), his concern was how to account for the self-
sufficiency and survival of the first terrestrial humans and animals. There is no
evidence that Anaximander or Anaximenes wrote about either the place of
human beings in the cosmic order or how we should live our lives in relation to
the paradigmatically well-ordered world in which we are situated. Heraclitus
does address these issues.

Heraclitus: cosmic logos and the human condition

Heraclitus flourished in the late sixth to early fifth century BCE in Ephesus, an
Ionian port city north-west of Miletus. His unique style of writing – aphoristic,
full of wordplays and double meanings – earned him a reputation for literary
obscurity, as Diogenes Laertius reports (DK22A1). But there is a philosophical
point to his mode of expression: the enigmatic style of his writing mirrors his
metaphysical view of the cosmos as one and many: a unity in diversity, its
stability secured by change. In perhaps the most straightforward of the extant
fragments, Heraclitus not only summarizes his overall view of the cosmos but
also addresses his audience, suggesting how they may discern the truth for
themselves: ‘Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things
are one’ (DK22B50; KRS 187, #196). Of course, this raises questions for us: what is
the Logos, and how does one listen to it? How can all things be one? Why is it
wise for us to agree that is so? Pursuing these questions serves to delineate
Heraclitus’ view not only of the cosmos but also of the human condition.
First, how can all things be one? Each Milesian philosopher appealed to a
single originative source (archē) for the cosmos. According to Anaximander, there
was one originative source, the apeiron, from which the opposites were somehow
generated, enabling the war of opposites within the defined cosmos; for
Anaximenes, not only is there one archē, air, but, given the processes of
condensation and rarefaction, one can explain how all things come from air.8 For
Heraclitus, there is a special role for fire. In one fragment, he draws an analogy
between exchanging all things for fire and vice versa, and between exchanging
goods for gold and gold for goods (DK22B90). But, in another fragment,
Heraclitus characterizes the cosmos as a whole as ever-living fire: ‘This world-
order, the same for all, no god or human made, but it always was and is and will
be: ever-living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures’ (DK22B30;
trans. V. L. Harper) This fragment associates the regularity of the cosmic
processes of kindling and being quenched with the maintenance of the cosmos
(world-order) itself.9 In a sense, one could say that everything is fire: for the sake
of convenience, call this Fire. At this cosmic level, however, it is better to think of
Fire as a process; it is not merely a single, privileged stage in the process. In the
latter sense, fire is not ever-living: ‘The death of fire is the birth of air, and the
death of air is the birth of water’ (DK22B76b; G 155, #52; see also DK22B36; G
167, #101). Thus Heraclitus probably should not be interpreted as a material
monist. What is stable and enduring is the ordered world-system as a sustained
process of regular, reciprocal changes. The regular processes of ‘kindling’ and
‘quenching’ sustain the kosmos.10
A parallel in ordinary human experience can be found with respect to rivers:
‘On those stepping into rivers staying the same, other and other waters flow’
(DK22B12; G 159, #62). Without the flow of different waters, there would be no
river; the flow constitutes the river. In a comment that seems directed at
Anaximander’s characterization of the war of opposites as injustice, Heraclitus
insists that ‘strife is justice, and all things happen according to strife and
necessity’ (DK22B80; G 157, #58). Inevitable, measured strife constitutes cosmic
order. Heraclitus points to a kind of unity that goes far beyond a single
originative source for the cosmos. He cites a number of everyday examples that
encourage us to think holistically about what we observe in ordinary experience:
‘A road up and down is one and the same’ (DK22B60; G 157, #61). ‘Sickness
makes health pleasant and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest’ (DK22B111; G
163, #80). ‘Sea is the purest and most polluted water: for fish it is drinkable and
healthy, for men undrinkable and harmful’ (DK22B61; G 163, #79). None of these
examples undermines the law of non-contradiction; they do show ways in which
a correct understanding of things must appreciate unity despite relativity or
diversity.
Second, what is the Logos, and how does one listen to it? The word logos has a
range of interconnected meanings by the time of Heraclitus. Most notably, in
addition to the literal sense of ‘what is said’, it can mean account, cause or
reason, measure or proportion. Of course, someone could give a false account, or
deceptive reason; what is alleged might not be correct. But logos can also be used
to signify a correct account or explanation, the true or proper reason, due
measure; this is the way Heraclitus uses the word in DK22B50. (An extensive
survey of the word’s usage before and during the fifth century BCE, with many
specific examples, is given by Guthrie (1962: 419–24).) To understand the logos is
to understand the cosmos correctly. We can listen to the logos by paying
attention to what we experience, giving weight to the evidence of our senses:
‘The things of which there is sight, hearing, experience, I prefer’ (DK22B55; G
149, #33), but also realizing that experience needs to be properly interpreted:
‘Poor witnesses for men are the eyes and ears of those who have barbarian souls’
(DK22B107; G 149, #35).11 One needs to attend not only to one’s own experience
but also to be self-reflective in interpreting that experience: ‘I enquired of myself’
(DK22B108; G 149, #38). Heraclitus chastises many for misunderstanding, but he
does not seem to think that sound thinking is humanly impossible: ‘All men have
a share in self-knowledge and sound thinking’ (DK22B116; G 147, #30). The key is
to seek what is common (DK22B2), for ‘there is a single common world for those
who are awake, but each sleeper retires into a private world’ (DK22B89; G 143,
#9). Thus, in a striking (and enduring) analogy, Heraclitus compares an
objectively correct understanding of the world to being awake, as opposed to
dreaming. Sound thinking is a virtue with normative import for human action:
‘Sound thinking is the greatest virtue and wisdom: to speak the truth and to act
on the basis of an understanding of the nature of things’ (DK22B112; G 171, #123).
 Clearly, this is a normative principle for the virtuous, wise person and for the
good human life. Does Heraclitus go beyond this, to address spiritual concerns or
an afterlife? Heraclitus makes a number of rather cryptic comments about soul
(psyche): ‘If you went in search of it, you would not find the limits of the soul,
though you travelled every road – so deep is its measure [logos]’ (DK22B45; G
167, #99). ‘For men who die there await things they do not expect or anticipate’
(DK22B27; G 171, #119). ‘For deaths that are greater greater portions gain’
(DK22B25; G 171, #114). But this need not entail personal survival or an afterlife.
One’s soul may not be separable from anything else in the cosmos: ‘For souls it is
death to become water, for water death to become earth, but from earth water is
born, and from water soul’ (DK22B36; G 167, #101).12 But how could this demean
the soul? All is one: in Heraclitus’ view, not even God is separable from the
cosmos. According to Heraclitus, to fail to agree that all things are one is to
misunderstand not only the nature of the cosmos and oneself but also the nature
of God: ‘God is day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger’ (DK22B67;
G 177, #148). ‘One being, the only wise one, would and would not be called by
the name of Zeus [life]’ (DK22B32; G 177, #147). ‘Thunderbolt steers all things’
(DK22B64; G 157, #56). God is not separate from the ever-living Fire that
constitutes the cosmos, the world-order, as a whole.
Even more clearly than for the Milesians, Heraclitus associates goodness with
cosmic order and the regularity of cosmic processes, although he explicitly
contrasts limited human points of view with a divine appreciation of cosmic
order as a whole: ‘To God all things are fair, good and just, but men suppose some
things are unjust, some just’ (DK22B102; G 177, #149). A wise and virtuous person
must strive to see things from a cosmic perspective and to appreciate the beauty,
goodness, and rightness of the whole, insofar as this is humanly possible. Thus
the goal for humanity is to live in accordance with natural (and divine) cosmic
order – an idea that foreshadows Stoic philosophy. Given this view of objective
goodness, both with respect to the cosmos and with respect to human beings, it
seems appropriate to suggest that, for Heraclitus, the opposite would be
objectively bad or evil: being out of tune with the natural (and divine) order of
the whole. Heraclitus has something to say about moral – not just prudential –
goodness for human beings, so that a failure to seek ‘sound thinking’ and ‘to act
on the basis of an understanding of the nature of things’ (DK22B112) should
count not merely as foolish but as evil. I think that all of these points taken
together are sufficient to support the idea that Heraclitus’ thought suggests a
conception of evil.
I have dwelt in some detail on Heraclitus, since there are enough surviving
fragments to support a claim that he had not only a conception of cosmic
goodness but also a normative principle for human beings, the violation of which
might plausibly be construed as evil. Admittedly, this is an inference from what
he says about cosmic goodness; Heraclitus does not directly address the topic of
evil. But I shall argue that, of all the Presocratics (with the possible exception of
Empedocles), Heraclitus comes closest to suggesting a conception of evil. Earlier
Presocratics provide a conception of cosmic order but do not discuss the
normative implications of such order for human beings. Even the fragments of
Xenophanes, who also flourished at the end of the sixth or early fifth century BCE,
do not provide enough support for a conception of evil.

Xenophanes
Xenophanes, a poet who was born in Colophon, near Ephesus, did not stay in
Ionia: possibly leaving there around 546 BCE, the time of the Persian invasion of
Ionia, he travelled extensively in Sicily and southern Italy – an area that also
became home to another famous émigré from Ionia, Pythagoras of Samos. (In
relating an anecdote [DK21B7] about Pythagoras’ intervention to stop the beating
of an unfortunate puppy, Xenophanes comments wryly on the former’s belief in
the transmigration of souls: Pythagoras claimed to recognize the soul of his friend
when he heard the puppy crying.) Xenophanes shares the interests of the
Milesians insofar as he, too, offers a naturalistic account of the cosmos: ‘All
things that come to be and grow are earth and water’ (DK21B29; G 217, #50).
Phenomena such as comets, shooting stars, meteors, and lightning are explained
in terms of burning clouds (DK21A44–5; G 125, ##70–71). As for rainbows, ‘She
whom they call Iris [rainbow], this too is in reality cloud, purple and scarlet and
green to the view’ (DK21B32; G 125, #72). Xenophanes does have interesting and
new things to say about the cosmos13 – even more so about theology: ‘One God,
greatest among gods and men, not at all like to mortals in body nor in thought’
(DK21B23; G 111, #35). ‘All of him sees, all thinks, all hears’ (DK21B 24; G 111,
#36). ‘But without any toil he shakes all things by the thought of his mind’
(DK21B25; G 111, #37). Xenophanes also has something to say about the human
condition:

Now the plain truth no man has seen nor will any know concerning the gods
and what I have said concerning all things. For even if he should completely
succeed in describing things as they come to pass, nonetheless he himself
does not know: opinion is wrought over [or comes to] all.
(DK21B34; G 111, #74)

However, he also enjoins: ‘Let these things be believed as being like true things’
(DK21B35; G 127, #76), and one fragment, at least, suggests a more optimistic
view of the human condition than one might expect: ‘Nor from the beginning
have the gods revealed all things to mortals, but in time by seeking they come
upon what is better’ (DK21B38; G 127, #77). His distinction between knowledge
and opinion seems to leave room for the value of mortal opinion.14 But
Xenophanes does not agree with Heraclitus that ‘To God all things are fair, good
and just’ (DK21B102); we cannot know that. Nor does he say we ought to
appreciate divine perspective and strive ‘to act on the basis of an understanding
of the nature of things’ (DK21B112), as Heraclitus does. Thus Xenophanes’
cautious epistemology seems to rule out a Heraclitean conception of evil.

Pythagoras
We have very little reliable evidence for the views of either the historical
Pythagoras or the very early Pythagoreans. Huffman (2011), for example, cites
only four points as being well supported by early evidence: Pythagoras’ fame as a
believer in the immortality of the soul and reincarnation, as someone with
expertise on religious ritual, as a wonder-worker, and as the founder of a strict
way of life.15 Huffman’s view is consonant with the work of Burkert (1972),
whose analysis helped to separate the historical Pythagoras from the persona
created for him by later commentators.16 Some scholars, such as Kahn (2011),
think Burkert went too far, and I would agree that it is plausible that Pythagoras
shared at least some of the interests of the philosophers who flourished in nearby
Miletus somewhat before and at roughly the same time that he himself was
growing up on Samos.17 Without assuming that Pythagoras articulated a detailed
cosmology, it does not seem unreasonable to hypothesize that he believed in the
existence of an orderly cosmos and that he connected his religious and moral
beliefs with the idea of cosmic order. Mathematical analyses of cosmic order are
developed in the late fourth century BCE by Philolaus (Huffman 1993), but
similarly detailed analysis is not substantiated for the original Presocratic
Pythagoreans. With respect to the development of a conception of evil, the well-
attested early Pythagorean belief in the immortality of the soul and reincarnation
sounds promising: the idea that how one lives one’s current life could affect one’s
future reincarnations is consonant with an idea of negative consequences for an
evil life. But we do not have enough evidence about Pythagoras or the earliest
Pythagoreans to determine their conception of evil precisely.

Parmenides of Elea
Now for the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides. At this point, Presocratic philosophy
takes a philosophical turn that radically challenges the kind of naturalistic
cosmology pursued by the Milesians and undercuts the very basis for the kind of
conception of cosmic goodness that supports the views of Heraclitus as well.
There is some foreshadowing of Eleatic epistemological concerns in earlier
distinctions (in Xenophanes and in Heraclitus) between knowledge and mortal
opinions. However, Parmenides’ poetic, albeit carefully reasoned exploration of
the limits of human enquiry, raises questions for us about the possibility of a
cosmos at all.
According to Diogenes Laertius, Parmenides flourished in the 69th Olympiad
(504–503 BCE) at Elea in southern Italy (DK28A1), although Plato’s dialogue
Parmenides (127b–8d) suggests a somewhat later date. He wrote in hexameter
verse, and substantial portions of his poem survive. It is divided into three parts: a
prologue, Truth (the path of persuasion), and Opinion. There is considerable
debate about the interpretation of each of these three sections, and about their
relation to one another. In the prologue, Parmenides offers a first-person
description of a chariot journey, in which the narrator (addressed by the goddess
as a ‘youth’ in line 24) was borne by ‘welldiscerning’ mares, ‘when the maiden
daughters of the Sun hastened to escort me, having left the House of Night for the
light’ (DK28B1, 4–10; G 211, #10). The daughters of the sun persuade ‘much
avenging Justice’ to open the ‘ethereal’ gates of the paths of Night and Day, so
that they may drive through to be welcomed by a gracious goddess (DK28B1, 11–
23; G 211, #10). The goddess addresses him, saying:

O youth, companion to immortal charioteers,

and to mares which bear you, as you arrive at our abode,
hail! Since no evil fate has sent you forth to travel
this way (for indeed it is far from the track of men),
but Right and Justice. It is right for you to learn all things,
both the unshaken heart of persuasive Truth,
and the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true reliance.
(DK28B1, 24–30; G 213, #10)

Since antiquity, commentators have been tempted to interpret the prologue as

an allegory. For example, in our source passage for DK28B1, Sextus Empiricus
interprets the prologue as an epistemological allegory on soul and the senses
(Adversus Mathematikos 7.111). In modern times, more than one scholar has
analysed the passage as a journey to enlightenment.18 Some speculate that, even
if it is an allegory, it could stem from Parmenides’ own transcendental
experience: ‘The allegory may, of course, be based on something akin to a
mystical experience, but it is none the less an allegory’ (Bowra 1937: 98). Others
deny that it is intended to be an allegory at all, conceding only that it is
metaphorical.19 Scholars such as Curd and Lesher do not interpret either the
prologue or the poem as a whole as subscribing to divine revelation as a basis for
knowledge but, rather, as introducing a reliable method of enquiry, providing
‘signs’ by which one may test the truth of beliefs for oneself.20 McKirahan (2010:
153) suggests that Parmenides is ‘attempting to describe his discovery of the
divine power of logic’. (For his analysis of Parmenides’ use of logic in the overall
structure of the argument, see McKirahan 2008.) A detailed study of motifs and
themes in the prologue is given by Mourelatos ([1971] 2008a: 1–46).21
There is even livelier debate about the interpretation of the second part of the
poem, Truth, and its implications for the status of the third part, Opinion. Is the
path of persuasion, Truth, designed to encourage us to follow reasoning, which,
paradoxically, points to a reality that transcends the bounds of discursive
reasoning itself? Does it rule out cosmology altogether, on the grounds that the
very existence of an ordered world – taken for granted by ordinary experience, as
well as by Parmenides’ philosophical predecessors – is illusory? Or does the poem
allow cosmology a measure of credibility, even though this must have the status
of opinion rather than knowledge?22 At the beginning of Truth, the goddess says:

Come now and I shall tell, and do you receive through hearing the tale,
which are the only ways of inquiry for thinking:
the one: that it is and that it is not possible not to be,
is the path of Persuasion (for she attends on Truth);
the other, that it is not and that it is right it should not be,
this I declare to you is an utterly inscrutable track,
for neither could you know what is not (for it cannot be accomplished),
nor could you declare it [or; point it out].
(DK28B2; G 213, #11)

The overall form of Parmenides’ argument is a disjunctive syllogism: A or B.

But not B. Therefore A. In terms of its pure logical form, the argument is
impeccable in that it is formally valid: if the premises are all true, the conclusion
must true. But are the premises true? Why isn’t the disjunction a false
dichotomy? Even more basically, what is the subject? In the Greek, no subject is
stated, only the third-person singular verb. If there is an implied subject for the
sentence, one possibility is that the subject is ‘what is’ or ‘Being’; alternatively,
one might interpret ‘[it]’ as a kind of generic placeholder for whatever can be
spoken or thought.23 In that case, the disjunctive first premise of Parmenides’
syllogism would commit us to the view that, with respect to any subject, whether
spoken or thought, ‘either it is and it is not possible not to be, or it is not and it is
right that it should not be’. Since the second disjunct is ‘utterly inscrutable’, we
would be left with the first disjunct alone. At the end of our fragment,
Parmenides supports this conclusion by appealing to an even more fundamental
premise: ‘for neither could you know what is not (for it cannot be accomplished)
nor could you declare it’ (DK28B2 above, lines 7–8). This is the most basic
premise of the entire argument, one to which Parmenides returns more than
once. Its interpretation, and exactly how it is supposed to function in the overall
argument, is a topic of much debate, as is the related question of whether there
are, after all, three routes rather than two. For example, could the route of mortals
in DK28B6, 3–9, be a third route?24 One line of interpretation holds that the
unknowability and (impossibility) of what is not would rule out not only the
second way or path (it is not and it is right that it should not be) but also what
one might see as an attractive third option: speaking or thinking of contingencies,
or descriptions that presuppose a subject that both is (in some respect) and is not
(in another). As fragment 7 puts it: ‘Never shall this prevail, that things that are
not are’ (DK28B7; G 2l5, #16). The use of the verb is at issue here, because it
affects the overall interpretation of the poem with respect to the reality of the
cosmos itself. This is germane to our purpose, for, if there really is no ordered
world-system at all, there can be no conception of cosmic goodness to suggest
what might count as evil, as we saw in Heraclitus.
On the line of interpretation suggested above, Parmenides’ basic premise
would seem to rule out the intelligibility of any definite, describable subject at all.
The goddess asks us to ‘judge by reasoning the very contentious examination
uttered by me’ (DK28B7; G 215, #16). Reason is supposed to direct us to the
conclusion that ‘only one tale is left of the way: that it is’ by many ‘signs’ posted
on the way: ‘that [i] what is is ungenerated and imperishable, [ii] a whole of one
kind, [iii] unperturbed and [iv] complete’ (DK23B8 lines 1–4; G 217, #17). Could
this be using reason and language to point to an ineffable reality that is beyond
the scope of discursive reasoning itself? If Truth is meant to point to a
transcendent, ineffable reality, then all the things which mortals have established,
‘trusting them to be true’, would be illusory: ‘coming to be and perishing, being
and not being, changing place and exchanging bright colour’ (DK28B8, 39–41; G
219, #17). This would mean that Parmenides rejects not merely the enigmatic
philosophy of Heraclitus but the beliefs of ordinary mortals with respect to the
existence of an ordered world-system of movement and change, including a
plurality of identifiably different things that come to be and pass away. However,
the text and translation of DK28B8 lines 38–40 are disputed, as is the translation
of crucial lines at the end of the prologue (DK28B1, 31–2), and also at the
beginning of Opinion (DK28B8, 49–54). The interpretation of Truth and the
epistemological and metaphysical issues associated with its implications for
Opinion are also intertwined with both linguistic questions and debates over
Parmenides’ use of the verb ‘be’.25 Thus other interpretations of Parmenides allow
a measure of credibility to Opinion, including the cosmology outlined there.26
In Heraclitus we saw a conception of cosmic goodness and a view of the nature
of soul, which suggested that what would count as evil in such a cosmos would
be a failure of ‘sound thinking’ – that is, failing to appreciate cosmic goodness
and failing ‘to act on the basis of an understanding of the nature of things’
(DK22B112). Parmenides undercuts the basis for this inference, either altogether
(by arguing that cosmology must be illusory) or at least in part (by arguing that,
at best, cosmology must be in the province of opinion but not of knowledge). But
could Parmenides offer another framework for conceptions of good and evil? If
the poem points to the ability of reason to transcend ordinary human experience
altogether, then (assuming reason is a faculty of soul) this may suggest a
normative goal that requires an attunement not to cosmic order but, rather, to a
transcendent reality. Evaluative and normative language occurs in the prologue:
‘since no evil fate sent you forth to travel this way (for indeed it is far from the
track of men), but Right (Themis) and Justice (Dikē). It is right for you to learn all
things’ (DK28B1, 26–8; G 215, #10). The decrees of Justice also play a prominent
role in the Way of Truth, along with the bonds of Necessity (Anankē) and Fate
(Moira), and, at the beginning of the Way of Opinion, mortals are chastised for
naming two forms ‘of which it is not right to name one – this is where they have
gone astray’ (DK28B8, 53–4; G 219, #17). Perhaps this suggests that evil, for
human beings, is to ignore the guidance of reason, to fail to take the path of
enquiry as reason directs, to ignore the ‘signs’ posted on the path – in short, to
fail to undertake the quest for reality beyond everyday experience. If Parmenides
allows transcendent goodness, this conception of evil might follow.

Cosmology after Parmenides: the new pluralists

Presocratic philosophers after Parmenides introduce new cosmologies to explain
the existence of ordered world-systems. Two of these philosophers also introduce
new divine forces for their cosmogony: Mind (Nous) for Anaxagoras and Love
and Strife for Empedocles. The Atomists, by contrast, develop a materialistic
cosmology governed by mechanical necessity, thereby repudiating divine
intervention and design.

Anaxagoras
According to Diogenes Laertius’ report of Apollodorus’ chronology (DK59A1),
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae in Ionia was born in the 70th Olympiad (around 500
BCE) and died in the first year of the 88th Olympiad (428 BCE). Accepting
Parmenides’ arguments against generation and destruction in DK28B8, 6–14 –
construed as involving the unintelligible notion of what is not – Anaxagoras uses
the idea of mixture to get around them. According to Simplicius, he said that the
Greeks ‘should really call coming to be mixture and perishing segregation’
(DK59B17; G 281, #24). Originally, there is a primordial mixture: ‘Together were
all things’ (DK59B2; G 281, #11), and cosmogony begins when air and aither are
separated off. So far, this does not sound very new, but it soon becomes clear that
Anaxagoras is working with some novel ideas. For example, he maintains that ‘it
is not possible for things to be isolated, but everything has a portion of
everything’ (DK59B6; G 285, #19). In the same fragment, he appeals to a principle
of infinite divisibility, such that ‘it is not possible for there to be a least’, and
asserts that ‘there are portions equal in number of the large and of the small’. In
addition, whether consistently or not, Anaxagoras posits the principle that ‘each
one is and was most manifestly those things of which it has the most’ (DK59B12;
G 291, #31). Although they can never be isolated, even in the original mixture
there were ‘seeds countless in number which were not all like one another’
(DK59B4(b); G 281, #13). At the macroscopic level, once separation from the
primordial mixture has occurred, the principle of predominance is supposed to
explain the manifest diversity of things that make up the ordered world-system.
The interpretation and analysis of Anaxagoras’ principles, as well as the relation
between his use of infinite divisibility and the paradoxes of the Eleatic
philosopher Zeno, is a fascinating topic which I cannot pursue here.27 For our
purposes, it is not the details of Anaxagoras’ cosmology but his introduction of
Nous that is important.
In an extensive surviving fragment (DK59B12; G 191, #31), Anaxagoras
elaborates on this new cosmic force. Mind alone is unmixed: ‘Everything else has
a portion of everything but mind is boundless, autonomous, and mixed with no
object, but it is alone all by itself.’ Yet Mind is present and active within the
existing cosmos: ‘And all things that have soul, both the larger and the smaller,
these does mind rule.’ Mind was responsible for generating the cosmos in the first
place, by means of a revolution that separated things from the primordial
mixture: ‘And of the whole revolution did mind take control, so that it revolved
in the beginning.’ Mind oversees the continuing revolution that defines and
sustains the world-order, ‘this revolution, with which the stars, the sun, the
moon, the air, and the aither which were being separated now revolve.’ Mind
comprehends and orders everything: ‘And things mixed together, things
separated, and things segregated, all these did mind comprehend. And the kinds
of things that were to be – such as were but now are not, all that now are, and
such as will be – all these did mind set in order.’ Past, present, and future:
everything comprehensively set in order by Mind.28
So what is missing? The role of Mind in Anaxagoras’ cosmology points in the
direction of teleology, but it does not suffice. As Socrates complains in Plato’s
Phaedo (97b), what is missing is an account of cosmic goodness: ‘For I never
imagined that once Anaxagoras had asserted that these things were ordered by
mind, he would adduce any other cause than that it was best for them to be as
they were’ (DK59A47; G 309, #64). In contrast to Heraclitus, Anaxagoras does not
develop a conception of cosmic goodness, or an account of the place of human
beings in such a cosmos, from which one might infer what counts as evil.

Empedocles
Empedocles of Acragas in Sicily was a contemporary of Parmenides’ follower
Zeno. According to Diogenes Laertius, he wrote two works in verse, ‘On Nature’
and ‘Purifications’ (DK31A1). Published fragments from the Strasbourg papyrus
(Martin and Primavesi 1999) reinforce modern scholars’ suggestions that there is
no sharp separation of religious from cosmological thought in Empedocles’
work.29 Some of Empedocles’ surviving fragments are clearly religious, since they
contain fallen gods, a doctrine of reincarnation, and transmigration as a process
of expiation and purification after transgression (DK31B115; G 345, #25), and even
the possibility of redemption (DK31B146, 147; G 417, ## 220, 221). Ethical (and
religious) guidelines stress the evil of killing and the importance of abstaining
from meat (DK31B115, 136, 137; G 345, 413, ##25, 197, 198). It is not clear how
Empedocles’ religious views fit his cosmology or the role of Love and Strife.30
Recent work by Primavesi (2008a, 2008b) and others suggests some promising,
though not unchallenged lines of research.31 Thus, although the relation between
Empedocles’ physical theory and his religious and ethical views is more
problematic than such connections in Heraclitus, this, too, could provide fertile
ground for investigation of the development of conceptions of evil in Presocratic
thought.

The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus

The Presocratics also explore another option, however. In contrast to the views of
Anaxagoras and Empedocles, as well as to the Heraclitean picture of a cosmos
ordered by divine logos, the Atomists present a purely mechanistic account:
cosmoi (in the plural) are subject to blind causal necessity, without teleology or
transcendent value.32 According to Democritus, pleasure and pain are the criteria
for what is or is not good or profitable for us (DK68B188), and that should be the
focus of our concern.33 Thus, although it makes sense to talk about what is wise
or foolish for an individual, or even for human beings in general, good and evil
are not absolute. Some of the ideas of the Atomists, including their scepticism
about transcendent values, are explored by the Sophists and taken up later in a
systematic way by the Epicureans; it is not surprising that Epicurus, in the
context of his naturalistic, hedonistic approach to ethics, explicitly classifies
justice and injustice as purely a matter of convention and human agreement.
‘There is no such thing as justice in itself; it is merely an agreement among men
… that they will neither harm nor be harmed’ (Principal Doctrines, XXXIII).

Conclusion
In conclusion, conceptions of evil are suggested by the work of some but not all
of the Presocratic philosophers. The clearest example is found in Heraclitus,
whose extant fragments explicitly include the notion of cosmic goodness and of
the human condition in relation to such a cosmos, from which a specific
conception of evil would follow for human beings: a failure of ‘sound thinking’,
failing ‘to speak the truth and to act on the basis of the nature of things’
(DK22B112; G 171, #123). Recent work on Empedocles by Primavesi (2008a,
2008b) and others suggests further promising avenues for research. The Milesians
Anaximander and Anaximenes may set the stage for a conception of evil by their
assumption of cosmic goodness, but they do not discuss normative principles for
human beings in such a cosmos. Xenophanes’ cautious epistemology seems to
rule out a Heraclitean view of good and evil. The surviving evidence about
Pythagoras and the earliest Pythagoreans is too meagre for any precise
determination of their conception of evil. Although the interpretation of
Parmenides is open to debate, his thought must rule out any conception of evil
based on the notion of the reality of cosmic goodness. However, one might argue
that Parmenides introduces a normative principle from which a different
conception of evil follows: a failure to take the path of enquiry as reason directs.
Anaxagoras introduces Mind as a cosmic principle, but – as Plato notes in Phaedo
(97b) – fails to extend this to a teleological account of cosmic goodness. Finally,
the Atomists preclude the issue at the level of metatheory: the metaphysics
behind their atomic physics rules out a teleological conception both of cosmic
goodness and of any absolute conception of good or evil at all.

Texts and abbreviations

Citations of primary sources are keyed to the following editions:
Diels, H., and Kranz, W. 1951. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th ed., 3 vols., Berlin: Weidmann
[abbreviated DK].
This is the standard source for citing the texts of the Presocratics. Entries for each
philosopher are divided into two sections – ancient testimony in section A, and
the Greek texts of extant fragments, plus German translations, in section B. For
example, Heraclitus’ Fragment 12 is cited as DK22B12, while Diogenes Laertius’
anecdotal report of Heraclitus’ death is found in DK22A1.
Graham, D. W. 2010. The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies
of the Major Presocratics, Part 1: Cosmologists and Ontologists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
[abbreviated G].
This contains the Greek texts accompanied by English translations. Unless
otherwise noted, the translations used here are from Graham’s text with spelling
adjusted to UK conventions.
Kirk, G. S., Raven, J. E., and Schofield M. [1957] 1983. The Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd ed., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press [abbreviated KRS].
This includes Greek texts and English translations, with commentary.

Notes
1 Some scholars (e.g. Kahn 1960: 29–32) suggest that Anaximander’s innovation was in his use of the term
archē rather than the term apeiron. See the discussion in KRS: 108–9.
2 The Greek word translated as heavens (ouranoi) probably refers to Anaximander’s arrangement of
celestial circles or wheels of fire; these were reported by Hippolytus (and others) as explaining the sun,
moon, and stars we see as heavenly bodies (DK12A20). The Greek word kosmoi, translated as world-
orders, is also plural and has prompted debate as to whether or not Anaximander postulated a plurality
of ordered world-systems – successive or even coextensive in time (concurrent). McKirahan (2001)
argues for the latter interpretation. See also the discussion in KRS 122–6 and Kahn (1960: 47–53).
3 See interpretations and discussions of the etymology of the term apeiron in Kahn (1960: 231–9); KRS
109–10; Barnes ([1979] 1982: 28–36); and Graham (2010: 66). See also Liddell et al. ([1968] 1996).
4 See discussion in Kahn (1960: 40–42); KRS 126–33.
5 See Graham (2010: 67) for the translator’s comment on the phrase ‘according to the ordering of time’;
see also Sassi (2006).
6 See Simplicius’ use of the plural term kosmoi in DK12A20. In parallel testimony, Aëtius also uses the
plural term kosmoi (DK12A14), but Pseudo-Plutarch uses the singular term kosmos (DK12A10).
Simplicius and Aëtius may have mistakenly attributed a plurality of kosmoi to Anaximander, or the
plural term might be interpreted differently. For example, Kahn (1960: 53) suggests that the term kosmoi
may refer simply to ‘different constitutions of dry land, sea and atmosphere in which men may live at
other points upon the earth’.
7 For a discussion of the legalistic language, see McKirahan (2010: 45) and Sullivan (1995: 214–15).
8 Is Anaximenes really a material monist, or would that anachronistically presuppose Aristotle’s
distinction between substance as substratum and attributes? Stokes (1971); Graham (2003; 2010: 90).
9 Clement of Alexandria, who reports fragment 30 in the context of his Miscellanies (Stromateis V: 104, I),
makes a valiant effort to interpret Heraclitus’ words in a way that makes them consistent with the Stoic
 doctrine of ecpyrosis, the doctrine of periodic world conflagrations that consume the world. But the
kosmos (which is said to be everlasting) is the ordered world-system. G. S. Kirk ([1954] 1962: 307–24 and
335–8) has a detailed discussion of the issue, including a succinct summary of arguments for and
against the ecpyrosis interpretation of Heraclitus.
10 For some interpretations of Fire in Heraclitus: Barnes (1982); Graham (2008); Kahn (1979); Kirk ([1954]
1962); Marcovich (1967); McKirahan (2010); Nehamas (2002); Robinson (1987; 2008: 489–93); Wright
(2008).
11 The Greek term barbaroi refers to foreigners (as opposed to Greeks) and mimics the unintelligible
sounds made by those who do not speak the language (Greek).
12 Articles on soul in Heraclitus may be found in Nussbaum (1972) and Schofield (1991).
13 For a discussion of Xenophanes’ cosmology, see Lesher (1992: 120–48); Mourelatos (2008b). For
Xenophanes’ theology, see Lesher (1992: 78–119); Robinson (2008) 487–9.
14 For a discussion of the debate over the extent of Xenophanes’ scepticism, see Lesher (1992: 149–86).
15 See also Huffman (1999).
16 Burkert’s book was originally published in German in 1962 as Weisheit und Wissenschaft.
17 Kahn (2011: 23–38).
18 For example, Fränkel ([1930] 1975: 1–14); Cordero (1984: 176–84); Coxon (1986: 13–17); Conche (1996:
41–71).
19 For example, Graham (2010: 235) suggests that, ‘Rather than allegory, Parmenides seems to be aiming at
the moral status of an epic poem, one that claims revelation for the poet and authority for the message’.
See also Palmer (2009: 52–3).
20 Curd ([1998] 2004; 2012), Lesher (2008: 472–6).
21 Mourelatos argues that the ‘image of the route mediates a new concept of the nature of thinking and
knowing. The image of wandering works toward a concept of error which corresponds to this new
concept of knowing’ (Mourelatos 2008a: 40). In characterizing this new concept of knowing, he notes
that “[t]he transformation of the theme of Fate-Constraint is a projection which reaches toward the
concept of logical or metaphysical necessity” (ibid.).
22 For the first option (ruling out cosmology), see Owen ([1960] 1975), who argues that the second part of
the poem, Truth, challenges the very idea of a reality extended in space and time (cf. Barnes 1982). For
the second (finding a measure of credibility for Opinion), see, e.g., Curd ([1998] 2004; 2012); Graham
(2010: 204); Lesher (1999: 236–41); Nehamas (2002); Palmer (2009: 163). Sedley (1999: 124), who interprets
Truth as establishing the reality of a spatially extended, albeit undifferentiated sphere, holds that the
Way of Opinion ‘does not vindicate phenomena, but it does address the most glaring problem facing
anyone ready to entertain Parmenides’ conclusions: how can human experience have got things so
 catastrophically wrong?’
23 Owen ([1960] 1975) argues that analysis of fragment 6, lines 1–2, supports the idea that there is no
definite subject such as ‘Being’; rather, the implied subject is whatever can be spoken or thought. See
also Owen ([1966] 1974); Mourelatos (2008a); Schofield in KRS 245; Palmer (2009: 74–82).
24 Nehamas (1981) and Cordero (1984) discuss textual details in support of a two-path interpretation.
Owen ([1960] 1975) also argues against the viability of the third path. Most scholars who argue for a
measure of credibility for opinion think there is room for a third path: see note 22 above.
25 Virtually every commentator on Parmenides must confront issues concerning the usage of the verb ‘be’.
Palmer (2009: 93–100) expands the basic issues with his modal analysis of Parmenides’ ways of enquiry.
See also Kahn ([1973] 2003) for a wide-ranging general study of the verb in Greek.
26 See note 22 above.
27 Curd (2008). Allen and Furley (1975) include three classic articles in their anthology: Cornford ([1930]
1975); Vlastos ([1950] 1975); and Strang ([1963] 1975). See also Curd (2007) for detailed discussion and
bibliography, and Curd (2011) for an overview of issues.
28 For a discussion the role of Nous in Anaxagoras, see Lesher (1995); Laks (1993); De Filippo (1993); Curd
(2007); Robinson (2008: 494–6).
29 There is still debate about whether there were two separate poems (Primavesi 2008a, 2008b) or only one
(Inwood [1992] 2001; Osborne 1987; 2000b). For an overview, see Parry (2012).
30 See, e.g., Guthrie (1965); Kahn ([1960] 1974); O’Brien (1969); Solmsen ([1965] 1975); Wright ([1981]
1995); KRS; O’Brien (1995); Osborne (2000a, 2000b); Inwood ([1992] 2001); Curd (2005); Graham (2005);
Janko (2005); Pierris (2005); McKirahan (2010).
31 Pierris (2005); Primavesi (2008a, 2008b); Graham (2005); Janko (2005); Laks (2005); Kingsley (2002); Laks
(2002). See Caston and Graham 2002: (127–37).
32 See discussion of the role of mechanistic necessity in the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus in G
621; KRS 419–20; McKirahan (2010: 316–20); and Taylor (1999: 185–9). But see also Barnes (1984); and
Hirsch (1990).
33 Gregory Vlastos’s groundbreaking articles (1945–6) on Democritus’ ethical thought are reprinted in
Allen and Furley (1975: 381–408). For a more eudaimonistic interpretation of Democritus, see Annas
(2002: 169–81).

Further reading
The following works (along with KRS and G) have extensive bibliographies:
Allen, R. E., and Furley, D. J. 1975. Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, Vol. 2: Eleatics and Pluralists. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Barnes, J. [1979] 1982. The Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd ed., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Caston, V., and Graham, D. (eds) 2002. Presocratic Philosophy: Essays in Honour of A. P. D. Mourelatos.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Curd, P. [1998] 2004. The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought. Rev. ed., Las
Vegas: Parmenides.
——2007. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae: Fragments and Testimonia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Curd, P., and Graham, D. W. (eds) 2008. The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Guthrie, W. K. C. 1962–5. A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. 1: The Earlier Presocratics and the
Pythagoreans; Vol. 2: The PresocraticTradition from Parmenides to Democritus. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kahn, C. 1979. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— [1960] 1994. Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Kirk, G. S. [1954] 1962. Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lesher, J. 1992. Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Long, A. A. (ed.) 1999. The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
McKirahan, R. [1993] 2010. Philosophy before Socrates. 2nd ed., Indianapolis: Hackett.
Mourelatos, A. P. D. [1970] 2008. The Route of Parmenides. 2nd ed., Las Vegas: Parmenides.
Pierris, A. 2005. The Empedoclean Kosmos: Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity. Patras: Institute
for Philosophical Research.
Primavesi, O. 2008. Empedokles ‘Physica’ I. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Robinson, T. M. 1987. Heraclitus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Taylor, C. C. W. 1999. The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Wright, M. R. [1981] 1995. Empedocles: The Extant Fragments. Indianapolis: Hackett.

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 London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Annas, J. 2002. ‘Democritus and Eudaimonism’, in V. Caston and D. W. Graham (eds), Essays in Honour of A.
P. D. Mourelatos. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Barnes, J. [1979] 1982. The Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd ed., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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——2005. ‘Some Thoughts about Empedoclean and Demonic Cycles’, in A. Pierris (ed.), The Empedoclean
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9 Socrates and Plato1
Sophie Grace Chappell

Their dread commander: he above the rest

In shape and gesture proudly eminent
Stood like a tower; his form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured: as when the sun new risen
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs. Darkened so, yet shone
Above them all the archangel.
(John Milton, Paradise Lost 1.589–600)

As for the base motives, he was perfectly sure that he was not what he called
an innerer Schweinhund, a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart; and as for
his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad
conscience only if he had not done what he been ordered to do … This
admittedly, was hard to take. Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as
‘normal’ – ‘More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him.’
(Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 25)

Our concepts of good and bad and evil, and those of

the ancient Greeks
‘Evil’ is a word of decidedly fluid meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary begins
by defining it as the ‘antithesis of “good”’. This might be helpful if ‘good’ were
not at least equally fluid and, in particular, if there were not another possible
antithesis of ‘good’, namely ‘bad’. Or might ‘bad’ and ‘evil’ be synonyms? The
OED entry for ‘evil’ seems to suggest that when it goes on to define ‘evil’ using
‘bad’. Our lexicographer distinguishes ‘evil’ as meaning, first, ‘bad in a positive
sense’ and then ‘bad in a privative sense’. Under the heading of ‘positive bad’ the
dictionary defines ‘evil’ as ‘morally depraved … doing or tending to harm. … Of
an omen, etc.: boding ill … causing discomfort, pain, or trouble, hard, difficult,
unfortunate, miserable, unlucky, disastrous’. Then under the ‘privative bad’
heading it defines ‘evil’ as ‘Not good … unsound, diseased, corrupt,
unwholesome, inferior’.
At this point we might look up the OED entry on ‘bad’. Disconcertingly, this
tells us that ‘bad’ too has both ‘positive’ and ‘privative’ senses, but the other way
round from ‘evil’. ‘Evil’ (we were told before) was primarily positive and only
secondarily privative. Although ‘bad’ has just been used to define ‘evil’, we are
now told that ‘bad’ is primarily privative and only secondarily positive in sense.
To make matters worse, we also read that the first sense of ‘bad’ as privative is
‘defective’ (after which it means ‘incorrect’, ‘legally invalid’, or ‘unfavourable’).
So should we put this together with the OED’s definition of ‘evil’ and conclude
that the principal meaning of ‘evil’, in the word’s positive sense, is ‘bad’ in the
word’s privative sense – i.e., defective? Perhaps the moral of this rigmarole is
rather just that someone is in a muddle. Either the lexicographer is giving a
muddled account of the lexicographical data, or the data themselves are muddled
– or both.
The OED muddle at least shows us how many different things fall within the
scope of our concepts BAD and EVIL. Alongside moral depravity and
harmfulness, we have illomenedness and disastrousness associated with EVIL in
its positive sense and corruption, disease and inferiority associated with its
privative sense. Alongside defectiveness, we have incorrectness, invalidity, and
unfavourableness associated with BAD’s privative sense and also immorality,
offensiveness, dangerousness, and unhealthiness associated with its positive
sense. Whatever the confusions here, there is an interesting profusion too, which
no sensible philosopher with a healthy interest in reallife data should turn her
nose up at. Not even – in fact particularly not – if she has been trained to think
that BAD (and its opposite GOOD) is a purely formal concept, ‘thin’ to the point
of logical transparency. If GOOD/BAD are capable of this kind of semantic
profusion (and confusion), then neither can be a thin concept.2
Also interesting is the OED’s contrast between privative and positive opposites
of ‘good’. This contrast is intuitively familiar; it is often represented in ordinary
English by a contrast between ‘bad’ and ‘evil’. I hope to find myself in the hands
of a good dentist, but there is more than one way for my hope to be disappointed.
It is one thing to be exposed to a bad dentist, another thing to be at the mercy of
an evil dentist. A bad dentist is merely incompetent – a well meaning bungler,
maybe. An evil dentist is one who actively tries to harm or hurt. And
unfortunately she needn’t be the least bit incompetent. (I might even say: ‘Given
that my dentist is an evil dentist, it’s just as well she’s also a bad dentist.’ Cf.
Aquinas’ famous example of the blind horse which, fortunately, is also slow
(Summa Theologica, 1a 2ae q. 58 a. 4).) My hope to find myself in the hands of a
good dentist is, then, a complex hope: roughly, and at least, I hope to avoid both
incompetence and malevolence.3
Something like this contrast between badness as defect and evil as malice can
be found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s remarks in Beyond Good and Evil about the
SCHLECHT/BÖSE contrast:

How different these words ‘bad’ and ‘evil’ are, though they are both
apparently the opposite of the same [word]4 ‘good’ … [In master morality]
the antithesis ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (gut/schlecht) means the same thing as ‘noble’
and ‘despicable’ – the antithesis ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (gut/böse) originates
elsewhere … power and danger were felt to exist in evil, a certain
dreadfulness, subtlety and strength which could not admit of contempt. Thus
according to slave morality the ‘evil’ inspire fear; according to master
morality it is precisely the ‘good’ who inspire fear and want to inspire it,
while the ‘bad’ man is judged contemptible.
(Nietzsche 1967: 114, 106–7, 108)
Nietzsche’s ‘master morality’ opposes a privative concept to GOOD: the concept
BAD, badness as defect or incompetence. By contrast Nietzsche’s ‘slave morality’
opposes a positive concept to GOOD: the concept EVIL, badness as malevolence
or dangerous power. So it comes about that ‘slave morality’ condemns the very
superiority and nobility that is praised by ‘master morality’:

One should ask … who is ‘evil’ in the sense of the morality of ressentiment
[the ‘slave morality’]. The answer is … precisely the ‘good man’ of the other
morality, precisely the noble, powerful man, the ruler, only recoloured,
reinterpreted and seen differently by the poisoned eye of ressentiment.
(Ibid.: 114)

Nietzsche develops this contrast in pursuit of a historical thesis, his ‘genealogy of

morality’. His thesis is that ancient societies (including Greek ones) were
mastermorality societies, whereas ours is a slavemorality society, and that the
cause of this transformation is the reorientation of moral thought brought about
by – Nietzsche’s pairing – ‘Platonism and Christianity’.
In the case I address here, the case of ancient Greece, there is certainly
evidence that Nietzsche is on to something. Here too part of the evidence is
lexicographical. Classical Greek has various words for BAD and EVIL, but only
one word is central in ancient Greek in the way in which the two words ‘bad’
and ‘evil’ are central in modern English, namely kakos.5 Yet the first meaning
that Liddell, Scott and Jones’ lexicon of classical Greek ([1968] 1996; LSJ) gives for
kakos is not ‘bad’ at all. It is ‘ugly’. Next LSJ lists ‘illborn, mean, craven, base,
worthless, sorry, unskilled’; only then does it get round to mentioning ‘in moral
sense, base or evil’. Clearly, on this account of the meaning of kakos – for which
LSJ’s evidence is in large part Homeric – badness is indeed, as Nietzsche’s thesis
predicts, mainly ‘privative’. It is a matter not of ‘positive’ or forceful evil but of
defect, inferiority (including social inferiority), lack of specialist ability or
knowledge, and incompetence.6
Our very different notion of evil as active, forceful, energetic malice,
Nietzsche’s slavemorality notion of BÖSE, is a notion that an enduring tradition
of JudaeoChristian thought has encapsulated in figures of almost pure malignity
such as Job’s and Milton’s Satans, Marlowe’s and Goethe’s characterization of
Mephistopheles, Verdi’s and Shakespeare’s Iagos, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth,
Richard III, and Edmund. It is no accident that Greek tragedy (and likewise epic)
has no villains to rival those of Shakespeare. For Greek tragedy is, typically, not
about a force of good versus a force of evil; it is about different kinds of good
force that – tragically – come into conflict in someone’s life. What is bad is that
these forces conflict at all. But their conflict is not due to evil, to malevolence: it
is simply part of the trials of life. As Aristotle puts it, tragedy is about someone
noble (kalos, Poetics 1448b8) who falls into misfortune, not through his own
wickedness (mokhthêria) or badness (kakia) but through some mistake or (as it is
traditionally translated) character flaw (hamartia, 1453a). The contrast between
this ancient tragic outlook and the Jacobean tragic outlook, which was dominated
by the idea of Satanic grandeur, is among other things a contrast between an
ethics of GOOD versus BAD and an ethics of GOOD versus EVIL.
Nietzsche is right that between our ethical thinking and that of the preSocratic
Greeks a great gulf is fixed. We might doubt whether the gap is best described in
Nietzsche’s way, as a gap between master and slave moralities. We might also
doubt whether Nietzsche can be right to see ‘Platonism and Christianity’ as a
single source of the transition that he identifies. Socrates and Plato, between
them, are certainly responsible for a momentous transition in moral thinking. But
theirs is not – pace Nietzsche, and despite some affinities – the same momentous
transition as Christianity was later to cause. All becomes clear as we turn to a
closer look at Socrates and Plato on evil (or, rather, Socrates and Plato on to
kakon. In what follows I shall often, for brevity, use ‘evil’ as a rough translation
of kakos/to kakon. I have already explained why this translation is rough).

What evil is not in Socrates and Plato

Socrates and Plato are revolutionary thinkers about evil/badness/to kakon – just
as they are about goodness.7 But their revolution is not about asserting a new
positive conception of evil like the one so often found in the JudaeoChristian
tradition: evil as a dark potency, or the secret knowledge that comes from eating
forbidden fruit (Genesis 2:17). Mostly when they discuss evil, they are denying,
not asserting (and one thing that they pointedly deny, as we shall see, is precisely
this idea of evil as Satanic grandeur). When they do assert, they assert a privative
not a positive conception of evil, and a remarkably and studiedly narrow
conception. This narrow conception of evil – to which there corresponds an
equally narrow conception of good – is all there is left for evil to be once all the
popular conceptions of evil have been dismantled. Socrates and Plato think that
these popular conceptions are just as muddled as my dictionary surveys suggest.
For them, it is a central aim to dispel the muddles engendered by these
conceptions, by denying the conceptions. Here I shall discuss four of the most
important of their denials. Then, in the next section, we shall turn to their three
main affirmations about evil.

1 Evil is not a matter of ‘Fate’ or other supernatural agency

The idea of Fate as a merciless and inexorable hidden agency, often malign and
always unpredictable, is essential to the construction of the greatest Greek
tragedies. Without that idea there is no making sense of Aeschylus’ Oresteia or of
Sophocles’ Theban plays. It is the powers of Fate that drive Agamemnon and
Oedipus to disaster, and it is only by making some sort of reconciliation with
those dark powers that Oedipus and Orestes can find peace. Perhaps, in fact, the
malignity of Fate is the nearest thing there is in Greek drama to the malignity of
Shakespearean villains. In the Christian literary tradition, comparable plaints
about the unkindness of fate certainly occur, but almost always as something to
be displayed and criticized, hardly ever as straightforward authorial assertions –
not, at any rate, until we get to a novel such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles – where,
of course, these assertions are given a studiedly Greek and explicitly
antiChristian framing. Those more central to the Christian literary tradition than
Hardy can never locate pure evil in the heavens, so, when they have to locate it at
all, they locate it in people. In preSocratic Greece, the opposite was true.
Socrates and Plato take an important step away from the Greek tragic and
towards the Christian conception, insofar as they simply refuse to talk or think in
the tragedians’ kind of way and are inclined to mock those who do. But this is
not because they do not believe in Fate as a form of agency; it is because they
believe that Fate is an essentially just and rational agency, and not the source of
evils. (In Aeschylus, one key part of what Fate is is atê, ‘doom’ or ‘destined
destruction’. Socrates and Plato may believe in (a just and benevolent) Fate, but
they emphatically do not believe in atê.)
 So Socrates, at Phaedo 115a, speaks mockingly of the ‘tragedian’s Fate’
(heimarmenê) that, if he were histrionically inclined, he would say brings him to
his death by hemlock. Yet he himself has just been speaking of ‘the deserved fate’
(hê prosêkousa moira) that, in the afterlife, throws the unjust and the lawless into
Tartarus (Phaedo 113e). He is quite prepared to see his own death as something
fated – indeed, he clearly thinks that his ‘divine voice’, his daimonion, is leading
him straight towards execution. But, to Socrates, the fact that Fate is leading him
to his death is not evidence that Fate is unkind. On the contrary: since Fate is
bound to be kind, it is evidence that death is not a bad thing.

The divine sign did not oppose me when I left my house this morning, nor
when I arrived here in court, nor when I was about to say anything in my
defence speech … presumably (kinduneuei) this means that what has
happened to me is a good thing (agathon) … For if I was going to encounter
something not good, it is impossible that my customary sign would not have
blocked my way.
(Apology 40c)

Likewise Socrates and Plato refuse to talk about ghosts and spooks in what was
the most familiar way in their society, thanks to Homer and others, and is also in
ours, thanks to our tradition of ghost and horror stories. Here too it is not that
Socrates and Plato do not believe in disembodied spirits (if that is what ghosts are
supposed to be). Emphatically they do believe in them, and in his myths in the
Phaedo (108–13), Republic Book 10, the Phaedrus (245e–8c), the Laws (903–905),
and elsewhere, Plato spends a great deal of time speculating about what may
happen to them after they part from the body. So Socrates and Plato do not reject
all talk about disembodied spirits; what they reject is the traditional Homeric
horror story way of talking about them.

Well then, do you think that someone who believes in the reality of ‘the
things of Hades’, and takes them to be terrible – do you think he will be
unafraid of death, or will prefer death in battle to defeat and slavery? – By
no means. – Then apparently we need to exercise control also over those
who want to tell tales about Hades, and require them not to speak such
unqualified ill of the things of Hades, since what they say is neither true nor
 helpful (out’ alêthê … out’ ôphelima) for those who are going to be warriors;
rather they should praise what is there … We must ban all the fearfilled
terrortalk about this subject, about Cocytus and Styx the rivers of Hell,
about the Stream of Hate and the people of the pit, and all the rest of it that,
every dramaseason, makes the whole audience shudder. Maybe such
experiences are very good for – some other purpose; but we are worried for
our guardians, lest this kind of thrill of fear make them more feverish and
softer in condition than they ought to be …
(Republic 386b1–c2, 387b8–c7)8

Homeric horror stories will fill our citizens with fear and cowardice; moreover,
they are untrue. It is an interesting question what makes Socrates so sure that the
horror stories are untrue. Perhaps there is less of a gap than we might expect
between the truthclaim and the prediction about character; perhaps, for Socrates
and Plato, the truth cannot be something that justifies cowardice and fear of
death. Just as Socrates argues that, since his fate was sending him to his death,
his death must be a good thing, so here, perhaps, Socrates’ thinking is that, since
horror stories cause cowardice, they cannot be true.
More about this style of argument under (2). First, briefly, a different question:
Do horror stories teach us cowardice? I think that is at least questionable. (For
empirical research: among soldiers today, is there any correlation between
conspicuous bravery and watching fewer video nasties than average? A priori
suspicion: if anything, the reverse.) Of course, wallowing in our darkest fears
might make them worse. But also, surely, one reason we engage with fearful
fictions is for evolutionarily obvious roleplaying purposes. In reading about how
Odysseus tackled a Cyclops, we are visualizing a type of violent scenario that, in
a violent world, may face us for real. We are rehearsing how we might tackle a
strong and murderous foe like a Cyclops. This sounds like a brave person’s
imagination at work, not a defeatist’s, still less a coward’s.

2 Evil is not sent by God

It is mistaken to think that the classic ‘theological problem of evil’ does not arise
at all for traditional Greek religion. Wherever humans are inclined to think of the
divine as both good and powerful (as, for all the heavens’ occasional malignity,
the ancient Greeks usually did), and whenever the supposedly good gods
nonetheless don’t stop bad things from happening or evil people from thriving (as
is apparently always the case), a tension of that kind can be felt. However,
traditionally the Greeks had a very simple solution to the problem of evil: this
was just to allow that God/Zeus/the gods/Fate, for reasons best known to
themselves, sent humans both good and evil. Zeus on this view was good but also
inscrutable – and very often more obviously the latter than the former.
So, for example, at Iliad 24.527–32 Homer has Achilles say that ‘Zeus has two
urns on his threshold, one of blessings (heaôn) and one of evils (kakôn); to some
he assigns a mixture, and they meet with some goods and some evils; to others he
assigns only sufferings.’ Plato’s character Socrates quotes this in his critique of
poetry in Republic Book 2 and comments on it at 379a6–e2:

– I take it that the way God is, is the way God should always be presented,
whether in epic verse or in lyric verse or in tragedy. – Yes, it must be so. –
And isn’t God, of course (ge), good in his nature (agathos tôi onti), and to be
spoken of as good? – How else? – But now, nothing that is good is harmful
(blaberon): is it? – I don’t believe so. – Then if something is not harmful, it
does no harm (blaptei). – By no means. – And if something does not harm,
does it do anything bad (kakon ti poiei)? – Not that either. – But then, if
something does nothing bad, can it be the cause of anything bad? – No; how
could it be? – Well then: is the good helpful (ôphelimon) to us? – Yes. – So
what is good is the cause of wellbeing (eupragia). – Yes. – Hence what is
good is not cause of everything, but only of things that are themselves good
in condition (eu ekhontôn); for things that are bad (kakôn), what is good has
no responsibility. – Absolutely right, said Adeimantus. – Therefore, I
concluded, God is not what the many say he is, the cause of everything,
precisely because God is good. In fact, God is the cause of rather few of the
things that affect men; for most of them, he has no responsibility. For there
are far fewer good things than bad in our lives; we can attribute
responsibility for the good things to no one except to God, whereas for the
bad things we should seek out some other cause than God … This is why we
should not let the poets say that ‘Zeus brings both good and evil to men’.

God cannot be the source of good and evil alike, says Socrates, because God is ‘of
course’ ‘good in his nature’. Socrates simply states this thesis about God, and
Adeimantus simply agrees with it. From the philosopher who is said to claim to
know nothing, and who expects every thesis to be supported by an argument, this
is a remarkable pronouncement. Many of Socrates’ contemporaries would have
found it equally obvious that, even if the divine is essentially good in itself, still
its most likely effects on us are not in any straightforward or unqualified way
good: they would say that what Achilles tells us about what humans receive from
heaven, via the image of Zeus’s twin urns, is a matter of universal human
experience. Closer to Socrates’ and Plato’s own time, Sophocles’ horrifying
depiction of the suffering and death of Zeus’s own son Heracles, in his play The
Women of Trachis, closes with the words ‘And nothing in all this that is not
Zeus’.
Two obvious questions for Socrates and Plato are, first, how they justify their
view of God as entirely good in his nature and, second, where they think evil
does come from, if not from God. More about the second question later. On the
first question, it is possible, and it seems concordant with many of ancient
Greece’s intuitions about God, to suggest that Socrates’ and Plato’s core idea is
this: whatever else God is, he must be a fit object of the virtue of reverence. The
most basic and necessary property of God is being worthy of worship: his other
properties, so far as we can know them, can be inferred from this first one. (And,
as for God, so for Fate: cf. my discussion under (1) above.) However, this line of
reasoning is never explicitly stated by Plato, and there is nothing logically
compulsory about it. My own suspicion is that the deepest reasons why it attracts
Socrates and Plato, indeed the deepest motivations of their whole theology, arise
from their own mystical experience.9 But they say little or nothing about this
directly.
I said above that Socrates and Plato are offering a narroweddown conception
of good and evil. This narrowing down is obvious in what I have just quoted.10 It
is central to Socrates’ argument here to equate ‘bad’ with ‘harmful’, ‘harms’, and
‘does bad’, whereas ‘good’ is equated with ‘helpful’, ‘causes wellbeing’, and
‘causes good condition’. Socrates presents this narrowing down of evil, and good,
to two unitary polarities as if it were selfevident. (Republic Book 1 and the Crito
add ‘just’ to the list of terms equated: see below.)
We do not need to read Nietzsche to see that these equations are anything but
selfevident. Intuitively, good people fight wars, make hard choices in dilemmas,
refuse to help others when they don’t deserve it and punish or coldshoulder them
when they do, and are selective about whose wellbeing or good condition they
cause. But all these are arguably ways of harming others. So, going by our
intuitions, good people do sometimes harm others. Socrates’ and Plato’s society
widely shared these intuitions. And they had other intuitions too, such as the
intuition that it was right or just to return evil for evil. To this I now turn.

3 Evil is not to be returned for evil

Here is Socrates at Republic 335b2–e2:

– But, I said, is it characteristic of a just man (dikaiou andros) to harm

(blaptein) anyone at all? – Certainly, said Polemarchus: he ought to harm
those who are both wicked (ponêrous) and his enemies. – Do we make
horses better or worse if we harm them? – Worse. – Worse by a decrease in
what kind of virtue (aretê)?11 The virtue of dogs, or of horses? – Horses. –
And if we harm dogs, don’t they become worse by a decrease in the virtue of
dogs, and not that of horses? – Obviously. – Well, my friend, shouldn’t we
say the same about humans? If we harm humans, won’t they become worse
by a decrease in the specifically human kind of virtue? – That must be right.
But isn’t justice (dikaiosynê) the specifically human virtue? – That too must
be right. – Then, my friend, humans who are harmed are bound to become
more unjust as a result. – Apparently. – But look: when people are skilled in
music, is it possible that they should make others less musical by means of
that skill? – No, that’s not possible. – Or when people are skilled at
horsemanship, is it possible that they should use that skill to make others
worse horsemen? – No. – Then can it be possible for just people to make
others unjust by means of their justice, or – overall – for good people to
make others bad (kakous) by means of their virtue? – No, that’s impossible.
… Then it is not the just man’s function to do harm, Polemarchus, neither to
a friend nor to anyone else. That is the function of his opposite, the unjust
man … So if someone said that it is just to give to each what is due to him
(ta opheilomena), meaning by this that the just man ought to harm his
enemies and help his friends, then whoever said it was no wise man.
To harm others is to make them worse; ‘to make them worse’ means ‘to make
them worse in respect of the specifically human virtue’; the specifically human
virtue is justice; so to harm others is to make them more unjust. But any F thing
naturally tends to make other things F, and not to make them the opposite of F.
So a just man naturally tends to make others just, not unjust; making things
unjust is what the unjust man does, not the just. So a just man not only does not
harm his friends, he does not harm anyone. Indeed, it is better to be the victim of
evil than its perpetrator (Gorgias 473a–5e).
This is a peculiar argument, and its peculiarities are not merely a matter of the
cultural differences between us and the ancient Greeks; as their reactions show,
Socrates’ hearers found it peculiar too. Part of the peculiarity comes from
Socrates’ and Plato’s tendency, already noted, to run together ‘good’ and
‘helpful’, ‘bad’ and ‘harmful’; here (as also at Crito 49a–e) we have good/helpful
run together with ‘just’ and ‘virtuous’, and bad/harmful run together with
‘unjust’ and ‘vicious’ as well. But that is not the only peculiarity. Socrates’
argument also contains a rhetorical question that obviously backfires, and that he
and his hearers should be able to see backfires. Socrates asks: ‘When people are
skilled in music, is it possible that they should make others less musical by means
of that skill?’ Polemarchus tamely concedes that it isn’t. But of course it is
possible to use a skill destructively as well as constructively. For a skilled teacher
of piano or riding, nothing is easier than deliberately to encourage a novice
pianist or rider in habits that, in the one case, will snuff out the pianist’s playing
and, in the other, snuff out the rider. What is more, if Polemarchus had been
listening to Socrates at Republic 333e, he would have heard Socrates admit this
himself (with medicine, boxing, generalship, and moneykeeping as examples of
ambivalent skills). Socrates wants to appeal to an analogy between justice and
these skills, but all his argument shows is that there is no analogy.12
Socrates might still be right that the just man naturally tends to make others
more just, not more unjust. Does it follow that the just man should make others
more just, not more unjust? It does not; one is tempted to suggest that this
inference goes through for Socrates only because of the ambiguities of the Greek
word ergon (‘natural function’). And does it follow that the just man will
naturally tend not to harm others? Not unless harming others is, as Socrates
claims and Polemarchus limply agrees, the same thing as making them less just.
But there are obvious cases where it is at least tempting to say that harming
others makes them more just. Punishment as moral education is one: I smack
your fingers for stealing my custard creams, or I coldshoulder you because you
have been bullying my sister, and you learn not to. There are also obvious cases
where harming you seems to have no effect on your justice one way or the other:
if I murder you, that makes me a worse person, because less just. But only a
martyr complex could make you think that being murdered makes you a better
person; and only a victim complex could make you think that it makes you
worse.
Of course, Socrates has things to say about these apparent counterexamples to
his equation of harming and making worse, or less just. He says (in the Phaedo,
the Protagoras, and the Gorgias) that, precisely because punishment makes its
subject more just, it cannot be a kind of harm; he also says in these three
dialogues that, precisely because being murdered has no effect on the victim’s
justice one way or the other, being murdered is neither a harm nor a benefit. ‘No
evil can come to a good man, whether he lives or dies’ (Apology 41d1; cf. Gorgias
509c–e, Phaedo 83c). But Socrates cheerfully admits that death, dishonour,
physical loss, and pain all can come to a good man. He therefore concludes that
none of these things is a form of evil. To put it another way, Socrates’ thesis that
‘No evil can come to a good man’ is not a conclusion that he draws from
arguments; it is a first principle that he brings to arguments.

4 Evil is not a positive, malevolent force

I argued in the first section that the idea of evil as positive potency or Satanic
grandeur is a JudaeoChristian idea, not central to ancient Greek ethical thought.
For completeness, I should add that Socrates’ and Plato’s own arguments against
this idea are one key reason why it never became as prominent in their culture as
it has been in ours. Socrates and Plato anticipated and fought off such a
conception of evil at a moment in the development of their culture when
something like it was certainly looming. The hero worship of the Iliad,
Thucydides’ cynical and Hobbesian Realpolitik, the agonistic skills required in the
Athenian courtroom and parliament, and perhaps other influences came together
to produce that very fifthcentury figure, the sophist who is also an amoralist. As
Bernard Williams points out, at least some amoralist sophists had a decidedly
Luciferian selfconception:

Once at least in the history of philosophy the amoralist has been concretely
represented as an alarming figure, in the character of Callicles who appears
in Plato’s Gorgias. Callicles, indeed, under the conventions of Platonic
dialogue, engages in rational conversation and stays to be humbled by
Socrates’ argument … What is unnerving about him, however, is something
that Plato displays and that is also the subject of the dialogue: he has a
glistening contempt for philosophy itself, and it is only by condescension or
to amuse himself that he stays to listen to its arguments.
(Williams 1985: 22)

Like Thrasymachus – Plato’s other main portrait of the amoralist (see Republic
Book 1) – Callicles is unnerving because he represents the possibility of
malevolence as a lively positive force, of evil as a power which is perfectly
consistent with, and even a precondition of, a certain kind of happiness:

[M]any people are horrible because they are unhappy, and conversely …
some who are not horrible, and who try hard to be generous and to
accommodate others’ interests, are miserable, and from their ethical state …
There is also the figure, rarer perhaps than Callicles supposed, but real, who
is horrible enough and not miserable at all but, by any ethological standard
of the bright eye and the gleaming coat, dangerously flourishing. For those
who want to ground the ethical life in psychological health, it is something
of a problem that there can be such people at all.
(Williams 1985: 45–6)

Thrasymachus describes justice as a vice (kakia) and as ‘totally naïve docility’

(panu gennaian euêtheian, Republic 348c); his idea is that ethical constraints are
imposed on the weak by the strong as a control mechanism, an ‘ideology’.
Callicles’ view is, in a sense, the opposite.13 He thinks that ethical constraints
such as those of justice and temperance are forced upon the strong by the weak
because the weak are afraid of the strong, and that no one who is strong and has
any sense will allow this to happen. ‘Suppose it is open to you to enjoy the good
things of life (ta agatha) without anyone to hinder you: why would you then
impose upon yourself as a control the law, the reasoning, and the disapproval of
the hoi polloi?’ (Gorgias 492b). This is a kind of disagreement between Callicles
and Thrasymachus, but it is an empirical disagreement only. On the philosophical
point, they are in full agreement. Both take conventional morality to be
essentially a mug’s game, a con, a racket. They disagree only about who, in
practice, in their own society, actually falls for this con.
Given that this is the nature of justice and similar ethical constraints, Callicles
and Thrasymachus agree too on how it makes sense for a ‘strong’ or ‘superior’
(kreittôn) man to live:

‘Justice and happiness’ means luxury, intemperance, and libertinism, backed

up by brute force. All the rest – those manmade conventions which run
contrary to Nature – is nothing but a pretence; it is worthless drivel.
(Callicles, at Gorgias 492c)
If you want to see how much more beneficial injustice is than justice, you
should consider the man with a full capacity for taking unfair advantage;
and you will see the point most clearly in the most extreme case of injustice
of all. This is the tyrant. He does not waste his time on piecemeal robberies,
by stealth or by force, from temples and sanctuaries, from individuals and
the state. He takes the lot, all in one go. (Thrasymachus, at Republic 344b)14

Clearly the conception that Callicles and Thrasymachus are talking about – and
trying on for size – is something not unlike evil as Satanic grandeur, forceful
malevolence, lively wilfulness. Justice, temperance, and suchlike ethical
constraints, they say, are for dupes. The man of real strength and wisdom is not
duped. He sees through these ideological tricks, these mindgames; and he knows
how to use them for his own ends. And what ends are those? The real answer is
‘Whatever takes his fancy – whatever he likes.’ But Callicles and Thrasymachus
share certain assumptions about what is likely to take his fancy, namely money,
power, and gratification. The prima facie plausibility and attractiveness of their
assumptions is underlined by the fact that, for all the cultural differences between
us and the ancient Greeks, we understand them at once.
It is a central aim of Plato’s Gorgias and Republic to deny the very possibility
of such a Satanicgrandeur conception of evil as we see beginning to coalesce in
such passages. It was, if I am right, only among fifthcentury sophists such as
Callicles and Thrasymachus that this conception emerged at all in ancient
Greece; in some other places where we might have expected to find it, such as
Greek drama, it is surprisingly absent.
Socrates’ and Plato’s main weapons in combating the emergence of the
sophistic conception of evil as lively malevolence are two positive theses about
what evil is. Both are, in a sense, thoroughly traditional Greek views, views that
emerge quite naturally from, for instance, the LSJ entry for kakos with which we
started. Socrates and Plato, however, characteristically give these two views a
quite untraditionally thorough philosophical development, and they dislocate
both from their traditional place in a network of other longstanding Greek
platitudes about what evil is, most of which, as we have seen, they deny. It is
partly this dislocation that gave both their positive views about evil the air of
paradox that they tended to have for their contemporaries. I turn to these two
positive views about evil now.

What evil is in Socrates and Plato

One of these views is that vice is ignorance; the other is that vice is defect.15 For
Socrates and Plato, the two views are always connected and at times nearly
equivalent: in short, vice is often understood in the early dialogues as a form of
ignorance.
So, for instance, in the Protagoras (358d–61c), it is argued that, if the virtue of
courage is a form of knowledge, then so are the other virtues; but courage is just
knowing what to fear and what not to fear; so courage is a form of knowledge; so
therefore are the other virtues. But then, if all virtues are forms of knowledge, all
vices are forms of ignorance.
Also in the Protagoras, in fact immediately before this (351b–8d), it is argued
that, if what is commonly called ‘being overcome by our passions’ just means
‘acting on a false view of what is good’, then it is impossible to be, literally,
‘overcome by our passions’: all that that phrase can mean is that we choose what
we think best but have wrong views about what is best. But ‘being overcome by
our passions’ means ‘pursuing what we think most pleasant’, and – in another
significant narrowingdown equation – ‘what we think pleasant’ is asserted to be
the same as ‘what we think good’. Hence false views about what is (most) good
are false views about what is (most) pleasant, and ‘being overcome by our
passions’ does just mean ‘acting on a false view of what is good’; so, once more,
vice is ignorance.

‘Therefore’, I said, ‘no one willingly pursues what is evil, or what they
consider evil; nor, apparently, is it in human nature for someone to prefer to
pursue what he considers to be bad instead of what is good. Moreover, when
someone is forced to choose one of two evils, no one will take the larger if
the smaller is available to him.’
(Protagoras 358d; cf. 345e1 and Gorgias 509e6)

The Protagoras thesis that vice is ignorance is, centrally, an attack on the
livelymalevolence view of evil that sophists such as Callicles and Thrasymachus
are moving towards. On the Protagoras view, the vicious do not have some
special, dangerous potency that the virtuous lack. In particular, they do not have
hidden knowledge, or special wisdom, or a double portion of euboulia, ‘skill in
counsel’ (as Thrasymachus calls the unjust man’s proprium at Republic 348d,
using a key term from the Homeric tradition: see Schofield 1986). They are just
mistaken, wrongheaded. They have gone wrong in their answer to the biggest
question of all – how to live (Republic 344d). There is nothing Satanically
majestic about their mistake; they have just screwed up.
Incidentally, Plato’s noun for ‘mistake’ is hamartia and his verb is
hamartanein (these are also Aristotle’s terms for what the hero gets wrong).
Later, in Greek Christianity, these words become the noun and the verb for sin.
Given how naturally Christians have usually conceived of sin as lively
malevolence and forceful wilfulness, and how correspondingly hard they have
usually found it to see sin as simply screwing things up – even those of them,
such as Augustine and Aquinas, who follow Plotinus in formally affirming that
evil is no more than the ‘privation of good’ – the history of the words seems an
almost perfect examplar of how the Satanicgrandeur view of evil was to reassert
itself in the ancient Greek world once that world became Christian.
Another crucial question arises here, one that is very plainly audible in the
Protagoras. If vice is ignorance, what becomes of blame? Our intuition is that
vice/ evil deserves moral blame and opprobrium, and Socrates and Plato share
that intuition. But is ignorance blameworthy? The natural reply is that only some
is – namely, wilful ignorance. But this just reminds us how much easier it is to
see vice/evil as culpable if we conceive of it as rooted, at least ultimately, in the
will, in active malevolence. No doubt this point is another motivation for the
predominant JudaeoChristian view of evil: ‘Men were thought of as “free” so that
they could become guilty’ (Nietzsche 1967: 57).16
In later works, Plato comes to have his reservations about significant parts of
the Protagoras picture. In particular, the hedonism of the Protagoras – its
equation of goodness and pleasure – is already clearly rejected by the time of the
Phaedo (69a–b):

Bless you, Simmias, I don’t think this can be the right sort of exchange, or
one that will move us towards virtue – to swap pleasures for pleasures and
pains for pains and fears for fears, as if they were coins, preferring the
greater to the smaller. The only true coinage, the coin which is an exchange
for everything else, is wisdom.17

(This is one place where textual critics have postulated a visible change, within
the Platonic corpus, from authentically Socratic to distinctively Platonic views.
Such speculations are, at any rate, impossible to refute.) However, Plato never
rejects the thesis in Protagoras 345e that vice, evil, is ignorance: he is still
explicitly defending that thesis at the time of the much later Timaeus (86d5–e1)
and Laws (731c2). And perhaps he wants to find new defences for that claim
anyway. For just to say that Thrasymachus or his ilk are evil or vicious or bad
because they are ignorant seems to prompt further questions. Why are they
ignorant? And what can be done to instruct them out of their ignorance? Or, to
put this question another way, can virtue be taught?
Socrates and Plato never lost their interest in the question whether virtue can
be taught. No doubt there are various reasons for that; but, if I am right, one
reason must be the obvious connections to the question how we should conceive
of evil. If evil is what Thrasymachus and Callicles take it to be – an
unconventional lifestyle choice, a preference for quasiSatanic grandeur over dull
conformity – then the choice between virtue and vice, good and evil, is simply
that: a choice, a matter of will. It is hard to see how teaching or rational
persuasion could affect such a choice. So, if vice is active malevolence, virtue
cannot be taught. But if vice is ignorance, mistakenness, then virtue can taught.
Socrates and Plato campaign at length to show that Callicles and Thrasymachus
are not the heroes of a cosmic rebellion but just confused. The theses that virtue
can be taught, and that evil is not lively malevolence but confusion and muddle,
are two sides of the same coin.
Neither, then, did Socrates and Plato ever much change their answer to the
question whether virtue can be taught; their answer was always ‘Certainly it can
be taught, provided adequate teachers can be found.’ What it takes for the
teaching of virtue to be adequate is unclear in earlier works such as the
Euthydemus and Protagoras: perhaps the suggestion there is only that we should
submit ourselves to Socratic examination, though of course Socrates himself
professes to have no answers.
In later works, from the Phaedo onwards, and above all in the Republic, we get
a much fuller and more detailed picture of what might be involved in the
teaching of virtue; for we get a much fuller and more detailed psychology. The
Republic, in particular, leaves the hedonism of the Socratic dialogues far behind,
replacing it with a picture on which the choice of the good and the choice of the
pleasant are never simply identical and can easily become diametrically opposed.
In the psychology of the Republic it is, therefore, perfectly possible for someone
to be ‘overcome by passion’. For the psyche has parts, including a reasoning part
(to logistikon) and a passionate part (to epithymêtikon), and these parts can
conflict; in fact, the only way to guarantee that the parts of the soul do not
conflict is for the psyche as a whole to become orientated towards The Good.
Virtue, on the Republic view, is still knowledge; it is the knowledge of The
Good that brings with it psychic harmony. Evil, conversely, is psychic
disharmony; it is disorder in the soul (cf. Gorgias 505–6). Callicles had said that
the fullest happiness was tyranny and had drawn a picture of the tyrant to
illustrate it – a picture which makes clear how the tyrant whom he has in mind is
a paradigm of lively malevolence and forceful wilfulness. The extended argument
of the Republic too culminates in a picture of the tyrant (572e–80c): a picture of
the tyrant as the man with the maximally disordered soul, who hence is ‘the most
enslaved’ and ‘the least able of all to do what he wants’ (577e). Vice is not only
ignorance but also inner chaos; the evil man is not – as Callicles and
Thrasymachus were on the way to suggesting – an instance of sublime
wickedness or Satanic grandeur, but one of miserable, stupefied confusion.18 It is
not by accident that at Republic 590d the name of Thrasymachus comes back into
the argument, having gone almost completely missing after the end of Book 1, as
Plato triumphantly sums up the political implications of his completed argument
about the ordered and disordered psyches: ‘unlike Thrasymachus … we believe
that it is better for everyone to be ruled by what partakes of divinity and wisdom
in us: ideally from inside his own psyche, but if not, then by imposition from
outside.’
The evil man has a disordered soul; that disorder can be remedied insofar as it
arises from ignorance, because ignorance can be cured by teaching the knowledge
that is virtue. But the Republic’s subtilizing of Plato’s psychology is also a
subtilizing of Plato’s account of what the teaching would have to be like that
could cure us of the ignorance that vice is. And Plato is increasingly aware of the
sheer difficulty of the psychiceducational task that he proposes. In principle,
everyone has eyes that can see the light if it is shown to them, but it is no easy
matter ‘to reorient the whole soul away from the world of becoming’ towards
reality (Republic 518c).
As for reallife tyrants – whether or not they actually look like instances of
Satanic grandeur or more like sick, confused, and helpless prisoners of their own
whims – they are not necessarily educable at all. If the Seventh Letter is to be
believed, Plato discovered this for himself during his short and unpropitious
involvement with the Syracusan regime of Dionysius. According to the Seventh
Letter 330c–34d, Plato’s advice to Dionysius was to order his disordered soul in
precisely the way recommended by the Republic; yet it was not even possible for
Plato and his friend Dion to give this advice openly without danger to themselves
(332d5). Where the pupil is not inclined to heed the teacher, it is difficult for a
Platonic educator to teach. Where the pupil has soldiers, executioners, and
torturers hanging on his orders, it is not even safe to try.
It must, anyway, have been clear to Plato that nothing in the structure of his
account of evil really explains how evil first arises. We may explain vice as
ignorance and ignorance as caused by disorder in the soul; but that does not
explain how the soul came to be disordered in the first place (unless it was
through ignorance, in which case we are working in a circle). In the Timaeus, it
becomes explicit that Plato sees the world as the work of a single creative God.
Since, as before, this God is conceived of as perfectly good, Plato finds himself in
need of a theodicy to explain how a perfectly good God, with no rivals, can end
up creating a world which has (as Plato agrees) so much evil in it.
So to the third and the last of Plato’s positive accounts of evil, according to
which evil is a necessary and inevitable part of a full creation. Something like this
view is already affirmed, in passing, at Theaetetus 176a. It seems no accident that
the affirmation is conjoined with an open admission of the impossibility of
persuading the whole world – and the consequent advice to give up on the world:

THEODORUS: Socrates, if what you say convinced everybody as it convinces me,

there would be more peace and fewer evils (kaka) among mankind.
SOCRATES: But it isn’t possible for evils to be destroyed, Theodorus. There always
has to be something opposite to the good; and evils cannot find a place
among the gods, so by necessity they haunt this mortal nature and this place.
That is why we must try to flee, Hence and Thither, as fast as may be. This
flight consists in our assimilation to God (homoiôsis theôi), so far as we can,
where assimilation means becoming just and holy, together with
understanding.

We might wonder why ‘there always has to be something opposite to the good’, a
view which sounds very like the popular pseudoBuddhist cant that nothing can
exist without its opposite. To that the answer is – as I said in Chappell 2004: 125 –
that the concept and its negation may logically imply each other’s existence; but
concepts are one thing, and instances are another.
But Plato (I now think) has something deeper and more interesting in mind,
namely the metaphysics of the Timaeus. This dialogue is, among other things,
Plato’s own response to the challenge to Anaxagoras that he himself puts in
Socrates’ mouth at Phaedo 98c. The challenge is to found the whole of
metaphysics on the principle that the reason why everything happens is because
it is best that it should happen (Timaeus 29e–30a):

Let us now state the reason why the one who constructed this system of
becoming and this universe constructed it. He was good (agathos), and in
one who is good, envy never comes to be about anything. So having no part
in that, he wanted everything to be as much like himself as possible … God’s
 plan was that everything should be good (agatha), and that nothing should
be foul (phlauron), as far as was possible.

‘As far as was possible’ – how far was that? The idea in the Timaeus is
apparently that God’s creation is supposed to follow out the order of a kind of
combinatorial lexicon of possibilities. There are a given number of basic ideas;
what these are is no doubt logically determined, somehow, by the theory of
Forms. All the ways in which these basic ideas can be combined are all the
possibilities that, in principle, exist. For God (the dêmiourgos, workman) to create
as much good as possible is for him to realize all these possibilities. Creation is
complete when the whole lexicon of possibilities has been enacted – when
everything that can be, is. But Plato obviously also thinks that there will be a
kind of gradation of dignity or beauty, a scala naturae, among the beings so
created. To talk of evil will, then, be simply to talk of the things at the lower end
of this scale, or alternatively to misunderstand the interrelations of the various
parts of creation – perhaps, for instance, as Theodorus misunderstands them in
the passage just quoted from the Theaetetus.
As Arthur Lovejoy (1936: 51) summarizes one part of this remarkable and
perennially retold story:

After all the grades of immortal beings have been created, the Demiurgus
notes that mortals still remain uncreated. This will not do; if it lack even
these the universe will be faulty, ‘since it will not contain all sorts of living
creatures, as it must do if it is to be complete’ [Timaeus 41b]. In order, then,
that ‘the Whole may be really All’ [Timaeus 41c], the Creator deputed to the
lesser divinities who had already been brought into creation the task of
producing mortal creatures after their kinds. And thus ‘the universe was
filled completely with living beings, mortal and immortal’, and thereby
became … ‘most perfect’ [Timaeus 91c]. In short, Plato’s Demiurgus acted
literally upon the principle in which common speech is wont to express the
temper not only of universal tolerance but also of comprehensive
approbation of diversity – that it takes all sorts to make a world.

Evil, we found Plato saying before, is ignorance, or a kind of disorder in the soul
which is either the same thing as ignorance or a consequence, or a cause, of that
ignorance. And, if evil is ignorance, perhaps we may hope to instruct the evil
man out of his wickedness. But on this third and last way of considering evil, evil
is a necessary consequence of the created order of the entire universe, which is
itself, overall, good. And here we come back to the question of blame. For when
ignorance and psychic disorder are understood this way, it does not even seem to
make sense to deplore or blame them. Aren’t ignorance and psychic disorder too
just ‘partial evils’ which add up to ‘universal good’? Just ‘discords’ which add up
to a ‘harmony misunderstood’?
In the Timaeus, Plato invented – whether from scratch or from earlier
materials, it is now too late to tell – a whole new way of thinking about the
universe and our place in it; what he discovered was what is now often called the
principle of plenitude, or ‘the great chain of being’. As Lovejoy’s classic study of
that name demonstrates, this way of thinking brought with it a style of theodicy
which had its heyday perhaps in the writings of Leibniz, so famously parodied by
Voltaire, but which despite Candide remains influential to this day. Can this way
of thinking – determinist as it fairly clearly is – be reconciled with Plato’s other
lines of thought about the nature of evil, in particular with his conceptions of evil
as ignorance and as defect? That seems to me improbable. Does it lead believers
in a benevolent God into anything like a satisfactory theodicy? On this question I
will allow Lovejoy, commenting on Archbishop William King, the
eighteenthcentury divine, to have the last and sharpest word:

… even if the criterion of the goodness of the universe were assumed to

consist not solely in the diversity of creatures, but in the quantity of joie de
vivre it contains, the creation of beasts of prey could still, according to a
further argument of King’s, be justified … since ‘the infinite power of God
was able to produce animals of such capacities’, his ‘infinite Goodness’ may
‘be conceived to have almost compelled him not to refuse or envy [them] the
gift of life’. ‘If you insist’, says the archbishop genially to a supposititious
critic, ‘that a lion might have been made without teeth or claws … I grant it
… but then they would have been quite another species [i.e. there would
have been a missing link in the Chain of Being],19 and have had neither the
nature, nor use, nor genius, which they now enjoy.’ As for the lion’s victim,
if it were a rational animal it doubtless would, or at all events should, rejoice
 as does its Maker in the thought of the agreeable exercise which it is
affording to the ‘genius’ of the lion. If the victim be not endowed with
reason, or be too meanspirited to take a large philosophical view of the
matter, the consoling insight into the higher meaning of its sufferings is still,
through the happy ordering of things, left to be enjoyed vicariously by
optimistic archbishops.
(Lovejoy 1936: 220)

Notes
1 My thanks for comments and encouragement to Tom Angier, Alex Barber, Chris Belshaw, Sarah
Broadie, Cristina Chimisso, Elizabeth Cooke, Sean Cordell, Roger Crisp, Ashley Cummins, Nicholas
Denyer, Manuel Dries, Simon Kirchin, Adam Morton, Jon Pike, and Edward Skidelsky. The usual
disclaimers apply.
2 See Chappell 2013. The OED is more prescriptivismfriendly, and more thinfriendly, about “good” than
about “bad”, calling it first of all “a term of most general or indefinite commendation”.
3 R. M. Hare might rejoin that “a good dentist” simply means “the kind of dentist I would like to have”,
and that people just so happen to tend to want competent and benevolent dentists. This is to fail to see
what Philippa Foot insists upon in “Moral Beliefs” and “Goodness and Choice” (in Foot 1977): the
nonanalytic necessity of the connections that hold in nonspecial circumstances between wanting and
intelligibility.
4 Nietzsche puts “concept”, not “word”. As the rest of his remarks are in the formal rather than the
material mode, I have tidied this up.
5 Grammatical point: in ancient Greek, kakos is the adjective “bad”/“evil”; to kakon is the noun
“bad”/“evil”. I use both forms here.
6 LSJ conjecturally connects kakos with an IndoEuropean root *kasu-that shows up in Lithuanian and
Avestan words meaning “puny”. Surprisingly, LSJ does not connect it with the (presumably)
IndoEuropean root that is found in Greek kakkos, Italian cacca, Gaelic cac, and Scottish/northern
English dialect cack.
7 It is a notoriously tricky business to attribute theses to Socrates and Plato – especially Socrates. For
present purposes, I talk only about what I think might reasonably be inferred from Plato’s texts about
the beliefs, respectively, of their author and of the character in those texts named Socrates. I have my
doubts about reading any Platonic work as straightforward exposition of any philosophical view, but I
 here suppress those doubts to keep things manageable.
8 All translations from the Greek are my own.
9 For more on this, see Chappell [2010] 2012.
10 The narrowing down is obvious too in the Euthydemus (278c–82a), the dialogue in which Socrates most
clearly insists that all good and evil really resides in our powers of choice – in what the later tradition
came to call the will. With everything else, what counts is how you use it; but the will is what uses
other things. This focus on the will was inherited by the Stoics and then by Augustine, so it eventually
became a key part of the Christian conception of lively malevolence. But that’s another story: see
Chappell 1995.
11 Aretê is often translated “excellence”, and indeed that translation makes more sense of many
arguments, including the present one. However, arête has a clear opposite, kakia, and “virtue” has a
clear opposite, “vice”; but “excellence” has no clear opposite apart perhaps from “defect”. And “defect”
will not do because arête and kakia, like virtue and vice, are voluntary.
12 On one longestablished reading of Republic Book 1, the failure of the analogy, and so of the argument,
is exactly the point; Plato is deliberately displaying the inadequacies of Socratic methods and
assumptions in order to pave the way for his own arguments, later in the Republic, for the conclusions
that justice is the specifically human virtue, and that it is always wrong to return evil for evil.
13 As I first pointed out in Chappell 1993.
14 “Steal a little and they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you king”: Bob Dylan, “Sweetheart
Like You”.
15 In what follows I take vice (kakia) to be a form of evil (kakon) – unexceptionably I hope.
16 Thanks to Sarah Broadie for discussion. On these questions see Chappell 1995.
17 Or practical wisdom (phronêsis). As usual, it is difficult to tell to what extent this is a technical term.
18 Compare here Adolf Eichmann (see my second epigraph) and Aleister Crowley. Personally, Eichmann
was rather boring – just a bureaucrat following orders to further his own career; he also claimed to be a
good Kantian. Crowley, by contrast, was anything but boring. He spent most of his life screwing
around, in a number of senses of that fecund phrase; he liked inventing weird occult rituals and being
known by such Satanically grand names as “the beast of the Apocalypse” and “the wickedest man
alive”. Crowley exaggerated. Being personally obnoxious, as he no doubt was, does not put you in the
same league as the genuinely evil. Compared with Eichmann, Crowley was barely wicked at all.
19 Lovejoy’s parenthesis.

Further reading
Aquinas, T. 2003. On Evil, trans. R. Regan, ed. B. Davies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Augustine 1977. Confessions, trans. W. Watts. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Lovejoy, A. 1936. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nietzsche, F. [1886] 2003. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin.
Plotinus, Ennead 1.8, in Enneads vol. 1, trans. A. H. Armstrong. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.

References
References to Plato follow the Stephanus numbering of the Greek editions. The
translations, which are my own, follow the Loeb text.

Aquinas, T. 1981. Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. Westminster,
MD: Christian Classics.
Arendt, H. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Aristotle 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Chappell, T. 1993. ‘The Virtues of Thrasymachus’, Phronesis, 38(1): 1–17.
——1995. Aristotle and Augustine on Freedom of Action. London: Macmillan.
——2004. Reading Plato’s Theaetetus. Indianapolis: Hackett.
——[2010] 2012. ‘On Hearing God Speak: Socrates’ Daimonion and Euthyphro’s “Dilemma’’’, European
Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 1: 39–64; repr. in H. Harris (ed.), God, Goodness and Philosophy.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
——2013. ‘There are No Thin Concepts’, in S. Kirchin (ed.), Thick Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 182–96.
Foot, P. 1977. Virtues and Vices. Oxford: Blackwell.
Liddell, H. G., Scott, R., and Jones, H. S. [1968] 1996. A Greek–English Lexicon. 9th ed., with rev. supplement.
Oxford: Clarendon Press [LSJ].
Lovejoy, A. 1936. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Milton, J. [1674] 2000. Paradise Lost, ed. J. Leonard. London: Penguin.
Nietzsche, F. 1967. A Nietzsche Reader, trans. R. F. Hollingdale. London: Penguin.
Schofield, M. 1986. ‘Euboulia in the Iliad’, Classical Quarterly, 36(1): 6–31.
Williams, B. A. O. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
10 Aristotle
Tom P. S. Angier

Philosophical interest in the topic of evil has grown markedly since the
millennium.1 The reasons for this are difficult to pin down: perhaps it signals a
delayed response to the Second World War, and in particular the Holocaust, or
more recently the American experience of terror in 2001 (and the government
response to it). These events were clearly within Western philosophers’ conscious
horizon and demanded their engagement. Despite this pressing need, however,
what those events highlighted, arguably, is a certain resourcelessness faced by
philosophers since the retreat of Christian concepts and arguments to the margins
of their discipline. Whereas Judaeo-Christianity had (and has) a conceptual
apparatus with which to think about depravity – ranging from sin, to original sin,
the devil, and, not least, ‘evil’ itself – mainstream Anglophone philosophers find
themselves bereft of such a vocabulary. As Peter Dews puts it, they lack terms
with such an ‘intense semantic charge’ or equivalent ‘moral depth’ (Dews 2008: 1,
3). On the one hand, this might be thought welcome, given the ‘antiquated ring’
(ibid.: 2) of terms such as ‘evil’ and ‘sin’. But, on the other, philosophers find
themselves casting around for terms of analysis that are adequate to the
phenomena at hand. Hence the renewed recourse to ‘evil’, however antiquated its
connotations may be.
In this context, there is some irony in suggesting that perhaps the greatest
philosopher of antiquity may be able to assist us. Aristotle was active in the
fourth century BCE, so his thought is more ancient than that of any Christian
philosopher. Moreover, in virtue of its antiquity, it is even further removed from
modern horrors such as Auschwitz and Hiroshima. But it is precisely because of
its ancient pedigree, I want to suggest, that Aristotle’s ethical thought is valuable.
On the one hand, it manages to avoid the strong metaphysical commitments of
Christian thought, with its notions of original sin, redemption, and the afterlife.
Although Aristotle does refer (somewhat indifferently, it seems) to ‘god’ or ‘gods’,
he has no notion of an all-good Creator-God, the existence of whom makes the
very existence of evil peculiarly difficult to rationalize. Moreover, he is not only
innocent of the narrative elements of Jewish and Christian revelation – figures
such as ‘the Satan’ play no role in his moral universe – even the gods of Greek
polytheism play little (if any) direct or determinative role for him. On the other
hand, Aristotle’s detailed and subtle conceptual scheme affords a range of notions
that help us grapple with the phenomena of human wrongdoing. While he lacks
any concept cognate with our ‘evil’, his notions of the ‘bad man’ (phaulos),
wickedness (mochthēria), and above all ‘vice’ (kakia) – together with all the
particular vices – lead us into a moral landscape that is far from resourceless or
shallow. Indeed, as I shall document later on, Aristotle supplies a metaphysics of
wrongdoing that is profound, albeit one in which the narrative imagination
characteristic of monotheism is absent.
In what follows, I shall begin by elaborating Aristotle’s notion of the ‘mean’,
which is central to his account of vice. I will then go on to analyse his conception
of moral responsibility, which encompasses responsibility for both vicious action
and vicious character. Next, I will outline Aristotle’s metaphysics of vice,
something unfortunately sidelined by much modern scholarship yet essential to
understanding his overall moral theory. And, lastly, I shall unpack his seemingly
contradictory portrait of vicious character in Books VII and IX of the
Nicomachean Ethics (NE).2 When put in the context of his metaphysics, the
appearance of contradiction here, I will argue, can readily be made sense of.

The structure of vice: Aristotle’s ‘mean’

Aristotle’s ethical mean (mesotēs, meson) is his main heuristic for understanding
the virtues (good dispositions) and vices (bad dispositions).3 A good upbringing,
he holds, will inculcate the virtues through repeated practice of generically good
acts, while at the same time steering moral learners from correlative bad acts – a
process he likens to learning a skill (1106b8–16). Now one might ask why, given
this focus on learning-through-doing, Aristotle does not simply tell us which act-
types are vicious – as the Ten Commandments do, say – and leave talk of vicious
dispositions to one side. But there is reason behind his method. While he does tell
us that adultery, theft, and murder are forms of hamartia (‘going wrong’), and
thus never to be done (1107a11–17), Aristotle concentrates on vices per se because
he believes it is at this level of analysis that clear structure can be found. Every
virtue, he claims, lies between two vices, which constitute (respectively) an
‘excess’ and a ‘deficiency’: for instance, courage lies between rashness and
cowardice, while temperance lies between insensibility and self-indulgence. This
neat triadic schema is most straightforwardly conveyed at EE 1220b38ff., where
Aristotle provides a hupographē or ‘diagram’ of what he takes to be the main
virtues and vices. Here we find, for instance, the virtue of generosity, flanked by
wastefulness (excess) and meanness (deficiency); truthfulness, corresponding to
the vices of boastfulness and self-deprecation; and modesty, which is opposed to
both shyness and shamelessness.
There is much, I take it, to recommend this ethics of virtue or character
excellence (aretē) – not least because it reveals a genuine pattern among the
vices. These are dispositional ‘outliers’, as it were, which are nonetheless all too
easy to fall into, given our propensity to self-indulgence (akolasia, literally
‘uncorrectedness’) and aversion to moral effort. Part of this pattern consists,
therefore, in our tending to some vices more than others. As Aristotle maintains,
we tend more to cowardice than to rashness and more to self-indulgence than to
insensibility (1108b35–9a19); hence we should practise ‘dragging ourselves away’
from those vicious excesses or deficiencies to which we are most prone (1109a30–
b7). As he puts matters, ‘We must drag ourselves away to the contrary extreme;
for we shall get into the intermediate disposition by drawing well away from
error, as people do in straightening sticks that are bent’ (1109a4–7). And this
counsel to err on the side of the ‘least of the evils’ (1108b35) – such as rashness
and insensibility, rather than cowardice and self-indulgence – in order to arrive
at courage and temperance, respectively, looks like sound moral psychology. But,
notwithstanding such insight, there are also difficulties with Aristotle’s triadic
schema of virtues and vices, two of which I want to highlight here.
First, it seems that Aristotle’s desire for an architectonic that captures moral
dispositions in general leads him into some procrustean analyses. The clearest
case of this is justice, which is analysed as a mean between ‘profit’ and ‘loss’
(1132a19) or between acting unjustly and being unjustly treated. The former
analysis is grounded in Aristotle’s assumption that the greatest threat to justice is
the vice of pleonexia, namely ‘greed’ or the disposition to have more than one’s
fair share (see, e.g., 1129b1–2, 1130b3–4). But, as Bernard Williams (1980) has
argued, injustice may be undergirded by any number of vicious dispositions – for
example, laziness, malice, or merely indifference to the requirements of justice.
As to the idea that injustice takes the form of either acting unjustly or being
unjustly treated, this rescinds from dispositions entirely (something Aristotle
admits at 1133b32–4a1) and also denominates as ‘unjust’ a form of behaviour that
is plausibly construed as virtuous (namely, giving up some of that to which one is
entitled). Another problematic triad centres on the virtue of nemesis, ‘righteous
indignation’, which is flanked by ‘envy’ (phthonos) as excess and ‘Schadenfreude’
(epichairekakia) as deficiency (sometimes translated ‘spite’).4 It is very difficult to
discern what common quality underlies all three of these dispositions, such that
nemesis constitutes a mean while its correlative vices constitute excess and
deficiency. Indeed, it would seem that people given to envy are just as given to
Schadenfreude – these hardly appear opposite kinds of vicious disposition. (For
more on this, see Stephen Leighton, ‘Inappropriate Passion’, ch. 9 in Miller 2011,
esp. pp. 224–6.)
A second and more systematic problem with Aristotle’s mean is that it
purports to tell us not only about dispositions but also about the actions and
passions at which they ‘aim’. This aspect of the mean may sound odd, given that
commentators such as John McDowell have pressed the view that Aristotle never
even countenances a ‘decision-procedure’ for right action (see McDowell 1998: pt
1).5 But, in fact, this is to underestimate Aristotle’s ambitions for the mean. For he
informs us that moral dispositions are in a mean not only per se but also because
they are directed at passions and actions that are independently ‘intermediate’. As
he writes:

[virtue] is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess, and
that which depends on deficiency; and again it is a mean because the vices
respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions,
while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.
 (1107a2–6)

This latter claim that actions and feelings should themselves be ‘in a mean’ – and
that it is in virtue of their being so that dispositions (hexeis) are medial – is
bolstered by Aristotle’s comparison of moral praxis to technical or skilled action.
‘If every skill [technē] does its work well’, he holds, ‘by looking to the
intermediate and judging its works by this standard … and if … virtue is more
exact and better than any technē … then it must have the quality of aiming at the
intermediate’ (1106b8–16). The upshot of this is that moral action and feeling can
themselves be ‘crafted’ medially, so as to occur ‘at the right times, with reference
to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the
right way’ (1106b21–2). This ‘is what is both intermediate and best’, Aristotle
declares, ‘and … is characteristic of virtue’ (1106b22–3).
What are we to make of these claims? On the one hand, it is welcome news
that the mean can tell us about more than moral dispositions (i.e., virtues and
vices) and, in particular, that it can tell us about the structure of virtuous and
vicious action. But, on the other hand, it is hard to see how the range of
dimensions Aristotle presents as ‘intermediate’ are in fact so. For how can one
capture right objects, people, and motives in the frankly quantitative terms he
proposes?6 True, emotions or pathē (‘passions’) do admit of degrees or intensities,
and, insofar as action concerns, for example, money, it too can be construed in
terms of quantitative ‘rightness’ (where this lies between excess and deficiency).
(Indeed, the ‘mean in action’ comes into its own when Aristotle analyses the
virtue of liberality or generosity, together with the vices of prodigality and
meanness, at IV.1.) But the idea that virtuous and vicious action can in general
and pervasively be characterized in terms of intermediacy, and deviations from it,
looks – although admirably ambitious – essentially misguided.
In response to this problem, some scholars have defended Aristotle, holding
that he is saved from an implausible doctrine of ‘intermediate action’ owing to
the mean’s ‘relativity to us’. As Chappell maintains, ‘the mean he has in mind is
“relative to us” and not arithmetical (1106a27 ff.)’ (Chappell 2012: 48): in other
words, Aristotle is supplying not some absolute blueprint for action but, rather, a
notion of rightness-in-action that is sensitive to individual circumstance. And,
pro tanto, Chappell is correct. But it does not follow from the fact that Aristotle’s
mean is pros hēmas – i.e., relative to particular situations and their requirements,
that he is any the less committed to the idea that good action, unlike bad action,
is somehow always ‘intermediate’. And it is this, in point of fact, which needs
defending. Other scholars argue that Aristotle’s ascription of intermediacy to
action is acceptable because it is basically metaphorical (see, e.g., Hursthouse
2006) and consonant with his comparison of moral action to aiming at a target
(see 1106b31–2; 1109a32–3, b11–12, 26; 1138b22). And in one sense, I take it, they
are right. Aristotle does speak of how ‘men are good in but one way, but bad in
many’ (1106b35), reflecting the fact that ‘to miss the mark [is] easy, to hit it
difficult: for these reasons also’, he avers, ‘excess and deficiency are characteristic
of vice, and the mean of virtue’ (1106b32–4). But it does not follow from the fact
that ‘intermediate action’ finds echoes in appealing metaphors or images7 that it
becomes any more capable of elucidating rightness of object, person, motive, etc.
At best, we could say that such metaphors hold out the hope that such an
elucidation is possible.

Responsibility for vicious action and character

In sum, Aristotle’s mean is an interesting ethical heuristic, widely applicable to
moral dispositions (not least the vices) yet also overextended in its application to
action (perhaps owing to Aristotle’s being under the impress of the technai or
crafts; see Angier 2010: ch. 4). Having outlined the structure of vice, it is time to
address agents’ relation it, and in particular their responsibility for wrongdoing.8
It is a natural assumption that, if someone does wrong – i.e., acts viciously – he is
to blame. Insofar, that is, as such action is genuinely ‘up to us’ (eph’hēmin, in
Aristotle’s Greek) or flows from our agency – so that we are its ‘moving
principle’ (archē, e.g., 1113b18) – we are guilty. Aristotle affirms this view,
arguing that there are only two generic excusing conditions for bad action (see
III.1): first, when it is ‘forced’ on us and, second, when we are ignorant of some of
its aspects (Oedipus, for instance, was not guilty of patricide because he didn’t
know the man he killed was his father). If either of these conditions holds, then
our action is no longer ‘voluntary’ (hēkousion, hēkōn), and we cannot be blamed
for it. It follows, straightforwardly, for Aristotle, that vice – in the sense of
vicious action – is often blameworthy. Granted, ‘the vices that are blamed must
be in our own power [eph’hēmin]’ (1114a31), as articulated by the above criteria
– but there is no immediate reason to think this uncommon. As Aristotle
contends,

where it is in our power to act, it is also in our power not to act, and vice
versa … Now if it is in our power to do noble [kala] or base [or ‘shameful’,
aischra] acts, and likewise in our power not to do them, and this was what
being good or bad meant, then it is in our power to be virtuous [or
‘equitable’, epieikesi] or vicious [or ‘bad’, phaulois].
(1113b7–14)

While this symmetry between virtuous and vicious action – both can be
voluntary, and thus subject to moral judgement (namely praise and blame
respectively) – has a pleasing theoretical concinnity, and certainly reflects
‘common sense’, it confronts a significant difficulty. This consists in the fact that
Aristotle inherits the Socratic view that people act, and desire, ‘under the guise of
the good’. As Plato’s Socrates holds in the Meno, we all desire the good (77b–8b),
and whenever we act we do so for the sake of the good (Gorgias 467c–8c).
Aristotle accepts this, both for specifically rational desire – ‘wish’ (boulēsis) and
‘choice’ (or ‘decision’, prohairesis) – and for desire (orexis) generally, including
non-rational desire (such as ‘appetite’, epithumia). Regarding the former, he
maintains that ‘every prohairesis seems to aim at some good’ (1094a1–2) and that
‘The object of boulēsis unqualifiedly and in truth is the good, but for each person
the apparent good’ (1113a23–31). Regarding the latter, he appears equally
confident: e.g., ‘The object of desire [orekton] always moves, but this is either the
good or the apparent good’ (De Anima 433a26–9); ‘The apparently noble [kalon]
is the object of epithumia, the truly noble the primary object of boulēsis’
(Metaphysics 1072a27–8); ‘Epithumia moves one on account of the now, for the
presently pleasant appears both absolutely pleasant and absolutely good’ (De
Anima 433b8–10).9 What is problematic, then, about this view that action and
desire proceed sub specie boni, ‘under the guise of the good’?
It presents, I think, two key problems. The general problem is that, if action
and desire are good-dependent, they can never be in a clear-eyed way ‘for the
bad’ or proceed under the aspect of the vicious. And this has been found counter-
intuitive, at least among modern commentators. David Velleman, for instance,
argues that a ‘Satanic’ agent who proclaims ‘Evil be thou my good!’ is perfectly
conceivable, and is even a practical possibility (see Velleman 1992; cf. Milo 1998).
Kieran Setiya (2010), although he concedes that agency is characteristically good-
dependent, denies that this is definitive of agency as such. And Katja Vogt (2010)
makes the interesting case that, while Aristotle is right about 2017 ‘background’
motivations that relate to one’s life as a whole, he is wrong to think that every
action and desire must be good-dependent. While this is a genuine and vital area
of dispute, I will not dwell on it, simply because Aristotle’s position is well
entrenched and, indeed, continuous with that taken by most (if not all) ancient
philosophers.10 More pressing is the specific problem of how good-dependence
can be reconciled with Aristotle’s symmetry thesis above. For if all wrongdoing
or wicked conduct involves, and in fact is owing to, ignorance of what is good,
then how – given ignorance appears to preclude voluntariness, and voluntariness
is a necessary condition of responsibility – can it be subject to blame? In other
words, Aristotle’s endorsement of Socrates’ ‘guise of the good’ view seems to
land him (albeit malgré lui) with an ‘asymmetry thesis’,11 to the effect that,
whereas good actions are voluntary and to be praised, bad actions are
involuntary and thus cannot, in principle, be a proper source of blame.
There are three main responses to this problem in Aristotle’s text. First, he
reaffirms the connection between voluntariness and the causal conditions of
praise and blame. In short, it is because vicious actions – no less than virtuous
ones – issue from us as causal agents that we can be blamed for them. As
Aristotle writes,

wickedness [mochthēria] is voluntary. Or else we shall have to … deny that

man is a moving principle or begetter of his actions as of children. But if
these facts are evident, and we cannot refer actions to moving principles
other than those in ourselves, the acts whose moving principles are in us
must themselves also be in our power and voluntary.
(1113b16–22)

Although the analogy of actions to offspring here has prima facie plausibility, it
is also misleading. For the relation Aristotle adverts to between parents and
children is, in his terms, one of ‘efficient causation’: parents are simply the
necessary and sufficient conditions of their progeny’s coming into being
(whatever character the latter turn out to have). By contrast, the salient relation,
in this context, between an agent and his actions is one of ‘final causation’: i.e.,
we need to ask under what intentional aspect they are purposefully brought
about. And this is exactly the source of the difficulty. For the Socratic view,
which Aristotle adopts, holds that actions are brought about only ever under the
aspect of the good. But then, ex hypothesi, it is hard to see how wicked actions
can be ‘clear-eyed’ or voluntary. Hence, given voluntariness is a necessary
condition of blame, it is also hard to see how they can legitimately be blamed.
Aristotle’s second attempt to undo the asymmetry thesis is basically an appeal
to the endoxa, namely what is commonly and reputably thought and practised.
As he adjures,

Witness seems to be borne to [the symmetry between virtue and vice] both
by individuals in their private capacity and by legislators … for these punish
and take vengeance on those who do wicked acts [mochthēra] … while they
honour those who do noble acts, as though they meant to encourage the
latter and deter the former.
(1113b21–6)

As a summary of how citizens and legislators actually behave – punishing

mochthēra when they are judged voluntary, partly on grounds of giving the
guilty their just deserts and partly on grounds of deterrence – this is well taken.
But how does it show that vicious action is properly imputable in the first place?
Perhaps Aristotle is gesturing towards a consequentialist argument, to the effect
that punishment is justified in virtue of its social consequences. Indeed, John
Kekes mounts just such an argument: he claims that, even though so-called moral
‘monsters’ are usually mere moral ‘idiots’, banally mistaking evil for good,12
nonetheless they should be punished. In Kekes’s words, it is one of the ‘basic
tasks of morality’ (Kekes 1998: 226) to punish evil behaviour: the social good
requires this, so failure to do so on grounds of the non-imputability of vice is
simply irresponsible. But whatever the merits of Kekes’s baldly consequentialist
argument, it is straightforwardly irrelevant to the crucial issue (and Aristotle’s
main concern) of whether vice is imputable and can thus be voluntary: neither it
nor any number of endoxa could establish that.13
Aristotle’s third and most promising attempt to refute the asymmetry thesis
centres, like the first two, on NE III.5. His first move, in III.1, is to make a
distinction between what someone does and their reason for doing it. This
distinction allows him to make a concomitant distinction between ignorance of
what he calls the ‘particulars’ (ta kath’hekasta) of an action (1110b33, 1111a23–4)
and ignorance of the ethical ‘universal’ (1110b32; cf. 1147a3). The former
(sometimes translated as ignorance of the ‘particular circumstances’ of action)
covers details such as who one is, whom one is acting on, what instrument one is
using, and how one is acting (1111a3–6). The latter covers the overall aim of one’s
action, including its moral character. With these distinctions in place, Aristotle
offers the following argument:

Now every wicked man is ignorant of what he ought to do and what he

ought to abstain from, and error of this kind makes men unjust and in
general bad; but … it is not ignorance in prohairesis [moral choice] that
makes action involuntary (it makes men wicked), nor ignorance of the
universal (for that men are blamed), but ignorance of the particular
circumstances of the action and the objects with which it is concerned.
(1110b28–11a1)

The upshot of this is that ethical ignorance is not properly an excusing condition;
only ignorance of the ‘particulars’ can legitimately be termed ‘involuntary’, and
thus excuse someone. It follows that vicious choice per se, and the action to
which it gives rise, can be perfectly voluntary, and thus subject to blame. What
are we to make of this argument?
As it stands, it looks overstipulative. For why should we accept that only
ignorance of particular circumstances makes an action involuntary? This appears
a mere device, one designed to uphold the symmetry between vice and virtue. In
light of this weakness, perhaps, Aristotle makes his second move, drawing an
analogy between vicious action and drunkenness. He holds:

we punish a man for his ignorance, if he is thought responsible for [it], as

when … [he] had the power of not getting drunk and his getting drunk was
the cause of his ignorance … So, too, to the unjust and to the self-indulgent
 man it was open at the beginning not to become men of this kind, and so
they are such voluntarily.
(1113b30–14a21)

The argument here seems to be that, even if ethical ignorance is unavoidable, and
thus involuntary – relative to someone’s developed character – the very
development of that character was not itself inevitable. Consequently, someone
who is now confirmedly self-indulgent, say, cannot be excused for their actions:
their vice was initially voluntary, and it is this prōton pseudon, or original fault,
that determines their present culpability. As Aristotle affirms towards the end of
III.5: ‘though we control the beginning of our dispositions, the gradual progress is
not obvious … because it was in our power, however, to act in this way or not in
this way, therefore the dispositions are voluntary’ (1114b32–15a3; emphasis
added).
This grounding of responsibility for vicious action in responsibility for vicious
character achieves, in one sense, what Aristotle wants it to achieve: for it shows,
pace the asymmetry thesis, how vice can be voluntary.14 But, in another sense, it
achieves too much, since we could legitimately ask why what was introduced as
a hypothesis – NB: ‘if he is thought responsible [aitios]’ (1113b30–31) – becomes,
by the end of Aristotle’s argument, a quasi-doctrine. That is, why should we
accept that the initial stages of character formation are always ‘up to us’, or ‘in
our power’, and hence voluntary? Such formation usually takes place in
childhood and adolescence, when people are maximally vulnerable to their
family, educators, and environment. So it seems not only morally rigoristic but
also morally unrealistic to expect that how our characters take shape (virtuously
or viciously, or somewhere in between) is largely our responsibility. True,
Aristotle does remark that we are ‘somehow part-causes [sunaitioi] of our
character-dispositions’ (1114b21–2) – but this concession is not reflected in his
insistence that ethical ignorance is never involuntary, and thus never excusable.
David Furley, for one, takes this to be an unwarranted and overly harsh position
(see Furley 1977: 53). Susan Sauvé Meyer counters that Aristotle was well aware
of the crucial role of early education: after all, he expects his audience to be well
brought up (1095b4–6, 8–13; 1104b11–13), and he emphasizes the vital importance
of law for good upbringing (1103b1–6; 1179b31–80a6) (see Sauvé Meyer 2006:
155–6). But, despite this, I think Furley is right in suggesting that these insights
are not effectively brought to bear on Aristotle’s view of the voluntariness of vice,
a view which remains uncompromising – and unforgiving.
Before moving on to Aristotle’s metaphysics of vice, it is worth mentioning
what may be a point in favour of his moral rigorism. For, on one construal, that
rigorism is a response to what has, since Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in
Jerusalem (1963), become known as the problem of the ‘banality of evil’. Arendt
maintains that Adolf Eichmann’s evil acts were never ‘clear-eyed’: they always
proceeded under the aspect of some perceived good.15 But, unlike Aristotle, she
does not maintain that such moral ignorance, or ‘sheer thoughtlessness’ (ibid.:
287), was always traceable to some initial, voluntary, and thus culpable embrace
of vice. Rather, her suggestion appears to be that, since evil had become so
endemic in the Third Reich, there was, in effect, ‘the responsibility of nobody’ –
only the system, or political structure, so to speak, was properly to blame. By
contrast, Aristotle could be taken as saying that this is never the case: whenever
vicious action occurs, then however far moral ignorance has penetrated
someone’s character, and bar the excusing conditions of genuine coercion and
ignorance of particular circumstances, that person is blameworthy. Not that
Aristotle’s position is less controversial than Arendt’s: it too, as I have argued, is
open to criticism. It is just that it reflects the strong intuition that, especially
when extreme evil is at stake, responsibility must be taken by its ‘begetters’ – all
the while accepting that such evil is not ‘clear-eyed’ and is, in some sense,
‘impersonally’ and pervasively present within a political system.

The metaphysics of vice

So far, then, we have explored both the structure of vice and whether and how
individual agents can be held responsible for it (where ‘vice’ picks out both
vicious action and vicious character). I want now to take a brief look at Aristotle’s
wider metaphysics of vice. This is not often done in contemporary scholarship,
owing perhaps to a general resistance to metaphysical foundations within ethics,
but more particularly to the theological aspects of Aristotle’s thought. I think it is
nonetheless vital to tackle his moral metaphysics, not only because he has one
but also because it will help us understand far better the problems he identifies in
‘living viciously’ (see next section).
It is clear from Aristotle’s ethical treatises that vice is a derogation from, or
failure to fulfil, the human essence. Right at the start of the NE, he tells us that
‘every action and choice is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason, the
good has nobly been declared that at which all things aim’ (1094a1–3). Now,
though the first ‘good’ here suggests mere ‘perceived good’, the second suggests
‘real good’, since Aristotle takes it that humans desire not some illusory
fulfilment but actual, real fulfilment. And, in NE I.7, he argues that this is
achieved by fulfilling the human function or ergon – NB: ‘the excellence [aretē]
of each thing is relative to its proper function’ (1139a16–17) – and that humans
fulfil their function by living according to the virtues. As he maintains at II.6,

every virtue [aretē] both brings into good condition the thing of which it is
the virtue, and makes the function of that thing be done well; e.g. the virtue
of the eye makes both the eye and its function good; for it is by the virtue of
the eye that we see well … Therefore … the virtue of man also will be the
disposition which makes a man good, and which makes him do his own
function well.
(1106a15–24)

The ‘disposition’ in question here is (generically) virtue and (specifically) the

particular virtues, such as generosity, courage, temperance, and justice. It is these
into which we need to be habituated, Aristotle holds, in order to fulfil our species
function and thus our nature. Indeed, since such fulfilment is our proper end, we
are fitted for the virtues: as he says, ‘we are adapted by nature to receive them,
and are made perfect by habit’ (1103a25–6; cf. 1144b4–9). It follows that the vices
are destructive of our nature and cannot fulfil us: ‘for evil [or vice, kakon]
destroys even itself, and if it is complete [holoklēron], becomes unbearable’
(1126a12–13).
This unabashedly objectivist conception of virtue and vice is bolstered in
Aristotle’s Metaphysics (M). At M IX.9, in particular, we discover just how
continuous his moral theory is with his general axiology and ontology. In M IX.8,
Aristotle unpacks his well-known view that a substance’s ‘actuality’ (energeia)16
is prior in being, time, and account (logos) to its ‘potentiality’ (dunamis). For
instance, a boy is a potential man, yet he is so precisely in virtue of his father,
whose form supplies the end or telos towards which the boy develops (1050a4–
10).17 This teleological account of substance is complemented by a teleological
account of contrary qualities, such as health and illness. On the one hand, an
individual substance (for example, a man) is capable of being either healthy or ill,
and so has the potentiality for both qualities. But, on the other hand, because his
telos – namely, that which determines his good18 – excludes illness, his potential
for either contrary is not neutral but ordered to one (namely, health) alone.19 And
this evaluative bias, as it were, in Aristotle’s metaphysics of actuality and
potentiality is made explicit in M IX.9. Here he writes: ‘the good actuality is
better and more honourable than the good potentiality … And in the case of bad
things, the end or actuality must be worse than the potentiality … [for] the bad is
in its nature posterior to the potentiality’ (1051a4–19). From this we can learn
that, unlike actuality simpliciter, which realizes the telos (and hence good) of a
substance, bad ‘actuality’ – e.g., illness or vice – is never prior in being, time, or
account. Rather, it merely derogates from, or constitutes a privation of, that good
which should come to being in a substance. It follows that vice is a form of
radical failure: the failure of a substance to achieve that state of being towards
which its nature tends.
To appreciate the depth of this metaphysical picture, it is necessary to see how
it encompasses not only biological, but also eternal beings (and, above all, god).20
Unlike perishable beings, Aristotle holds, ‘eternal beings [contain] … nothing bad,
nothing defective, nothing perverted (for perversion is something bad)’ (1051a19–
21). His grounds for saying this are, in short, that eternal beings are perfectly
actual, on pain of harboring various potentialities, and thus the possibility of
change (from being to non-being, and vice versa). But, if they are perfectly actual,
they are also incapable of any evil or defect since, as I outlined above, the notion
of a ‘bad actuality’ is in fact a pseudo-notion. Realized badness is merely a way of
identifying a failure of being – i.e., a derogation from completed (and thus good)
being. It follows that god, supreme among eternal beings, is most actual and best.
As Aristotle contends,

If … god is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this

compels our wonder; and if in a better, this compels it yet more. And god is
in a better state … We say, therefore, that god is a living being, eternal, most
 good.
(1072b24–30)

His conclusion is that god, in virtue of being supremely good, is the ultimate
object of aspiration: not qua Platonic Form – which is argued against in NE I.6 –
but qua separated, eternal, living substance (see Menn 1992: 550, 564, 573; Mirus
2004b: 703–4, 712–13). Human vice, therefore, is not only a failure to attain the
good proper to human nature; it is also a failure to share in the divine life (to the
degree that human nature permits). And this lends Aristotle’s metaphysics of vice
a depth and a seriousness which a non-theological metaphysics would, arguably,
lack.

Living viciously
We come finally to a problem of consistency in Aristotle’s portrayal of the vicious
person. The apparent inconsistency is between VII.7–8, on the one hand, and
IX.4, on the other. In the former two chapters, Aristotle pictures the vicious
character (or akolastos)21 as – like the virtuous – integrated – i.e., as wholly
devoted to his ends, and thus as without any regrets. As such, he stands in
contrast to the akratēs (the weak-willed or incontinent person), who grasps the
correct moral end but often backslides, thus allowing his passions to undermine
his choice. As Aristotle holds,

the self-indulgent man is incurable, and the incontinent man curable; for
wickedness is like a disease such as dropsy or consumption, while
incontinence is like epilepsy; the former is a permanent, the latter an
intermittent badness [ponēria]. And generally incontinence and vice are
different in kind; vice is unconscious of itself, incontinence is not … for
incontinence is contrary to choice, while vice is in accordance with choice …
[moreover] the incontinent man … is better than the self-indulgent man, and
not bad without qualification; for the best thing in him, the [moral] first
principle [archē], is preserved.
(1150b32–51a26)
Hence we have a clear contrast between vice and akrasia: vice is permanent,
incurable (aniatos), unaware of its own nature, and destructive of the archē of
practical wisdom (phronēsis), whereas akrasia is intermittent, curable, self-aware,
and preserves the ‘starting points’ of phronēsis.22
The portrait of vicious agency in IX.4 is significantly different, since it
assimilates it to akratic agency and contrasts it straightforwardly with virtuous
agency. The virtuous or good man, Aristotle claims, has opinions that are

harmonious, and he desires the same things with all his soul … And such a
man wishes to live with himself; for he does so with pleasure, since the
memories of his past acts are delightful, and his hopes for the future are
good … he has, so to speak, nothing to regret.
(1166a13–29; cf. 1170a9–10, b2–5)

By contrast, the vicious or bad man is portrayed as the model of self-dissension:

no one who is thoroughly bad and impious has these [virtuous] attributes …
those who have done many terrible deeds and are hated for their wickedness
even shrink from life and destroy themselves; for they remember many a
grievous deed, and anticipate others like them … their soul is rent by faction,
and one element in it by reason of its wickedness grieves when it abstains
from certain acts, while the other part is pleased … as if they were pulling
themselves in pieces … for bad men are laden with regrets.
(1166b5–25; cf. 1099a12–13, 1172a8–9)

Evidently, we have come a long way from the vicious character of VII.7–8.
Instead of the concerted, self-assured agent, whose condition is compared to that
of chronic (yet stable) disease, we have an agent effectively at war with himself,
pained by continual guilt, but nonetheless enmired in a life of self-destructive
vice. No wonder, then, that some commentators have judged Aristotle’s analyses
of living viciously to be contradictory, and unsalvageably so.23 Are they right?
Several scholars have come to Aristotle’s defence here, mostly notably Thomas
Brickhouse (2003) and David Roochnik (2007). Brickhouse argues that, while the
vicious person does act from deliberate choice (prohairesis) – as maintained in
VII.7–8 – psychic conflict of the kind outlined in IX.4 is bound to take place
subsequent to such choice. Why so? Because, Brickhouse holds, the vicious have
systematically unruly and conflicting appetites. As he puts it, ‘if rebellious
appetite is aroused prematurely [as it is in the vicious] … [it] generates
deliberation about its satisfaction independently of any consideration about how
its satisfaction will affect its possessor’s good’ (Brickhouse 2003: 15). In other
words, vicious appetites act as a pre-emptive and mutually antagonistic set of
forces, which commandeer rational decision and thus play havoc with an agent’s
life trajectory. This reading thus finds a role for both prohairesis and self-
dissension in the life of the akolastos and, furthermore, has some basis in
Aristotle’s text.24 As a result, it has found favour with several interpreters. Irwin,
for instance, holds that, ‘Since [vicious people] form rational plans, they are
capable of disapproving of themselves when they violate them, but, since the
rational plans are themselves unstable devices for satisfying changing
inclinations, they are liable to frustration’ (Irwin 2001: 94). Should we embrace
this attractive account with its not insignificant interpretative dividends?25
Roochnik has provided conclusive reason against doing so. For what could be
called its ‘internal’ perspective on vice – namely, that the psychic conflict
endemic to vice is a function of importunate and conflicting desires – simply
does not capture what he calls Aristotle’s ‘language of self-loathing’ in IX.4
(Roochnik 2007: 213). The vicious person is not only frustrated and self-stultified;
he tries to flee himself, finding his own memories unbearable, and discovering
nothing lovable (1166b17) in himself. In short, vice generates profound self-
conflict (stasis), to the extent that the vicious even want to kill themselves. As
Roochnik comments, ‘This does not sound like a man punishing himself for being
a failure at the pursuit of vice. Instead, it better describes someone regretting the
terrible wrongs he has done’ (Roochnik 2007: 213). In place, then, of the ‘internal’
account of vice and its conflicts, Roochnik suggests another way of reconciling
VII.7–8 and IX.4. What we have in the former two chapters, he maintains, is the
vicious person’s own self-conception, with its systematic lack of self-awareness
and characteristic bravado. By contrast, the latter chapter conveys ‘our troubled
attempt to think through the reality of viciousness’ (ibid.: 214) for ourselves.
‘Perhaps’, he remarks, ‘we wish or need to believe that the vicious man
experiences the same sort of regret we would feel’ (ibid.: 217); ‘Aristotle gives us a
truthful account of how we who are not vicious struggle to comprehend a basic
and awful human possibility which is not, and cannot be, fully intelligible to us’
(ibid.: 218).
Although Roochnik’s ‘external’ account has some plausibility, I think we have
explored Aristotle’s metaphysics of vice sufficiently to see that it is inadequate.
For integral to that metaphysics is the idea that living viciously is, in effect, a
profound revolt against human nature, a doomed attempt to go against the norms
of flourishing inscribed in our very being. If this is the case, then it is wholly
unsurprising that those who persevere in the life of vice will find themselves
continually subject to bouts of self-alienation. Granted, they may be unable to
arrive at any rational explanation for this and, at a conscious level, may carry on
regardless, periodically disturbed but nevertheless determined to plough ahead,
convinced that the habits they have formed must be the right ones. But this does
not detract from the fact that their mode of behaviour is permanently in tension
with their actual nature. This is, in a way, a tragic picture of vice and its effects.
But, in another way, it offers hope. For if the vicious person is necessarily subject
to the kind of self-dissension or self-dissociation I have outlined, then, far from
being ‘incurable’, as Aristotle suggests above, he may find ample (at least
subconscious) motivation to seek a cure. Indeed, it is precisely by attending to his
nature, and its inner aspiration to the good, that he may find the path that will, in
the end, deliver him from evil.26

Notes
1 To name but a few texts: Evil in Modern Thought (Neiman 2002); Radical Evil: A Philosophical
Investigation (Bernstein 2002); Naming Evil, Judging Evil (Grant 2006); The Idea of Evil (Dews 2008);
Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (Card 2010); Evil: A Philosophical Investigation (Russell
2014).
2 References will be to this seminal text, not to the Eudemian Ethics (EE) – unless otherwise stated.
3 He outlines the mean at NE II.2, 6–9, then gives an extended treatment of courage (III.6–9) and
temperance (III.10–12) – along with their correlative vices. IV covers other virtues and vices, including
the controversial virtue of ‘pride’ or megalopsuchia (IV.3). V deals with justice and injustice (see
following). The space Aristotle devotes to the mean demonstrates its salience within his moral theory.
4 In the EE ‘diagram’, Aristotle claims that the vice of deficiency here is ‘anonymous’ – i.e., unnamed, or
 not readily identifiable. He allows, reasonably, that some dispositions have no obvious designation.
5 Cf. Timothy Chappell (2012: 48): ‘Aristotle is not in the business of offering any … formula [for right
action] … the mean is supposed to be a … phenomenological description of … a wide range of
excellences of character … no more than that’.
6 NB: ‘In everything that is continuous and divisible it is possible to take more, less, or an equal amount
… and the equal is an intermediate between excess and deficiency’ (1106a26–9). The inescapably
quantitative language here is noted at Rapp 2006: 114.
7 Cf. Aristotle’s notion that the good is subject to limit (peras), whereas the bad is limitless (apeiron). As
he puts matters: ‘it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited, as the
Pythagoreans conjectured, and good to that of the limited)’ (1106b28–30). For a modern attempt to
resurrect the idea that evil conduct is somehow ‘unlimited’, see Buber 1952.
8 In what follows, I am going to narrow my focus to wrongdoing qua vice proper, rather than including
akratic or weak-willed action and what Aristotle calls ‘brutishness’ (thēriotēs) (see VII.1). Akrasia is
sub-vicious, since it involves falling into vicious behaviour despite one’s better judgement, whereas
brutishness is super-vicious, being characterized by Aristotle as a rare condition, akin to mental illness
(1145a31).
9 Jessica Moss (2010) argues that, for Aristotle, action and desire are for the sake of the good qua pleasant.
This may be so, but what is salient for my purposes is Aristotle’s guise of the good thesis per se, rather
than any properties in virtue of which he takes ends (telē) to be good.
10 It is worth noting in this context that Christian philosophy (though perhaps not in its Aristotelian form)
makes room for the direct doing of evil qua evil, in a way alien to ancient moral psychology. See, for
instance, Pieper 1968: 57; Finnis 1983: 111; Chappell 1995.
11 I owe this label to Susan Sauvé Meyer (2006: 151–3).
12 He cites as examples of such ‘monsters’ the witch-hunter, the authoritarian patriarch, and the ruthless
businessman (see Kekes 1998: 219).
13 Aristotle, as is well known, does counsel his readers to heed the opinions of the many and the wise (see,
e.g., Topics 100b22–3). But this is different from showing their opinions to be independently secure and
well-founded. To appeal to the endoxa per se, that is – and no more – looks argumentatively weak.
14 It does this, essentially, by construing prima facie involuntary action as negligent action. Granted,
vicious conduct can, according to Aristotle, become so ingrained as to ‘destroy the principle’ of moral
action (see 1144a35–6, 1151a15). But this destruction was not inevitable ab initio; it follows that those
who allow it to take place are negligent. For an argument to the effect that Aristotle’s work on
voluntariness is designed to uphold a ‘negligence standard’ in law, see Curren 1989.
15 The ‘goods’ in Eichmann’s case consisted in qualities such as efficiency, institutional loyalty, and
 dutifulness. For Arendt’s separation of Eichmann’s evil acts from his motives, see (e.g.) Allison 2001:
87–90; and Bernstein 2002: 207–14, 219, 227, 232. As Arendt puts things, Eichmann was no Iago or
Richard III: ‘He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realised what he was doing’ (1963: 287).
16 Aryeh Kosman (2013) argues that the proper translation of energeia is ‘activity’, but I have adhered to
the traditional translation.
17 For the close connection between form and end in Aristotle’s metaphysics, see Mirus 2004a: 519 and
Mirus 2004b: 708.
18 For the tight relation between end and good in Aristotle’s metaphysics, see Mirus 2004b: 702, 704 n.14.
19 Jonathan Beere (2009) and Katz and Polansky (2006) disagree here, since the former maintains that
some potentialities are neutral, whereas the latter maintain that none are.
20 This is emphasized in Menn 1992; Mirus 2004a: 518; and Mirus 2004b.
21 Akolasia is properly ‘self-indulgence’ – i.e., lack of temperance. But Aristotle uses it here as a generic
term for viciousness of character, perhaps because he understands self-indulgence – literally,
‘uncorrectedness’ – as characteristic of vice in general.
22 Clearly there is an issue here about just how the vicious person does choose, given Aristotle’s
commitment to action sub specie boni. Terence Irwin argues that the akolastos chooses to act in line
with his inclinations or pleasures and under the aspect of the advantageous (sumpheron) rather than
the noble (kalon) or good (agathon) (see Irwin 2001: 79–89). I will remain neutral on this issue, merely
noting that, according to VII.7–8, the vicious person chooses and acts consistently and without regret.
23 See, for example, Annas 1977: 553–4; Bostock 2000: 173.
24 For example, ‘the same thing is always painful, and the same thing always pleasant [to the good man],
and not one thing at one time, and another at another’ (1166a28–9; cf. 1101a9). By implication, the bad
man is characterized by a series of diverse, and probably also mutually conflicting appetites (see
1154b29–31).
25 Similar accounts are given by Nancy Sherman (1989: 108–12) and Paula Gottlieb (2009: 150).
26 Aristotle speaks, NB, of friends who are not ‘incurable in their wickedness’ and are thus ‘capable of
being reformed’ (1165b18–19). Cf. the following passage from the Categories:

For the bad man, if led into better ways of living and talking, would progress, if only a little,
towards being better. And if he once made even a little progress, it is clear that he might either
change completely, or make really great progress. For however slight the progress he made to
begin with, he becomes ever more easily changed towards virtue, so that he is likely to make still
more progress; and when this keeps happening, it brings him over completely into the contrary
disposition, provided time permits.
(13a23–31)

For an optimistic view of Aristotle on the curability of vice, see Di Muzio 2000; for a more pessimistic
 view, see Jacobs 1997.

Further reading
Brickhouse, T. C. 2003. ‘Does Aristotle Have a Consistent Account of Vice?’, Review of Metaphysics, 57
(September): 3–23.
Irwin, T. 2001. ‘Vice and Reason’, Journal of Ethics, 5(1): 73–97.
Katz, E. C., and Polansky, R. 2006. ‘The Bad is Last but Does not Last: Metaphysics θ 9’, Oxford Studies in
Ancient Philosophy, 31 (winter): 233–42.
Mirus, C. V. 2004a. ‘Aristotle’s Agathon’, Review of Metaphysics, 57 (March): 515–36.
——2004b. ‘The Metaphysical Roots of Aristotle’s Teleology’, Review of Metaphysics, 57 (June): 699–724.
Roochnik, D. 2007. ‘Aristotle’s Account of the Vicious: A Forgivable Inconsistency’, History of Philosophy
Quarterly, 24(3): 207–20.
Vogt, K. M. 2017. Desiring the Good: Ancient Proposals and Contemporary Theory. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. http://katjavogt.com/pdf/katja_vogt_motivation.pdf.

References
Allison, H. E. 2001. ‘Reflection on the Banality of (Radical) Evil: A Kantian Analysis’, in M. Pia Lara (ed.),
Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 86–100.
Angier, T. 2010. Technē in Aristotle’s Ethics: Crafting the Moral Life. London: Continuum.
Annas, J. 1977. ‘Plato and Aristotle on Friendship and Altruism’, Mind, 86(344): 532–54.
Arendt, H. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Aristotle 1995. The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Beere, J. 2009. Doing and Being: An Interpretation of Aristotle’s ‘Metaphysics’ Theta. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Bernstein, R. J. 2002. Radical Evil. Cambridge: Polity.
Bostock, D. 2000. Aristotle’s Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brickhouse, T. C. 2003. ‘Does Aristotle Have a Consistent Account of Vice?’, Review of Metaphysics, 57
(September): 3–23.
Buber, M. 1952. Images of Good and Evil. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Card, C. 2010. Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chappell, T. D. J. 1995. Aristotle and Augustine on Freedom: Two Theories of Freedom, Voluntary Action and
Akrasia. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
——2012. ‘Aristotle’, in T. Angier (ed.), Ethics: The Key Thinkers. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 33–55.
Curren, R. R. 1989. ‘The Contribution of Nicomachean Ethics iii 5 to Aristotle’s Theory of Responsibility’,
History of Philosophy Quarterly, 6(3): 261–77.
Dews, P. 2008. The Idea of Evil. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Di Muzio, G. 2000. ‘Aristotle on Improving One’s Character’, Phronesis, 45(3): 205–19.
Finnis, J. 1983. Fundamentals of Ethics. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Furley, D. 1977. ‘Aristotle on the Voluntary’, in J. Barnes, M. Schofield, and R. Sorabji (eds), Articles on
Aristotle: Ethics and Politics. London: Duckworth, pp. 47–60.
Gottlieb, P. 2009. The Virtue of Aristotle’s Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grant, R. W. 2006. Naming Evil, Judging Evil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hursthouse, R. 2006. ‘The Central Doctrine of the Mean’, in R. Kraut (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s
‘Nicomachean Ethics’. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 96–115.
Irwin, T. 2001. ‘Vice and Reason’, Journal of Ethics, 5(1): 73–97.
Jacobs, J. 1997. ‘Plasticity and Perfection: Maimonides and Aristotle on Character’, Religious Studies, 33(4):
443–54.
Katz, E. C., and Polansky, R. 2006. ‘The Bad is Last but Does not Last: Metaphysics θ 9’, Oxford Studies in
Ancient Philosophy, 31 (winter): 233–42.
Kekes, J. 1998. ‘The Reflexivity of Evil’, in E. Frankel Paul, F. D. Miller, and J. Paul (eds), Virtue and Vice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 216–32.
Kosman, A. 2013. The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle’s Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
McDowell, J. 1998. Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Menn, S. 1992. ‘Aristotle and Plato on God as Nous and as the Good’, Review of Metaphysics, 45 (March):
543–73.
Miller, J. (ed.) 2011. Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Milo, R. D. 1998. ‘Virtue, Knowledge, and Wickedness’, in E. Frankel Paul, F. D. Miller, and J. Paul (eds),
Virtue and Vice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 196–215.
Mirus, C. V. 2004a. ‘Aristotle’s Agathon’, Review of Metaphysics, 57 (March): 515–36.
——2004b. ‘The Metaphysical Roots of Aristotle’s Teleology’, Review of Metaphysics, 57 (June): 699–724.
Moss, J. 2010. ‘Aristotle’s Non-Trivial, Non-Insane View that Everyone Always Desires Things under the
Guise of the Good’, in S. Tenenbaum (ed.), Desire, Practical Reason, and the Good. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 65–81.
Neiman, S. 2002. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Pieper, J. 1968. Death and Immortality. South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press.
Plato 1997. Plato: Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Rapp, C. 2006. ‘What Use is Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean?’, in B. Reis (ed.), The Virtuous Life in Greek
Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 99–126.
Roochnik, D. 2007. ‘Aristotle’s Account of the Vicious: A Forgivable Inconsistency’, History of Philosophy
Quarterly, 24(3): 207–20.
Russell, L. 2014. Evil: A Philosophical Investigation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sauvé Meyer, S. 2006. ‘Aristotle on the Voluntary’, in R. Kraut (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s
‘Nicomachean Ethics’. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 137–57.
Setiya, K. 2010. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, in S. Tenenbaum (ed.), Desire, Practical Reason, and the Good.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 82–110.
Sherman, N. 1989. The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Velleman, J. D. 1992. ‘The Guise of the Good’, Nous, 26(1): 3–26.
Vogt, K. M. 2010. ‘Desiring the Good: A Socratic Reading of Aristotle’,
http://katjavogt.com/pdf/katja_vogt_motivation.pdf.
Williams, B. A. O. 1980. ‘Justice as a Virtue’, in A. Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’.
Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 189–99.
11 Epicureanism1
Thomas A. Blackson

Only a small percentage of Epicurus’ writings have survived,2 partly because his
philosophy became unpopular once the Hellenistic reaction to the classical
tradition gave way to the resurgence of non-sceptical forms of Platonism and the
subsequent rise of Christianity. This makes it difficult to know in much detail
what Epicurus thought about evil, but there is reason to think that he made an
important advance over his predecessors.
To understand this advance, it is helpful to begin by clearing away certain
interpretations. The first is that Epicurus understood evil as a theological
problem. There is no good reason to think that he understood evil in this way.
The concept of free will seems to enter the philosophical tradition after Epicurus,
during the time of late Stoicism.3 Furthermore, even if he did possess the concept,
as some scholars can appear to suppose,4 there is no good reason to think that he
understood evil as a theological problem whose solution consists in the
recognition of free will. It seems clear that Epicurus did not believe in a
providentially ordered world5 and hence that he did not believe in a god whose
existence evil could call into question.6
Epicurus did not understand evil as a theological problem, but he did explain
the existence of some evil in terms of certain beliefs about theological matters. He
thought that some evil is the result of common but false beliefs about the divine,
that these beliefs are a prominent source of unhappiness, and that human beings
are particularly prone to such beliefs and to superstition generally. It is in this
connection that Epicurus made an important contribution to the understanding of
evil.
 Epicurus was interested in the practical problem of living well, and his
discussion of evil is part of his solution to this problem. He rejected the dominant
line of thought from the classical tradition of Plato and Aristotle and moved
away from rationalism and towards empiricism. From within this new
perspective, Epicurus came to a significantly different set of conclusions about
human beings, their place in reality, and the good life. He thought that the life of
enlightened moderation is the good life and that ‘contemplation’ is not essential
to happiness.
Epicurus’ move towards empiricism was part of a significant change of
perspective in the history of philosophy. To appreciate the full extent of his
contribution to this change of perspective, and the significance of his advance
over his predecessors in the understanding of evil and its causes, it is necessary to
clear away one more interpretation. Epicurus did not conceive of evil either as a
theological problem or as a natural consequence of the existence and exercise of
the will. It is true that the Epicurean Lucretius7 discusses libera voluntas in On
the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura). It is true that, in translation, Lucretius
is commonly portrayed as believing in free will. It is also true that Epicurus is
commonly thought to be the source for this discussion in Lucretius. However, it
would be a mistake to conclude that Epicurus understood evil as a practical
problem to be solved by the introduction of a way for human beings to control
their wills.
Although the term ‘free will’ is sometimes used to express an ordinary part of
the way human beings typically understand themselves and their behaviour,8 it is
more properly used to express a theoretical concept, such as the concept of
phlogiston, as Gilbert Ryle says in The Concept of Mind.9 The concept of free will
originated as part of a theory to explain a familiar but deeply perplexing notion
that presumably is part of the way human beings have always understood
themselves: that they are capable of action. The range of human behaviour seems
to include things that they themselves do. In this behaviour, human beings are
not forced by anybody or anything. Rather, in such cases, a human being
somehow does what he does in virtue of something in his ‘mind’. The concept of
free will entered the ancient philosophical tradition in an explanation of what
this thing is.
In the philosophical tradition that precedes Epicurus, the concept of free will is
not present. Aristotle, for instance, in his philosophy of mind, has boulēsis play a
fundamental role, but he does not conceive of boulēsis as a will.10 For Aristotle, as
for Plato, boulēsis is the desire that belongs to reason.11 The view is that some
desires belong to reason, either because a desire for the real good is fixed in
reason or because the epistemic process of determining what the real good is
belongs to reason. In the latter case, accepting a belief about what the real good is
constitutes a desire for what the real good is believed to be. In the former, the
desire for the real good is a part of reason, and the problem is to figure out what
this good is.
Reason, however, according to Aristotle, is not the only source of motivation in
human beings. Human psychology does not consist in reason alone. There are
other parts of the soul – for example, the appetite. This part of the soul has its
own distinctive form of desire. Furthermore, it is supposed to be possible for
desires in the different parts to conflict. According to Aristotle, it is possible for a
human being to have conflicting motivations, one from reason and one from
appetite, and to act on the basis of the appetitive desire, and so against ‘choice
and thought’.12 This psychological state is often described, misleadingly, as
‘weakness of the will’.
This description is misleading because Aristotle did not conceive of boulēsis as
a will. According to Aristotle, some things human beings do, and for which they
are responsible, do not involve boulēsis. A human being may eat because he is
hungry, but he need not be thinking about whether eating is a good idea. His
action can stem from an appetitive desire, not a desire of reason. Even so, his
eating would clearly be something that he himself does and not something
anything or anybody forces him to do.
Furthermore, from Aristotle’s point of view, action in terms of boulēsis has its
ground in the attachment human beings have to the good. This assumption,
which he shares with Plato and the Stoics, is that, just as reason in human beings
naturally seeks the truth, so also it naturally seeks the good. The form this
assumption takes is not entirely clear. Fixed in reason, either there is a desire for
the real good or, in addition to the general epistemic process of forming and
retracting beliefs on the basis of evidence, there is an ongoing and more specific
process of belief formation devoted to determining what the real good is. The
assumption may be false, but it is not the assumption that human beings have a
will.13
To see that libera voluntas does not mean ‘free will’ in Lucretius’ discussion,
note first of all that he makes his remarks just after he has said that the atoms
sometimes ‘swerve’. The Hellenistic philosophers were united by their critical
reaction to what they perceived as the excesses of the classical philosophy of
Plato and Aristotle, and this attitude manifests itself in Epicurus and the
Epicureans in an extremely striking way. They reached across the philosophy of
Plato and Aristotle to revitalize the atomism philosophy of Democritus and
Leucippus. It is thus quite possible that Epicurus did not believe in the swerve
because he was convinced that human beings have free will. Instead, his belief in
the swerve, if he believed in this at all, may have been part of his attempt to
revitalize atomism.
In fact, this is a plausible way to understand Epicurus. Ancient atomism, as is
well known, was an expression of the enlightenment attitude that showed itself
in the Milesian revolution. A driving idea in this revolution was that the gods, as
they behave in the traditional stories, are not the causes of the regularity
apparent in the world. Instead, as Democritus and Leucippus seem to have
developed the idea, this regularity is how the random motion of the atoms
through the void appears to human beings. Lucretius, in arguing for the swerve,
may intend to emphasize the continuity between Epicurean atomism and the
prior atomism of Democritus and Leucippus. Epicurus himself does not mention
the swerve in his surviving work. So it may be that, if he believed in the swerve,
his belief was not connected to any worry about the integrity of human action.14
Instead, it may well just have been part of his atomism. Furthermore, it may be
that Lucretius draws the connection between the swerve and libera voluntas
because he belonged to a tradition of Epicureans who built on and extended
Epicurus’ work in an effort to meet problems they perceived.15
This interpretation makes sense of the way in which Epicurus expresses his
concern over the implications of ‘fate’. His concern is clearly evident in the Letter
to Menoeceus:

Whom, after all, do you consider superior to the man who … would deride
the [fate] which some introduce as overlord of everything, [but sees that
some things are necessitated,] others are due to fortune, and others depend
 on us, since necessity is accountable to no one, and fortune is an unstable
thing to watch, while that which depends on us, with which culpability and
its opposite are naturally associated, is free of an overlord? For it would be
better to follow the mythology about gods than be a slave to the ‘fate’ of the
natural philosophers: the former at least hints at the hope of begging the
gods off by means of worship, whereas the latter involves an inexorable
necessity.
(X.133–4; LS 20 A)

But Epicurus, in these remarks, does not express a theory of mind. He simply
expresses the ordinary idea that some human behaviour consists in things that
human beings themselves do, as opposed to things they are made to do by fate or
by the gods. So, in this case at least, there is no reason to think that Epicurus
possessed a substantive concept of free will.
Lucretius, like Epicurus, is concerned about ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’.16 He notes that
human beings and other living things are free to pursue their own good, unless
they are subject to force or are otherwise constrained. Living things, unless they
are defective, can move for the sake of their own ends. They can take steps to
move ‘where pleasure leads’ them, as opposed to being made to do whatever they
do by being pushed or shoved. The ‘decrees of destiny’, or ‘fate’, can appear to be
a way of pushing and shoving, but, whether in fact it is or not, Lucretius says that
the ‘swerve’ defeats and thereby removes this particular threat to libera voluntas:

Moreover, if all movements are invariably linked, if new movement arises

from old in unalterable succession, if there is no atomic swerve to initiate
movement that can annul the decrees of destiny and prevent the existence of
an endless chain of causation, what is the source of this free will (libera)17
possessed by living creatures all over the earth? What, I ask, is the course of
this power of will (voluntas) wrested from destiny, which enables us to
advance where pleasure leads us, and to alter our movements not at a fixed
time or place, but at the direction of our minds? For undoubtedly in each
case it is the individual will that gives the initial impulse to such actions and
channels movements through the limbs.
(De Rerum Natura II.251–62; LS 20 F; Smith 2001: 41)
But there is no affirmation of a substantive concept of free will in these remarks.
Lucretius sees the swerve as preventing ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ from threatening libera
voluntas, and it seems clear that he uses libera voluntas to express the ordinary
idea that some behaviour consists in things that ‘living creatures’ do, as opposed
to things they are made to do.
If there is a temptation to think that something more is going on, this thought
becomes much less tempting once one appreciates how the Epicurean argument
was understood in antiquity. For this understanding, the primary evidence is
Cicero’s On Fate.18 In this work, Cicero reports that Carneades criticized the
argument (XI.23; LS 20 E 4). According to the criticism, it is acceptable in
ordinary language to say that something happens without a cause. But such
assertions mean only that there is no external antecedent cause. They do not
mean that there is no cause whatsoever (XI.23–4; LS 20 E 5). In the case of an
atom, for example, when it moves without an external antecedent cause, the
cause of the motion is internal, in the nature of the atom (XI.25; LS 20 E 6).
Similarly, for the ‘voluntary movements’ of the mind, it is acceptable to say that
there is no cause because there is no external antecedent cause. But it does not
follow that there is no cause of these movements (XI.25; LS 20 E 7).
Carneades, as Cicero portrays him, does not understand the Epicureans to say
that there is an uncaused cause of the motions by which human beings move to
‘where pleasure leads’ them. He uses the ‘power of the will’ to talk about the
‘voluntary movements’ (motus voluntarios) of the mind, whatever these
movements are. These movements are called ‘voluntary’ because they are not
forced on a human being by external antecedent causes. The point was that these
motions in the mind, insofar as they are voluntary, have no such causes; rather,
they are the unspecified things that happen in the mind when human beings do
things, as opposed to having things done to them. This was the content of the
Epicurean premise, as Carneades seems to have understood it, and this also seems
to be the content of the premise whose truth Lucretius attempts to preserve when
he says that it is necessary to ‘annul the decrees of destiny’.19
So there is good reason to think that the Epicureans did not understand evil in
terms of free will. Epicurus and Lucretius no doubt accepted the commonplace
that human beings are capable of action, but this is all that libera voluntas means
in Lucretius’ remarks. The focus of Epicurus’ discussion of evil was practical. He
thought that experience showed that ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ are the good and the
bad in life, and that the most important problem for human beings is to figure out
how to control their behaviour, so that they attain the good but not the bad. But it
is a mistake to think that Epicurus explained this control in terms of the will.
Just how Epicurus did explain this control is unfortunately much less clear, but
the first step to a proper appreciation of his thought is to see that he rejected
reason, as it was classically understood in Plato and Aristotle, and hence that he
did not think that happiness is a matter of ‘contemplation’ (theōria). Epicurus
believed that the study of nature would be unnecessary were human beings not
prone to worrisome false beliefs about celestial phenomena (LS B 25). He thought
that human beings, if they do not understand the nature of reality, are plagued by
fear of the sorts of events described in mythology. Human beings make up
threatening stories about natural phenomena they do not understand. They think
these phenomena indicate divine mood and that storms and other such
phenomena are punishment from the gods. For Epicurus, knowledge of physics
contributes to the good life by dispelling the fears enshrined in mythology.
Epicurus thought that theoretical investigations are useful to correct the
unfortunate and all too common tendency of human beings to form certain
distressing but false beliefs. Human beings are prone to such beliefs about the
gods, death, the availability of good things, and the likelihood of experiencing
bad things. Yet, in truth, as Epicurus seems to have stated it in his fourfold
remedy, ‘God presents no fears, death no worries, and while good is readily
attainable, bad is readily endurable’ (LS 25 J).20
Epicurus advances this remedy as a solution to life’s most difficult and
worrying problem. A human being who takes the remedy is supposed to realize
that there is an easy-to-execute and effective plan for living in a way that is
overwhelmingly likely to result in a life in which the pleasure taken in one’s
circumstances vastly outweighs the pain.21 This knowledge is a source of
immense relief and tremendous satisfaction. The relief, because it consists in the
removal of prior worries, makes a human being happier than he or she was
before taking the remedy. But the idea also seems to be that the knowledge itself
is a source of immense satisfaction. Moreover, the satisfaction taken is ongoing
because the knowledge is ongoing. The knowledge ensures that the few bad
things that do happen are not nearly disturbing enough to undermine one’s
overall happiness.
Given only this much, there can appear to be a significant resemblance
between the Epicurean conception of happiness and the conception present in
Plato and Aristotle. In Plato, given the picture in the Phaedo and the Republic, the
best existence is the one the soul enjoys in its disincarnate and natural state, fixed
in contemplation, free from practical concerns and the need to exercise reason to
meet those concerns. Its existence, in this natural and disincarnate state, is
characterized by knowledge of the Forms. Aristotle’s position is more nuanced.
He thinks that contemplation contributes most of all to happiness,22 but he also
believes that the excellent exercise of reason in practical matters contributes to
happiness and hence is a good life ‘secondarily’,23 or in a ‘secondary way’.24 Since
for Epicurus there is immense pleasure in the knowledge that a certain plan for
living is both straightforward and likely to result in a good and happy life, it
might appear that he too has a version of the view that happiness is most of all a
matter of contemplation and the exercise of reason.
In fact, there is reason to doubt that Epicurus took this view. The evidence is
sparse, but it is not hard to get the impression that he rejected this way of
thinking about happiness and knowledge as part of his more general rejection of
Platonic and Aristotelian rationalism.
In Plato, knowledge and expertise is a matter of ‘reason’. This is Socrates’ point
in the Gorgias. He says that rhetoric is not an expertise but a matter of
‘experience’ (empeiria), where ‘practice’ (tribē) and ‘memory’ (mnēmē) are
examples of such cognition (462b11–c7, 463a6–c7, 500a7–c6). In the Phaedo, when
Socrates mentions questions he considered in his youth but now finds confusing,
he refers to a tradition in which knowledge is a matter of experience, where
perception and memory are instances of this form of cognition (96b4–8). Plato
places Socrates in opposition to this ‘empirical’ tradition. This is true in the
Gorgias and also in the Phaedo. In the Phaedo, Socrates famously argues that the
lover of wisdom should not fear death. For the lover of wisdom, the body and the
senses are obstacles. The wisdom the lover seeks consists in knowledge of Forms,
knowledge that is a matter of ‘reason’ (65a9–7b5).
Aristotle rejects significant parts of the Platonic ontology, but he accepts the
broad outline of Plato’s rationalism. In the Metaphysics, in his theory of
induction (which seems to depend on the empiricist tradition Socrates mentions
in the autobiography passage), Aristotle is careful to distinguish ‘knowledge’
from ‘experience’, which precedes it in the sequence.25 Furthermore, in the
Nicomachean Ethics, he says that reason in one part of the soul is that by which
human beings contemplate realities, that happiness most of all consists in the
perfection of this part of the soul, and that the perfection of this part of the soul
makes a human being’s life most resemble the perfect existence of the first
unmovable mover.26
In contrast, Epicurus stresses memory in a way which suggests that he is part
of the empiricist tradition that Plato and Aristotle rejected. In the Letter to
Herodotus, Epicurus makes memory play an important role with respect to
happiness and the good life. He says that ‘freedom from disturbance … involves a
continual remembrance (mnēmēn) of the general and most important points [of
Epicureanism]’ (X.82). It is true that Epicurus tried to present his doctrines in
summary form for easy consumption and retention.27 It is also true that he uses
theōria and its cognates,28 as these are ordinary Greek words. But the stress he
places on memory and the ‘continual remembrance’ of his doctrines suggests that
he rejected the rationalism of the prior classical tradition.29 It suggests that he did
not think of the knowledge that contributes to happiness in terms of
‘contemplation’ (theōria) and the perfection of reason, and that he rejected the
conception of knowledge and happiness in the work of Plato and Aristotle.
Although the issue is difficult to settle conclusively, it seems that, for Epicurus,
knowledge contributes to happiness in a significantly different way. It is not that
contemplating the content of the knowledge, without the obscuring presence of
false belief, is itself supremely pleasurable. Rather, the idea seems to be that, once
a human being really knows,30 for example, that the ‘good is readily attainable’
and that the ‘bad is readily endurable’, as is proclaimed in the fourfold remedy,
he takes pleasure in thinking about the various circumstances in which he is
likely to find himself in the future.31 This is the opposite of what typically
happens when someone thinks about the negative consequences of certain
current actions (say smoking). Thinking about the results of smoking can be
extremely distressing, and this experience can change one’s behaviour.32 Epicurus
seems to rely on this general cognitive mechanism, which would have been
understood to belong to ‘experience’, as opposed to ‘reason’, in his understanding
of how the knowledge enshrined in the fourfold remedy contributes to happiness.
When a human being thinks about how things might go for him in the future,
which happens whenever he thinks about what to do, he experiences immense
pleasure because he knows that ‘God presents no fears, death no worries, and
while good is readily attainable, bad is readily endurable.’
Epicurus understands this pleasure taken in knowledge of the fourfold remedy
as constituitive of the ‘delighted mind’ and as part of the ‘highest and most
secure joy’ in the ‘blessed’ life of a human being. This is evident both in his own
remarks on the nature of the good life and in the discussion of his views in the
doxographical tradition:

[A] delighted mind, as I understand it, consists in the expectation that our
nature will avoid pain while acquiring all the pleasures I just mentioned.
(Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.41–4; LS 21 L; IG I–19.41)

The comfortable state of the flesh, and the confident expectation of this,
contain the highest and most secure joy for those who are capable of
reasoning.
(Plutarch, Against Epicurean Happiness 1089 D; LS 21 N)33

[T]he health of the body and freedom of the soul from disturbance … is the
goal of a blessed life.
(Letter to Menoeceus X.128; LS 21 B 1)34

Just how the fourfold remedy contributes to this ‘delight’ and ‘joy’ is not easy to
articulate precisely, but the mechanism is clearly very different from the one that
Plato suggests (in the Phaedo and Republic) in order to understand the
contribution knowledge of the Forms makes to happiness and the good life.
Epicurus seems to have tried to understand knowledge of the remedy, and the
way it underwrites ‘joy’ and the good life, in a way that does not recognize the
existence of reason as it was classically conceived.
It is in this connection that Epicurus broke important new ground in the
philosophical discussion of evil. At a certain level of abstraction, he looks like his
predecessors in the classical tradition. He thought that the good life was one of
happiness, that what detracts from happiness is bad, that living the best life is a
matter of having a certain wisdom and expertise, and that most human beings
never acquire this wisdom because they are subject to false beliefs about god,
death, the availability of good things, and the difficulty of bad things. Epicurus
thought that human beings must control themselves and that this means that
they must control their beliefs. But what is most distinctive and interesting about
Epicurus is the particular way he cast this general idea. He worked within a
broadly empiricist framework, not the rationalist one that figured so prominently
in the work of Plato and Aristotle. Epicurus thought that there is immense
pleasure in the knowledge that ‘God presents no fears, death no worries, and
while good is readily attainable, bad is readily endurable’, but he did not conceive
of human beings and the place of knowledge in the good life in terms of reason
and its perfection. Instead, he tried to conceive of human beings in terms of
experience. It is from within this perspective that he conceived of the good life
and the contribution knowledge of the fourfold remedy makes to happiness. The
lack of evidence makes it difficult to reconstruct his view in detail, but it seems
clear from what has survived that Epicurus’ view was innovative, and that he
made a historically significant advance over his predecessors in the
understanding of evil and its causes.

Abbreviations
IG Inwood, B., and Gerson, L. P. 1997. Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory
Readings. 2nd ed., Indianapolis: Hackett.
LS Long, A. A., and Sedley, D. N. 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Notes
1 I am grateful to Tom Angier and Sabra Nuel for helpful comments on the penultimate draft of this
paper.
2 Epicurus (341–271 BCE) set up his school (the Garden) in Athens in about 306 BCE. His literary output
was enormous. Diogenes Laertius lists the forty-one titles of Epicurus’ ‘best’ books (Lives and Opinions
of the Philosophers X.27). None of this work has survived. What is now known about Epicurus and his
philosophy depends primarily on three letters Diogenes preserves in Book X of his Lives and Opinions:
 Letter to Herodotus (which outlines the Epicurean philosophy of nature), Letter to Pythocles (which
discusses natural phenomena in the sky), and Letter to Menoeceus (which outlines the Epicurean
position on happiness).
3 The classic discussion is now M. Frede’s A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought (2011).
4 In the introduction to his book On the Nature of Things, M. F. Smith writes:

An extremely important point, which emerges clearly from Lucretius’ account, is that the
supposition of the swerve was made not only to explain how compound bodies can be formed, but
also to account for free will, which Epicurus firmly believed in, but which the physical
determinism of Democritus seem to have excluded.
(2001: xxvi)

5 Cf. De Rerum Natura [DRN] II.167–81, V.156–234.

6 Lactantius (an early Christian writer, c. 240–320 CE) attributes to Epicurus an argument that appears to
be part of a discussion of evil as a theological problem (IG I-109), but there is little reason to think that
Epicurus actually gave this particular argument. For discussion, see O’Keefe 2010: 47–8.
7 Lucretius (c. 94–c. 55 BCE) was a Roman poet whose poem De Rerum Natura is a source for Epicurean
beliefs. For Lucretius’ life, about which little is known, see Smith 2001: vii–x.
8 Given this use of the term, the translation of libera voluntas as ‘free will’ tempts the reader to think that
all the great philosophers from the past thought that in the mind of every human being there is a will
and that Lucretius is part of a tradition of philosophical enquiry into the will and its freedom. In his
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for ‘Free Will’ (2010), Timothy O’Connor can seem to
suggest this understanding of the philosophical tradition. He begins his discussion as follows:

‘Free Will’ is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to
choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will sort is what
all the fuss is about. (And what a fuss it has been: philosophers have debated this question for over
two millennia, and just about every major philosopher has had something to say about it.)

9 Ryle 1949: 62. See also Frede 2011: 2.

10 For discussion, see Frede 2011: 19–30.
11 On the Soul I.3.414b; Nicomachean Ethics III.2.1111b.
12 Nicomachean Ethics VII.4.1148a9–10.
13 About Aristotle, W. D. Ross says that ‘[o]n the whole we must say that he shared the plain man’s belief
in free will but that he did not examine the problem very thoroughly, and he did not express himself
with perfect consistency’ (1923: 201). But really what Aristotle shared with the ‘plain man’ is the belief
that human beings are capable of action, not that they have free will. Cf. Frede 2011: 2–4.
14 The role the swerve plays in Epicurus’ thought is the subject of an enormous literature. For a guide to
 some of it, see O’Keefe 2005.
15 Annas (1992: 187–8) makes a similar point:

It has been suspected … that the swerve was a late idea of Epicurus’, one developed after he had
written his major works, possibly in response to objections. It is also possible that Epicurus himself
had no very definite theory of how the swerve underpins free agency, and that later Epicureans
filled in the story, possibly in divergent ways.

16 For some discussion, see Long 1986: 56–61.

17 In their translation, Long and Sedley render libera voluntas as ‘free volition’ (1987: 106). So does
O’Keefe (2010: 74–5).
18 For discussion, see Long and Sedley 1987: 104–5, 107–12.
19 My argument is a variation on one Frede (2011: 91–5) constructs for a different purpose.
20 The sequence of topics in the fourfold remedy follows the sequence in the Letter to Menoeceus. The
second topic has received the most discussion in the secondary literature. Epicurus tells Menoeceus to
‘accustom [himself] to believe that death is nothing to us’ (Letter to Menoeceus X.124; LS 24 A). For an
interesting analysis of the argument, see Broome 2008.
21 For discussion and a helpful collection of the evidence for Epicurus’ understanding of pleasure,
including the difficult distinction between katastematic and kinetic pleasure that the doxographical
tradition attributes to Epicurus, see Long and Sedley 1987: 121–5.
22 Nicomachean Ethics X.8.1178b28–32.
23 Ibid.: X.8.1178a9.
24 Just what he had in mind is notoriously obscure. For a possible interpretation, see Lear 2004: 205–7.
25 Posterior Analytics II.19.100a3–10; Metaphysics I.1.980a27–81a12. In the Metaphysics, in his discussion
of induction, Aristotle mentions Polus, and so shows himself to be working within the framework
Socrates sets out in the Gorgias. For discussion, see Frede 1996a: 11; 1996b: 169.
26 Nicomachean Ethics VI.2.1139a, X.7.1177b, and X.8.1178b. In his study of the history of ethics, Terence
Irwin affirms this point. Aristotle

declares that happiness consists in theoretical ‘study’ or ‘contemplation’ (theoria), grasping the
ultimate universal truths about the universe (1177a12–18) … The exercise of theoretical reason in
study is the best exercise of human reason; its activities are choiceworthy solely for their own sake,
and in them a human being comes closest to the condition of a purely rational being, a god.
Contemplation is the highest fulfilment of our nature as rational beings; it is the sort of rational
activity that we share with the gods, who are rational beings with no need to apply reason to
practice.
(Irwin 2007: 149)

27 See X.35. Cf. X.36 and X.116.

 28 So, for example, Epicurus urges Pythocles to devote himself to the ‘study of first principles’ (Letter to
Pythocles X.116). In their translation, Inwood and Gerson (IG I–3.116) use ‘contemplation’ instead of
‘study’.
29 Frede (1990: 240–41) takes the Epicurean rejection of ‘dialectic’ as evidence (X.31).
30 Epicurean epistemology is not well understood. For a detailed study from within the context of the
empiricist/rationalist debate, see Allen 2001.
31 Epicurus seems to have thought that the recollection and anticipation of pleasure is an important way
to counteract bodily pain. In his letter to Idomeneus, Epicurus says that he has set the pleasure he
experiences in thinking about his past conversations against his current suffering from strangury and
dysentery (X.22; LS 24 D). See also Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.95; LS 21 T. Cf. Long and
Sedley1987: 124.
32 This mechanism seems to be presupposed in anti-smoking campaigns that employ various horrific
images to indicate the negative utility of smoking. For a contemporary discussion of such cognitive
mechanisms and their place in a theory of practical reason, see Pollock 2006: 48–9, 62–5.
33 Plutarch goes on to express considerable doubt about the reasonableness of this ‘confident expectation’,
given the uncertainty of the future and the weakness and vulnerability of the flesh (1090A–B).
34 Cf. Letter to Menoeceus X.131; LS 21 B 5. ‘When we say that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not
mean the pleasures of the dissipated … By pleasure, we mean the absence of pain and of trouble in the
soul.’

Further reading
Bobzien, S. 1998. ‘The Inadvertent Conception and Late Birth of the Free-Will Problem’, Phronesis, 43: 133–
75.
——2000. ‘Did Epicurus Discover the Free-Will Problem?’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 19, 287–337.
Kahn, C. 1988. ‘Discovering the Will: From Aristotle to Augustine’, in J. M. Dillon and A. A. Long (eds), The
Question of ‘Eclecticism’: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press.

References
Allen, J. 2001. Inference from Signs: Ancient Debates about the Nature of Evidence. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Annas, J. 1992. The Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Broome, J. 2008. ‘What is Your Life Worth?’ Daedalus, 137: 49–56.
Frede, M. 1990. ‘An Empiricist View of Knowledge: Memorism’, in S. Everson (ed.), Companions to Ancient
Thought, Vol. 1: Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——1996a. ‘Introduction’, in M. Frede and G. Striker (eds), Rationality in Greek Thought. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
——1996b. ‘Aristotle’s Rationalism’, in M. Frede and G. Striker (eds), Rationality in Greek Thought. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
——2011. A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Irwin, T. 2007. The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study, Vol. 1: From Socrates to the
Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lear, G. R. 2004. Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Long, A. A. 1986. Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics. 2nd ed., Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Long, A. A., and Sedley, D. N. 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
O’Connor, T. 2010. ‘Free Will’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill.
O’Keefe, T. 2005. Epicurus on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——2010. Epicureanism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pollock, J. 2006. Thinking about Acting: Logical Foundations for Rational Decision Making. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Ross, W. D. 1923. Aristotle. London: Methuen.
Ryle, G. 1949. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson.
Smith, M. F. 2001. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Indianapolis: Hackett.
12 The Stoics
John Sellars

For the Stoics there is no such thing as evil in the modern sense of the word.1 The
nearest equivalent to the English word ‘evil’ in ancient Greek is kakon, and for
the Stoics there is very little that is truly kakon. All the seemingly unpleasant
events that befall people are, according to the Stoics, strictly speaking value
neutral and so are classified as ‘indifferents’ (adiaphora). They are, moreover, the
product of providence (pronoia). So the Stoics offer two distinct arguments
against the existence of external evils, one based on their ethics and another
based on their physics. The Stoics also effectively deny the existence of what
might now be called moral evil. While all external states of affairs are merely
‘indifferents’, positive value resides with virtue (aretê) and negative value with
vice (kakon). Given that the Stoics deny virtue to almost everyone, it looks as if
vice is ubiquitous. However, it is worth stressing that the Stoics follow Socrates in
arguing that such vice is always the product of ignorance; there are no genuinely
evil intentions. Thus the Stoics deny the existence of both external evil states of
affairs and internal evil intentions. Having said that, the works of Roman Stoics
such as Seneca continually address the theme of apparent external evils,
conscious of the effect they continue to have on us.
In order to flesh out these claims we shall need to consider some aspects of
both Stoic ethics and Stoic physics. Beginning with ethics,2 I shall start by saying
something about Stoic value theory and the way in which this underwrites the
claims that there are no external evils and no evil intentions. I shall then move on
to physics and consider the role of providence in Stoicism, focusing on Seneca’s
essay De Providentia, which offers a lively presentation of the Stoic attitude
towards seemingly bad or evil events.

Ethics: value theory

The fullest accounts of early Stoic value theory to survive can be found in
Cicero’s De Finibus and in the summary of Stoic ethics in Stobaeus, which has
been attributed to Arius Didymus.3
The account in Stobaeus tells us the following. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism,
divided existing things into three categories: (i) good, (ii) bad or evil, and (iii)
indifferent. The only things that count as good (agathon) are virtues or things
that participate in virtue. The only things that are bad or evil (kakon) are vices or
things that participate in vice; in particular Stobaeus mentions ‘stupidity, lack of
self-restraint, injustice, cowardice’.4 Everything else – ‘life, death; reputation, lack
of reputation; toil, pleasure; riches, poverty; sickness, health’ – fall into the third
category of indifferent things (adiaphora).5 From this it is clear that (a) the Stoics
deny that many of the things that people ordinarily refer to as bad or evil, such as
death, sickness, or poverty, are really evil at all, and (b) the only things that have
genuine value, whether positive or negative, reside within the mind or ruling part
of the soul (hêgemonikon).
The account continues by fleshing out each of the three categories of Stoic
value theory. The only thing that is genuinely good – virtue (aretê) – is described
as ‘a disposition of the soul in harmony with itself concerning one’s whole life’.6
This is not merely a psychological disposition but also a physical one, for the
Stoics insist that the soul is a body, conceived as breath (pneuma) in mixture with
the matter that constitutes our bodies.7 Further, virtue is a disposition towards
which we are naturally inclined, and so a life according to virtue is the same as a
life according to nature.8
Although external things are classified as indifferents (adiaphora), the Stoics
suggest that some of these may be preferred over others. They famously draw a
distinction between preferred (proêgmena) and dispreferred (apoproêgmena)
indifferents.9 Other things being equal, the Stoic will prefer health over illness,
while still denying that health possesses any intrinsic value. The criterion for
classifying some things as preferred and others as dispreferred is whether or not
they are in accord with our nature.10 In everyday life people will choose preferred
things, but they do not deserve to be called genuinely good because they do not
contribute to our happiness or well-being (eudaimonia).11
If virtue is the only thing that contributes to our happiness, then a life without
virtue is necessarily unhappy. This is why vice is the only thing genuinely bad or
evil. It is this sort of unhappy life that the Stoics say is a life of genuine poverty
and slavery.12 In his De Legibus, Cicero adds that a life shaped by vice is marked
by inconstancy (inconstancia), and it contrasts with a natural, virtuous life
marked by perfected reason (perfecta ratio).13
Cicero offers us a fuller account of Stoic ethics elsewhere, in his De Finibus.
During the course of the discussion there he reports an objection to the Stoic
position credited to the Academic Sceptic Carneades: the attempt to classify
external things as ‘preferred’ or ‘dispreferred’ rather than simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’
is merely a case of playing with terminology. In fact, so the objection goes, the
Stoic position differs from Aristotle’s position (which insists on the need for
certain external resources for a good life) in words only.14 Cicero’s response to
this objection helps to bring the Stoic position into greater focus. His Stoic
spokesman Cato argues that the Peripatetics are committed to the view that
someone richer in external goods will be happier than someone without them.
They are also committed to the claim that a life marked by physical suffering or
illness can never be a truly happy life.15 The Stoic theory of value explicitly
rejects both of these claims, highlighting a substantive difference between the
two positions. The key point for the Stoics is that the pursuit or avoidance of
external things ought never to take precedence over the pursuit of virtue.16
One consequence of this view is the Stoic claim that the person who has
attained virtue will be happy no matter what the external circumstances – even
when being tortured on the rack, as the old saying goes.17 Cicero goes on to voice
a common response to this sort of claim, namely that it is difficult to convince
anyone in the midst of extreme physical pain that what they are experiencing is
not a genuine evil.18 One might say that proponents of this sort of objection are
themselves eager merely to argue over words. The Stoic distinction between
genuine goods and evils, on the one hand, and preferred and dispreferred
indifferents, on the other, is not an attempt to deny the unpleasantness of certain
external things, such as great pain or illness, or our natural desire to avoid them,
but rather is part of an attempt to define the necessary and sufficient conditions
for a happy life.
We can find arguments addressing directly these conditions in another key
source for Stoic ethics, the lengthy doxography in Diogenes Laertius. There we
encounter three arguments supporting the Stoic account of value. The first goes
like this:

[i] For just as heating, not chilling, is the peculiar characteristic of what is
hot, so too benefiting, not harming, is the peculiar characteristic of
what is good.
[ii] But wealth and health no more do benefit than they harm.
[iii] Therefore wealth and health are not something good. 19

This is immediately followed by a second:

[i] Furthermore they say: that which can be used well and badly is not
something good.
[ii] But wealth and health can be used well and badly.
[iii] Therefore wealth and health are not something good. 20

A few lines later Diogenes reports a third:

‘Indifferent’ is used in two senses: unconditionally, of things which

contribute neither to happiness nor unhappiness, as is the case with wealth,
reputation, health, strength, and the like. For it is possible to be happy even
without these, though the manner of using them is constitutive of happiness
or unhappiness.21

The first two arguments stress the way in which external things can be used for
both good and evil ends. Whether they are used for good or evil ends depends not
on some intrinsic property of those externals but, rather, on the directing mind
that makes use of them. In other words, the good or evil that might appear to
attach to external things in fact derives from the virtue or vice of the person
making use of them. Great wealth might look superficially like a good, but of
course such wealth can be put to use in the service of vicious ends. The third
argument highlights the fact that it is possible to achieve happiness without the
possession of so-called goods. Expanding upon this a little, we might say that this
is close to an empirical claim for the Stoics: if we can point to examples of people
with great wealth and other external goods who are not happy, and we can point
to others who are happy without such goods, then we can show that these so-
called goods are neither necessary nor sufficient for a happy life. And, as we have
seen, if they do not contribute to happiness then they do not benefit us, and if
they do not benefit us then they do not deserve to be called goods. The same
applies to so-called evils.
As a number of commentators have noted, here the Stoics follow Socrates, or
at least the Socrates we find in Plato’s Euthydemus,22 and the discussion there
provides a fuller account of the position than the compressed summaries in the
Stoic sources. In the Euthydemus, Socrates, trying to determine what one needs if
one is to do well (eu prattein) in life, lists a series of goods (agatha), including
wealth, health, reputation, and the traditional virtues such as courage and
temperance, as well as wisdom. He goes on to suggest that these goods will
contribute to a happy life only if they benefit us in some way, and the only way
they can benefit us is if we make use of them. Here Socrates is concerned
principally with external goods such as wealth and health, and he asks his
interlocutor: ‘Well now, suppose a man had got wealth and all the goods that we
mentioned just now, but made no use of them; would he be happy because of his
possessing these goods?’23 The answer that comes back is of course ‘no’, and
Socrates goes on to argue that, not only must one make use of such external
goods in order to benefit from them, but one must also know how to use them
rightly or correctly. While using them correctly will bring benefit, using them
incorrectly may well bring harm. What we need, then, of course, is knowledge
(epistêmê) of how to use such goods rightly, for if we do not have that knowledge
we may well inadvertently use them incorrectly and end up making things worse
for ourselves. So Socrates concludes that the initial claim that external things
such as wealth and health ought to be classified among goods was mistaken, for
such things will generate harm if they are not guided by knowledge, which
Socrates characteristically identifies with wisdom. Thus, ‘of all the other things,
not one is either good or bad, but of these two, wisdom is good and ignorance
bad.’24
Here we can see plainly the Socratic background to the Stoic theory of value.
The focus here is very much on external objects rather than on external events or
states of affairs, and we shall turn to consider the latter later on. However, before
we do there is another Stoic argument against assigning value to externals that is
worth noting. This can be found in the Meditations of the late Stoic Marcus
Aurelius, who argues that, if we accept the existence of providence, then there is
no way that externals such as wealth and poverty can have any genuine value,
for these things are distributed randomly to the deserving and undeserving alike.
The fact that they are so distributed shows that they cannot possess any genuine
value:

The nature of the Whole would not have been blind to this, either through
ignorance or with knowledge unaccompanied by the power to prevent and
put right. Nor would it have made so great an error, through lack of power
or skill, as to have good and bad falling indiscriminately, on good and bad
people alike. Yes, death and life, fame and ignominy, pain and pleasure,
wealth and poverty – all these come to good and bad alike, but they are not
in themselves either right or wrong: neither then are they inherent good or
evil.25

This and the previous arguments give us a good idea of the reasons why the
Stoics denied the existence of external evils. As we have seen, the only thing that
possesses genuine negative value is vice, conceived as the opposite of a
harmonious, rational state of mind. In general it is a condition defined in contrast
to virtue, and we find few explicit accounts of its nature. Indeed, at first glance it
is puzzling how it comes about at all, given that the Stoics argue that our natural
tendencies are always towards the good. All animals, they suggest, have an
inborn instinct to self-preservation that leads them to select what is good for
them and to avoid what is bad.26 When the Stoics identify a life according to
virtue with a life according to nature, one element of this, at least, involves the
claim that a virtuous life accords with our natural instincts. As Michael Frede has
put it, for the Stoics ‘nature has constructed human beings in such a way that, if
nothing went wrong, we would, in the course of our natural development,
become virtuous.’27 When people are diverted from leading a virtuous life, this is
always due to some error or external influence, ‘for the starting points of nature
are never perverse’.28 Calcidius fleshes this out a little further for us: ‘Offences
are not voluntary, because every soul partaking in divinity by natural desire
always aspires to the good, yet sometimes errs in its judgment of good and evil.’29
How do the errors that divert people from their naturally good instincts arise?
For the Stoics, these errors are ultimately mistaken judgements, and in particular
mistaken value judgements.30 Drawing on what we have already seen in Stoic
value theory, someone who mistakenly ascribes value to an external thing and
then fails to secure it will generate the sort of mental dissonance (in the form of a
negative emotion) that characterizes vice. The primary instinct motivating their
behaviour will still be good – it will still be reducible, ultimately, to a natural
desire for self-preservation – but the outcomes will be perverse on account of
mistaken judgements made along the way. Thus the Stoics are committed to a
view close to Socrates’ claim that all wrongdoing is the product of ignorance, and
so ought not to be punished. This point is nicely articulated by the later Stoic
Epictetus:

Every error implies a contradiction: for, since the man who errs does not
wish to err, but to act rightly, it is evident that he is not doing what he
wishes. For what does a thief wish to achieve? His own interest. If, then,
thieving is against his own interest, he is not doing what he wishes. Now
every rational soul is naturally averse to contradiction: but so long as a
person fails to understand that he is involved in a contradiction, there is
nothing to prevent him from performing contradictory actions, but when he
has come to understand it, he must necessarily renounce and avoid the
contradiction, just as bitter necessity makes a man renounce what is false as
soon as he perceives that it is false, though as long as he does not have that
impression, he assents to it as true.31

Just as no one in their right mind would assent to something they know to be
false, so no one in their right mind would choose to live according to a
contradictory or confused set of principles, choosing courses of action that work
against their own goals. In short, no one in their right mind would choose to
follow a life shaped by the genuine evil of vice. But, of course, those already on
such a path are not in their right mind and need philosophical therapy to help
them return to a more coherent and harmonious frame of mind. What this
suggests is that, while the Stoics do acknowledge the discordant inner state of
vice to be a genuine evil, they do not admit the existence of genuinely evil
intentions. No one acts viciously willingly. Thus Stoic ethics denies the existence
of both external evils and internal evil intentions.

Physics: providence
Stoic physics provides further reasons for denying the existence of evil. Central
here is their doctrine of providence (pronoia). According to the Stoics, all events
that take place are the product of a divine providence. They identify this divine
providence with fate (heimarmenê), which they define as a string of causes.32
Calcidius gives us the following account of Chrysippus’ view:

For providence will be God’s will, and furthermore his will is the series of
causes. In virtue of being his will it is providence. In virtue of also being the
series of causes it gets the additional name ‘fate’. Consequently everything in
accordance with fate is also the product of providence, and likewise
everything in accordance with providence is the product of fate.33

Here both providence and fate are identified with the divine will. Elsewhere this
is identified with a divine logos that permeates all of Nature, which in turn is
identified with God.34 This claim that all events ultimately spring from divine
providence undermines the idea that there are any events or states of affairs that
are evil. When we take this claim alongside what we have already seen in Stoic
value theory, we might expect the Stoics to dismiss out of hand the idea of any
‘problem of evil’, for on their account there is no evil that needs to be explained
away. However, according to Plutarch, Chrysippus did wrestle with the problem,
tentatively suggesting that perhaps in some cases providence inadvertently
neglects some details when aiming for the general good.35 Plutarch reports
similar views elsewhere, all of which presuppose that genuinely evil events take
place that must in some way be squared with the existence of divine
providence.36 In particular, he reports that the Stoics argued that it is necessary
for evil to exist in order for there to exist good.37
This cannot be right for the Stoics. As we have seen, their value theory denies
the existence of any genuine external evil. And they needn’t admit the existence
of evil simply in order to make the conceptual point that the notion of good
makes no sense without the companion notion of evil, for their contrast between
virtue and vice does that already. Plutarch’s scraps of information, taken out of
context and reassembled in order to generate a polemic against the Stoa, ought to
be used with extreme caution here. Instead, we might do better by turning to a
text by a Stoic, in this case Seneca’s De Providentia.38 Although we ought not to
assume that Seneca’s later discussion is a reliable guide to what the earlier Stoics
thought, it is consistent with what we know about early Stoic ethics and physics,
and in any case Seneca’s place within the Stoic tradition stands on its own terms.
The discussion in his De Providentia is especially relevant here, as it is an explicit
response to the traditional problem of evil – why it is that innocent people suffer
if the world is providentially ordered.
Seneca’s robust response to the problem is that ‘nothing bad can happen to a
good man’.39 As we have seen, no external thing counts as good or bad. The only
genuinely bad thing that could happen to a good man would be for his virtuous
state of mind to be undermined in some way. But, as Seneca will go on to argue,
apparently adverse external events should be seen as opportunities to strengthen
virtue rather than undermine it. For the genuinely good man, who understands
the providential ordering of Nature, ‘all adversity he regards as a training
exercise’.40 Like a wrestler, who would soon lose his ability if he only ever
competed against lesser opponents, the virtuous man ought to welcome whatever
life throws at him as an opportunity to train himself. It is only when facing a real
match that the wrestler gets the opportunity to improve his skills and also to
prove his ability. The same is true in life. Seneca presents the Stoic God as a
tough but loving father, who shows his concern by setting such challenges. Once
we grasp this, we shall see that our usual attitude towards so-called adversities
ought to be reversed:

I shall show how true evils are not those which appear to be so: I now make
this point, that the things you call hardships, that you call adversities and
 detestable, actually are of benefit, first to the very persons they happen to,
and secondly to the whole human race, which matters more to the gods than
individuals do; I also say that good men are willing that such things should
happen to them, and that, if they are unwilling, misfortune is what they
deserve.41

It is worth noting here that the person who does not embrace adversity in the
way Seneca is proposing will experience genuine misfortune – not in the sense
that the external events will be genuinely bad but, rather, in the sense that
judging them to be bad and then struggling against what Nature has decreed will
generate the sort of internal mental conflict that constitutes vice. Only knowledge
can save us from this: knowledge of what does and does not possess genuine
value (i.e., ethics) and knowledge of the rational, providential order of nature (i.e.,
physics). In this sense, virtue is dependent on knowledge, as we would expect
from the Socratically inspired Stoa.
If Seneca’s friendly game of wrestling does not seem like an adequate analogy
to capture the suffering that can sometimes befall us, he follows it with a more
graphic one. Adverse external events act like surgery and cautery; they are
painful, but sometimes necessary, cures. Of course they are not cures for the
virtuous, who will welcome them as opportunities for training and testing, but
they are necessary cures for the vicious, who will experience them as
misfortunes, but will ultimately benefit from them. For instance, experiences of
hunger, poverty, or bereavement are all painful but beneficial cures that prepare
us to cope with these experiences when they happen again in the future. One
might want to object at this point: if these sorts of external events are not really
bad at all, why would we need to be trained to endure them? Surely a better
strategy would be to develop one’s grasp of Stoic value theory to the point where
these mere ‘indifferents’ are correctly grasped as value neutral. That is of course
the ideal, but, for those who remain a long way from mastering virtue, such
training still has its uses. In short, seemingly adverse events sent by providence
serve to train the imperfect and test the perfect.
Seneca develops the theme further by suggesting that we find out who we
truly are only when we are put to the test by events. If we were never to
experience any adversity in our lives, then we would never find out how we
would react, and so never uncover our true character: ‘no one will know what
you were capable of, not even you yourself.’42 In other words, it is impossible to
be sure that one has virtue if one is never put to the test: ‘only bad fortune reveals
a great example.’43 That is why the truly virtuous will always welcome adversity.
As Seneca puts it, ‘disaster is the occasion for virtue’.44 If we fail the test, then we
ought equally to welcome those adverse events as an opportunity to train
ourselves for the next one. In all of this, Seneca is unflinching in his choice of
examples:

How do I know how calmly you will bear the loss of children, if you see all
the ones you have fathered? I have heard you giving consolation to others:
that was when I might have seen your true worth, had you been consoling
yourself, or telling yourself not to grieve.45

This is a brutal but important point. How can anyone know how well they would
bear the loss of a loved one until they go through it? This applies to all of us but
is especially relevant for the Stoic, who claims that the loss of a loved one does
not count as a genuinely bad event.
If this sounds somewhat extreme to modern ears, Seneca goes even further. Not
only ought we to welcome so-called adversity, we ought also to shun good
fortune. Seneca insists that ‘the greatest danger comes from excessive good
fortune’.46 A smooth and comfortable life of unending luxury and wealth will
serve only to make us complacent, weak, and lazy. We shall never have the
opportunity to discover our true character, let alone train and improve it. Worst
of all, the longer we experience a soft and comfortable life, the harder it will be to
face adversity when it finally arrives, as one day it surely will. What seems to be
good fortune is in fact bad for us, while what seems to be misfortune benefits us
in a number of ways. This final point is predicated on the idea that our true self is
our inner character or mind. If providence chooses to damage my body, no real
harm has come to me, for my mind remains untouched. But if providence makes
my life so easy that my mind is never forced to work, then I suffer a genuine
harm insofar as I miss an opportunity to cultivate virtue.
As to the opening question of why good men suffer misfortune in a
providential world, Seneca responds by saying that we ought to expect the best
among us to be tested and trained the most. Teachers set the hardest problems for
the brightest students, generals send the bravest soldiers into the toughest battles,
and so on. Moreover, it is essential – echoing the argument we saw from Marcus
Aurelius earlier – that apparent goods and evils are distributed randomly
between the good and bad alike, in order to show that these things are not what
they seem:

God’s purpose, and the wise man’s too, is to show that what ordinary men
desire, and what they fear, are not either goods or evils; but it will appear
that there are goods, if these are granted only to good men, and that there
are evils, if these penalize only bad men. … In no way can God better cast
doubt on what we desire than by awarding those things to the most
disreputable men and denying them to the best.47

In this sense the distribution of external objects by Nature supports the claims of
Stoic value theory, which insists that all externals are value neutral. But in
another sense Seneca’s account seems to carry us well beyond value neutrality,
for his argument takes us not just from endurance of adversity to indifference,
but beyond to affirmation. All events, no matter how apparently evil, ought to be
welcomed as part of God’s providential plan and as of direct benefit to us in
developing or maintaining virtue.48 If they benefit us, then, on the Stoic account,
they count as genuine goods (for they contribute to the cultivation of virtue).

Conclusion
The Stoics were famous in antiquity for their paradoxes, and there is something
of a paradox in the Stoic attitude towards evil. In the ethical realm, almost
everyone fails to reach the Stoic ideal of the virtuous sage and so remains vicious,
no matter how close they might get. As Chrysippus memorably put it, someone
drowning a metre from the surface is still drowning.49 This implies that evil is
ubiquitous. Yet, as we have seen, all of those supposedly vicious people are so
unintentionally, motivated by naturally good intentions and diverted from a
natural development towards virtue by a combination of errors of judgement and
social influences. Everyone is both vicious and naturally good.
 In the physical realm, the Stoics (especially the later Roman Stoics) spend
much time addressing the problem of adverse external events and how best to
cope with them. The range and extent of the advice they offer suggests that they
took this to be a serious problem. Yet, as Seneca makes plain, not only are these
adversities not really adversities at all, in fact they are benefits. Even so, the
language of adversity and heroic endurance remains. Such language seems right
for someone still drowning, but for a Stoic sage there are no external evils, and so
nothing that requires endurance.

Notes
1 The standard collection of fragments for the early Stoics is von Arnim 1903–24, which I cite by the
widely used abbreviation SVF, followed by volume and fragment number. Another widely used
collection, containing both texts and English translations, is Long and Sedley 1987, which I cite
according to their system of text numbering. For other ancient texts, I follow standard abbreviations (as
listed in the Oxford Classical Dictionary).
2 Diogenes Laertius 7.84 (in SVF 3.1) reports that the study of things good (agathon) and evil (kakon) is
one of the divisions of ethics.
3 A good modern translation of De Finibus can be found in Annas and Woolf 2001. The relevant section
of Stobaeus is edited and translated in Pomeroy 1999, which I cite according to the volume, page, and
line numbers of Wachsmuth’s 1884 edition. I quote from these translations. On Arius’ authorship, see
Pomeroy 1999: 1–3.
4 Stobaeus 2,57,19ff. (in SVF 3.70); Pomeroy 1999: 10–11.
5 Ibid.
6 Stobaeus 2,59,4ff. (in SVF 3.262); Pomeroy 1999: 12–13.
7 See Stobaeus 2,64,18ff. (in SVF 3.305); Pomeroy 1999: 20–21. For discussion of the soul–body relationship
in Stoicism, see, e.g., Long [1982] 1996; Annas 1992: 37–70.
8 See Stobaeus 2,65,7ff. (in SVF 1.566); Pomeroy 1999: 22–3.
9 See Stobaeus 2,80,14ff. (in SVF 3.133); Pomeroy 1999: 44–5.
10 See Stobaeus 2,82,5ff. (in SVF 3.121); Pomeroy 1999: 46–7.
11 See Stobaeus 2,84,18ff. (in SVF 3.128); Pomeroy 1999: 50–51.
12 See Stobaeus 2,101,14ff. (in SVF 3.593); Pomeroy 1999: 76–7.
13 Cicero, Leg. 1.45 (in SVF 3.312).
14 See Cicero, Fin. 3.41 (not in SVF; text in Reynolds 1998); Annas and Woolf 2001: 78. For Aristotle’s
position, see Eth. Nic. 1.8, 1099a31–b8.
15 See Cicero, Fin. 3.43 (not in SVF); Annas and Woolf 2001: 79.
16 See Cicero, Fin. 3.44 (SVF 3.60); Annas and Woolf 2001: 79.
17 While this phrase was often used to characterize the Stoic position (e.g., Cicero, Fin. 3.42), it was also
used by Epicureans; see Diogenes Laertius 10.118 (in Long and Sedley 1987: 22Q). The image had
already been used by Aristotle; see Eth. Nic. 7.13, 1153b19–21.
18 See Cicero, Fin. 4.52 (not in SVF).
19 Diogenes Laertius 7.103 (in Long and Sedley 1987: 58A), numbers added.
20 Ibid.
21 Diogenes Laertius 7.104 (in Long and Sedley 1987: 58B).
22 See, e.g., Long [1988] 1996; Annas 1993; Striker 1994; McCabe 2002.
23 Plato, Euthyd. 280d (text and translation in Lamb 1924).
24 Plato, Euthyd. 281e.
25 Marcus Aurelius 2.11 (Hammond 2006: 13).
26 See, for example, the parallel accounts in Cicero, Fin. 3.16 (in SVF 3.182) and Diogenes Laertius 7.85 (in
SVF 3.178). See, further, Engberg-Pedersen 1990.
27 Frede 1999: 71.
28 Diogenes Laertius 7.89, with the discussion in Long 1968: 336.
29 Calcidius, in Tim. 165 (in SVF 3.229); trans. in Den Boeft 1970: 58.
30 See further Sellars 2003: 154–9.
31 Epictetus, Diss. 2.26.1–3 (Gill and Hard 1995: 145).
32 See, e.g., the quotations from Chrysippus defining fate that are reported in Aulus Gellius 7.2 (in SVF
2.1000). See, further, Bobzien 1998: 44–58.
33 Calcidius, in Tim. 144 (in SVF 2.933); Long and Sedley 1987: 54U. See also Den Boeft 1970: 13.
34 See, e.g., Plutarch, Stoic. Rep. 1050a–b (in SVF 2.937). On Stoic physics and theology, see Hahm 1977;
Meijer 2007; Salles 2009.
35 See Plutarch, Stoic. Rep. 1051c (in SVF 2.1178; also Long and Sedley 1987: 54S). For further discussion,
see Long 1968: 330–31.
36 See, e.g., Plutarch, Comm. Not. 1065b; also discussed in Long 1968: 331.
37 See especially Stoic. Rep. 1050f and Comm. Not. 1065b (both SVF 2.1181).
38 Seneca’s De Providentia can be found in Reynolds 1977 and is translated in Davie 2007.
39 Seneca, Prov. 2.1 (Davie 2007: 4).
 40 Seneca, Prov. 2.2 (Davie 2007: 4).
41 Seneca, Prov. 3.1 (Davie 2007: 6).
42 Seneca, Prov. 4.3 (Davie 2007: 10).
43 Seneca, Prov. 3.4 (Davie 2007: 8).
44 Seneca, Prov. 4.6: calamita virtutis occasio est.
45 Seneca, Prov. 4.5 (Davie 2007: 11).
46 Seneca, Prov. 4.10 (Davie 2007: 12).
47 Seneca, Prov. 5.1–2 (Davie 2007: 13).
48 In the sixteenth century, Seneca’s great admirer Justus Lipsius, inspired by De Providentia, developed a
threefold model of providential benefits in his De Constantia. What Lipsius called ‘public evils’ (mala
publica) in fact (i) exercise the good, (ii) chastise the weak-willed, and (iii) punish the bad. See Sellars
2006: 89–94.
49 See Plutarch, Comm. Not. 1063a (in SVF 3.539). On the ideal of the sage, see Sellars 2003: 59–64.

Further reading
Frede, M. 1999. ‘On the Stoic Conception of the Good’, in K. Ierodiakonou (ed.), Topics in Stoic Philosophy.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Inwood, B. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Long, A. A. 1968. ‘The Stoic Concept of Evil’, Philosophical Quarterly, 18: 329–43.
Sellars, J. 2006. Stoicism. Chesham: Acumen.

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——[1988] 1996. ‘Socrates in Hellenistic Philosophy’, Classical Quarterly, 38: 150–71; repr. in Long, Stoic
Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–34.
Long, A. A., and Sedley, D. N. 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
McCabe, M. M. 2002. ‘Indifference Readings: Plato and the Stoa on Socratic Ethics’, in T. P. Wiseman (ed.),
Classics in Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meijer, P. A. 2007. Stoic Theology: Proofs for the Existence of the Cosmic God and of the Traditional Gods.
Delft: Eburon.
Pomeroy, A. J. (ed.) 1999. Arius Didymus, Epitome of Stoic Ethics. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature.
Reynolds, L. D. (ed.) 1977. L. Annaei Senecae Dialogorum Libri Duodecim. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
—— (ed.) 1998. M. Tulli Ciceronis De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum Libri Quinque. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Salles, R. 2009. God and Cosmos in Stoicism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sellars, J. 2003. The Art of Living: The Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy. Aldershot: Ashgate.
——(ed.) 2006. Justus Lipsius, On Constancy. Exeter: Bristol Phoenix Press.
Striker, G. 1994. ‘Plato’s Socrates and the Stoics’, in P. A. Vander Waerdt (ed.), The Socratic Movement. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Wachsmuth, C. (ed.) 1884. Ioannis Stobaei Anthologii Libri Duo Priores, 2 vols. Berlin: Weidmann.
13 Scepticism1
Richard Bett

Modern scholarship recognizes two traditions of scepticism in the Graeco-Roman

world. There is the Academic tradition, beginning with Arcesilaus (316/5– 241/0
BCE), the fifth head of the Academy after Plato himself, and extending to the early
first century BCE; and there is the Pyrrhonist tradition, drawing inspiration from
the obscure figure Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360–270 BCE), but beginning as a continuous
movement with Aenesidemus (first century BCE), who was initially a member of
the Academy in its latest phase but then broke away to found a Pyrrhonist
variety of scepticism in reaction to what he saw as the enfeeblement of Academic
scepticism in his own day. The only sceptic of either tradition of whom complete
works survive is Sextus Empiricus, who is generally thought to have been active
in the second century CE,2 and who appears to belong near the end of the
Pyrrhonist movement. It is clear from fragments and second-hand reports that
ethical topics figured from the start among the concerns of both sceptical
traditions.3 But the meagre evidence on the sceptics other than Sextus Empiricus
does not allow us to reconstruct any positions on issues that we might identify as
relating to a notion of evil. From now on, therefore, this chapter will confine itself
entirely to the writings of Sextus.4
The centrepiece of Sextus’ scepticism (as for ancient scepticism generally) is
suspension of judgement. The following sentence, from the opening chapters of
his best-known work, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (hereafter referred to as PH, the
transliterated initials of the title in Greek), offers a thumbnail sketch of his
outlook:
 The sceptical ability is one that produces oppositions among things that
appear and things that are thought in any way whatsoever, one from which,
because of the equal strength in the opposing objects and accounts, we come
first to suspension of judgement, and after that to tranquillity.
(PH 1.8)5

We can distinguish three stages in the process described here. First, one assembles
a set of conflicting arguments and impressions on some topic. The sceptic is one
who has a particular expertise at designing this set of conflicting arguments and
impressions in such a way that they exhibit the characteristic of ‘equal strength’
(isostheneia); this is what Sextus refers to as the sceptic’s ‘ability’ (dunamis). The
notion of ‘equal strength’ should be understood in psychological rather than in
evidential or logical terms; the point is that the person faced with the oppositions
among these arguments and impressions will in fact find them all equally
attractive or persuasive. This means that the particular mix of arguments and
impressions juxtaposed with one another may need to be tailored to the
propensities of the audience – who may, of course, include the sceptics
themselves – so as to produce the desired psychological effect. In any case, Sextus
now says, the result of being faced with this set of opposing ideas of ‘equal
strength’ is that one suspends judgement about the matter in question; if one
finds all of them equally persuasive, one has no incentive to accept any one of
them over the others, and so one will decline to accept any of them. Again, it is
not that there is no rational basis for accepting one of them over the others, but
simply that one finds oneself unable, in this situation, to opt for one of them in
particular. And a further result of this suspension of judgement, according to
Sextus, is ataraxia, tranquillity. I will return shortly to the question of why he
thinks this.
What is the range of potential topics of such sets of opposing arguments and
impressions? The sentence I have quoted from Sextus makes it sound as if their
subject matter is quite unrestricted, and there is a sense in which this is so. But
elsewhere, in explaining how the sceptic can act, Sextus says that the sceptic
follows the appearances, and that whether something appears to one a certain
way is not itself open to question; the question is whether things actually are the
way they appear (PH 1.22). There is a longstanding debate about whether Sextus
means to restrict the sceptic’s focus to the theoretical accounts of the underlying
natures of things offered by non-sceptical philosophers, or whether he is
operating with a more everyday distinction between how things appear and how
they are;6 it may be that the texts offer no single and consistent answer to this
question. In any case, the sceptic devotes his attention to how things are rather
than to how they appear – whatever exactly that amounts to.7 But, provided that
is understood, there is in principle no restriction on the kinds of ‘things’ that may
be the subject of the procedure outlined in the previous paragraph.
In particular, it is clear that ethics is among the areas to which Sextus is
interested in applying that procedure. The second half of the final book of PH is
devoted to this area (3.168–279); there is also a complete book, Against the
Ethicists (M 11), belonging to another of his works,8 which covers similar
material at considerably greater length. In addition, one of the sets of Modes, or
standardized forms of sceptical argumentation, which Sextus discusses in the first
book of PH includes a Mode dealing with differences in human behaviour and
differences in views about how humans should behave (1.145–63). A central issue
in all these places is the question of what things, if any, are really, or by nature,
good or bad. There is some room for debate about exactly what in this context is
built into the terms ‘really, or by nature’; but they seem at least to entail an
objectivist picture of the nature of value, and this in fact seems to be enough to
make sense of Sextus’ account. Now, any non-sceptical philosopher in antiquity
would be committed to some position holding that certain things are, in this
sense, really good and others really bad; and at one point (PH 1.30) Sextus makes
clear that he thinks ordinary non-philosophical people also hold such views.9 In
this case, then, the interpretative question mentioned in the previous paragraph,
concerning whether Sextus’ focus is only on theoretical positions or also on
everyday opinions, has a clear answer: he takes both non-sceptical philosophers
and ordinary people to hold views to which his sceptical procedure is to be
applied. And the effect of this procedure, as in any other case, is that the sceptic
distances himself from both groups by refraining from any claims of the form ‘X
really is good/bad’.
Sextus does not use any term that could fairly be translated ‘evil’ as opposed to
‘bad’. But insofar as evil can be thought of as a particularly acute form of
badness, and insofar as genuinely thinking that someone or something is evil
presupposes that there are some true claims of the form ‘X really is bad’,10 Sextus’
stance regarding good and bad would seem to apply to evil as well. If one were to
present him with the notion of evil, understood as badness magnified, he would
say that, as a sceptic, he will avoid any assertions of the form ‘X is evil’; this is a
simple consequence of his policy of suspension of judgement.
But there is more to be said about this, which involves us in the question why
Sextus thinks that suspension of judgement produces ataraxia – a question that I
earlier left unresolved. When he first introduces this point, Sextus makes it sound
as if ataraxia were a result of suspension of judgement quite generally. The idea
is that sceptics start out as normal philosophers, trying to discover the truth, and
thinking that they will thereby achieve ataraxia. This original ambition is
thwarted, because the search for the truth keeps on yielding a conflict between
equally powerful opposing positions on the same subjects, which produces
suspension of judgement rather than discovery. Yet this suspension of judgement
itself leads to the ataraxia that had been sought all along (PH 1.12, 26). Sextus
does not explain why this should be, but it sounds from these passages as if one is
tranquil because one no longer has a stake in how things really are, which was
the source of worry in the first place; in any case, there is no suggestion here that
suspension of judgement about some subjects is more conducive to ataraxia than
suspension of judgement about others. However, both in PH (1.27–8, 30, 3.235–8)
and, at much greater length, in Against the Ethicists (M 11.110–67) Sextus
addresses directly the relation between suspension of judgement and ataraxia,
and now a somewhat different picture emerges. It turns out that beliefs to the
effect that certain things are really good or bad are the specific source of the non-
sceptic’s turmoil, and therefore that freedom from these beliefs in particular is the
source of the sceptic’s ataraxia. Here the idea is that, if one thinks some things
are really good and others really bad, one will be obsessed by the need to get or
keep the good things and to ward off the bad things. The non-sceptic is therefore
in a state of constant turmoil and anxiety because of caring so much about the
things deemed good or bad. And the sceptic, who by definition has no beliefs of
the form ‘X is really good/bad’, is therefore free from an immense source of
trouble that afflicts others – who include, to recall, both non-sceptical
philosophers and ordinary people.
It is not obvious how we are supposed to reconcile these two pictures – one
that restricts the beliefs freedom from which gives the sceptic ataraxia to those
concerning things considered really good or bad, and the other that treats
suspension of judgement quite generally as yielding this result. Sextus apparently
sees no difficulty in combining them; indeed, in one passage (PH 1.25–30) he
alternates freely between the two, as if there is no difference between them. One
might of course hold that beliefs about what things are good or bad are
necessarily connected with a wider range of beliefs about the nature of the world,
in which case the two pictures are not as distinct as I have suggested. But Sextus
never makes any explicit moves in that direction, and one might well wish that
he had said more to explain himself. Be that as it may, it is clear that he regards
the topic of good and bad as especially relevant to the issue of the sceptic’s
tranquillity and the non-sceptic’s distress. If, then, as suggested earlier, we think
of evil as (real, objective) badness of an especially intense kind, then it is not
merely the case that Sextus’ sceptic lacks all beliefs of the form ‘X is evil’; these
are precisely among the kind of beliefs that he is especially glad to be rid of.
Indeed, at times Sextus presents this point so graphically that one may wonder
whether he lapses into inconsistency. The various forms of anxiety allegedly
produced by beliefs that things are really good or bad are themselves sometimes
described as bad things; given the forcefulness of his language, one might even
say that he considers them evils. This tendency is particularly marked in the
longer account in Against the Ethicists; for example, we are told that the person
who believes that certain things are really good or bad

is swept around accompanied by never-ending disturbances, avoiding some

things and pursuing others, and drawing on himself, because of the good
things, many bad things, but being pounded, because of his opinion about
the bad things, by many more bad things.
(M 11.145; cf. 119–24, 130)

Now, one may say that the description of these effects as ‘bad things’ is supposed
to be understood as coming from the perspective of the troubled believer in real
good and bad things. But, while this may well be how Sextus would respond if
pressed on the matter, in this and other passages of Against the Ethicists he at
least gives the impression of endorsing the judgement that these effects are bad.
In addition, it is somewhat surprising to find Sextus declaring in such
unequivocal terms that these are the results of believing that things are really
good and bad. Normally he is keen to emphasize the differences of viewpoint or
reaction between different people; that everyone is affected in these dreadful
ways by holding such beliefs seems itself more of a doctrinaire claim than one
would expect from a sceptic. In some respects, though not in this last one, PH is
notably more careful. Not only is the exaggerated tone avoided, but the badness
of the effects is never independently asserted, appearing only in the antecedent of
a conditional (PH 3.238). This is one of a number of reasons for thinking that PH,
although much more concise, is a later and more polished composition than
Against the Ethicists.11 At any rate, it is clear what Sextus can and should say
about this matter; and, if his claims concerning the effects of believing in real
good and bad seem unexpectedly one-sided, they may still be consistent with
scepticism, so long as they are understood as reports of what he has observed
rather than as immutable truths.
So the sceptic is not troubled by beliefs to the effect that someone or something
is evil, and Sextus would regard this as one of the major advantages of the
Pyrrhonist outlook – or, in other words, as a major component of the ataraxia the
sceptic is said to enjoy. But what if a sceptic were faced with an actual example of
what the rest of us would call evil? Some people clearly considered this the basis
of a serious objection to the sceptical position, and, at the end of the section of
Against the Ethicists on why the sceptic is better off than the non-sceptic, Sextus
takes the trouble to respond to it (M 11.162–6). The example given is: What if a
tyrant had power over you and compelled you to do some unspeakable deed, on
pain of torture and death? And, as Sextus presents the objection, the thought is
that, no matter what choice the sceptic made, it would involve some definite
commitments concerning what things are good and bad. If the sceptic refused to
do the unspeakable deed, it could only be because of a conviction that such things
must never be done, no matter what the cost. But if he submitted to the tyrant’s
demand, this too would betray another evaluative commitment – namely, that
the fate the tyrant had in mind would be too terrible to endure. The thought,
then, is that, either way, one would be unable to remain a consistent sceptic in
the face of the appalling choice the tyrant presents.
Before seeing how Sextus responds to this objection, it would be as well to step
back and consider more closely how he explains the sceptic’s choices and actions
in general. As noted earlier, Sextus says that the sceptic acts by following the
appearances. Elaborating on this theme in the first book of PH, he mentions four
broad categories of appearances that together shape a great deal of how the
sceptic behaves (PH 1.23–4). The first two may be thought of as natural: we are
just born with certain perceptual and cognitive capacities, and, as bodily
creatures, we are bound to experience hunger, pain, and other feelings. In both
cases, it is not hard to see how our responses can lead to action without the need
for any belief about how things are. Given our perceptual capacities, things look
or sound to us a certain way, and this can lead to our doing certain things; and
the feeling of hunger, for example, can lead us to eat. The sceptic’s behaviour in
these cases can be explained in the same kind of way as can the behaviour of
non-human animals. The other two types of appearances, however, are
distinctively human, and here the story is a little more complicated. One is the
‘teaching of skills’ (didaskalia technôn); one learns and then practises certain
kinds of expertise. It may seem that this must involve learning, and hence coming
to believe, certain propositions about the world. But it is at least possible to
understand some skills, such as riding a bicycle or carving a sculpture, as
consisting in nothing more than knowing how to do certain things, with no
additional doxastic component involved; and this seems the most plausible model
for how Sextus is conceiving the skills that a sceptic can take on board.12
The other kind of ‘cultural’ appearance is especially relevant for our current
purpose, and this Sextus calls ‘handing down of laws and customs’ (paradosis
nomôn te kai ethôn). In a nutshell, the sceptic is inclined towards some kinds of
actions and against others because of having been trained to have these
inclinations through living in a particular society that encourages the former
kinds of actions and discourages the latter. Again one may wonder whether this
could happen without any element of belief; and the example Sextus gives to
illustrate this type of appearance may seem to reinforce this worry. He says that,
in virtue of the handing down of laws and customs, ‘we accept piety as good and
impiety as bad, in terms of ordinary life’. How is this different from believing
that, in fact, piety is good and impiety bad? But the qualification ‘in terms of
ordinary life’ (biôtikôs) must be intended to mark a kind of observance of piety
that is embedded in everyday practice rather than captured in any kind of
intellectual commitment. One observes (and feels favourably disposed towards
observing) the religious rituals current in one’s society, and one feels repelled by
violations of religious norms.13 More generally, one is disposed to do the kinds of
things considered good and to avoid the kinds of things considered bad. While
other people may very well believe that the former kinds of things are indeed
good and the latter kinds bad, the sceptic echoes their practice without involving
himself in any beliefs; for him, these actions and avoidances of actions are simply
a matter of ingrained habit and preference. It is also quite possible that, before
becoming a sceptic, Sextus himself believed that these things really were good
and bad respectively. But now that he is a sceptic, the beliefs have been shed, and
all that remains are the dispositions to act that originally accompanied them. He
does not offer any justifications for what he does, or does not do; he will simply
point to a causal explanation in the patterns of behaviour that society has
inculcated in him. By the same token, he does not make any decisions, if by that
term is understood a process of deliberating and settling on the best course of
action in the circumstances. Rather, he runs on autopilot; he simply lets his
ingrained dispositions incline him towards or against doing certain things and
follows these inclinations.
Let us return to the case of the tyrant who makes a horrific demand and
threatens dreadful consequences if one does not obey. To recall, this is presented
as an objection to scepticism; the idea is that, whichever way one acts, one could
not act this way without having come to some kind of decision, in the robust
sense just mentioned, thereby committing oneself to definite beliefs about value.
Sextus’ response is precisely along the lines one would expect from his general
account of how the sceptic acts by following appearances. The sceptic faced with
the tyrant’s demand, he claims, will not be saddled with any definite beliefs;
instead, ‘he will choose one thing, perhaps, and avoid the other by the
preconception which accords with his ancestral laws and customs’ (M 11.166).
Sextus goes on to say that, even in this situation, the sceptic will be better off
than the non-sceptic, because the latter, unlike the former, in addition to
consenting to do the repugnant act or facing the horrible consequences of
refusing, will also be afflicted with beliefs. He does not say what these beliefs are,
but we can well imagine that there will be the belief that what is happening
(whatever the choice made) is abominable, as well as the belief that the tyrant’s
demand was evil. And these are precisely the kinds of beliefs that, as we saw,
Sextus thinks are responsible for huge amounts of distress. By not having any
such beliefs, the sceptic escapes more easily even in this case, despite having to
endure either doing something that disgusts him or suffering the penalty for not
doing so.
We might well question whether holding beliefs that things are really good or
bad is quite so burdensome as Sextus suggests. For one thing, as already
suggested, one might expect this to vary considerably from person to person. In
addition, it is likely to vary from case to case. One can certainly think of
scenarios in which people care about some outcome – the result of a race, for
example, or a political campaign – more than is good for them, and are
devastated if things go against them, whereas others who, while paying attention
to this outcome, have no great investment in it retain their equanimity whichever
way things go. But Sextus seems to overgeneralize from this kind of case; there
are surely also cases where having an attachment to some definite moral vision is
itself a source of comfort or reassurance. Still, the central question about the
tyrant example is whether Sextus is right that, contrary to the objection, the
sceptic can stay free from definite beliefs in this extreme situation. His claim is
that, in this case as in all others, the sceptic simply acts as his societally induced
dispositions prompt him to act, with no commitment to anything being genuinely
good or bad. Can we accept this?
One possible worry is that laws and customs are hardly likely to include any
explicit prescription about how to respond to a tyrant’s demands, so that it is not
clear how they could be thought to guide someone’s behaviour in this situation. I
think the response to this would have to be that ‘laws and customs’ should be
understood in a rather broad sense to include not just explicit rules, written or
unwritten, about what to do, but also a range of behavioural tendencies, or
tendencies to approve or disapprove of certain types of behaviour, which could
affect what one did in a given situation. For example, in one society there might
be strong pressure to show deference towards those in authority, while in another
resistance to unchecked power, or to gratuitous bullying, might be highly prized.
It is not unreasonable to think that a sceptic raised in the first kind of society
would be more likely to submit to the tyrant’s demand than one raised in the
second kind. It is possible that something like this is what Sextus has in mind
when he speaks not just of laws and customs but of ‘the preconception which
accords with his ancestral laws and customs’. A ‘preconception’ (prolēpsis) in this
case would be an attitude, or set of attitudes, concerning the character of the
actions open to one in this case, including attitudes of approval or disapproval of
those actions. The laws and customs of the sceptic’s society, in the broad sense
just outlined, would combine to give the sceptic (and other conventional
members of that society) a particular way of looking at those possible actions
which will make one of them look to him more attractive than the other, and
therefore cause him to pursue that one rather than the alternative.
However, it is doubtful whether this response is really adequate. For, while we
need not doubt that societies do differ in these sorts of ways, it is not clear that
such societal tendencies or pressures will suffice to guide one automatically, and
without deliberation, to a given action in every single case. Unreflective habits
may indeed govern many aspects of our lives, whether we are sceptics or not; so
the ‘autopilot’ picture of the sceptic’s action is by no means wholly unrealistic.
But exceptional cases, such as the case of the tyrant’s demand, would seem to be
precisely the kinds of cases where unreflective habits will not point clearly in any
direction. Both because this case is so far outside the quotidian routine of life and
because so much is at stake in how one responds, there is at least a serious
question as to whether the tyrant will not force the sceptic to make a conscious
choice about what to do, and thereby to become invested in certain values as
against others. The idea that even here the sceptic could simply consult his
ingrained dispositions and find himself pushed more towards one action than the
other seems not to do justice to the extreme circumstances of the tyrant’s
challenge.
Or, at least, it seems not to do justice to these extreme circumstances if we take
seriously what Sextus’ wording clearly intends to suggest: namely, that it is an
open question which way the sceptic will act. The sceptic, according to Sextus, is
someone with no moral convictions but a number of behavioural tendencies,
some societally induced and some natural; his account of the sceptic’s response to
the tyrant seems to underestimate the force of the natural ones. For among the
natural tendencies is the tendency to avoid pain and, presumably (though Sextus
does not mention this), the instinct to fight for survival. Thus the tyrant’s credible
threat of torture and death is likely to produce in the sceptic (as it would in
anyone) one of the strongest possible negative reactions. Now, someone with a
deep moral commitment, including a very strong conviction that an action of the
kind the tyrant is demanding is absolutely off-limits, may be able to surmount
this negative reaction and face up to the tyrant. But the sceptic is not like this; he
may very well feel revulsion at the prospect of doing what the tyrant demands,
but, in the absence of any moral commitment to bolster that feeling, it is much
less likely that it will outweigh the feelings engendered by the tyrant’s threat of
the alternative. In other words, the sceptic seems much more likely to submit to
the tyrant’s demand than to resist it, and much more likely to submit to it than
would someone whose choices were informed by a strong moral vision.
But suppose I am wrong about all of this; suppose that the sceptic’s ingrained
dispositions are indeed sufficient to guide action in all the circumstances of life,
even this one, and that the norms of his society have produced in him a revulsion
at what the tyrant has demanded that might actually be stronger than his natural
tendency to avoid torture and death. In this case Sextus’ account would be
consistent. But there is still the further question of whether it paints scepticism in
an attractive light. There is a peculiar passivity to the sceptic’s life, as so
described. He acts as his ingrained dispositions prompt him to act, but he does
not endorse any of the values that, in normal people, would go along with those
dispositions. He does what his society has programmed him to do, and he does
not have the resources to question what that society prescribes. Even if his
society’s norms are internally inconsistent, so that he may be pushed towards
conflicting courses of action, he is not in a position to reflect on which of these
courses of action is in fact the best; all he can do is observe the relative strength
of the forces within him that prompt the different actions. It is not just that he is
not going to be one of society’s reformers, although this is surely true. In not
identifying with any set of values, and in not making full-fledged choices or
decisions (as we noted earlier), he is in a real sense abandoning some central
characteristics of normal human agency; or, to put it another way, he is not a
fully human self.14 So much the worse for normal human agency or selfhood,
Sextus might reply; that is precisely where all the trouble comes from. If all one
cares about is ataraxia, one may be satisfied with this reply.15 But most of us
think that there is more to life than avoiding mental distress, and, if so, the
sceptic’s life – supposing, contrary to the objection, that it can be consistently
maintained even in the tyrant case – is likely to strike us as a very stunted one.
And so, although Sextus would not recognize the category of evil, it looks as if
his account of how the sceptic would respond to (what the rest of us would call)
evil exposes some significant limitations in his Pyrrhonist outlook.

Notes
1 Thanks to Tom Angier for helpful comments, in response to which this essay is, I hope, improved.
2 Jouanna 2009 has argued for placing him in the early third century CE, on the basis that Galen, who
lived into the third century, never mentions him. Like most arguments from silence, this is not
conclusive. But the article does have the merit of highlighting in detail how unlikely it is that Galen
would not have mentioned Sextus had they been contemporaries, given the amount of name-dropping
about medical Empiricists (of whom Sextus was one) that occurs in his works. However, the issue is not
important for our purposes.
3 For a brief account of this history, see Bett 2013: section 2.
4 Virtually nothing is known about Sextus as a person, either from his own works or from other sources;
on this see House 1980, which (except for the matter of his dates – see again note 2) has not been
superseded. Certainly we know nothing about him that might be relevant to the topic of this essay aside
from what can be gathered from his writings.
5 Translations of passages of Sextus are my own. In the case of Against the Ethicists they are taken from
Bett 1997. The best complete English translation of PH is by Annas and Barnes [1994] 2000.
6 On this topic, see the classic series of essays collected in Burnyeat and Frede 1997; also Brennan [1994]
2000; Perin 2010.
7 It will turn out that an answer to this question that suits our present purposes is available, even if a
general answer is elusive; I return to this point in the next paragraph.
8 This work also includes two books, Against the Logicians (M 7–8) and two Against the Physicists (M 9–
10); together with Against the Ethicists, these cover roughly the same territory as the second and third
books of PH. All five books were almost certainly preceded by a general book or books, now lost, which
would have paralleled the first book of PH.
9 See also M 11.159, where the belief that pain is really a bad thing is clearly not meant to be limited to
philosophers.
10 This is perhaps an overstatement, in that, given the interpretation of ‘really’ in the previous paragraph,
it precludes someone who denies the objectivity of values from thinking that anything is evil. I do not
wish to deny that an anti-objectivist about value might have a legitimate use for the term ‘evil’.
 However, my own observation, at least, is that the term is generally used precisely when the speaker
does wish to convey the implication that some value claims have an objective status. ‘Hitler [or
substitute any monster you choose] was an evil man’ is regularly viewed as a refutation of any position
that takes ethics to be at bottom a matter of individual or societal preferences, with no objective moral
order underpinning them. In any case, given the ancient consensus that ‘good’, ‘bad’, and other ethical
terms do pick out real properties of things, it seems harmless in the present context to ignore this
complication.
11 I have argued for this in detail in Bett 1997.
12 This may still strike us as a drastically impoverished conception of skills at the more technical end of
the spectrum. But the ancient world, being largely innocent of anything that could be called
technology, had far fewer of these than we do. And even a technê such as medicine, which might seem
obviously to require beliefs, could be conceived in antiquity – and was conceived by the Empiricists, to
whom Sextus belonged – as a mere series of practices or routines of treatment, with no underpinning of
theory. Sextus’ conception of technê was no doubt open to question even in his own time; but it would
not have seemed as outlandish to his contemporaries as it may seem to us.
13 There is a real question whether Sextus has a consistent story when it comes to the sceptic’s attitude to
religion; I have discussed this in Bett 2009. However, the issues involved are not particularly germane to
his treatment of the tyrant case.
14 I have discussed the sceptic’s pared-down self in Bett 2008.
15 Against this, it might be observed that there are other sources of anxiety and distress than those
stemming from an attachment to values and other beliefs. (Dogs can have anxieties, too.) But I think
Sextus would agree. He does not claim that scepticism releases us from all distress whatever – only
from those forms of distress that have their source in our opinions. As we have seen, Sextus conceives
these (especially opinions about what is good and bad) as extremely troublesome and a conversion to
scepticism, therefore, as an immense improvement to one’s life. But he does not deny that, whether we
are sceptics or not, we are subject to a variety of unpleasant feelings over which we have no control.
See PH 1.25, 29–30; the emphasis here seems to be primarily on physical feelings (thirst and cold are the
examples given), but I see no reason why fears, anxieties, and other (as we might generally consider
them) mental feelings that arise independently of any beliefs should not belong in the same category.

Further reading
Annas, J. [1986] 1998. ‘Doing without Objective Values: Ancient and Modern Strategies’, in M. Schofield and
 G. Striker (eds), The Norms of Nature: Studies in Hellenistic Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 3–29; rev. in S. Everson (ed.), Companions to Ancient Thought, Vol. 4: Ethics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 193–220.
——1993. The Morality of Happiness. New York: Oxford University Press, esp. chs 8, 11, 17.
Bett, R. (ed.) 2010. The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
——2011. ‘How Ethical Can an Ancient Skeptic Be?’, in D. Machuca (ed.), Pyrrhonism in Ancient, Modern,
and Contemporary Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 3–17.
Cooper, J. 2012. Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, esp. ch. 5.5–5.7.
Hankinson, R. J. 1995. The Sceptics. London: Routledge.
Nussbaum, M. 1994. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Thorsrud, H. 2009. Ancient Scepticism. London: Acumen; Berkeley: University of California Press.

References
Annas, J., and Barnes, J. (trans. and ed.) [1994] 2000. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bett, R. (trans.) 1997. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Ethicists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——2008. ‘What Kind of Self Can a Greek Sceptic Have?’, in P. Remes and J. Sihvola (eds), Ancient Philosophy
of the Self. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 139–54.
——2009. ‘Sextus Empiricus’, in G. Oppy and N. Trakakis (eds), The History of Western Philosophy of Religion,
Vol. 1: Ancient Philosophy of Religion. London: Acumen; New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 173–85.
——2013. ‘Ancient Scepticism’, in R. Crisp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp. 112–28.
Brennan, T. [1994] 2000. ‘Criterion and Appearance in Sextus Empiricus: The Scope of Sceptical Doubt, the
Status of Sceptical Belief’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 39: 151–69; rev. in J. Sihvola (ed.),
Ancient Scepticism and the Sceptical Tradition. Helsinki: Philosophical Society of Finland, pp. 63–92.
Burnyeat, M., and Frede, M. (eds) 1997. The Original Sceptics: A Controversy. Indianapolis: Hackett.
House, D. 1980. ‘The Life of Sextus Empiricus’, Classical Quarterly, 30: 227–38.
Jouanna, J. 2009. ‘Médecine et philosophie: sur la date de Sextus Empiricus et celle de Diogène Laërce à la
lumière du Corpus galénique’, Revue des Études Grecques, 122: 359–90.
Perin, C. 2010. ‘Scepticism and Belief’, in R. Bett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 145–64.
14 Neoplatonism1
Kevin Corrigan

Introduction
In this chapter, I shall examine two principal Neoplatonic views of evil: that of
Plotinus (204–270 CE), who held that, while moral evil is a weakness of the
individual soul, evil in the cosmos generally (including moral evil) must
ultimately be traced to matter as non-being, privation, or defect; and that of
Proclus (412–485 CE), who held that matter is not evil; evil is instead a by-product
of the outpouring of being, a sort of parasitical existence.
Before we examine Plotinus, the reader should be aware of two things: first,
the term ‘Neoplatonism’ is itself problematic and, second, Plotinus’ theory is not
simply his own; it emerges from the complex tangle of earlier thought that ranges
from the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle through the Stoics and Middle
Platonists to the Gnostics.
Neoplatonism is a modern term that indicates what modernity saw as a ‘new’
form of Platonic thought. Ever since the separation of an earlier ‘Plato’ (424/423–
348/347 BCE) and his immediate heritage from the later reinvention of Platonic
tradition that occurred in the nineteenth century, Neoplatonism has been traced
back to Plotinus, an Egyptian who wrote in Greek and lived in Rome, and whose
works, known as the Enneads (or six groups of nine treatises), were collected by
his pupil and colleague Porphyry (234–305 CE). The term is then extended to
cover subsequent thinkers such as Iamblichus (c. 245–325 CE), Syrianus (d. 437 CE),
Proclus (412–485 CE), Damascius (c. 458–538 CE), and some of the Aristotelian
commentators, such as Simplicious (c. 490–560 CE), as well as later figures in
different traditions – Christian, Jewish, and Muslim – who were influenced to
greater or lesser degrees by Plotinus’ thought. These figures range from Pseudo-
Dionysius (late fifth to early sixth century CE), Avicenna (c. 980– 1037 CE), Ibn
Gabirol (1021–1058 CE), and Moses Maimonides (1135–1204 CE) to Marsilio Ficino
(1433–1499 CE), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600 CE), and others in the Italian
Renaissance.
In the second case, Plotinus himself explicitly disavows any originality for his
own thinking in regard to Plato. His own education occurred at the hands of a
certain Ammonius Sakkas, a shadowy figure who lived on the outskirts of
Alexandria, and about whom we know virtually nothing; in fact, Plotinus swore
an oath of secrecy not to divulge Ammonius’ teachings.2 What then is distinctive
about Plotinus? According to Porphyry, what was characteristic of Plotinus’
thinking was that he brought the ‘mind of Ammonius’ to bear on every question,
a mind that took a distinctive line of enquiry on traditional texts and problems
(such as the Platonic dialogues or the commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias
on Aristotle).3 Plotinus’ thought on evil and other questions, then, is indebted to
many others before him, especially Plato, and his distinctive lines of enquiry
inevitably arise out of questions in Plato, Aristotle, and much earlier ancient
thought.4

Plotinus
In an early work, Ennead 5 1 [10] 1, 1–6, Plotinus asks what made the souls forget
their Father; and he replies ‘that the beginning of evil for them was audacity
(tolma) and genesis and the first otherness and the wish to belong to themselves.’
Here Gnostic, Stoic and Neopythagorean elements coincide, especially in the
word tolma.5 The wish to belong only to oneself (instead of the whole) is the
beginning of self-alienation and evil. In a later work, the problem of evil arises
from the complex interweaving of causality, chance, potentiality, and privation,
without losing sight of the intricate workings of providence that, unlike in
Peripatetic thought, do not stop before the sublunary world6 but infuse individual
agency with added significance.7 One who tries to unravel this complex mixture
of ‘reason and necessity’ (Timaeus 47e), Plotinus observes,
 contemplates things … that continually go on being mixed; and he cannot
himself distinguish providence and what is according to providence clearly
on the one side, and on the other the substrate and all that it gives to what
results from it.
(3 3 [48] 6, 8–17)

The ‘substrate’ here is matter and, in this passage, it clearly contributes both good
and bad things.8 How, then, can this passage be reconciled with Plotinus’ ultimate
view that matter is evil?
We first see why matter is evil (and not simply neutral) in Enneads 2 4 [12]
(‘On the two matters’ [the matters of the intelligible and sensible worlds]),9
which is the first of four treatises Plotinus wrote on the subject – the others being
2 5 [25] (‘On what exists potentially and what actually’), 3 6 [26] (‘On the
impassibility of things without body’), and 1 8 [51] (‘On what are and whence
come evils’). In setting out Plotinus’ thinking, I will follow these treatises in their
chronological order, since together they articulate an innovative, if difficult
theory of evil qua matter.
In Ennead 2 4 [12], the central question is what we mean when we speak about
‘matter’. The Aristotelian analysis sees form and privation of form as formal
contraries inhering in an underlying matter works on a positive level: matter
makes a positive contribution to the formation of bodies. However, if quality,
quantity, etc., are forms, and we push deeper into the indeterminacy of matter (an
indeterminacy, Plotinus argues, we experience even in ordinary life as absence or
non-being), we get a different picture. Matter is positive, as contained by form,
but, as indeterminate, matter is not form and bears a negative relation to form; it
is not even ‘other’ than form, if the word ‘other’ implies a formal, unitary notion,
but simply ‘others’ (2 4, 13, 16–32). That is, matter is indeterminate plurality
negatively characterized by privation or absence of form. In other words, Plotinus
combines Plato’s notion of a kind of ‘form of what is not’, namely, a part of
otherness opposed to beings but not completely non-existent (Sophist 258a–9a),10
with a deeper analysis of Aristotle’s notion of privation (which even Aristotle
himself characterized as ‘evil-doing’; Physics 192a15).
Aristotle, then, had made privation a formal concept (i.e., form and privation
are contrasted, in the Physics, with matter as their underlying ‘stuff’), but
Plotinus insists this is to leave indefiniteness unexamined. Admittedly, the
definitions of matter, indefiniteness, and privation may differ according to what
we mean in each case; however, when by privation we mean no longer the
sensible qualities of things, but the indefiniteness of matter, then there is no
reason, ultimately, not to identify privation with matter (2 4, 14). We always
approach such indefiniteness by means of a synthetic definition (form and
matter), but what we refer to as privative matter is not form or shape, and our
means of referring to it is not ‘genuine’, as Plato characterizes our tenuous grasp
of the ‘receptacle’ or ‘space’ (chora) in the Timaeus; it is, instead, a kind of
‘bastard reasoning’.11 According to Plotinus’ analysis there is, then, a kind of
thinking that does not come from intellect as such (2 4, 12) – namely, empty
thought of the indefinite and unlimited. Matter is not entirely unknowable, for
we speak of it through meaningful language (through logos) and also through
deficiency of meaning. Plotinus concludes that matter is unlimited, in contrast to
form (2 4, 15). It has a kind of existence, but its antithesis to being appears as a
negating, privative force. It is therefore ‘ugliness’, even ‘deformity’. 12
This indeterminacy is certainly perplexing: matter is potentially everything,
while actually being no one thing (a formula employed in different ways by
Plato, Aristotle, and the Peripatetics).13 Both sides, positive and negative, are
aspects of our experience and of a larger analysis of the meanings of matter.
However, when we speak of matter’s negativity, we cannot speak in terms of
truth or falsity as we can for a world of determinate things, for matter is neither
an independent essence nor a thing, and there are no things or formal points of
reference in an indeterminate landscape.
Thus in Ennead 2 5 [25] and other works, Plotinus develops a curious way of
speaking about indeterminacy. He places it in the context of Peripatetic (i.e.,
Aristotelian) thought,14 setting out the different meanings of potency, power, and
actuality: matter is ‘potentially everything, but not yet actually any of the things
it is potentially’.15 Here Alexander of Aphrodisias’ treatment of this formula
(derived from Plato’s Timaeus),16 together with matter’s privative and even
corruptive nature,17 helps us to understand the apparent breaking of the principle
of non-contradiction: matter both is and is not the forms from which it is
distinguished. Instead of simply making true and false statements in a
determinate universe of reference, we approach the puzzling character of
indeterminacy by combining apparently opposite statements: X both is and is not.
Plotinus tries to make sense of the problem of indeterminacy in Platonic and
Aristotelian terms,18 since, if the principle of unity or identity is explicitly
removed (as in 2 4 [12]),19 there is no foundation for the principle of non-
contradiction, and we are left only with ‘the others’ – that is, indefinitely many
others in the absence of any determinate truth function or unifying principle, a
curious notion we also find in the final pages of Plato’s Parmenides.20
Ennead 3 6 [26] provides some answers to further important questions. If
matter is different from form in the way Plotinus has argued, how is it related to
the contrary forms that characterize it successively? Why do we speak about it
being shaped? In the case of soul (chapters 1–5) and of matter (6–10), Plotinus
argues that neither can strictly be thought to undergo qualitative or quantitative
change;21 only people or compound things blush or blanch, not ‘souls’ or ‘matter’.
How then does the receptacle have a ‘participation’ in the intelligible, as Plato
asserts in the Timaeus?22 Matter’s participation, Plotinus argues, is its peculiar
receptivity as space or receptacle to all the forms that appear in it, not to a
particular form (chapters 11–19). Like faces in a mirror, particular forms appear
and disappear, but the mirror stays untouched: ‘what it might have grasped slips
away from it as if from an alien nature, like an echo from smooth flat surfaces …
the illusion is created that it is there and from there’ (14, 24–7). Plotinus’
descriptions of matter here are striking:

[Matter] always presents opposite appearances on the surface, small and

great23 … a phantom that does not remain but cannot again flee, for it has no
strength … whatever announcement it makes is a lie … it seems to be filled
but holds nothing … Imitations of real beings pass into and out of it,24 ghosts
into a formless ghost.
(3 6 [26] 7)

According to another work, it is ‘grasped’ by both intelligible and sensible

realities but escapes both.25 Evil is grasped – but never completely.
Although Plotinus does not use the term ‘metaphysical’ evil or any rough
equivalent (as modern scholars do),26 it would have been natural for his
contemporaries to have asked how moral and physical evils, such as vice and
sickness respectively, are connected to matter as the ultimate metaphysical evil.
And how is the Good responsible for generating evil? Are not the two models –
first, of the derivation of all things from the Good and, second, of metaphysical
evil as developed by Plotinus – fundamentally incompatible, as Proclus will argue
later? Some of these questions Plotinus addresses at the end of his life, in 1 8 [51]:
‘What are and whence come evils?’ Let us see first how matter-evil is the source
of other evils.
If there is no evil in the Good, Intellect, and Soul as such, Plotinus argues, evil
can exist only in formlessness and unmeasuredness, ‘in what underlies figures …
and measures, adorned with alien order, having no good of itself’ (3, 35–7).
Individual bodies and souls can be evil only in a secondary sense, not in
themselves. Bodies are prone to the fluctuation, corruption, and disorderly
motions of matter, and they can hinder the proper activity of soul (4, 1–6). Souls
too become infected by lack of measure, and their reasoning capacities are
damaged by passion and the focus of their attention (4, 14–32).
Why then is evil ‘contrary’ to the Good, as Plato claims (Theaetetus 176a), and
how is primary evil a source of all secondary evils? Plotinus’ answer is that,
while individual substances have no contrary, substance as a whole and the Good
on which substance depends do have a contrary. This contrary is primary evil
and its secondary instances. Plotinus puts this as follows:

Non-substance is contrary to substance, and the nature and principle of evil

to the nature of the Good … and all the things included in each nature are
contrary to those in the other; so that the wholes are contrary and more
contrary than other contraries. For the other contraries belong to the same
species or … genus, and have something in common … but things that are
separate … are furthest removed from each other.
(6, 33–41)

At issue here is how matter can be a principle/beginning, without mediation

between itself and the Good, and how such a deficient principle (as later in
Augustine)27 can have powerful yet profoundly defective results. In Aristotle’s
terms, such opposites ‘cannot pass into each other’ (Metaphysics 1055a6–7), and
this singular form of contrariety would be the ‘greatest opposition’ (1 8 [51] 6)
and not admit of any mean (cf. 6 7 [38] 23, 13–14). Virtues and vices, therefore,
can be looked at in two ways: on a relative scale they belong in the same genus;
on a radically privative scale, they are opposed fields. Human life is played out on
both the relative and the radically privative scale.
Such phrases as ‘the nature and principle of evil’ have puzzled commentators,
even though the admission of two principles as such does not imply they are
equal.28 Plotinus does not use the word arche (principle or beginning) of matter
except in 3 6 [26] 19, 32 (‘beginning in the sense of substrate’) and then in 6 1 [42]
25, 14; 26, 17; 27, 1–4, but he accentuates the challenge by his use of arche
(principle), physis (nature), and aitia (cause) in 1 8 [51] 4, 13, 20; 6, 33. Some
scholars have supposed that 1 8 [51] is Plotinus’ radically dualist, mature
position, perhaps evidence of his failing powers.29 Others have tended to
minimize his theory of evil or to treat it as metaphorical.30 However, since the
radical opposition between good and evil occurs already in 6 7 [38], since the
causal language of 1 8 [51] is to be found in 3 6 [26], and since Plotinus evidently
needs to interpret causal/quasi-causal language in such Platonic dialogues as the
Timaeus, Politicus, and Philebus, one may argue that this is his view throughout
the middle and later works. In using the word ‘principle’ or ‘beginning’ of matter,
Plotinus clearly does not mean that matter is an independent principle equal to
Being or Good (as in Zoroastrianism), or that it has independent efficient power.
Matter is not an efficient cause but, rather, as in Augustine, a deficiency that
haunts and resists regular causality.
In 1 8 [51], chapter 7, Plotinus takes up the question of how, if the Good is
necessary, evil is also necessary (7, 1ff.; cf. Timaeus 47e–8a; Theaetetus 176). And
he replies that matter is necessary for the existence of the universe, that
contrariety necessarily brings with it the existence of evils, and that, if the first in
a series exists, so too must the last. But, whereas all positive principles for
Plotinus are creative, matter-evil is non-productive in any positive sense (1 8 [51]
7). As noted above, there is a problem of how to reconcile a derivation model (of
evil from the Good) with a metaphysical analysis of evil as corruptive privation.
And this problem applies to all the passages in the Enneads dealing with the
generation or derivation of matter. For some scholars, matter is not generated;31
for others, its evil is minimized32 or reduced to metaphor;33 for others, matter is
generated by the partial soul;34 for others, all relevant passages are ambiguous
and could refer not to matter, but to the generation of place or of a soul-trace;35
and, for still others, matter’s generation is a different kind of derivation: a ‘flight’,
‘expulsion’, or fall of matter from the intelligible. The one passage where Plotinus
mentions soul generating matter (later in 1 8 [51] 14), this represents not his own
position but that of the Gnostics, a position he has already definitively rejected in
2 9 [33] 12.36 Here in 1 8 [51] 7, matter-evil is the last ‘going out’ (ekbasis), ‘going
down/under’ (hypobasis), or ‘falling away’ (apobasis) – that is, matter-evil is
simultaneously derived, lying under, and yet receding.
What answer might one give to these problems? All we can say is that Plotinus
represents the derivation of matter-evil in several different ways, none of them
fully determinate or unambiguous – and this is ironically appropriate to absolute
indeterminacy. Matter is both last in a system and yet alien – an outcast that
eludes every attempt to fit it neatly into being, thought, and language. As
positive, it manifests the substrate’s or the receptacle’s unique capacity to receive;
as negative, it escapes being shaped and resists generativity (just as the receptacle
is represented in the Timaeus (53b) and Politicus (273b–d) or, in Plotinus’ own
words in 1 8 [51] 7, as ‘not yet ordered by some god’).
What then is soul’s weakness?37 All the different possible relations between
soul and matter – one in which matter is mastered by soul, another in which soul
is mastered by matter – occur in our present experience, Plotinus argues. Soul is
self-dependent, an entity rooted in itself and in Intellect before it, but, because of
the presence of matter, soul is also susceptible to a different orientation ‘because
of that in it which is not undivided’ (15, 19). This means that it can become
divided by the presence of ‘something alien to it’, with the result that its powers
cannot operate; the soul then becomes cramped and starts to identify itself not
with the whole of reality, but only with the ‘qualified thing’ it has become – a
more extreme version of ‘wanting to belong only to itself’, as we saw in 5 1 [10] 1
above. Soul, instead of being rooted in itself, in Intellect and the One, becomes a
form in or dependent upon matter, capable of letting its real life-force, the very
meaning of soul, become progressively weakened. As in Plato’s Phaedo, this is
what the death of soul means: a cramped, living-death experience in ‘the mud of
Hades’.38
Such a fall can happen to both soul and intellect. When we see relative
wickedness or ugliness, we recognize it by its falling short of virtue or beauty.
But we see absolute wickedness by a complete removal of form and grasp
‘formlessness in ourselves’, as an eye removes itself from light ‘to see darkness’
(9, 21). By such an apprehension, Plotinus writes, ‘another intellect which is not
intellect [sees matter], dar[es] (tolmesas) to see what does not belong to it’ (9, 18).
Matter-evil’s privative reach, therefore, can extend to both soul and mind, yet it
cannot fully determine them, because their true, free natures are always in their
own power39 (though not everyone actualizes them).40 For Plotinus, then, neither
soul nor matter is independently responsible as a positive force for evil. Yet
matter’s negative presence is cause of soul’s weakness (1 8 [51] 14, 49), and, once
soul is caught by matter’s influence, a strange co-dependency emerges, in which
soul’s increasing weakness is caused by the negative charge of matter.

From the third to the fifth century: Porphyry,

Iamblichus, and Proclus
Later Neoplatonists, such as Iamblichus, Proclus, and Simplicius, rejected
Plotinus’ view that matter is the cause of evil in the soul and that it is evil or a
principle of evil (De Malorum Subsistentia, 30–37; Simplicius, In Phys. 249, 26–
250, 3; Commentary on the Categories 108–109). They adopted instead the view
that evil is a parhypostasis, a by-product, parasitic existence, or failure, ultimately
uncaused (though negative terminology about matter in the privative sense
continues to be used by Iamblichus, for instance – see De Mysteriis III 2841 – and
by Proclus).42 Proclus’ commentary on Ennead 1 8 has unfortunately been lost,43
but three of his opuscula have been preserved in the Latin translation of the
thirteenth century Flemish Dominican, William of Moerbeke – one of which is
his treatise on evil, De Malorum Subsistentia (DMS). Proclus does not mention
Plotinus by name, but he is clearly a target of Proclus’ criticism.

Proclus: De Malorum Subsistentia

Proclus, like Pseudo-Dionysius after him,44 first determines if (DMS 2–10) and
then where (DMS 11–39) evil exists – in gods, angels, demons, heroes, souls of
various kinds, or nature (as a whole or particularized) – and argues that only in
fallen human souls, irrational souls, and nature that governs individual bodies
can evils occur. But is matter evil? Proclus argues that, if matter is the cause of
evil, then either matter is an ultimate ungenerated principle or it derives its
existence from the Good. If the first alternative is true, then there will be two first
principles – an unacceptable conclusion. If the latter is true, then the Good must
be the cause of evils and itself evil, since the cause is in an eminent degree what
its product is, and evils themselves must be good, if what is caused is assimilated
to its cause. Here is perhaps the strongest formulation of the case against
Plotinus, namely, the position that matter-evil as an ultimate metaphysical evil is
incompatible with the derivation model of matter-evil as produced by the Good.
Matter cannot be the principle of evil or evil itself, since it is necessary for the
making of the universe (32, 34, 36–7), is produced by the Good or the One, and is
simply the lowest manifestation of unlimitedness.45 Proclus therefore integrates
matter into his system of causality in a way that Plotinus does not; and since, for
Proclus, the influence of higher causes is more far-reaching than that of
proximate causes, the influence of the One on matter is the most direct of all.46
At the same time, weakness of soul exists (in the Phaedrus)47 before matter and
darkness. Therefore, matter cannot be the cause of weakness in souls. The
responsibility lies with soul and its choice. Throughout these chapters, Proclus
argues for the interpretation of major Platonic dialogues such as the Timaeus,
Philebus, Phaedrus etc., but he also insists upon an ‘orthodox’ interpretation of
Aristotle – by orthodox, I mean an interpretation that stays within the usual
confines of Aristotle’s thought. In contrast, Plotinus pushes against the limits of
Aristotle’s thinking to find more creative ways of approaching traditional
problems. A common modern way, therefore, of interpreting Proclus as defending
an Aristotelian view against a renegade Plotinian view of Plato simply misses the
point.48 In Plotinus and Proclus, the interpretation of both Plato and Aristotle is
fundamental to the argument, and we can see this clearly in DMS 37.
In Proclus’ view, then, matter is ‘neither good nor evil, but only necessary’ –
good for the sake of the good; evil, in a manner of speaking, as the lowest of
beings; in itself simply necessary. Nor can privation be evil (in the sense that
Plotinus had intended), for absolute privation cannot exist, and privation of form
is merely absence and could never give rise to evil. Only privation of a good –
and therefore of something that should be the case – is capable of using the
power of the good to attack and undermine the health of the soul or body.
Intellectual or physical blindness, for instance, is not simply absence of form but
a limiting condition on the exercise of the good. And this is the sense, Proclus
concludes, in which the notion of evils as ‘subcontrary to the Good’ (Theaetetus
176a) should be understood – as a special form of subcontrariety, whereby a
particular evil derives its being and power from the good to which it is opposed.49
What, then, are the causes of evil? They cannot be one, but only many. Nor can
there be a divine principle of evil or Form of evil (as Amelius, Plotinus’ colleague,
supposed)50 or an evil World Soul (as Plutarch and Atticus had thought) (DMS
40–49). There cannot be a ‘principal’51 or efficient/formal/ material/final cause of
evil, for evils are a kind of defect, indeterminacy, or privation – namely, ‘a kind of
parhypostasis’ or parasitic existence that depends or feeds on other things (DMS
49).52 In regular causality, an intrinsic relation holds between cause and effect,
but, when something happens in nature that does not bear that relation or (in
purposive action) is unintended, it is said to be ‘beside’ (para) the result.53 An
archer, for instance, shoots but misses the target. Missing the mark is intelligible
only within the context of goal-directed actions or processes, but missing the
mark is still real. Failures, defects, or evils, then, are real, but they are not the
outcome of goal-directed processes. We aim for a perceived good, according to
Proclus, even if we do evil. Evils, therefore, have to be ranked among accidental
things without principal causes (DMS 50, 18–25). It is therefore ‘appropriate to
call such a generation a parhypostasis, as imperfect, without a goal, uncaused in a
way and indefinite’ (DMS 50, 29–30).54
The view that evil is uncaused absolves Being and the Demiurge of
responsibility (as in Plato’s Timaeus 42d),55 but it derives too from discussions
about contingency in Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias.56 Proclus’ view of
uncaused evil, in light of his strict insistence upon causality elsewhere and his
criticism of Epicurus’ uncaused ‘swerve’, has been seen as problematic, even
indefensible.57 But the Aristotelian-Peripatetic context provides a reasonable
explanation: the contingent, parasitic by-product has accidental existence that is
fully intelligible only in the context of causality. Contingent, particular evils
therefore do not so much violate the causal nexus as confirm it.
So, for Proclus, the existence of evil does not destroy providence (as it does,
arguably, for Epicurus), nor does providence destroy particular evils (as it does for
the Stoics). And providence does not extend only to the superlunary world (as in
Aristotle and Alexander).58 Instead, Proclus charts a middle course,59 allowing
providence to permeate all goods throughout the universe, since, even if things
are evil from a partial or subordinate perspective, they are also good, because
they derive from the Good and employ the Good’s power either to deepen or to
remedy their defects.

Conclusion: afterlife and assessment

The afterlife of these Neoplatonic views of evil is profound. One line of influence
is from Proclus through Pseudo-Dionysius to Aquinas (who writes a commentary
on Pseudo-Dionysius’ condensed treatment of the DMS).60 We can also move
from Plotinus and Porphyry through Marius Victorinus and Ambrose to
Augustine.61 Alternatively, we can go through Pseudo-Dionysius to Eriugena, and
then to Anselm, Meister Eckhart, and Nicholas of Cusa. We can also see the
influence of Neoplatonism on Arabic thought, in such figures as Ibn ‘Arabi and
Avicenna, and Jewish thought, in Ibn Gabirol and Moses Maimonides.
Furthermore, the transmission of Byzantine Neoplatonism by Gemistius Pletho to
Florence (and to Marsilio Ficino in particular) ensured that the many different
currents of Neoplatonic influence would have a major impact upon not only the
Italian Renaissance but also the British Romantics, the German Idealists,
especially Hegel, Schelling and others, and even the great Russian writers and
thinkers such as Gogol, Solovyov, and Dostoevsky.62
How can we assess this complex picture? On the one hand, Proclus’ view of
evil is logically coherent and has virtually carried the day, from Pseudo-
Dionysius’ highly accurate, condensed transformation of Proclus’ DMS in his
Divine Names, to Simplicius’ later rebuttal of Plotinus’ apparently self-
contradictory theory,63 to equally forceful modern assessments.64 Scholars have
therefore tended to side-line Plotinus’ theory of evil, as we have seen, or to treat
it as metaphorical.65 On the other hand, Jean-Marc Narbonne has emphasized the
radical negativity of evil in Plotinus and argued for a generation of matter
different from that of form.66 By contrast, Andrei Cornea has rejected even the
charge of dualism: first, because Proclus’ principle that ‘the cause is, in the
highest degree, what its effects are’ does not apply to Plotinus, where the giver
does not ‘have’ what is given to its effects, and, second, because the supposed
contradiction between the metaphysical and derivational models is based only
upon an abstract theory of classes, genera, and species and not upon the model of
serial continuity in Plotinus, where the last in a series not only can but must have
nothing in common with the first or second of the derivational series, and even
be radically opposed to the first.67
Whatever the case is here, matter is the last to appear in the unfolding of
emanation,68 but all the passages dealing with the generation of matter in the
Enneads are ambiguous. Is matter-evil an image of intelligible
otherness/indeterminacy? Yes, but its relation/participation is puzzling, for it
flees, resists, and yet begs for entry,69 so that we cannot categorize it. At the same
time, we cannot rule out definitively that it is generated by the partial soul. The
question of origin, then, admits no conclusive answer.
A major problem in Proclus’ account, by contrast, is that evil becomes an
epiphenomenon or accidental result that is close to being nothing at all. Proclus’
solution tends to make evils disappear, either into the good of ‘wholes’ (rather
than partial viewpoints) or into a nexus of causality/rationality in which
accidents simply vanish against a backdrop of regular causes.70 Despite later
Neoplatonist attempts to accentuate the significance of providence and the
‘theological’ virtues in the lives of ordinary individuals,71 the problem of evil in
the experience of actual individuals simply disappears. Arguably, this destroys or
at least blunts the power of Proclus’ approach.
By contrast, there may be advantages to Plotinus’ theory or some version
thereof, perhaps combined with that of Proclus, for one does not need to hold a
matter-evil theory to appreciate Plotinus’ subtle approach to the overall question.
For Plotinus, evil remains an intractable problem for individuals in their ordinary
experience, since, while negativity and privative indeterminacy are meaningful
and have genuine explanatory force, they are also not collapsible into rationality
or logos. Evil’s deepening negativity is not just something we frame in language
and logic or tame by causality;72 it evades our grasp and functions even as a
privative, anti-force field that remarkably becomes ‘more what it is’ (2 4 [12] 16,
15–16). Secondary evils, such as sickness or vicious behaviour, are not simply
species or accidents, since the infinite, in this privative sense, Plotinus argues, is
‘not form … or an accident of matter’ (2 4 [12] 15).
The perplexing quasi-reality of evil, then, is not just ‘accidental’. It negates
through a disturbing otherness that operates indeterminately – but this is not the
agency of regular causality. Evil is never fully explicable, for it falls below the
level of logos, corrupts forms in matter, and thus violates, erases identity, flees,
begs for entry into intelligible and sensible being, and yet resists. At the same
time, evil is subordinate and can be overcome, unlike in Manichaeism, which for
so long defeated Augustine. While Plotinus’ view, with its irredeemable, ultimate
evil, cannot be accepted entirely by Jewish, Christian, or Islamic thought, its
explanatory power and simultaneous recognition of the limits of explanation,
together with its existential/philosophical imagery (as in Plato’s Timaeus,
Politicus, Parmenides, Philebus, Laws) and psychological and social applications
(as in the Republic, Phaedo, Symposium), are attractive, and many of its elements
were readily adopted in these traditions (as in Proclus’ DMS).73 In such hybrid
forms, the force of a ‘Neoplatonic’ approach to the problem of evil continues to
live in the subsequent history of thought.

Notes
1 I thank Jean-Marc Narbonne, John D. Turner and Tom Angier for reading earlier versions of this article,
and making many valuable criticisms and suggestions.
2 Porphyry, Vita Plotini (VP), ch. 3.
3 VP, ch. 14.
4 There is no room for separate treatment of Plotinus’ antecedents. For an over view, see Corrigan 1996:
10–22; Wallis 1995: 16–36; and Gerson 2010: 11–297. For Middle Platonism, see Dillon 1977; and, for
Gnosticism, see Turner 2001; and Thomassen 2001: 1–18. On Plato’s oral teaching as reported in
Aristotle, see Wallis 1995: 48, 66, 148.
5 For tolma, see, for example, Plutarch, De Iside et Osisride 75, 381ff.; Iamblichus, Theologoumena
arithmeticae 2, 9, 5–6; Falco, Zostrianus, 128, 11.
6 See Sharples 1983: 12ff., 200.
7 See 3 3 [48] 1; 7, 1–6; 10–28; 3 2 [47] 16.
8 So too is radical disorder said to contribute “small good things”, though it also corrupts them in Plato,
Politicus 273d1–2.
9 Here I shall restrict my focus to sensible matter; for intelligible matter, see Slezák 1979: 72ff.; Corrigan
1996: 257–97.
10 For this, see O’Brien 2011–12: Part III, 27–80.
11 Timaeus 52b–c.
12 See 2 4 [12] 16, 23–4; cf. Sophist 228a10–11.
13 Plato, Timaeus 50d–e; Aristotle, De Anima 429a18–20; Alexander, Quaestio 2.11, 56, 1–7.
14 Compare Simplicius, In Physica 399, 7–18.
15 See Alexander, Quaestio 2.11, 56, 1–7, and compare matter’s non-possession of the things that come
from it and into which it changes, so that it is all things potentially but separable in logos from positive
qualities (in Quaestio 2.11).
16 Timaeus 50d–e.
17 See, for example, Alexander, Quaestio 1.4 (matter is not yet what it comes to be); Quaestio 2.27 (matter
derives its lack of quality from privation but its being qualified from form); Quaestio 1.26 (matter
corrupts the forms which change into it).
18 See, for example, Aristotle’s De Interpretatione 19a29–b4; 23a21–6.
19 2 4 [12] 13, 26–32.
20 Parmenides 165e–166c.
21 Cf. Aristotle, De Anima 417b5–16; 408b11–15; concerning matter, Physics 190b34–5 and De Generatione
et Corruptione 323b1–4b24 (cf. Plotinus 3 6 [26] 8, 1ff. and 9, 12); for commentary, see Corrigan 1996:
134–57.
22 Timaeus 51a–b.
23 A classic Platonic description of the indefinite dyad; cf. also 2 4 [12] 11, 33ff.; cf. Philebus 24a–5a;
Aristotle, Metaphysics 1087b7.
24 Cf. Timaeus 50c4–5.
25 Cf. 2 5 [25] 4–5.
26 See O’Meara 1997: 33–47.
27 Cf. De Civitate Dei, 12, 6–8, esp. 7–8; 12, 9.
28 Cf. Narbonne 2011: 92–3.
29 See, for example, Schröder 1916.
30 Benz 1990: 125 n.116; Hager [1962] 1977: 451; Schwyzer 1973: 277; Rist 1961: 160.
31 Schwyzer 1973: 276; Benz 1990: 110–11.
32 See note 30.
33 Benz 1990: 125 n.116.
34 Cf. 3 9 [13] 3; 3 4 [15] 1. For different interpretations, see O’ Brien 1971: 113–46; Corrigan 1996: 259–60;
Phillips 2009: 108ff.; O’ Brien 2011: Part I, 16ff.; part II, 209ff.; Narbonne 2007: 136–41.
35 Phillips 2009: 103–37; Narbonne 2007: 123–63. Narbonne traces the view that matter is engendered by
the partial soul to Marsilio Ficino (pp. 155–6).
36 Cf. Narbonne 2007: 154–63; Corrigan 1986a: 170; Corrigan 1996: 289–90. In the second part of his
analysis, Narbonne examines: 2 4 [12] 15, 20–28; 2 5 [25] 4 and 5, 9–22; 6 6 [34] 1, 1–7; 3, 308, 15–16; 6 3
[44] 7, 1–9, 26–35; 1 8 [51] 7; and (with Corrigan, 1986a) emphasizes the different provenance of lower
matter in 2 5 [25] 5, 10–22; 2 4 [12] 5, 28–9; and 3 5 [50] 6–7. My position is this: just as we cannot
definitely affirm that matter, and not place, is generated (in some of these passages), neither can we
definitely assert that it is not.
37 Plato’s genealogical treatment of the degeneration of individuals and constitutions (e.g., Republic 8–9;
Phaedrus 248a–56e) and Aristotle’s treatment of akrasia (e.g., Nicomachean Ethics 7) also inform
Plotinus’ analysis.
38 See also Republic 7, 534c7–d1; cf. Ennead 1 8 [51] 13, 12–26; Phaedo 69c; and Politicus 273d6–e1.
39 Cf. 1 8 [51] 4, 25ff.; 7, 12ff.; 14, 28–34.
40 1 8 [51] 5, 28–30.
41 DM III 28, 167, 11–168, 14; 170, 8–14; and especially 29, 172, 10–12: “ if the soul … clings to the figments
of matter, it would be simple evil.”
42 See, for example, DMS 28, 26–38 (baseness of matter); 29, 12–14 (matter as the seat of disorder); 29, 16–
21 (disorder is absolute unmeasuredness, darkness, etc.); 24, 32–5 (the origin of evil is communion with
the inferior-oblivion, ignorance, and darkness); see Opsomer and Steel 2003: 164–5; and for helpful
introduction and notes to the DMS, see ibid.: 24–6.
43 For evidence about Proclus’ lost commentary, see ibid.: 155 n.4.
44 Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, 4, 713d–36b (Corpus Dionysiacum I, ed. B. R. Suchla, Berlin: De
Gruyter 1990).
45 Proclus, Elements of Theology (ET), Prop. 92; Platonic Theology 3, 32, 15–23; cf. Philebus 23c9–10; 26c–
7c; and compare DMS 34, 9–10; In Timaeum I, 384, 30–385, 17; Plat. Theol., 3, 30, 19–21; and see
Opsomer and Steel 2003: 173–5.
46 See Proclus, ET, props. 56–7; 70–72.
47 DMS 33, 1–6; Phaedrus 248a–b.
48 Cf. O’Meara 1999: 33; Erler 1978: 104–5 n.2; and Opsomer and Steel 2003: 179.
49 See Opsomer and Steel 2003: 30.
50 Cf. also Theaetetus 176e.
51 For the phrase, see Opsomer and Steel 2003: 186; Opsomer and Steel 1999: 242, 249 n.105, 256.
 52 Cf. Opsomer and Steel 2003: 23–8, 127 n.351.
53 For parhypostasis and accidental causation, see also Opsomer and Steel 1999: 244–60.
54 DMS 50, 29–30 (Greek version).
55 Cf. also Republic 617e4–5.
56 See Proclus, in Metaph. 194, 9–13; and cf., generally, in Tim I 374, 2–375, 5 with DMS 10, 1–9.
57 For discussion of Stoic, Epicurean, and Peripatetic views, see Opsomer and Steel 1999: 255ff.
58 See, generally, ibid.: 229–60.
59 Ibid.: 257–60.
60 Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, ch. 4 (Corpus Dionysiacum I, ed. B. R. Suchla, Berlin: De Gruyter
1990).
61 For different assessments of what Augustine read, see W. Theiler, Porphyrios und Augustin, Halle, 1933;
Armstrong 1954: 329–34; O’ Connell 1968: 1–14.
62 See Corrigan 1986b (on Ivan’s Devil in The Brothers Karamazov, namely Dostoevsky’s representation of
a negative, sub-physical, resistant yet banal “devil”).
63 Simplicius, In Aristotelis Categorias Commentarium, V 109, 5–110, 14.
64 See, e.g., Perl 2007: 56.
65 Cf. note 30.
66 Narbonne 2007: 123–65.
67 As Plotinus himself suggests in 1 8 [51] 7. See Cornea 2007: 27–43.
68 Cf. 2 5 [25] 5, 15–19; 1 8 [51] 15, 24.
69 Cf. 1 8 [51] 3, 12–15; 14, 35–6; 3 6 [26] 14, 5–15; Symposium 203b4.
70 On the force of evil in Plotinus in contrast to Proclus, see Steel 1998: 84–5; Opsomer and Steel 2003: 171
n.59; and, generally, Opsomer and Steel 1999: 255–60.
71 See, generally, on the triad faith–truth–love, Wallis 1995: 153–6, and, on love specifically, p. 154.
72 That is, despite the golden fetters by which evil is bound, according to Plotinus, at 1 8 [51] 15, 24–8.
73 Cf. DMS 24, 32–5; 28, 26–38; 29, 12–14; 29, 16–21.

Further reading
Narbonne, J.-M. 1993. Les Deux Matières (Ennéade II, 4 [12]). Paris: J. Vrin.
——2007. ‘La Controverse à propos de la génération de la matière chez Plotin: l’enigme résolue?’, Quaestio,
7(1): 123–65.
——2014. ‘Matter and Evil in the Neoplatonic Tradition’, in P. Remes and S. Slaveva-Griffin (eds), The
 Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism. London: Routledge, pp. 231–44.
O’Brien, D. 1981. ‘Plotinus and the Gnostics on the Generation of Matter’, in H. J. Blumenthal and R. A.
Markus (eds), Neoplatonism and Christian Thought. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 108–23.
——1991. Plotinus on the Origin of Matter: An Exercise in the Interpretation of the Enneads. Naples:
Bibliopolis.
——1996. ‘Plotinus on Matter and Evil’, in L. P. Gerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 171–95.
——2009. ‘Plotin: la question du Mal’, Cahier d’Études Levinassiennes, 8: 295–316.
——2011–12. ‘Plotinus on the Making of Matter’, Parts I–III, International Journal of the Platonic Tradition,
5(1): 6–57; 5(2): 209–61; 6(1): 27–80.
O’Meara, D. J. 2005. ‘The Metaphysics of Evil in Plotinus: Problems and Solutions’, in J. M. Dillon (ed.),
Agonistes: Essays in Honour of Denis O’Brien. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 179–85.
Opsomer, J. 2007. ‘Some problems with Plotinus’ Theory of Matter/Evil: An Ancient Debate Continued’,
Quaestio, 7(1): 165–89.
Phillips, J. 2007. Order from Disorder: Proclus’ Doctrine of Evil and its Roots in Ancient Platonism. Leiden: E.
J. Brill.
——2009. ‘Plotinus on the Generation of Matter’, International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, 3(2): 103–37.
Skliris, D. 2008. ‘The Theory of Evil in Proclus: Proclus’ Theodicy as a Completion of Plotinus’ Monism’,
Philotheos, 8: 137–59.

References
Armstrong, A. H. 1954. ‘Spiritual or Intelligible Matter in Plotinus and St. Augustine’, in Augustinus
Magister: Congrès International Augustinien I. Paris: Études augustiniennes, pp. 277–83.
Benz, H. 1990. ‘Materie’ und Wahrnehmung in der Philosophie Plotins. Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann.
Cornea, A. 2007. ‘Paradoxe du Mal et “ressemblances de famille”’, Chôra: Revue D’études Anciennes et
Médiévales, 5: 27–43.
Corrigan, K. 1986a. ‘Is There More Than One Generation of Matter in the Enneads?’, Phronesis, 31(2): 167–81.
——1986b. ‘Ivan’s Devil in The Brothers Karamazov in the light of a traditional Platonic view of evil’, Forum
for Modern Language Studies, 22(1): 1–9.
——1996. Plotinus’ Theory of Matter-Evil and the Question of Substance: Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander of
Aphrodisias. Leuven: Peeters.
Dillon, J. M. 1977. The Middle Platonists. London: Duckworth.
Erler, M. 1978. Proklos Diadochos: Über die Existenz des Bösen. Meisenheim am Glan: Hain.
Gerson, L. P. 2010. The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hager, F.-P. [1962] 1977. ‘Die Materie und das Böse im antiken Platonismus’, Museum Helveticum, 19: 73–103;
repr. in C. Zintzen (ed.), Die Philosophie des Neuplatonismus. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, pp. 427–74.
Narbonne, J.-M. 2007. ‘La controverse à propos de la génération de la matière chez Plotin: l’enigme résolue?’,
Quaestio, 7(1): 123–65.
——2011. Plotinus in Dialogue with the Gnostics, trans. S. Fortier and B. Monast. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
O’Brien, D. 1971. ‘Plotinus on Evil: A Study of Matter and the Soul in Plotinus’ Conception of Human Evil’,
in P. M. Schuhl and P. Hadot (eds.), Le Néoplatonisme: colloques internationales du CNRS. Paris: CNRS,
pp. 113–46.
——2011–12. ‘Plotinus on the Making of Matter’, Parts I–III, International Journal of the Platonic Tradition,
5(1): 6–57; 5(2): 209–61; 6(1): 27–80.
O’Connell, R. J. 1968. St. Augustine’s Early Theory of Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
O’Meara, D. J. 1997. ‘Das Böse bei Plotin’, in T. Kobusch and B. Mojsisch (eds), Platon in der
Abendländischen Geistesgeschichte. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp. 33–47.
——1999. Traité 51. I, 8. Paris: Les Écrits de Plotin.
Opsomer, J., and Steel, C. 1999. ‘Evil without a Cause: Proclus’ Doctrine on the Origin of Evil and its
Antecedents in Hellenistic Philosophy’, in T. Fuhrer and M. Erler with K. Schlapbach (eds), Zur Rezeption
der hellenistischen Philosophie in der Spätantike. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, pp. 229–60.
——2003. Proclus: On the Existence of Evils. London: Duckworth.
Perl, E. D. 2007. Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite, Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Phillips, J. 2009. ‘Plotinus on the Generation of Matter’, International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, 3(2):
103–37.
Rist, J. M. 1961. ‘Plotinus on Matter and Evil’, Phronesis, 6: 154–66.
Schröder, E. 1916. Plotins Abhandlung Pothen ta kaka (Enn. I, 8). Borna, Leipzig: R. Noske.
Schwyzer, H.-R. 1973. ‘Zu Plotins Deutung der sogenannten Platonischen Materie’, in Zetesis: Festschrift E.
de Strijker. Antwerp: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, pp. 266–80.
Sharples, R. W. 1983. Alexander of Aphrodisias on Fate. London: Duckworth.
Slezák, T. A. 1979. Platon und Aristoteles in der Nuslehre Plotins. Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe.
Steel, C. 1998. ‘Proclus on the Existence of Evil’, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient
Philosophy, 14(1): 83–102.
Thomassen, E. 2001. ‘The Derivation of Matter in Monistic Gnosticism’, in J. D. Turner and R. Majercik (eds),
Gnosticism and Later Platonism. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, pp. 1–18.
Turner, J. D. 2001. Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition. Laval, Quebec: Presses de l’Université
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Wallis, R. T. 1995. Neoplatonism. London: Duckworth.
15 Philo of Alexandria
Marian Hillar

Introduction
Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE), a Hellenized Jew, is a figure who spans two
cultures, the Greek and the Jewish. When Jewish mythical thought met Greek
philosophical thought in the first century BCE, it was only natural that someone
would attempt to develop speculative and philosophical justification for Judaism
in terms of Greek philosophy. Doing so, Philo also made a contribution to
Platonic philosophy at the stage classified today as Middle Platonism.
Thus Philo produced in his religious thought a synthesis of both traditions and
developed concepts for future Hellenistic interpretation of messianic Jewish
thought by Christian Apologists such as Athenagoras, Theophilus, Justin Martyr,
Tertullian, Origen and, especially, Clement of Alexandria. He may have
influenced St Paul, his contemporary, and perhaps the authors of the Gospel of
John1 and the Epistle to the Hebrews.2 In the process, he laid the foundations for
the development of Christianity in the East and West and as we know it today.
Philo’s primary importance lies in his contribution to the Christian conception
of evil and the development of Christology by the formulation of the Logos
doctrine, used by Middle Platonists and later applied to the Jewish messianic
tradition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These messianic ideas were fully expressed in
the historical context of first-century Israel/Palestine.
The church preserved Philonic writings because Eusebius of Caesarea (263–339
CE) erroneously labelled as Christians the monastic ascetic group of Therapeutae
and Therapeutrides, described in Philo’s The Contemplative Life.3 Eusebius,
Bishop of Caesarea and a church historian, also promoted the legend that Philo
met Peter in Rome. Jerome4 (345–420 CE) even lists him as a Church Father, and in
Byzantine excerpts from scriptural commentators, entitled Catenae (fifth to sixth
century), Philo is listed under the heading ‘Philo bishop’. The legend of Philo
Christianus was initiated before, probably by Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c.
220 CE), the first Church Father who quotes him explicitly, and it was maintained
until the Middle Ages.5 Jewish tradition was far less interested in Greek
philosophy and did not preserve Philo’s thought.6
Philo’s writings consist of philosophical essays dealing with central themes
within biblical thought and present a systematic and precise exposition of his
views. He attempted to demonstrate that Platonic or Stoic ideas were simply
deductions made from the biblical verses of Moses. Philo was not an original
thinker, but he was well acquainted with the entire range of Greek philosophical
traditions from the original texts. His works are divided into three categories:

1 writings that paraphrase the biblical texts of Moses;

2 philosophical treatises;
3 the historical-apologetic writings Hypothetica and Apologia pro Judaeos.

The third category survived only in two Greek extracts quoted by Eusebius. The
first extract is a rationalistic version of Exodus, praising Moses and giving a
summary of the Mosaic constitution, contrasting its severity with the laxity of
gentile laws; the second extract describes the Essenes. Other apologetic essays in
this group include Against Flaccus, The Embassy to Gaius, and On the
Contemplative Life.
Philo uses an allegorical technique to interpret Jewish myth, and in this he
follows the Greek tradition. One example of such a technique is represented by
Theagenes of Rhegium (second half of the sixth century BCE),7 who used this
approach in defence of Homer’s theology. He said that the myths of gods
struggling with each other referred to the opposition between the elements; the
names of gods referred to various dispositions of the soul – e.g., Athena was
reflection, Aphrodite, desire, and Hermes, elocution. Another example is provided
by the Sophist Prodicus of Cos (460–393 BCE), a contemporary of Socrates, who
interpreted the gods of Homeric stories as personifications of those natural
substances that are useful for human life – e.g., bread and Demeter, wine and
Dionysus, water and Poseidon, fire and Hephaestus.8 He also employed ethical
allegory. Allegory was further used by the Cynic Antisthenes (446–366 BCE, a
contemporary of Plato) and Diogenes the Cynic (404–323 BCE).9 Stoics expanded
the Cynics’ use of Homeric allegory in the interest of their system of philosophy.
Using this allegorical method, Philo sought the hidden message beneath the
surface of any particular text and tried to read a new doctrine into the work of
the past. In a similar way, Plutarch (46–129 CE) allegorized ancient Egyptian
mythology, giving it a new meaning.10

Philo of Alexandria faces ancient Hellenistic culture

Judaism was a narrative religion, with a personalistic God, in which the leading
element was the concept of a covenant between God and his people. Such views
produced a strong emphasis on ethnic and national unity and the notion of a
moral mission vis-à-vis the rest of humanity.11 The Jewish Bible contains
numerous statements reminding readers of the moral calling of the Jews and the
eschatological unification of the world under their religion and their Messiah.
When facing the cultural traditions of the surrounding Hellenized peoples in
Alexandria, Philo must have felt the cultural deficits of ancient Judaism. Indeed,
the ancient Greeks had developed over centuries a sophisticated system of
philosophical thought that was replacing popular mythical religion, at least
among educated people, and that was best expressed in Stoic philosophy. Stoicism
itself was the product of a long process of evolution of religious and philosophical
thought that started with Pythagoras and Plato. Philo was thoroughly educated in
Greek thought and culture, as can be seen from his superb knowledge of classical
Greek literature. He had a deep reverence for Plato, whom he referred to as ‘the
most holy Plato’ (Prob. 13). Philo’s philosophy represented contemporary
Platonism, designated by scholars as Middle Platonism, which incorporated Stoic
doctrine and terminology via Antiochus of Ascalon (c. 125–68 BCE) and Eudorus
of Alexandria (fl. c. 25 BCE), as well as elements of Aristotelian logic and ethics
and Pythagorean ideas. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215 CE) even called Philo
‘the Pythagorean’.12 It will be useful to review, briefly, the ideas of these two
important philosophers, Antiochus and Eudorus, who shaped the views of Philo
of Alexandria.

Antiochus of Alexandria
Antiochus of Alexandria13 (c. 125–68 BCE) was born in Ascalon. He moved early
in his life to Athens, around 110 BCE, and became a member of the Academy
founded by Plato. Antiochus was a student and follower of Philo of Larissa (159–
84 BCE), who was head of the school at that time. Philo of Larissa left Athens and
moved to Rome in 88 BCE, and the following year we find Antiochus in
Alexandria accompanying Lucullus, a Roman general and statesman. He also had
an influence on Cicero (106–43 BCE), who studied with Antiochus in Athens, and
on Varro (116–27 BCE), who (apart from Cicero) was the greatest Roman
intellectual of the first century BCE. Antiochus considered the criterion of truth
(namely, epistemology) and the goal of human life (namely, ethics) as the two
most important concerns of philosophy (Cicero, On Academic Scepticism 2.29) He
is considered to be the founder of the Middle Platonism that lasted until Plotinus
(204–270 CE), who is recognized as the founder of Neoplatonism.
Antiochus rejected the scepticism of Philo of Larissa and became a dogmatist,
embracing the position that knowledge is possible and that there are truths
known to humans. This epistemology was essentially Stoic, and thus he belonged
in the Stoa rather than in the Academy. Stoic epistemology claimed that humans
can attain wisdom as a condition free of opinion (false or insecure judgements).
To achieve this, there must be a criterion of truth which is a cognitive impression
– i.e., an impression from and in accordance with what is. Such impressions are
perceptual as well as non-perceptual, and, by confining assent to cognitive
impressions, one can act and avoid error. Antiochus followed the Stoics and
added a defence of the veracity of the senses, a view that corresponded to the
empiricism of Philo of Alexandria.
The Stoics maintained that only virtue, considered identical with wisdom or
the perfection of reason, is good, and only vice is evil. All the other so-called
goods, such as health, and their opposites, ‘evils’, were considered ‘indifferents’
(adiaphora). Nonetheless, the Stoics considered some of these indifferents to be
‘preferred’ and others to be ‘dispreferred’. These two categories provided the
subject matter for rational selection. Antiochus regarded the preferred
indifferents as goods, albeit lesser goods. Thus virtue is not the sole good, in
accordance with the Peripatetics. Similarly Philo of Alexandria, though he
disdained the material world and physical body (Spec. leg. 3.1–6), advocates
fulfilling first one’s obligations towards men and the use of mundane possessions
for the accomplishment of praiseworthy works (Fug. 23–8; Plant. 167–8). He
considers pleasure indispensable and wealth useful, but for a virtuous man they
are not perfect goods (LA 3.69–72).
As to the development of human nature, Antiochus supported the Stoic model
in which, in opposition to the Epicureans, our first natural impulse is towards
satisfying natural basic needs and not pleasure. These goods are indifferent,
though preferred. Humans recognize virtue and virtuous activity as the only
human goods, and human motives undergo transformation, only later in life.
Antiochus agrees with the Stoics about the first natural impulses, but he accepts
the principle that what is agreeable or accords with a creature’s nature is good for
that creature. The good life for human beings is therefore the life characterized
by the fullest possible enjoyment of the goods corresponding to our natural
impulses (Cicero, On Academic Scepticism 2.19; On Ends 5.24–5). He also
maintains that virtue is the highest human good, but not the only good, as the
Stoics had declared.
In his ethical theory, Antiochus distinguishes between the happy life,
designated by Cicero as the vita beata, for which virtue is sufficient, and the
completely happy life (vita beatissima in Cicero’s designation), which requires
additional external goods (On Ends 5.71, 95; Tusculan Disputations 5.22). For
Philo of Alexandria, the ideal of a happy life was achieved by engaging in
philosophical contemplation.

Eudorus of Alexandria
Eudorus of Alexandria14 (fl. c. 50–25 BCE), a native of Alexandria, attempted to
reconcile Plato’s philosophy with Pythagoreanism. He was concerned with ethics,
which he considered the most important branch of philosophy. Eudorus defined
ethics in terms of striving for a proper end (telos), which he considered to be
‘likeness to god as far as possible’, a phrase which he derived from Plato’s
Theaetetus (176b) (though he added ‘as far as possible’). He interpreted Plato’s
statement as referring to the intellect, that part of the soul which is closest to the
divine. In this conception, Eudorus differs from Antiochus, who viewed physical
pleasures or external goods as contributing to the happiness that depends on
virtue. For him, just as for Philo of Alexandria, true happiness concerns the
intellect alone.
In metaphysics and cosmology, Eudorus departed from the Pythagoreans and
introduced a supreme transcendental monistic principle above the Monad and the
Dyad (Limit and Unlimited) as creator of matter. This view was especially
appealing to Philo, given his Jewish monotheism. In addition to his Greek
education, Philo discovered his own ancestral tradition, though, as an adult, and
once having discovered it, he put forward the teachings of the Jewish prophet
Moses as ‘the summit of philosophy’ (Op. 8) and considered him the teacher of
Pythagoras (b. c. 570 BCE) and of all Greek philosophers and lawgivers (Hesiod,
Heraclitus, Lycurgus, to mention a few). For Philo, Greek philosophy was a
natural development of the revelatory teachings of Moses. He was no innovator
in this matter, because already before him Jewish scholars attempted the same.
Artapanus15 in the second century BCE identified Moses with Musaeus16 and with
Orpheus.17 According to Aristobulus of Paneas (first half of the second century
BCE), Homer and Hesiod drew from the books of Moses, which were translated
into Greek long before the Septuagint.18 Several Christian writers mention him,
and five fragments of Aristobulus’ writings are preserved both by Eusebius, in his
Praeparatio Evangelica, and by Clement of Alexandria.19 His treatise Exposition
of the Law of Moses was dedicated to King Ptolemy VI Philometer (c. 181–145
BCE)20 and was probably written in the form of a dialogue in which Aristobulus
answered questions posed by the king, similar to that of Philo’s Questions and
Solutions. The fragments indicate the influence of Greek Platonic and
Pythagorean thinking and have an apologetic character.21 Aristobulus, and after
him Philo, adopted the allegorical interpretation of Jewish sacred writings from
the Stoics who used it to interpret the Greek poets Homer and Hesiod.
In some aspects of Jewish life, however, Philo defends the literal interpretation
of his tradition, as in the debate on circumcision or the Sabbath (Mig. 89–93; Spec.
leg. 1.1–11). Though acknowledging the symbolic meaning of these rituals, he
insists on their literal interpretation. Aristobulus and Philo were the products of a
trend in Jewish thought that attempted, in confrontation with Greek culture, to
assert itself as a valid cosmic view. Aristobulus may be considered as among the
first who attempted to build a bridge between these two civilizations, and he tried
to adapt Jewish Law to the new ideological situation. Such an attitude found its
culminating expression in the Hellenistic system of Philo. The early Christian
writers in the post-evangelical or apologetic period used Aristobulus and Philo, in
turn, to show the continuity of some of their assertions with Jewish tradition and
the superiority of Christianity to the religions of the gentiles.

Emphasis on the contemplative life and philosophy

The key emphasis in Philo’s philosophy is the contrast of the spiritual life,
understood as intellectual contemplation, with the mundane preoccupation with
earthly concerns, either qua the active life or the search for pleasure. Philo
disdained the material world and physical body (Spec. leg. 3.1–6). For Philo, as for
Plato,22 the body was ‘an evil and a dead thing’ (LA 3.72–4; Gig. 15), wicked by
nature and a plotter against the soul (LA 3.69). It was a necessary evil, however,
so Philo does not advocate the complete abnegation of life (cf. his advocacy of the
use of mundane possessions for the accomplishment of praiseworthy works). He
believed that men should steer themselves away from the physical only
gradually. Some people, such as philosophers, may succeed in focusing their
minds on eternal realities. Philo believed that man’s final goal and ultimate bliss
lies in the ‘knowledge of the true and living God’ (Decal. 81; Abr. 58; Praem. 14);
‘such knowledge is the boundary of happiness and blessedness’ (Det. 86). To him,
mystical insight allows our soul to see the Divine Logos (Ebr. 152) and achieve
union with God (Deuteronomy 30:19–20; Post. 12). In a desire to validate scripture
as inspired, he often compares it to prophetic ecstasy (Her. 69–70). His praise of
the contemplative life of the monastic Therapeutae in Alexandria attests to his
preference for the ‘bios theoretikos’ over the ‘bios praktikos’. He adheres to the
Platonic picture of the soul’s descent into the material realm and affirms that
only the souls of philosophers are able to come to the surface and return to their
realm in heaven (Gig. 12–15). Philo adopted the Platonic concept of the soul, with
its tripartite division (LA 1.70–72). The rational part of the soul, however, is
breathed into man as a part of God’s substance. Philo speaks figuratively:
Now, when we are alive, we are so though our soul is dead and buried in our
body, as if in a tomb. But if it were to die, then our soul would live according to
its proper life, being released from the evil and dead body to which it is bound.
(Op. 67–9; LA 1.108)

Philosophy and wisdom: two paths to ethical life

Philo differentiated between philosophy and wisdom.23 To him, philosophy is ‘the
greatest good thing to men’ (Op. 53–4), which they acquired because of a gift of
reason from God (Op. 77). It is a devotion to wisdom and a way to acquire the
highest knowledge, ‘an attentive study of wisdom’. Wisdom in turn is ‘the
knowledge of all divine and human things, and of the respective causes of them’,
and is, according to Philo, contained in the Torah (Congr. 79). Hence it follows
that Moses, as the author of the Torah, ‘had reached the very summit of
philosophy’ and ‘had learnt from the oracles of God the most numerous and
important of the principles of nature’ (Op. 8). Moses was also the interpreter of
nature (Her. 213). By saying this, Philo wanted to indicate that human wisdom
has two origins – one is divine, the other natural (Her. 182) – and that Mosaic
Law is not inconsistent with nature. A single law, the Logos of nature, governs
the entire world (Jos. 28–31), and it is imprinted on the human mind (Prob. 46–7).
The man who is obedient to this law is a citizen of the world, and his actions are
in accordance with the intentions of nature (Op. 1). Conscience inheres even in
wicked persons (QG 4.62), but man is capable, nevertheless, of performing deeds
of opposite moral qualities (Op. 73).
Wisdom is consummated philosophy and, as such, has to be in agreement with
the principles of nature (Mos. 2.48; Abr. 16; Op. 143; Spec. leg. 2.13; 3.46–7, 112,
137; Virt. 18). The study of philosophy has as its end ‘life in accordance with
nature’ and follows the ‘path of right reason’ (Mig. 128). Philosophy prepares us
for a moral life – i.e., ‘to live in conformity with nature’ (Prob. 160). From this it
follows that life in accordance with nature hastens us towards the virtues (Mos. 2.
181; Abr. 60, Spec. leg. 1.155), and an unjust man is one ‘who transgresses the
ordinances of nature’ (Spec. leg. 4.204; Cf. Decal. 132; Virt. 131–2; Plant. 49; Ebr.
142; Agr. 66).
According to Philo, ‘pleasure of the body’ (Op. 152) and the loss of innocence
enjoyed in paradise constitute the origin of iniquities and transgressions. He
interprets the ‘tree of life’ as the greatest virtue – namely, piety towards gods –
and the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ as wisdom and moderation (Op.
150).
Thus Philo does not discount human reason but contrasts true doctrine, which
amounts to trust in God, with uncertain, plausible, and unreliable reasoning (LA
3.228–9).

Philo’s ethical doctrine

For Philo, man is basically passive, and it is God who sews noble qualities in the
soul; hence we are instruments of God (LA 1.45, 2.31–2; Cher. 127–8). Still, man is
the only creature endowed with freedom of action, though his freedom is limited
by the constitution of his mind. Philo considers man the most excellent of
animals because of his mind. As such, he is responsible for his actions and ‘very
properly receives blame for the offences which he designedly commits’. This is so
because he received a faculty of voluntary motion and is free from the dominion
of necessity (Deus 47–8).
Philo advocates the practice of virtue in both the divine and the human sphere.
Lovers of God only, or men only, are both incomplete in virtue. Philo advocates a
middle, harmonious way (Decal. 106–10; Spec. leg. 4.102). He differentiates four
virtues: wisdom, self-control, courage, and justice (LA 1.63–4). These all derive
from the generic virtue which was created according to the Logos of God (LA
1.65).
Philo divides human dispositions into three groups. The best type is afforded
the vision of God, the next has a vision on the ‘right’ – i.e., the Beneficent or
Creative Power whose name is God – and the third has a vision on the ‘left’ – i.e.,
the Ruling Power called Lord (Abr. 119–30). Felicity is achieved through the
achievement of three values: the spiritual, the corporeal, and the external (QG
3.16).
Philo adopts the Stoic wise man as a model for human behaviour. The sage
should imitate God, who is impassable (apathēs) and hence should achieve a state
of apatheia. That is, he should be free of irrational emotions (passions), pleasure,
desire, sorrow, and fear and should replace them with the rational or well-
reasoned emotions (eupatheiai) of joy, will, compunction, and caution. In such a
state of eupatheia, the sage achieves a serene, stable, and joyful disposition in
virtue of which his decisions are directed by reason (QG 2.57; Abr. 201–4; Fug.
166–7; Mig. 67). But, at the same time, Philo claims that the needs of the body
should not be neglected and rejects the other extreme – i.e., the practice of
asceticism. Everything should be governed by reason, self-control, and
moderation. Joy and pleasure do not have intrinsic value but are by-products of
virtue and characterize the sage (Fug. 25–34; Det. 124–5; LA 80).
Evil develops when man yields to wrong desires and passions; when these
become ingrained habits, they are more powerful than nature. Evil is contrary to
good (Decal. 144) and fills the soul with depression and despondency. Philo
differentiates between evils committed against God, such as impiety – i.e.,
neglecting divine service and worship (he lists atheism as the beginning of all
iniquity; Decal. 91) – and evils done to our neighbours, towards whom we have
certain duties (Decal. 111). It is interesting that he includes among our obligations
also those towards other animals. As the causes of evil, Philo lists pride and many
passions, such as desire for money, glory, pleasure, insolence, arrogance, etc.
(Decal. 153). In the battle against evil, what is vital, he writes, is learning how to
control our passions:

Unless discourse in accordance with philosophy did not, like a good physician,
check the influx of appetite, all the affairs of life would of necessity be set in
motion in a manner contrary to nature; for there is nothing exempt from such an
affliction, nothing which can escape the dominion of passion, but, when once it
has obtained immunity and licence, it devours everything and becomes by itself
everything in every part.
(Decal. 150)

Abbreviations
Abr. De Abrahamo
Aet. De Aeternitate Mundi
Agr. De Agricultura
Anim. De Animalibus
Cher. De Cherubim
Conf. De Confusione Linguarum
Congr. De Congressu Eruditionis Gratia
Cont. De Vita Contemplativa
Decal. De Decalogo
Det. Quod Deterius Potiori Insidiari Soleat
Deus Quod Deus Sit Immutabilis
Ebr. De Ebrietate
Flac. In Flaccum
Fug. De Fuga et Inventione
Gig. De Gigantibus
Her. Quod Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit
Hypoth. Hypothetica
Jos. De Josepho
LA Legum Allegoriarum
Legat. Legatio ad Gaium
Mig. De Migratione Abrahami
Mut. De Mutatione Nominum
Op. De Opificio Mundi
Plant. De Plantatione
Post. De Posteritate Caini
Praem. De Praemiis et Poenis
Prob. Quod Omnis Probus Liber Sit
Proem. De Proemiis et Poenis
Provid. De Providentia
QE Quaestiones et Solutiones in Exodum
QG Quaestiones et Solutiones in Genesim
Sacr. De Sacrificiis Abelis et Caini
Sobr. De Sobrietate
Somn. De Somniis
Spec. leg. De Specialibus Legibus
SVF Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta
Virt. De Virtutibus

Notes
1 Dodd 1953.
2 Williamson 1970; Attridge 1989.
3 Eusebius 1984. The view that the Therapeutae were Christians survived until the Reformation. The
Protestants began to consider them Jews. Today opinions are divided, but all evidence indicates that
they were remnants of the Buddhist tradition (Theravadins) introduced by the missionaries sent by
King Asoka in the third century BCE to King Ptolemy II Philadelphos (Gruber and Kersten 1995: 176–86;
Thundy 1993). The name Therapeutae is of Buddhist origin and is the Hellenized form of the
Sanskrit/Pali Theravadins, who were members of the Buddhist missionary order Theravada (‘Teachings
of the Old Ones’) founded during the reign of King Asoka (274–232 BCE) with the main centre at
Gandhara. The members of this order called themselves Theraputta (‘Sons of the Old Ones’). They were
also, according to Asoka’s edict (preserved on a rock inscription), to provide medical assistance, which
was a common occupation of Buddhist monks (Buddha was also extolled as the King of Medicine).
4 Jerome, De viris illustribus.
5 Runia 1993: 4–7, 28–9.
6 Wolfson 1947.
7 Vernant 1981.
8 Cicero 1986: 1.38; Philodemus 1997: 10.
9 Seddon and Yonge 2010.
10 Plutarch 1936: Vol. V.
11 ‘You will rule over many nations, but they will not rule over you’ (Deuteronomy 15:6).
12 Clement of Alexandria 2012: I.15; van den Hoek 1988.
13 See Allen 2011; see also Sedley 2012.
14 See Edward Moore, Middle Platonism, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
http://www.iep.utm.edu/midplato.
15 Artapanus of Alexandria, a historian of Jewish origin who lived in Alexandria during the second
century BCE. He wrote a history of the Jews entitled Concerning the Jews, the text of which did not
survive. His writings were summarized by Alexander Polyhistor in the first century BCE. Fragments of
his works were preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea in Praeparatio Evangelica (IX.18, 23, 27) and by
Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata (I.23, 154). See Collins 1985: 889–903.
 16 Musaeus of Athens was a legendary polymath, reputed to have been the founder of priestly poetry in
Attica (Euripides, Plato). The mystic and oracular verses of Eleusis are attributed to him.
17 Orpheus was a musician, poet, and prophet of Greek legend, a founder and prophet of the so-called
Orphic mysteries. He was credited with the composition of the Orphic Hymns, a collection of which
survives.
18 Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 9.27; 13.11.
19 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 7. 32: 17–18 (frag. 1); Praeparatio Evangelica 8.10: 1–17 (frag. 2); 13.12:
1–2 (frag. 3); 13.12: 3–8 (frag. 4); 13.12: 9–16 (frag. 5), also in 7.14: 1. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis,
Bks 1, 5, 6 (parts of frags 2–5). See Charlesworth 1985: 831–6; Borgen 1987: 7–16; Walter 1964.
20 2 Maccabees 1:10. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 1.150: 1–3. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 7. 32:
16 (where unreliable dating is given). Eusebius 1982–3: 9. 6: 6; 8. 9: 38; Borgen 1987: 7–16; Simon and
Simon 1990: 23–6.
21 Fritsch 1943.
22 Plato, Republic 585b; Timaeus 86b; Sophist 228.
23 Cicero, De Legibus I.22; SVF II.36.

Further reading
Borgen, P. 1987. Philo, John and Paul: New Perspectives on Judaism and Early Christianity. Atlanta, GA:
Scholars Press.
Daniélou, J. 2014. Philo of Alexandria, trans. J. G. Colbert. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books.
Dillon, J. M. 1996. The Middle Platonists: 80 B.C. to A.D. 220. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Hengel, M. 2003. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic
Period. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock.
Seland, T. (ed.) 2014. Reading Philo: A Handbook to Philo of Alexandria. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

References
Allen, J. 2011. ‘Antiochus of Ascalon’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
http://www.science.uva.nl/~seop/entries/antiochus-ascalon.
Arnim, J. von (ed.) [1903–24] 1964. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, 4 vols. Stuttgart: Teubner.
Attridge, H. W. 1989. The Epistle to the Hebrews. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Borgen, P. 1987. Philo, John and Paul: New Perspectives on Judaism and Early Christianity. Atlanta, GA:
 Scholars Press.
Charlesworth, J. H. (ed.) 1985. The Old Testament Pseudoepigrapha, Vol. 2. New York: Doubleday.
Cicero 1914. On Ends. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge MA: Loeb Classical Library.
——1927. Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
——1986. The Nature of the Gods, trans. H. C. P. McGregor. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——1988. De re publica; De legibus, trans. C. Walker Keyes. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press.
——2006. On Academic Scepticism. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Clement of Alexandria 2012. Miscellanies (Stromata). Bottom of the Hill Publishing.
Collins, J. J. 1985. Artapanus, in J. H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudoepigrapha, Vol. 2. New
York: Doubleday.
Dodd, C. H. 1953. The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eusebius 1982–3. Die Praeparatio Evangelica, ed. E. des Places, 2 vols. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
——1984. The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, trans. G. A. Williamson. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Fritsch, C. 1943. The Anti-Anthropomorphisms of the Greek Pentateuch. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
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Gruber, E. R., and Kersten, H. 1995. The Original Jesus: The Buddhist Sources of Christianity. Shaftesbury:
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ed. J. P. Migne. Paris, 1844–64.
Philo of Alexandria 1828–9. Philonis Judaei Opera Omnia, 6 vols. Leipzig: Schwickert [the Greek texts of
Philo’s works].
——1896–1930. Philonis Alexandrini Opera Quae Supersunt, 7 vols, ed. L. Cohn and P. Wendland. Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter.
——1981. The Contemplative Life, The Giants, and Selections, trans. D. Winston. Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press.
——1995. The Works of Philo, Complete and Unabridged, trans. C. D. Yonge. New updated ed., Peabody, MA:
Hendrickson.
Philodemus 1997. On Piety, Part 1: Critical Text with Commentary. New York: Oxford University Press.
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University Press.
Runia, D. T. 1993. Philo in Early Christian Literature. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Seddon, K., and Yonge, C. D. 2010. An Outline of Cynic Philosophy: Antisthenes of Athens and Diogenes of
Sinope in Diogenes Laertius Book Six. Lulu Press.
Sedley, D. (ed.) 2012. The Philosophy of Antiochus. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.
Simon, H., and Simon, M. 1990. Filozofia żydowska, trans. Tomasz Pszczόłkowski. Warsaw: Wiedza
Powszechna [Geschichte der jüdischen Philosophie. Berlin: Union Verlag, 1984].
Thundy, Z. P. 1993. Buddha and Christ. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
van den Hoek, J. L. 1988. Clement of Alexandria and his use of Philo in the ‘Stromateis’: An Early Christian
Reshaping of a Jewish Model. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Vernant, J.-P. 1981. Mythe et société en Grèce ancienne. Paris: Maspero.
Walter, N. 1964. Der Thoraausleger Aristobulos. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Williamson, R. 1970. Philo and the Epistle to the Hebrews. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Wolfson, H. A. 1947. Philo, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
16 Evil in Graeco-Roman religion and
literature
Rocki Wentzel

There is no single principle of evil in Graeco-Roman literature (Russell 1977: 123).

Rather, both evils and blessings for humans can originate from the gods, fate, or
man himself. Not only do gods send evils among mortals, evils are often
personified as gods (e.g., Nemesis, Atē), whereas fate remains morally neutral. In
Greek epic and tragedy, what is commonly seen is a dualistic idea of evil, with
various forces and notions opposing one another: purity and pollution, justice
and injustice, moderation and excess, civilization and savagery, health and
disease, youth and old age, order and chaos, duty and abandonment, loyalty and
betrayal, courage and cowardice, industry and laziness, nature and aberration,
clear vision and blindness, wisdom and foolishness, to name a few. The broad and
all-encompassing term for evil in Greek is kakos, which generates kakia,
‘predominantly the quality of being unfit for service, cowardly on the battlefield,
or lazy or untrustworthy in the household (of slaves) or agora (of fellow citizens)’
(Fantham 2008: 319). Evil may be approached as an anti-value, which offsets a
positive value (Sluiter 2008: 9). Therefore, in many instances we will arrive at a
concept of evil by deriving it from what is valued. Because the term kakos has a
higher frequency in poetry (ibid.: 7–8), the focus here will be on Greek epic and
tragedy. Since the influence of Greek literature, culture, and religion on Rome
was strong during the Hellenistic era (see Rüpke 2007: 3), this examination will be
weighted more heavily towards Greek views of evil, with remarks on Rome
confined to a general look at moral values, the civic function of religion, religious
practices, and attitudes towards the pagan gods, as seen primarily through
Roman epic and poetry. The Greek portion of the survey is organized roughly
chronologically by genre and will be concerned more with originary accounts
and the nature of evil than with its social and political manifestations.
Thematically, we will consider evils that befall mankind resulting directly from
gods or through the conflicting loyalties of the gods, as well as evils for which
mortals are responsible, particularly regarding transgression of boundaries.
Even though Greek philosophers were the first to treat evil in an abstract way
(Russell 1977: 122), ancient Greek literature did not often focus on evil as a central
theme; nonetheless, a theodicy of sorts emerges. The origins of evil in Greek and
Roman literature are multiple. What causes the gods and humans to behave in
ways that are evil in the first place is less clear. Gods are not governed by a
higher morality than humans. They are portrayed as capricious and petty and are
not subject to the same punishments and consequences that mortals suffer. They
seem to operate under moral values different from those of humankind and freely
commit what in the human world would be regarded as taboo practices, such as
incest and patricide. Nonetheless, human moral behaviour is affected by belief in
the gods, and the gods are invoked to influence the behaviour of others.

Evil in Greek religion and literature

Homeric epic: fate, hubris, atē, and the will of the gods
In Homeric epic, evils are tied closely to what mortals experience, with pain as
the most basic evil (Hankey 1990: 87). The sources of evil for humankind are the
gods, mortals themselves, and fate. The dynamic between these three factors is
inconsistent, and the mortal players seem to accept the nature of the world with
resignation. At times, the will of the gods and fate seem to be indistinguishable.
At other times, the will of the gods seems at odds with fate. Divine obstacles stem
from the mixed loyalties of the gods – for instance, when Poseidon avenges the
blinding of his son Polyphemus, whereas Athena champions Odysseus. These
conflicting interests are played out on the battlefield of the Iliad, as men seem to
function as pawns in a battle between the gods. Gods, however, are not wholly
responsible for evil, as Zeus makes clear at the opening of the Odyssey: ‘Ah, how
shameless – the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone, they say, come
all their miseries, yes, but they themselves, with their own reckless ways
(atasthalia), compound their pains beyond their proper share’ (Odyssey, [1996]
2006, 1.37–40).1 Zeus does not deny that the gods contribute to the evils of man,
but the actions of mortals matter too.
In the Iliad, Achilles, during his meeting with Priam, explains that Zeus has
two jars, from which he dispenses evils and blessings. These are mixed for man,
but the man on whom Zeus imposes evils is respected by neither mortals nor
gods (Iliad 24.527–33). At times, the outcome for man seems dependent not on the
will of Zeus, but on fate. In the Iliad, Zeus is also seen weighing the fate of man
on scales. Fate (moira) and chance (tyche) are morally neutral. It is not as simple,
however, as gods sending both blessings and curses. At times, fate seems to be
beyond the control of Zeus; at other times he seems to be able to override fate.
For instance, Zeus’s son, Sarpedon, who is born of a mortal mother, is fated to be
killed by Patroclus. Zeus considers saving him, suggesting he has that option,
until Hera intervenes and persuades him not to save Sarpedon for two reasons:
the gods would not approve, and they might start saving their own mortal
children (Iliad 16.440–49). This brings up two values – respect and limits – which
are the positive bases on which evil in the Homeric world is predicated.
The central heroic value or goal is kleos, the glory of a hero that resounds
throughout eternity, and timē, the honour owed to a hero while he lives. Even the
gods are worried about their timē; this is what motivates Poseidon in keeping
Odysseus from home (Odyssey 13.128–9). The context in which we determine the
evils of the Homeric world is this kind of heroic glory (Sluiter 2008: 10). In this
way, the discussion of such evil is confined largely to an elite upper class. Kakos
as a personal adjective is usually applied to people of lower status, seldom to
heroes (Hankey 1990: 90–91). Not even the suitors of the Odyssey are called kakoi.
In the Iliad, what Agamemnon does is a form of evil, because, in taking Achilles’
war prize, Briseis, from him, he fails to give him the honour he is due.
Heroes in Homeric epic are never one-dimensionally good but are portrayed as
subject to the same weaknesses as other men. Often the source of their heroism
stems not from within but, rather, from the favour of the gods. At times a hero’s
courageous spirit (thumos) can cross over into hubris, which can drive him to
violate the honour (timē) of other men or fail to honour the gods. Hubris is an
example of an evil that often involves transgression of boundaries. Considered a
crime in ancient Greece, hubris covered a host of wrongdoings and denoted
moral outrage, insult, excess, violence, and arrogance. In epic it often involves
exceeding the normal, governing limits of the universe. Hubris leads to atē, a
ruinous blindness that causes folly. Atē is represented as sent by the gods but also
as being the natural result of hubris. When Agamemnon attempts to repair the
conflict between Achilles and himself, he blames Zeus for sending atē upon him
(Iliad 19.134–7). When man acts out of hubris, he invites nemesis or righteous
indignation, which punishes the hubristic act. Similarly, evils (kaka) are also
connected to revenge (tisis). Humans and gods both devise evils for others,
sometimes for a good end, such as Odysseus’ plans for revenge on the suitors
(Hankey 1990: 89).
The opposition Odysseus faces could be conceived as evil, but even that is
ambiguous, as his hinderers are often also helpers.2 The evils in the Odyssey are
comprised of the obstacles that threaten Odysseus’ homecoming and reunion
with Penelope or, more generally, that jeopardize his glory. The dominant evils
present themselves in the form of uncivilized behaviour (e.g., the Cyclops),
threats to memory (e.g., the Lotus Eaters), and especially violations of guest-
friendship (xenia), a distinct form of hospitality, which is protected by Zeus.3 The
suitors, who take over Odysseus’ home and woo his wife in his absence,
egregiously violate the dictates of xenia, for which they meet with justified evils.
During the course of his wanderings, almost all Odysseus’ hosts, even when they
assist him, exhibit some form of bad hospitality. Calypso keeps him on her island,
Circe turns his men into pigs, Aeolus refuses to help him a second time, and the
Phaeacians mock him during the games. The most twisted form of hospitality is
offered by Polyphemus, the Cyclops, whose guest gift to Odysseus is offering to
eat him last.
What is remarkable about Homeric epic, and the Iliad in particular, is that
good and evil are not strictly represented by individual characters. The Greeks
may eventually win the war against the Trojans, but it is not because they are
more virtuous than the Trojans. Achilles, the victorious hero, is both mighty and
hubristic. Hector, his arch-rival, is often portrayed sympathetically and nobly.
Initially, Achilles’ primary enemy is the Greek leader, Agamemnon, but in the
end they are reconciled and fight together for the same cause. Evils are mixed not
only in the lives of men but in their characters as well, and Homeric epic presents
this in an unqualified manner. What makes men heroes is their ability to push
past the limitations of being human, usually when aided by the gods, but this can
also be a cause of evil when heroes act independently of the will of the gods.

Hesiod: moral responsibility, degeneration, and ambiguous evils

As we move away from Homeric epic to the archaic poet Hesiod (eighth/seventh
century BCE), the divine cause of evil is still present, but a new emphasis on moral
responsibility arises. The poems attributed to Hesiod portray a world of evils less
static than that of Homer (Greene [1944] 1963: 28). In the Theogony, the
movement from chaos (evil) to order (good) acts as an organizing theme, whereas
Works and Days includes a story of the moral degeneration of mankind. There is
an emphasis on the blend of good and evil explored through recurring motifs,
such as strife, labour, and Pandora.4
After generations of conflicts between the gods, Zeus comes to power. He is
portrayed as behaving hatefully towards humankind and as devising evils for
them. The traditional interpretation held that labour, which was not always part
of the human world, came about as a result of a conflict between Zeus and
Prometheus, champion of humankind.5 When Zeus withholds fire from mankind,
Prometheus steals it back, and as a counter-punishment Zeus sends a fabricated
maiden, called Pandora in Works and Days, to the human world.
There are the two accounts of Pandora attributed to Hesiod, one in the
Theogony and the other in Works and Days. The story of Pandora is a theodicy of
sorts, offering an explanation for the presence of evil in the world. In the
Theogony, an unnamed maiden is fabricated by the gods at Zeus’s request as a
punishment to counter the gift of fire, which Prometheus bestowed on man. She
represents a type of woman, endowed with gifts of beauty and charm, but also a
drone for men. Moreover, she is a necessary evil, since, without her, there would
be no children to console men in their old age. In Works and Days, Pandora,
which means ‘all gifts’, is also described as an ‘evil’. She is richly arrayed but also
blessed with skills. Accompanying her is a jar, which she opens. It is not
explicitly stated what is in the jar, although, traditionally, it was understood that
the jar contained evils which Pandora released into the world, with only hope
remaining under the lip of the jar. The difficulty of interpreting hope as counting
among evils has, however, given rise to other interpretations, namely that the jar
contained the blessings to stave off evils from man, and all but hope escaped (see
Beall 1989). Whether hope was meant to be a good or an evil, whether it was left
for man or withheld from him, and whatever may have been in the jar, a list of
evils is given in the account: diseases, hard toils, and sorrows. Works and Days
begins with a discussion of another kind of evil: two kinds of strife (eris).
Presented as goddesses, bad strife causes war and battle, whereas good strife
incites men to work, bringing about a competitive spirit.6 Like Pandora, strife is
twofold, with its value depending upon its application.
In Hesiod’s accounts of early humankind, and in Graeco-Roman literature in
general, there is a notable lack of discussion of the sources of evil in humans
themselves. For a long time, scholars believed that Hellenistic Orphism held the
key. Orphism has been defined as ‘a collection of diverse counter-cultural
religious movements’ rather than a ‘single unified Church’ (Edmonds 1999).
Various elements of stories about Orphic Dionysus, sometimes known as Zagreus,
have been used to explain a dual nature in man comprised of material and
spiritual aspects. It is controversial, however, whether or not the myth of Orphic
Dionysus suggests some doctrine of original sin, or whether Dionysus was ever
associated with Zagreus in ancient times (see ibid.: 37, n.6). Rather than the origin
of man’s sinful nature, a commonly recurring theme is the widespread
degeneracy of men, as Athena makes clear when telling Telemachus that few
sons equal their fathers (Odyssey 2.276). This perennial theme of moral
degeneration is addressed in Works and Days in the form of an account of the
ages of man, in which each age, named after metals of decreasing value,
represents a further deterioration: gold, silver, bronze, heroes, iron.7 The age of
heroes is the one period of respite in this decline, though war wipes out the race.
It is important to note that each race is not descended from the previous one;
rather, the gods create each race anew. The reason behind the degeneration is
unclear. In any case, the vices that emerge in each successive age and mark the
deterioration of moral values and behaviours include deceit, violence, disloyalty,
foolishness, irreverence, and anxieties. Hesiod considers himself part of the age of
iron, the worst age, in which ‘Neither day nor night will give them rest as they
waste away with toil and pain. Growing cares will be given to them by the gods,
and their lot will be a blend of good and bad’ (Works and Days, 1993, 71, lines
176–9). Similar accounts occur in the Metamorphoses, an epic-length poem by the
Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE), and in Daniel 2:31–5 in the Hebrew Bible. In
Ovid’s version, the first human race is created out of mud by Prometheus and
possesses something of the ‘divine seed’ (Metamorphoses 1.78–81). Also in Ovid is
the tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the fullest account of which is found in the
Metamorphoses. It tells the story of a couple who are preserved during a
catastrophic flood and sent to wipe out the world of humans, who have grown
too corrupt. Afterwards, they are told by a prophecy to repopulate the earth,
which has them throw stones behind them, thus producing a race of stone-
hearted men who must toil (Metamorphoses 1.414–15).8
In the Theogony, Justice (dikē) is born from Zeus. In the opening of Works and
Days, Hesiod continues this association of justice with Zeus, who ‘lowers the
noble and raises the lowly’ (Athanassakis 1993: 6). Much of Works and Days
focuses on the importance of justice, hard work, and the avoidance of sloth and
cheating. This is noteworthy, since Zeus, who sends Pandora as an evil to
‘balance things out’ among men, is extolled in Works and Days as the author of
justice. Justice continues to be a theme for other early poets, such as Solon and
Theognis. The contradictions and difficulties the theme affords are further
developed in tragedy.

Tragedy
Tragedy flourished in Athens in the fifth century BCE, and with this new genre
came a greater emphasis on the hero’s role in his own downfall. A sense of what
constitutes evil can be gained by examining the nature of the hero’s misfortunes
and their underlying causes. Heroes often suffer disproportionately to their error,
whether too much or too little, which is what makes tragedy tragic. Moreover,
the error of the hero often leads to the suffering of others.
Aristotle defines tragedy as an imitation of action or life that is governed by
probability and necessity (Poetics 1451a). An effective tragedy inspires pity and
fear in the audience (Poetics 1449b). Pity is the result of witnessing an undeserved
misfortune, and fear comes about as the audience member realizes that the
misfortune could just as easily happen to him – that is, someone who is a mix of
both good and bad (Poetics 1453a). For this reason, Aristotle argues that the
downfall must be neither of an all-virtuous hero nor of a complete villain
meeting with justice. Fear and pity are inspired by a reversal of circumstances or
situation (peripateia), usually good to bad, though not always. What leads to a
hero’s downfall must not be vice but some error, or hamartia – related to the verb
(hamartanō) used in archery when an archer misses the mark.9 What leads to the
hero’s error may be a failing or weakness in character. There may also be several
other factors, involving the gods or fate, over which the hero has little or no
control. This can make hamartanō closer to suffering evil than committing evil
(Paulson 2007: 34).
The error that leads to a hero’s downfall can be the result of vice but is often
the result of human limitations. The latter are more effective in inspiring fear and
pity, since the character’s punishment is less deserved and, as a result, more out
of proportion. Oedipus, for example, is a victim of the limits of his knowledge.
His blindness and hubris, while aggravating his circumstances, do not cause the
evils that are fated to befall him. In his ignorance he calls down curses on the
head of the murderer of Laius, not knowing that he is the murderer himself, but
Sophocles seems to suggest there is no way he could have avoided his fate.
Sophocles also emphasizes the need to know oneself, as enjoined by the
inscription on the temple at Delphi.
Wisdom and insight cannot, however, stave off necessity. Often characters
commit crimes out of the necessity to fulfil a curse or revenge from some original
transgressive act (Paulson 2007: 34). This is what drives the events of the Oresteia.
For instance, the House of Atreus is under a curse,10 resulting from an act of
Agamemnon’s grandfather, Tantalus, who fed his son Pelops to the gods in an
attempt to test them. Tantalus is famously and aptly punished in the underworld
by forever being near fruit and water just out of his grasp. In the background
mythology of the Trojan War, which necessitated Iphigenia’s sacrifice, the gods
are the ones behind the trouble. Helen’s abduction by Paris is the culmination of
events set in motion by Eris at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. The marriage is
arranged by Zeus, who fears a prophecy concerning Thetis, a nymph destined to
bear a child greater than his father.
The intervention of the gods manifests itself differently among the three
tragedians for whom we have complete plays. As in epic, the gods can be unfair,
ruthless, angry, and capricious, but they also have the final word and often act as
saviours, especially at points of impasse. Aeschylus, in his trilogy the Oresteia,
tackles complex issues of justice and retribution, in which human action cannot
be separated from the involvement of the gods. Although Aeschylus in his
Oresteia casts Zeus and Athena as upholders of justice,11 the deaths of Iphigenia,
Agamemnon, Cassandra, and Clytemnestra and the struggles of Orestes stem
from the conflicts and machinations of the gods. The Agamemnon begins in the
middle of a cycle of evils and takes place after the end of the Trojan War. The
problem of determining what is just is demonstrated by the dilemma of Orestes,
who is driven by Apollo to avenge his father’s murder by killing his mother, and
in doing so is guilty of a blood crime.12 For this he is pursued and driven mad by
the avenging goddesses, the Furies. Ultimately, in the final play, the Eumenides,
Athena must intervene to settle the matter, when the human jury and trial she
sets up result in a tied vote.
Euripides’ gods are more human than those in Aeschylus, and more present
among mortals. Like Orestes, Hippolytus also seems to be the object of a tugof-
war between the gods, in his case between Aphrodite and Artemis; it is not
possible to give due allegiance to both, when the former requires his participation
in erotic love and the latter the preservation of his chastity. Of all Euripides’
plays, the Bacchae offers one of the best examples of the dynamic between
mortals and gods. Dionysus returns to Thebes, seeking the honour due to him as
a god. He is ruthless, however, even to those who follow him, such as Agave.
In the works of Sophocles, the gods are more noticeably absent.13 They do not
intervene as they do in the works of Aeschylus or Euripides. Except in the form
of Apollo’s oracle, the gods are altogether missing from Sophocles’ Oedipus the
King. Sophocles’ limited use of deus ex machina emphasizes the isolation of
humans from gods (Lefkowitz 1989: 78). Even when the gods are not directly
present, however, Sophocles’ plays revolve around issues of religion. The point of
contention between Antigone and Creon is divine law, which Antigone holds
above any decree of the state. In Oedipus at Colonus, the Thebans attempt to
bring back Oedipus as a blessing on their city, although he was once a curse. As
in Oedipus the King, an oracle about Oedipus gives rise to the action.
As in epic, misfortunes arise for the characters of tragedy when they transgress
certain boundaries. Agamemnon makes a choice to sacrifice the interests of his
household (oikos) to those of the city-state (polis). Consequently, and almost
contagiously, Clytemnestra becomes the enemy of her children by banishing
Orestes and mistreating Electra. Tragic events often ensue when characters
violate the natural order – for example, when women behave like men, men like
women, humans like animals, and men like gods. Euripides’ Pentheus meets his
death when his mother and other women leave the confines of the oikos to
convene in the wilderness, nurse wild animals, and pillage the area. Medea’s
marriage to Jason, described in terms of male social relationships, breaks down as
it challenges gender norms. Both Antigone and Creon violate boundaries:
Antigone in defying Creon’s decree and leaving the polis to bury her brother
Polyneices, and Creon in keeping above the earth what belongs below (the body)
and putting below the earth what belongs above (Antigone’s live ‘burial’ in a
cave) (Sophocles, Oedipus the King 1068–71).
This latter case reveals the materiality of evil as part of ancient Greek thought.
When Polyneices’ body goes unburied, the contagion spreads through the birds
and to the altars. Miasma, or pollution, is an evil which can result from
something morally neutral, such as contact with a dead body, or it can originate
from a crime such as murder. It is contagious and may harm not only the
murderer but also innocents who come in contact with him. Jason of the
Argonautica must seek Circe to ritually cleanse himself for the murder of
Medea’s brother. Odysseus has his slaves conduct purification rites after his
slaughter of the suitors. An example of what can happen if one does not undergo
proper purification can be seen in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. When the city of
Thebes unwittingly harbours Oedipus, the murderer and son of their former king,
plague descends on the people. The related concept agos could be seen as
belonging to the category of miasma. It is also a contagious, religious danger, but
it is tied more closely to crimes committed against the gods (Parker 1996: 8).
The use of a scapegoat (pharmakos) to eradicate plagues, famine, or drought
indicates a conception of evil that is movable and transferable. Choices for the
scapegoat included various marginalized members of society: people of lowly
origin, ugly people, youths, foreigners, or criminals (Bremmer 1983: 303). What
happened to the scapegoat, particularly whether the scapegoat was killed or not,
is a matter of disagreement, as scapegoats are frequently killed in myths but
spared in historical accounts. The possibilities of treatment include being run
over a cliff, stoned to death, or driven out of town. Bremmer (1983: 318)
concludes that the death recounted in myth is equivalent to expelling the
scapegoat, since the scapegoat and the evils he bears go away, never to return. In
a sense, Oedipus is a scapegoat. His exile from Thebes guarantees the end of the
plague. In Euripides’ Bacchae, Cadmus and Harmonia are exiled in the form of
serpents, even though they participate in the worship of Dionysus. Although they
do not commit crimes themselves, they suffer the consequences of Pentheus’
irreverence.
The conceptions of evil developed in the Greek world remained influential,
even as power shifted towards Rome. But, as religion and politics were tightly
interconnected in Rome, we will shift our focus from the cosmic to the civic
sphere.

Evil in Roman religion and literature

Much of Roman mythology, religion, and philosophy was heavily influenced by
the Greeks. Major philosophical schools of thought in the Roman world, such as
Stoicism, Epicureanism, Neoplatonism, Scepticism, and Pythagoreanism all had
their roots in Greek philosophical tradition. Similarly, the religion of Rome had
much in common with that of Greece. The gods of the Greek pantheon were
combined with or added to the gods of Rome. Because religion was embedded in
almost every aspect of Roman daily life (Rüpke 2007: 5), the focus here will be on
evil with regard to the civic functions of religion and general attitudes towards
the pagan gods.
Several general Latin terms exist to denote concepts of evil. The Latin adjective
malus corresponds to the Greek kakos and encompasses all sorts of evil. Words
such as peccatum (error) and culpa (blame), which are later used to translate ‘sin’
in biblical texts, are aligned with hamartia. Vices include superbia (pride),
licentia (licentiousness), and malitia (bad intent). Some terms refer to what could
be called ‘negated’ values, such as nefas (‘crime’; literally, ‘not to be spoken’) or
nequam (‘worthless’; literally, ‘not something’). Additionally, there were
criticisms of foreign vices, such as the deceit of the Greeks or the luxury of
Asians. As with the Greeks, in determining what the Romans considered evil, it is
useful to address what the Romans valued. The mos maiorum, or the ‘custom of
the ancestors’, was a broad, unwritten code of conduct for the ancient Romans
which governed social behaviours, politics, and military life. The mores of the
ancestors include many values: pietas (sense of moral duty), religio (cultivation of
the gods), iustitia (justice), fides (trustworthiness), aequitas (fairness), pudor
(modesty or shame), continentia (self-control), fortitudo (strength), sapientia
(wisdom), consilium (wise counsel), gravitas (seriousness), constantia (integrity),
probitas (uprightness or honesty), disciplina (industry), virtus (courage), and
dignitas (honour).14 These values also governed a social relationship distinctive of
the Romans, that between patron and client.
There is much moralizing in the literature of ancient Rome, from Cato’s
opposition to Hellenistic influences, to the invective and writings of Cicero, to the
satires of Horace and Juvenal. Cicero famously bemoans the times and the
practices of the Roman people (‘O tempora! O mores!’) in speeches against Verres
and Catiline. The general attitude throughout much of the history of Rome was
one that despaired of justice (Russell 1977: 150). In ancient discussions of the
decline of certain moral values in Rome throughout the Republic and Empire,
various theories cropped up to explain the degeneration: pre-existing greed,
increasing wealth, contact with the luxuries of the East, and the removal of
foreign threats, particularly Carthage (Lintott 1972: 626–7). The historian Sallust
speaks of the growth of the vices of greed (avaritia), luxury (luxus), political
ambition (ambitio), and desire (cupido). After the civil strife of the Republic,
Augustus came to power as emperor and attempted to establish a programme of
moral reform, instituting legislation that gave incentives to fathers with three or
more children, encouraging marriage, and discouraging adultery. From the Silver
Age, Juvenal’s criticism of the decline of moral values in his Satires offers a
glimpse of what more socially conservative critics would later count among the
evils of the Empire: greed, corruption, hypocrisy, effeminacy, and the unfairness
of some patron– client relationships.
Permeating political and social interactions was a religion that, in its diversity
and diffusion, can be difficult to systematize. The roots of early Roman religion
can be found in the Near East. Religion was critical from the very founding of
Rome, and early Rome is characterized by religious piety, the decline of which
authors from the Republic to the Silver Age lament. In this and in certain
practices, the Romans are characterized by their conservatism. Nonetheless, as
Rome expanded, the Romans were particularly open to incorporating the
religions of others, including that of the Greeks and Eastern civilizations,
although one must be wary of overstating their level of accommodation (Beard et
al. 1998: 212). This made for a highly complex amalgamation of beliefs, among
them Hellenistic influences, Persian Mithraism, and Christianity (Rüpke 2007: 2).
Changing views of Roman-ness also make pinpointing religious views
problematic (Beard et al. 1998: 212).
Even long after Christianity became the official religion of Rome, worship of
the Roman gods was seen as critical for its success (Beard et al. 1998: ix, 74).
Roman religious life revolved around religious acts rather than faith, and
interaction with the gods took place primarily through ritual (North 2000: 37).
Religio referred to the traditional cultivation of the gods and was tied closely to
the state religion. Excessive devotion or unconventional practices were regarded
as superstitio. These two terms also designated two different forms of
relationship to the gods (Beard et al. 1998: 216). The term for a rite that had been
improperly performed was vitium, also a word for ‘flaw’ or ‘vice’. Magic, as a
deviation from religious practices and an attempt to manipulate cosmic forces,
was a form of superstitio. Apuleius’ second-century novel The Golden Ass decries
the evils of magic, as well as curiosity.
It has been argued that

the only religious ‘belief’ for the Romans consisted in the knowledge that
the gods were benevolent partners of mortals in the management of the
world, and that the prescribed rituals represented the rightly expected
counterpart to the help offered by the immortals.
(Scheid 2003: 173)

Representations of gods in literature, however, suggest Roman views of the gods

could be more ambivalent. The same resignation to fate and the will of the gods
as we see in Homeric epic is present in the great Roman epic the Aeneid, but with
a Stoic and Epicurean emphasis on personal responsibility. The Aeneid revolves
around a hero of pietas, which is the threefold duty to one’s gods, country, and
family. The hero, Aeneas, embodies these loyalties, as he protects his father and
son during an escape from the ruins of Troy and seeks a new homeland in
accordance with the will of the gods. It follows, then, that the evils of the Aeneid
are whatever impedes pietas, such as the furor (madness) and ira (wrath) of Juno.
The gods, who through their own conflicting loyalties cause trouble among
mortals, are as capricious as they ever were in Homeric epic. Aeneas’ primary
divine obstacle is Juno, who seeks to protect and defend her beloved Carthage,
and from whom destruction and chaos emanate (Feeney 1993: 134). Aeneas’
mother, Venus, is his champion, yet her machinations with Dido cause more
difficulty for Aeneas than benefit; and Jupiter is portrayed as a distant but
benevolent force. Venus blames the fall of Troy on the mercilessness of the gods
(Aeneid 2.602–3). Similarly, Aeneas blames the fall of Troy on ‘the fates of the
gods’ (2.54, 2.57), whom he describes as ‘conquered’ (2.320), ‘reluctant’ (2.402),
and as having abandoned the altars (2.351–2).15 As the Greeks take the Trojans
unawares at night, sleep or rest, which Aeneas calls the ‘most pleasing gift of the
gods’ (2.268), ends up putting the Trojans at a decided disadvantage, as so often
happens to Odysseus.16 In this way, sleep embodies the ambiguity of the gods’
gifts.
Although the Homeric underworld was certainly conceived of as a gloomy and
cheerless place, it was not considered the source of evil. Individuals did, however,
take some precautions during their lives to ensure a happier afterlife. This was
one motivation behind cult worship. The most well-known cult was that of
Demeter. Participation in her rites, known as the Eleusinian mysteries, ensured a
better lot in the afterlife (Homeric Hymn to Demeter 480–82; cf. 488). Men are
punished for their crimes in the underworlds of both the Odyssey and the Aeneid.
Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Ixion are famously punished in the underworld of the
Odyssey because of their crimes against the gods. In the Aeneid, however, the
underworld begins to take on darker associations. Several evils sit at the entrance
of the underworld: grief, worries, diseases, old age, fear, hunger, poverty, death,
trials, sleep, evil pleasures, and war. This is also the location of the Furies’
chambers, of Strife, and of various monsters.
Aeneas’ father, Anchises, who acts as his guide through the underworld,
explains that living creatures possess elements of the divine but are dulled by
their earthly bodies (Aeneid 6.730–32). When Aeneas sees the people waiting to
return to the upper world, he wonders why anyone would give up their
underworld existence to take up their bodies again (6.719–21). This Platonic
prizing of the spiritual and celestial over the corporeal and earthly is supported
by the deities who emerge from the earth. In Aeneid 7, Allecto, a demonic
goddess called to wreak havoc by Juno, comes out of the earth and has been
identified as a principle of evil (Thornton 1967: 38). Her connection with snakes
associates her with the Erinyes (Furies), while her earthly origins suggest
commonalities with other destructive forces, such as Fama and Tisiphone
(Thornton 1976: 39–41). In the Metamorphoses, a poetic reworking of many Greek
myths, Ovid tends to emphasize the malevolence of the gods and the helplessness
of mortals. For instance, Callisto, Io, and Actaeon are all undeservedly mistreated
by the gods. Certainly, however, humans behave badly, and their actions often
merit punishment. Mortals often meet with punishment when they violate some
limit, such as challenging the authority or supremacy of the gods or the dictates
of the natural world and human law. Human wickedness is exemplified early in
Ovid’s work by Lycaon, who attempts to attack Jupiter in his sleep and, on a
separate occasion, offers a feast of human flesh to test Jupiter’s omniscience
(Metamorphoses 221–9). For this violation and perversion of hospitality, Jupiter
destroys all of humankind with a flood. Arachne, Niobe, and Marsyas are
punished when they dare compete with the gods. Narcissus is not punished by
the gods for loving his own image – just as Scylla is not punished for loving her
enemy, Byblis her brother, and Myrrha her father – but they all suffer the
consequences of their actions and choices, since they love what they should not
love. In the cases of Byblis and Myrrha, who are guilty of incest, Ovid handles
their stories as warnings to his audience. Both Byblis and Myrrha question
human taboos, with Byblis lamenting that she cannot act as the gods in these
matters (Metamorphoses 9.497–501) and Myrrha comparing her situation to
practices in the animal world (Metamorphoses 10.324–31).
In the Graeco-Roman imagination, evils for mortals stem largely from the
limitations of being human, which often generate inevitable suffering and pain,
prevent complete knowledge, and interfere with moral purity. Evils also arise
from transgression of these limits and other boundaries dictated by the natural
and social world. It is also possible to arrive at general conceptions of evil by
examining the virtues they oppose, such as courage, moderation, health, and
duty. What is good and evil, however, can be ambiguous in Graeco-Roman
literature. Suffering can defeat or instruct. Strife and toil can be burdensome or
noble. Success can benefit or lead to ruin. The forces that act on humans and are
often beyond human control take the form of the gods, who send mixed curses
and blessings. Conceived as very human themselves, yet immune to many of the
consequences of their actions, the gods have the upper hand, and, whether
beneficent or malevolent, demand human worship and supplication, or, at the
very least, resignation to the blend of good and evil that defines the human
condition.

Notes
1 Except when a translation is used, the citation refers to the Greek or Latin text.
2 E.g., Calypso, Circe, and Aeolus.
3 Hankey’s list of primary evil types of behaviour in the Odyssey include maltreatment of guests,
infidelity, murder, dishonouring someone, and destruction of property (1990: 91–2).
4 See Zarecki (2007), who argues that Pandora and Good Strife are equivalent.
5 This view has been contested by Beall (2005–6: 162), who interprets labour (ponos) as ambiguous, just as
strife is in Works and Days.
6 Eris was the goddess who famously was not invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. She comes
anyway, setting in motion events that result in the Trojan War.
7 Parallel Indian, Persian, Sumerian, and Babylonian myths concerning the degeneration of humankind
exist (see Athanassakis 1993: 91; Fontenrose 1974: 2–3).
8 Originally a Greek myth, the fullest accounts of Deucalion and Pyrrha are found in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses and the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus.
9 Hamartia is used in the New Testament as the term for “sin”, although it does not have the same moral
connotation in Aristotle.
10 Cf. the House of Cadmus, into which Oedipus is born.
11 Cf. Justice (Dikē) is born of Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony (902).
12 Clytemnestra is not pursued by the Furies, because she has not committed a blood crime.
13 Gods do appear in the Philoctetes and the Ajax.
14 See Schofield 2009: 199; see also Cicero’s Tusculanae Disputationes and De re publica. The list above is
not exhaustive.
15 Translations are my own. Cf. Euripides’ Trojan Women (821–59).
16 See, e.g., the Winds of Aeolus and Cattle of the Sun episodes.
Further reading
Beall, E. F. 1989. ‘The Contents of Hesiod’s Pandora Jar: Erga 94–98’, Hermes, 117(2): 227–30.
——2005–6. ‘Hesiod’s Treatise on Justice’, Classical Journal, 101(2): 161–82.
Beard, M., North, J., and Price, S. 1998. Religions of Rome, Vol. 1: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Braund, S. M. 1997. ‘Virgil and the Cosmos: Religious and Philosophical Ideas’, in C. Martindale (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Virgil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 204–21.
Bremmer, J. 1983. ‘Scapegoat Rituals in Ancient Greece’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 87: 299–320.
Burkert, W. [1977] 1985. Greek Religion, trans. J. Raffan. Oxford: Blackwell.
Burnell, P. 1987. ‘The Death of Turnus and Roman Morality’, Greece and Rome, 34(2): 186–200.
Cohen, D. 1986. ‘The Theodicy of Aeschylus: Justice and Tyranny in the Oresteia’, Greece and Rome, 33(2):
129–41.
Edmonds, R. 1999. ‘Tearing Apart the Zagreus Myth: A Few Disparaging Remarks on Orpheus and Original
Sin’, Classical Antiquity, 18(1): 35–73.
Edwards, C. 2002. The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Euben, P. J. 1982. ‘Justice and the Oresteia’, American Political Science Review,76(1): 22–33.
Faraone, C. A. 1991. ‘Binding and Burying the Forces of Evil: The Defensive Use of ‘Voodoo Dolls’ in Ancient
Greece’, Classical Antiquity, 10(2): 165–205, 207–20.
Feeney, D. 1993. The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Fontenrose, J. 1974. ‘Work, Justice, and Hesiod’s Five Ages’, Classical Philology, 69(1): 1–16.
Greene, W. C. [1944] 1963. Moira: Fate, Good, and Evil in Greek Thought. New York: Harper & Row.
Hankey, R. 1990. ‘“Evil” in the Odyssey’, in E. M. Craik (ed.), Owls to Athens: Essays on Classical Subjects
Presented to Sir Kenneth Dover. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 87–95.
Helm, J. J. 2004. ‘Aeschylus’ Genealogy of Morals’, Transactions of the American Philological Association,
134: 23–54.
Lefkowitz, M. R. 1989. ‘“Impiety” and “Atheism” in Euripides’ Dramas’, Classical Quarterly, 39(1): 70–82.
Lintott, A. W. 1972. ‘Imperial Expansion and Moral Decline in the Roman Republic’, Historia: Zeitschrift für
Alte Geschichte, 21(4): 626–38.
North, J. A. 2000. Roman Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nussbaum, M. 2001. The Fragility of Goodness. Rev. ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parker, R. 1996. Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Paulson, R. 2007. Sin and Evil: Moral Values in Literature. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Rowe, C. J. 1983. ‘“Archaic Thought” in Hesiod’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 103: 124–35.
Rüpke, J. 2007. ‘Roman Religion – Religion of Rome’, in Rüpke (ed.), A Companion to Roman Religion.
Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–9.
Russell, J. B. 1977. The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Scheid, J. 2003. An Introduction to Roman Religion, trans. J. Lloyd. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sluiter, I., and Rosen, R. M. (eds). 2008. Kakos: Badness and Anti-Value in Classical Antiquity. Leiden: E. J.
Brill.
Thornton, A. 1976. The Living Universe: Gods and Men in Virgil’s Aeneid. Dunedin: University of Otago
Press.
Williams, G. 1962. ‘Poetry in the Moral Climate of Augustan Rome’, Journal of Roman Studies, 52: 28–46.
Zarecki, J. 2007. ‘Pandora and the Good Eris in Hesiod’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 47: 5–29.

References
Athanassakis, A. N. 1993. Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Shield. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Beall, E. F. 1989. ‘The Contents of Hesiod’s Pandora Jar: Erga 94–98’, Hermes, 117(2): 227–30.
——2005–6. ‘Hesiod’s Treatise on Justice’, Classical Journal, 101(2): 161–82.
Beard, M., North, J., and Price, S. 1998. Religions of Rome, Vol. I: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bremmer, J. 1983. ‘Scapegoat Rituals in Ancient Greece’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 87: 299–320.
Edmonds, R. 1999. ‘Tearing Apart the Zagreus Myth: A Few Disparaging Remarks on Orpheus and Original
Sin’, Classical Antiquity, 18(1): 35–73.
Fantham, E. 2008. ‘The Ethics of Malitia on Stage and at Law’, in I. Sluiter and R. Rosen (eds), Kakos:
Badness and Anti-Value in Classical Antiquity. Leiden: E. J. Brill, pp. 319–34.
Feeney, D. 1993. The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Fontenrose, J. 1974. ‘Work, Justice, and Hesiod’s Five Ages’, Classical Philology, 69(1): 1–16.
Greene, W. C. [1944] 1963. Moira: Fate, Good, and Evil in Greek Thought. New York: Harper & Row.
Hankey, R. 1990. ‘“Evil” in the Odyssey’, in E. M. Craik (ed.), Owls to Athens: Essays on Classical Subjects
 Presented to Sir Kenneth Dover. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 87–95.
Homer 1951. The Iliad of Homer, trans. R. Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
——[1996] 2006. Homer: The Odyssey, trans. R. Fagles. New York: Penguin.
Lefkowitz, M. R. 1989. ‘“Impiety” and “Atheism” in Euripides’ Dramas’, Classical Quarterly, 39(1): 70–82.
Lintott, A. W. 1972. ‘Imperial Expansion and Moral Decline in the Roman Republic’, Historia: Zeitschrift für
Alte Geschichte, 21(4): 626–38.
North, J. A. 2000. Roman Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parker, R. 1996. Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Paulson, R. 2007. Sin and Evil: Moral Values in Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Rüpke, J. 2007. ‘Roman Religion – Religion of Rome’, in Rüpke (ed.), A Companion to Roman Religion.
Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–9.
Russell, J. B. 1977. The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Scheid, J. 2003. An Introduction to Roman Religion, trans. J. Lloyd. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schofield, M. 2009. ‘Republican Virtues’, in R. K. Balot (ed.), A Companion to Roman Political Thought.
Chichester: John Wiley, pp. 199–213.
Sluiter, I. 2008. ‘General Introduction’, in I. Sluiter and R. M. Rosen (eds), Kakos: Badness and Anti-Value in
Classical Antiquity. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Thornton, A. 1976. The Living Universe: Gods and Men in Virgil’s Aeneid. Dunedin: University of Otago
Press.
Zarecki, J. 2007. ‘Pandora and the Good Eris in Hesiod’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 47: 5–29.
17 Vedas and Upaniṣads
Shyam Ranganathan

Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying ‘yes’ to itself,
slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’,
‘non-self’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed. This reversal of the evaluating
glance – this essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself –
is a feature of ressentiment: in order to come about, slave morality first has
to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking,
external stimuli in order to act at all, – its action is basically a reaction. The
opposite is the case with the noble method of valuation …
(Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, p. 20)

The Vedas are a body of literature of the ancient South Asian Indo-European
peoples. The corpus itself was written over a long stretch of time: 1500 BCE to 500
BCE. It has conventionally been divided into four Vedas (Ṛg, Yajur, Sāman, and
Arthavan) and each Veda (literally, ‘knowledge’) is often divided into four
portions: Formulas (Mantras), Ritual Manuals (Brāhmaṇas), Forest Books
(Āraṇyaka), and Dialogues (Upaniṣads).1 ‘Veda’, when not employed as a term
for the whole, denotes the first three, to the exclusion of the Dialogues. The four
Vedas themselves overlap, though there are some differences in theme. The
mantra portions of the Ṛg, Yajur, and Sāman consist of hymns to and accounts of
the various Nature deities, many of which are to be employed in sacrifices, while
the Arthavan is a collection of spells and cures. Whereas the Brāhmaṇas specify
the practical aim and procedures of the sacrifice, the Āraṇyakas treat the sacrifice
as a model for something else – often self-reflection. The school of thought
founded on these earlier portions is known as Pūrva Mīmāṃsā (literally, ‘the
interpretation of the former’).
The Dialogues (Upaniṣads) solidify a shift in focus (cf. Santucci 1976). Whereas
the previous portions of the Vedas focus on the various gods and fortuitous
relations to them, the dialogues shift to the relationship between the self (Ātmā)
and Development or Growth (Brahman).2 The Upaniṣads present Development as
the primary divinity and often identify it with the Self. The school of thought
based on the Upaniṣads is known as Vedānta (literally, ‘the end of the Vedas’).
There are two monographs available in English that touch upon what this very
large body of literature has to say about evil. The first is Wendy Doniger’s The
Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (1976). This book continues past the Vedas
and ranges over subsequent literature in the Hindu tradition. But it does offer
useful characterizations of the Vedic accounts of evil. Doniger notes that the
Vedic term for evil is pāpa (literall, ‘fault’). On her account, the Vedas understand
evil in the moral sense: ‘people are evil-minded; adultery is evil; incest is evil’
(Doniger 1976: 7). Hunger too is an evil, she notes (ibid.: 30). On Doniger’s view,
the Vedic orientation is towards avoiding illness (ibid.: 375).
Then there is the more focused (and earlier) book by the Swedish Indologist
Sten Olof Rodhe, titled Deliver Us from Evil: Studies on the Vedic Ideas of
Salvation (1946). This latter work is written from a Christian perspective that
treats the biblical prayer ‘deliver us from evil’ as a central concern of the Vedas.
Like Doniger after him, Rodhe notes that the Vedas conceptualize evil in moral
terms: ‘pāpa and pāpman are used throughout the Veda in order to indicate
various evils’ (Rodhe 1946: 36). ‘Pāpa’ is prima facie a term of moral criticism. Yet
Rodhe sees a pattern in the usage of these terms: ‘[l]ife is good, everything that
threatens it is evil, pāpman’ (ibid.: 33). Death, on this account, is evil.
One problem in attempting to answer the question of what the Vedas have to
say about evil is that the question assumes there is some finite or clear thesis
about evil present in the literature. A review of the secondary literature
mentioned so far presents a corpus that identifies evil with both vice and natural
misfortune. This already exhausts many of the possibilities. Moreover, as the
corpus of Vedic texts is vast, especially when we count the Upaniṣads, it may not
be very easy to say with any certainty what the Vedic thesis of evil is. Indeed,
there may be no single thesis, and what we might find is a vast collection of
differing perspectives on evil. Add to this the historical reality that the Vedas took
millennia to form, and it becomes less certain that they contain any single
diagnosis of evil.
However, if we treat the topic of evil as a constant, we can thereby discern the
changes in the dialectic of the Vedas as a critical meditation on evil. Read this
way, the Vedas and Upaniṣads present us with a dialectic that, first, explores a
naturalistic approach to evil as something to be avoided by appeasing the
appropriate natural forces but then gives way to a non-natural approach to evil as
an avoidable failure of self-mastery. By ‘naturalistic’, I mean the word in the
sense employed in the meta-ethical literature, namely, to denote theories of value
that treat moral properties (such as good and evil) as a function of natural
properties. In the Vedic version of naturalism, the natural properties that ground
moral value are the forces of nature. I likewise take ‘non-naturalism’ to mean that
moral properties are irreducible to natural properties. In the Vedic version of non-
naturalism, moral properties are not reducible to the forces of nature.
On the first approach, the goods that we desire are defined in contrast to evils.
Evil functions as our motivation to strive for goodness: it structures the rationale
for our choices. If ressentiment is the identification of goods in terms of evils
(Nietzsche 1994: xxv, 20), the former approach promotes a system of ressentiment
that can, at best, keep evil at bay but does not eliminate it from one’s outlook.
Evil in this cosmology appears as so many demons (rākṣasas) that must be given
their due in order to make sense of the good life. According to the second
approach, evil is a function of the failure to affirm our autonomy. On this
account, evil plays no essential role in self-understanding and can be eliminated
via responsible living.
This shift from naturalism to non-naturalism is part of a theoretical move from
consequentialism to deontology. The school of philosophy that codifies the Vedic
shift from naturalism to non-naturalism – and away from ressentiment – is Yoga.
To understand the Vedic to Upaniṣadic shift here is to understand Yoga.

Vedic naturalism
If we include the chants about the gods and the literature on how to sacrifice to
them in the first part of the Vedas, and the Upaniṣad discussions of the Self
(Ātmā) and Development (Brahman) in the later part of the Vedas, we arrive at
the traditional division. According to this division, the former part is concerned
with action (karma), while the latter is concerned with knowledge or insight
(jñāna).
The focus of the active or practical part of the Vedas consists in rituals aimed
at appeasing deities. Many of the deities of the Vedas are like the deities of other
early Indo-European cultures. They are objects or forces of nature: planets, the
elements, stars. The hymns often praise one deity, or group of deities, as supreme.
A theme in these hymns is the motivation to avoid some evil by seeking the
blessings of deities. The mantra section of the Ṛg Veda is filled with consecutive
prayers for protection against social evils brought about by demons (rākṣasa) (Ṛg
Veda 1.21, 10.87) and humans who break contracts and friendships (Ṛg Veda
10.88). The hymns betray a concern for the welfare of cattle, who are threatened
by poisons (Ṛg Veda, 6.28, 10.88). The evils that the Vedas describe undermine
both our security and good fortune and the security and good fortune of those
who depend on us.
As the Brāhmaṇas report, ritual is the means of gaining the support of the gods
and warding off evil. How could such influence work? If evil is the lack of
flourishing, then appeasing natural forces – the gods – helps us flourish. This
knowledge is commonplace in our worldview: if we want to flourish, we have to
be mindful of natural requirements. Vedic ritual is an appeal to this practical
knowledge. Hence, when we are hungry, we must eat. Eating requires the
appropriation by the body of some other living organism. In appropriating the
latter, we pay a debt to the natural forces. This allows us the nourishment we
require to flourish.
According to the Aitaraya Brāhmaṇa, the key to actualizing this flourishing is
a discrimination between sacrifice and victim. This discrimination requires a
certain moral sensitivity. For instance, the presiding priests at the end of an
animal sacrifice must mutter ‘O Slaughterers! may all good you might do abide
by us! and all mischief you might do go elsewhere.’ This counts as the order for
killing the sacrificial animal. But this appreciation of the difference between the
requirements of sacrifice and the general mischief of slaughter removes the fault
or guilt of those who kill the animal. Whereas the ordinary torture of innocent
animals is wrong, a sacrifice to the gods is no ordinary torture and is permissible
(cf. Śaṅkara (Ādi) 1983: III.i.25; Rāmānuja 1996: III.i.25). This knowledge allows
the presiding priest to enjoy the flourishing made possible by the sacrifice
(Aitaraya Brāhmaṇa 2.1.7, p. 61).
But why is it that there must be a sacrificial animal that is non-human? We
humans arguably make just as good a meal as a goat. The Vedic texts answer
that, in the first instance, humans are the sacrificial objects for gods. Yet things
change once gods dissect a human. They find that part of the human that is fit for
being the object of sacrifice is converted into a horse (quick-moving). But the
same is true of the horse: having killed the horse, the gods discover that the part
worthy of being sacrificed is now an ox (slower-moving). Each time a new
convention was set up for who is to be sacrificed, until a strange turn of events
occurred: the part worthy of sacrifice turned into rice, and that is where it ends
(Aitaraya Brāhmaṇa 2.1.8, pp. 61–2).
This certainly mirrors a shift from meat to a vegetarian diet. But these
progressive shifts consist in a distinction between two parts of an organic being:
the part that can be food and the part that cannot. If the part of the being that can
function as food is the flesh, then the part that cannot function as food grounds
the interest the being has in avoiding death. This is something that we animals
share. Yet we find that the bifurcation of the organic being in terms of natural
attributes (flesh) and personal interests (in avoiding death) seems not to apply to
the rice plant, according to the Vedas. Why not?
If death is the ultimate loss of autonomy and self-direction, plant thriving is
bound up with death insofar as plant health requires being non-autonomous with
respect to the ground in which it is rooted and the environment in which it is
found. The conditions of health for a plant would spell death for an animal. But
this means that, given the idea that death is the loss of autonomy, animals have
an interest in avoiding death but plants do not, and therefore that plants
seemingly have no part that cannot serve as food for sacrifice. Plants can thrive,
but their thriving is tantamount to death. Animal thriving, in contrast, is inimical
to death. One might respond that this analysis shows only that the conditions of
thriving for plants are inadequate for animals. But the point is stronger: the
conditions for thriving for plants are unhealthy for animals. If death as a public
event is the loss of autonomy and self-direction, then plants apparently require
this to be healthy, while it would spell the demise of an animal. (Correlatively:
death is not the same as a failure to thrive. It is a failure to be autonomous and
self-directing.)
Animals hence have two aspects to themselves: we must eat (to appease the
gods), but we have an interest in avoiding being eaten, for to be eaten is to die.
Yet we too make good meat, so we are vulnerable to being someone else’s lunch.
Why is it that animals are under this pressure to appease the gods? According to
the Aitareya Āraṇyaka, it is Agni (fire) that is the consumer of food (I.1.2.ii). The
sacrificial offering just is food (I.1.4.vii). If it is ultimately fire that is hungry, and
the sacrifice is how we enact feeding our debt to fire, then the sacrifice is the
ritualization of metabolism: the burning of calories. The sacrifice hence functions
as a model for our animal biology. It is also the uneasy legitimization of the
appropriation of some other living body for our ends.

Vedic non-naturalism: life after death

Trying to avoid death by sacrifice to the gods does not work in the long run.
Worse, the evils that we want to avoid by appealing to the gods do not disappear
from view because we sacrifice. Every day, we must feed the gods to maintain
our health and avoid illness. Worse, evil motives are not placated by sacrifice.
The Brāhmaṇa quoted already notes that, during the course of a sacrifice, the
blood of the victim should be offered to evil demons (rākṣasas). The reason? By
offering blood to the demons, we keep the nourishing portion of the sacrifice for
ourselves (Aitaraya Brāhmaṇa 2.1.7, pp. 59–60). But this is an admission that
appeasing the gods of nature is part of a system of ressentiment, where we must
understand the goods in life as definable in relation to evils we want to avoid.
In the famous Kaṭha Upaniṣad, we find that the young boy Nachiketa is
condemned to death by his father (who is conducting a solemn sacrifice to the
gods) in response to the boy’s pestering question ‘To whom will you sacrifice
me?’ ‘To death’, his father replies, in irritation. But this is in an official context.
So the boy is sacrificed and travels to the abode of the God of Death, Yama, who
is absent. Upon returning after three days, Yama offers the young boy three
boons to make up for his lack of hospitality. Two boons are readily granted: the
first is returning to his father, and the second is knowledge of a sacrifice that
leads to the ‘high life’. Last, Nachiketa wants to know what happens to people
after they die – do they cease to exist, or do they somehow exist? Yama tries to
avoid answering this question by offering wealth – money, progeny, and the
diversions of privilege. Nachiketa rejects this, on the grounds that ‘no one can be
made happy in the long run by wealth’, and ‘no one can take it with them when
they come to you [i.e., Death]’. He objects that such gifts are short-lived. Death is
inevitable, so he wants the answer. The boy is persistent and Yama relents. He
begins his response by praising the boy for understanding the difference between
śreya (control) and preya (literally, ‘advance-movement’ – i.e., the utility of the
sacrifice): the foolish are concerned with preya (what Yama tried to give the boy)
but the wise with control.
Yama continues with his allegory of the chariot.3 According to Yama, the body
is like a chariot in which the Self sits. The intellect (buddhi) is like the charioteer.
The senses (indriya) are like horses and the mind (mānasa) like reins. The
Enjoyer is the union of the self, senses, mind and intellect. The objects of the
senses are like the roads that the chariot travels. People of poor understanding do
not take control of their horses (the senses) with their mind (the reins). Rather,
they let their senses draw them to objects of desire, leading them to ruin.
According to Yama, the person with understanding reins in the senses with the
mind and intellect (Kaṭha Upaniṣad I.2). This is Yoga (Kaṭha Upaniṣad II.6).
Those who practise yoga reach their Self in a final place of security (Vishnu’s
abode).4 This is the place of the Great Self (Kaṭha Upaniṣad I.3). There is no evil
here.
The story is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, the young boy, far from
natural death, has to confront Death ahead of time. And whereas typically the
point of sacrifice to the gods is to avoid misfortunes that tend towards one’s own
death (by finding a suitable proxy who is then sacrificed), the boy himself is the
sacrificial victim. But having been deprived of his autonomy by this untimely
death, he has an audience with Death, not as one who suffers the misfortunes of
Death but as one who is honoured with gifts from Death. The gifts given by
Death to the one who faces Him ahead of time include not only a restoration of
relationships with loved ones and an understanding of the sacrifices necessary for
the high life but also a revelation of life’s secret: death (the ultimate loss of
autonomy) as an event (which we call dying) occurs only to those who do not
take control of their senses, mind, and intellect. Those who can take control of
these elements, and thereby control their body, are responsible agents avoiding
accidents. This is what it is to face Death ahead of time: it is to live life in the
knowledge of the possibility of dying and thereby to avoid dying. Death ahead of
time is life after Death (though not life after dying). This is Yoga.
There is a long tradition of interpreting the Upaniṣads as teaching a mysterious
doctrine about a non-empirical self. It is often couched in the Judaeo-Christian
language of being chosen by God. Just as God chooses his people, the ātmā, we
are told, chooses a person (cf. Müller’s translation of the Kaṭha Upaniṣad I.2.23–
5):

That Self cannot be gained by the Veda, nor by understanding, nor by much
learning. He whom the Self chooses, by him the Self can be gained. The Self
chooses him (his body) as his own. But he who has not first turned away
from his wickedness, who is not tranquil, and subdued, or whose mind is not
at rest, he can never obtain the Self (even) by knowledge! ‘Who then knows
where He is, He to whom the Brahmans and Kshatriyas are (as it were) but
food, and death itself a condiment?’

This translation consists of distortions, including the gratuitous insertion of

‘Veda’. Worse, it makes the issue occult. The doctrine becomes unmysterious if
we have a taste for moral philosophy. For the topic is ethical. To understand
oneself is to understand oneself as responsible for oneself. This is Death’s lesson.
Here we come upon an insight of the Vedic tradition. We need to do something
with Death (i.e., the ultimate loss of autonomy). If we do not take control of our
loss of autonomy, we lose our autonomy. The earlier Vedic tradition thought that
the way to remove death from the public realm is to inflict it on another. But the
later view is that to take control of death is for us to take it away from the public
realm (what we can all see), where it is a threat, and privately house it as a loss of
autonomy (where it is not visible to others). The private housing of a loss of
autonomy is the loss of autonomy to oneself: self-governance or self-control. This
is a self-imposed limitation on our person – that is, our public freedom. For this
reason, the Indian tradition has often connected Death with Duty. Indeed, the
latter tradition identifies the God of Death as Dharma (Duty, Virtue).
Reciprocally, the tradition also refers to Death by the same term it uses for ethical
responsibility, direction, or self-control: yama. To understand the self via yama is
to take hold of the public freedom to be ourselves by privately limiting ourselves.
This is to understand the self prescriptively in terms of what it ought to do, and
not in terms of what it contingently does. So Death concludes:

This self is not obtained by speech, nor by intellect, nor by many revelations
about sacrifices (śruti). He or she whom the Self chooses, gains him or
herself. Deliberately choosing the self (ātmā vi-vṛṇute) is governing oneself
(tanum svam) verily (am). One who has not first turned away from evil
policies (duścara), who is not peaceful and subdued, or whose mind is not at
rest, can never obtain the Self by insight! Such a confused one will not know
where the Self went – The self for whom privilege (Brahmins [the priestly
caste] and Kṣatriyas [the governing caste]) is the main course and death the
sauce.
(Kaṭha Upaniṣad I.2.23–5; my translation)

To attain the self is to be the master of one’s own destiny. But autonomy is
possible only for one who has shaken off evil, for, so long as we rely upon evil,
we rely upon excuses for our problems. Understanding the self is seeing through
the social order of privilege that depicts people – including those who officiate
sacrifices such as Brahmins and those who commission them such as Kṣatriyas –
in terms of social status. The real self is prior to that and treats superficial
features of life (such as social privilege) as food to be relished with death! The
underlying logic is clear: privilege that supports the consequence-oriented
paradigm of sacrifice, which sees some as beneficiaries and others as victims, is a
function not of self-governance but of accidents of birth, and is hence to be
minimized.
According to Death’s teaching, evil is an accidental misfortune of self-
direction. It is not a demon or a thing waiting in the dark. Death can teach us
this, for Death is the accident we want to avoid – by taking control of our loss of
autonomy. Knowing Death consists in keeping our distance from dying, and this
is a matter of self-respect as self-control.
The account of evil presented by Death is analogous to the idea that evil is a
privation of goodness, insofar as we start not with evil as a primitive or anything
positive. Accordingly, ‘Creation exists because it is good, and evil is in some
respects a privation or deforming of what is good. Goodness is antecedent to evil
historically and metaphysically’ (Taliaferro 2015: 3). There are portions of the
Upaniṣads that sound like this. For instance, Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.2.1 states
that priority is to be given to sat (reality, but also the good), from which
everything arose. But this is not the final word on the issue, for Death eliminates
talk of goodness in favour of control (śreya) and self-governance (tanuṃsvam).
Whereas goodness is an outcome or state of affairs, self-governance is the
condition of outcomes and states of affairs. To countenance ourselves as
essentially self-governing is to treat ourselves as the explanation of good and evil.
Evil arises from irresponsibility (failed practice, duścara). It is not an explanatory
primitive of our universe. But neither is goodness basic, if the right is prior to the
good, and it is our righteous behaviour that explains the good. So, evil is a
privation of rightness – not goodness – on the yogic model.

The philosophy of Yoga

According to the school of philosophy called Yoga – codified by Patañjali, 200 CE
– reality is explicable by two metaphysical principles: causality/efficacy (guṇa,
Yoga Sūtra [YS] II.19; prakṛti āpūrāt, YS IV.2) and normative concepts of formal
and practical rationality, such as abstraction, isolation, autonomy (kaivalya, YS
II.25), self-mastery (sva-svāmi, YS II.23), and authentic living (svarūpe
avasthānam – abiding in one’s own form, YS I.2; svarūpa-pratiṣṭhā – standing on
one’s form, YS IV.34). When things go poorly, nature is called upon as an
explanation. When things go well, it is personal determination that explains
matters. Ideally, we ought to isolate ourselves from natural influences. This
process of isolation involves the discernment of cosmic moral laws (Ṛta) and the
clearing of nature to facilitate a personal world, safe for people who have an
interest in self-direction and abstraction (YS I.47–51).
Self-actualization and autonomy are earned, on this account, when people put
critical distance between themselves and mental content, which just is public
content. The practice of criticism is the practice of yoga. When people can
practise criticism, they put distance between themselves and objects in the world
that would otherwise be their downfall. In the case of mental illness, we cure
ourselves when we can put some distance between ourselves and our thoughts
and feelings. In the case of physical illness, we can cure ourselves, too, if we put
some distance between ourselves and our pathogens.
Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra depicts moral evil as natural evil. The justification for
this identification comes from the explanatory dualism of Yoga that pits nature
against persons. The inauthentic life constitutes an incursion of nature into the
life of the sovereign person. Natural evil undermines autonomy: it is death as
dying. But moral evil is nothing but the failure to respect the autonomy of
individuals: it is hence of a piece with natural evil. When people act as though
they are vicious, and it seems as though there is no natural explanation, we must
think again. For moral evil in the form of cruelty or lack of consideration for
others is a function of habitual incursions into autonomy. The yogi diagnoses
those who are morally evil as confused and responds by fortifying their own self-
governance. This has the effect of disarming evils (YS II.33–5).
The shift from natural explanation to moral or personal explanation is the job
of yogic practice. To this end, the Yoga Sūtra catalogues all the things one can do
with oneself. Indeed, along the way, one can even amass great powers by being
an astute student and manipulator of nature (YS III). But Patañjali cautions the
yogi: such gifts are a diversion from the practice of yoga (YS III.38). Our ultimate
goal is autonomy (kaivalya), but we cannot accomplish this without renouncing
selfish desires in all contexts. To hold onto a selfish desire is to see things in
consequential terms, where we look at the project of life as gaining what we do
not have. The opposite is appropriate: we ought to view life as the project of
gaining what we have – ourselves. To renounce all selfish desires results in a
dharmameghasamādhi (absorption in a raincloud of virtue), which washes away
all that is extraneous to the self (YS IV.29).
The standard reading of the Vedas from the Indian tradition treats them as
consisting of two components: a component concerned with ritual and a
component concerned with knowledge of the Self and Development. But when
we look at the Vedas as a meditation on evil, it is the philosophy of Yoga worked
out in detail. The gods are the forces of Nature, and they compete as an
explanation with the Self. Opting for personal explanations requires getting rid of
natural explanations for problems. To move away from the natural towards the
personal is to move away from assessing life in terms of outcomes (from the
outside) and towards assessing life in terms of self-governance and autonomy.
This is the yogic turn in the Vedic corpus, which aims to take evil out of the
picture.

Self-governance versus orientalism

If the account that I have defended is correct, the Vedas document a critical
approach to evil that developed over time. The first stage is Consequentialist. The
motive for action is to avoid evil and to attain the good. The methodology
consists of appeasing forces of nature. A philosophical dissatisfaction with this
methodology, which enshrines evil as an ontological primitive, is the backdrop
for the move towards a deontological approach, where good and evil are
functions of choice and are not ontological primitives. On this approach, the
world is not evil any more than it is good: evil and good are functions of personal
responsibility. Yet, on the popular orientalist accounts, the Vedic account of evil is
forever stuck at the first stage and never moves to reconfiguring evil as a question
of personal responsibility.
In the humanities, ‘orientalism’ has come to denote a patronizing attitude
towards the East. Accordingly, the East gets cast as underdeveloped (Said 1978;
Inden 1990). Orthodox views of South Asia are in many cases orientalist. A prime
example of this attitude is the notion that Indian thinkers were not particularly
interested in ethics or moral philosophy (Ranganathan 2007). This is an
unsurprising attitude, given that South Asia was under colonial domination when
many of these views were developed: it does not suit the view of the colonizer to
depict the colonized as free-thinking and critical – especially about evil. The idea
that a basic South Asian approach to evil in the Vedas hinges on the question of
self-governance is threatening to orientalism, with its colonialist agenda that
would sooner depict South Asians as in need of management (to maximize
outcomes) and not as people who are concerned about self-governance. Yet we
find in scholarship ways to minimize the importance of self-governance in an
Indic account of evil.
One way to suppress the matter of self-governance in Indian accounts of evil is
to selectively rely upon Nietzsche. According to Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of
Morality, what we normally call ‘morality’ (social rules of reciprocity and a
concern to avoid suffering) is socially constructed under conditions of social
oppression. Nietzsche calls this ‘slave morality’. The problem with slave morality
is that it is resentful: it understands the ‘goods’ in life in opposition to a whole
host of evils that are forced on a slavish population by oppressors. This creates
conditions for philosophy (criticism) and asceticism (denial of pleasures) as
further exercises in ressentiment (Nietzsche 1994: 84). On Nietzsche’s account, an
ethical theory (such as Utilitarianism) that seeks to avoid natural evils and
maximize benefits is also a version of the same type of theory. The movement
away from Vedic naturalism, which defines goods in opposition to evils that we
wish to avoid, is the movement away from being resentful. In keeping with
Nietzsche’s characterization of non-slave, ‘master’ morality as the morality that
looks inwards towards the self, the Vedic move away from ressentiment consists
in affirming the Self as the explanation for the moral life. The Vedas may hence
have been a perfect model for Nietzschean reflections on the way morality goes
wrong and how it goes well. Or, conversely, Nietzsche’s Genealogy may be highly
derivative from this earlier thought-experiment of the Vedas. In praising the
Vedic thought-experiment on evil as showing how to renounce ressentiment by
deference to the self, we are not so much complimenting Nietzsche as
commending the Vedic tradition (which predates Nietzsche by two millennia) for
its critical exploration of the topic of evil. New ideas in the West are often old
ideas in the East.5
Yet the Vedic solution in the Upaniṣads is reputed to involve asceticism by way
of the criticism of offerings and gains of sacrifice – i.e., utility (preya). Worse,
according to Nietzsche, asceticism is resentful. This would render the Upaniṣads
an exercise in resentment, which involves taking evil seriously as an ontological
primitive necessary for the justification of the moral life. If asceticism amounts to
immaturity in moral development (the kind that requires a colonizer’s
intervention to manage the colonized), Upaniṣadic ethics would thereby be
immature – not to mention resentful. This depiction of Eastern thought as
immature is orientalism. Something must be wrong.
The ascetic reading of Indian thought and the Upaniṣads is old hat in the
Western commentary tradition. For some, such as Schopenhauer, the asceticism
of Indian thought is attractive. On his account, which is derivative from the
Upaniṣads and Indian thought, life experiences are characterized by māyā
(Sanskrit for illusion), which leads us to believe in our phenomenal individuality
as opposed to our noumenal unity. This supports an ethical self-centredness that
leads to suffering. We should, rather, deny our individuality and hence take an
interest in the suffering of others as our own suffering. But, on this score, we
ascetically criticize sense-experience as deceptive (Schopenhauer 1909: 471–2).
Others disagree that asceticism makes Indian thought attractive. Albert
Schweitzer, often praised for his philosophy of ‘reverence of life’ and lauded as a
moralist, is famous for an explicitly orientalist criticism of Indian thought.
According to Schweitzer,

We know very little about any thought except our own, especially about
Indian thought. The reason why it is so difficult to become familiar with this
is that Indian thought in its very nature is so entirely different from our own
because of the great part which the idea of what is called world and life
negation plays in it. Whereas our modern European world-view
(Weltanschauung), like that of Zarathustra and the Chinese thinkers, is on
principle world and life affirming.
(Schweitzer 1936: 1)

According to Schweitzer, the Upaniṣads teach this Schopenhauerian doctrine but

with a Platonic (or Neoplatonic) twist. This is the idea that our personal identity
consists in our soul or mind. Brahman, in turn, is depicted as the Universal Soul
(ibid.: 35–6). In affirming this universal soul, we apparently deny the world and
its variegation (that is, we regard it as evil) but affirm what is in each one of us.
Here we find some defence of Indian thought against Nietzsche: ‘Compared with
the Brahmanic superman, Nietzsche’s is a miserable creature. The Brahmanic
superman is exalted above the whole universe, Nietzsche’s merely over human
society’ (ibid.: 36). But this is a backhanded compliment, for, in essence:

The result of the freedom of the soul from the world of sense, as preached by
Brahmanic mysticism, is that man has to pass his life completely detached
from all that is earthly. His thoughts must be entirely directed to the world
of pure Being.
(Ibid.)

If this gloss is correct, the Upaniṣads regard the Earth and the sensible world as
an evil to be avoided by fleeing to another world of ‘pure Being’. The idea that
Indian thought teaches that life is an evil to be avoided is a common myth.
There are countless errors in these glosses. But most intriguing is the
Platonistic gloss on the teachings of the Upaniṣads. According to this gloss, the
Upaniṣad’s self (ātmā) is the soul. Brahman is the world-soul or pure Being, and
the mystical identity of the self and the world-soul is the liberating knowledge
that takes us away from the particulars of our life to the universals. Such a gloss
renders the Upaniṣad’s teachings a form of Neoplatonism (cf. The Enneads,
IV.3.17). Nowhere does this tendency to confuse Platonism, or Neoplatonism,
with the philosophy of the Upaniṣads come to a head more clearly than in the
Kaṭha Upaniṣad we have examined. Whereas for Plato’s Republic the soul
(comprised of appetite, spirit, and reason) is the self, and whereas for the
Phaedrus the soul is the collection of the charioteer (the intellect or reason), who
in the human case must control two troublesome horses (apparently
corresponding to desire and spirit),6 Death teaches us that the self is separate
from the mind, intellect, and senses – all the things that could comprise the soul.
Indeed, while the three portions that Death critically distinguishes from the self
mirror in some respects the three parts of the soul Plato identifies, Death is keen
to distinguish the self from the soul. The doctrine being taught here, explicitly, is
the doctrine of Yoga: we are kaivalya – autonomy, abstraction, isolation. Our
interests consist in being critical of thought – and anything under our control,
including our intellect – so that we may ‘abide in our own essence’ (YS I.2).
Failure to be critical results in the identification with thought (YS I.3), which in
the model of the chariot is tantamount to driving into a ditch. On this account,
we are defined not by our character or by capacities that ought to serve our
interests (capacities such as appetite, spirit, and intellect) but by our interest in
negotiating experiences unscathed. Each individual is one who has this interest in
surviving their life. This interest in escaping danger never changes and is a
constant: we are norms or values of survival, not minds (souls) or bodies. Self-
governance is about getting these different aspects of our life to respect our
essence as abstract. This is to steer clear of the ditch. The Earth is not an evil we
are trying to move away from on this account, but a good that we live with so
long as we take responsibility for avoiding the creation of evil by careless driving.
The inclination to interpret the Upaniṣads as teaching something Platonic or
Neoplatonic extends to traditional interpretations of the text. When Death is
impressed by Nachiketa’s wisdom, he praises him by distinguishing between
śreya (control) and preya (offering), saying that the wise choose the former while
the foolish choose the latter. It is not uncommon to see Death (in English
translation) praising the boy for distinguishing between the good and the
pleasurable7 – a distinction that resonates with Plato’s philosophy in the
Republic, where the Good is the light of reason and pleasure is what the appetites
crave. If this Platonic gloss is what the Upaniṣads recommend, this is asceticism
and would support Schweitzer’s contention that Indian thought regards life and
the world as an evil to be avoided. But in fact Death distinguishes between the
self-control of the good driver and diversions. In this respect, the distinction
between śreya and preya is the distinction between the deontological (śreya) and
the consequentialist (preya). The Platonic reading of Vedic thought inverts
Death’s lesson by identifying śreya, the deontological notion of self-governance,
with the consequentialist idea of ideal utility, to be favoured over the merely
pleasurable.
What then of the idea of Brahman as a super-soul and the self as expression of
this soul? Is this not Vedic? If it is the world-soul, would we not have Neoplatonic
reasons to shun pleasures and sense-experience as evil according to the Vedas?
On Death’s account, each self has an interest in abstracting from its
environment in the way that travellers have an interest in not colliding with
objects along the way. To be a Self just is to have this interest. What we Selves
have in common is our joint interest in Development – Brahman. This is the
opposite of driving into the ditch. Development, just like the Self, is not a soul –
and hence not a world-soul. Development is the prescriptive genus to which we
all belong: it is what all Selves have in common. To follow the taxonomical
analogy, each Self is as though a species: one’s various moods (horses),
expressions (charioteer), and behaviours (reins) instantiate this species that is
oneself with various degrees of clarity. As items within a class inherit the
defining traits, we can identify the Self (ātmā) with the prescription to develop
ourselves (Brahman). This renders Brahman a collectivity of Selves that shares its
traits. Brahman is more of the order of a categorical imperative of growth than a
thing (much as the individual self is more the prescriptive centre to avoid driving
into the ditch than what the self does). If Brahman is the class, and we are its
members, the challenge is not to affirm life (that it is good) or to deny life (that it
is evil) but to live authentically. In other words, the point of life on this account is
not to avoid evil and aim for the good but to live a life where we do not create
evil that undermines our essential interests.
Of course, there are portions of the Upaniṣads where Brahman is described as
sat, cit, and ānanda (truth/reality, awareness, and joy; Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1.3).
But such characterizations are consistent with Brahman being the genus of
development that every self is a part of and identical with. Understanding
Brahman as a genus of growth that its members inherit as part of their essence
gives rise to identity claims such as the Upaniṣadic formula tat tvam asi – ‘that
you are’ (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.8.7). If Brahman is the genus and ātmā is a
member of this genus, then, with respect to defining traits, ātmā contains
Brahman as part of its essence. In this sense, you are Brahman. With respect to
numerical identity, it is doubtful that we are the same Self. The ambiguity that
this class inclusion raises with respect to questions of personal identity is the stuff
of scholastic debates on how to interpret the Upaniṣads: Is there one self or many
selves (Madhva [Ānandatīrth] 1904; Rāmānuja 1996; Śaṅkara (Ādi) 1983)? Monists
tend to read ‘ātmā’ and ‘brahman’ as synonyms for the same species
(individuality gets off-loaded on to the ‘jīva’ or living agent – the soul and body).
Pluralists tend to read ‘ātmā’ as the species and ‘brahman’ as the genus – an
approach that is closer both to the literal idea of the ātmā and Brahman as Self
and Development and to the philosophy of Yoga set out by Death in the
Upaniṣads. Either way, we are not our soul. Our task is not to avoid the evil of
pleasures. Evil is not a thing in the world that we must steer clear of. Our goal is
to survive our life and thereby not create evil for ourselves and others. When we
are good at this, it is as pleasurable as an exhilarating ride in a chariot.
One might argue that, if we share the same interests, we are the same person.
But if the basis of moral conscience is our identity, as Schopenhauer thought, I
could just as easily abuse you if I despised myself: evil would be a natural
outcome of my attitude towards myself. Or, if I deny our noumenal identity but
concern myself instead with my own self-development, it seems that I can avoid
my agent-relative obligations and my agent-neutral obligations (Bharadwaja
1984). It would seem that evil pops up again, as the thing we leave at the side of
the road for others to contend with while we worry about our own personal
destiny. These are orientalist criticisms, as they render the moral dialectic of
Upaniṣadic thought immature. Something is wrong.
The problem with the first criticism is that it assumes that the Upaniṣad theory
entails that my interest in being nice to myself has to do with some type of
contingent self-love that could just as easily be replaced by malice. But, rather,
the argument is that my interest in being good to myself (not making evil for
myself) defines who I am. So self-understanding is not continuous with self-
loathing or self-malice. Second, the theory of the Upaniṣads does not require that
we are the same person (self) in order for us to act in each other’s interests. We
need only share interests, so that, in protecting one’s own self-interest, one is
protecting the interests of all.
Third, the theory entails that one’s duty to oneself is a benefit to others. A
world that is safe for me to move around in is a world that is safe for you to
move around in. If I allow you to suffer evils such as death, I have to face your
illness and dead body – your evils – as an impediment to my travels. If I allow a
world of illness and violence, I run the risk of getting sick or hurt. If I am
concerned for my own safety as a traveller, I look out for your interests as a
traveller too. This is what it is for ourselves to be defined by Development
(Brahman). Our self-interest is the eradication of evil.
The interest we share is not defined by our sex, gender, race, species, number
of legs, sexual orientation, or skin colour. What we share is an interest in
avoiding Death as a public event that can harm us. This is the same as our
interest in rendering Death (the loss of autonomy) private via self-governance. If I
pursue my interest in avoiding Death as a public event – my interest in self-
governance – I protect your interest in avoiding Death as a public event.
Things look very different when we are worried about goods. Even when our
lists of goods are the same (or especially when they are the same), and we live life
in pursuit of them, we can (as it were) ‘bump into’ each other. This is what
Hobbes, in Leviathan, calls a ‘State of War’ (Hobbes [1651] 1994: chs 13–14). Evil
here is a natural outcome of the pursuit of goods that we desire. We would avoid
this if we were interested in Death’s recommendation: śreya instead of preya –
control instead of utility. Being concerned for one’s own Development would
work just the same. This is to seek nothing but our autonomy.
Conclusion
Wendy Doniger, in her Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, writes:

Vedic religion is largely healthy-minded, ignoring (rather than denying) the

more tragic aspects of life, aspiring to heaven, and invoking benevolent gods.
The Upaniṣads introduce the insights of the sick soul and pave the way for a
vision of the essentially evil nature of life, a vision which largely colors the
image of the Hindu gods themselves in the early period: malevolence or
inadequacy motivating the divinities who determine our fates
(Doniger 1976: 375)

This resonates with Schweitzer’s comments that, in the Upaniṣads, we find life-
denial. But this story is plausible only if we ignore the philosophical shift in the
Vedic corpus. What is really going on in the Vedas is a shift from naturalism to
non-naturalism, from consequentialism to deontology. Whereas naturalism sees
the world as governed by many observable natural forces, which we ignore at our
peril, non-naturalism treats prescriptive concepts of moral responsibility – self-
governance, self-ownership, self-direction – as fundamental. Whereas
consequentialism concerns itself with good and evil, deontology moves past this,
to questions of self-governance and autonomy. Beyond good and evil here is not
beyond ethics: it is deontology. When we shift to the non-naturalism of the
Vedas, we enter the philosophical world of Yoga. Here we realize natural
explanation is something to which we resort at our peril. Ideally, each one of us is
free and self-directing, which means it is not the forces of nature that we need to
appease but our own requirement for direction and responsibility. The gods of
nature will always appear malevolent when we decide to orient our life around
self-determination. For when one centres one’s life in oneself, all the elements
seem to deny one’s autonomy. The goal is to show them wrong. This is yoga.
The gods of nature are also less interesting when I understand them as bound
up in a worldview where evil plays an essential role. According to the early Vedic
reckoning, I am motivated to appease the gods of nature in proportion to my
desire to avoid evil. But evil is thereby a force that plays a role in my life. I
cannot get rid of it, and at most I can avoid it. If I want evil to be gone, I require
another explanation for how things go wrong. If I choose myself as the
explanation of how things go wrong, then I need only set a path to righteousness
to get rid of evil. This path is the paradoxical loss of autonomy: self-control. This
is life after Death.

Notes
1 The Upaniṣads can be found in Max Müller’s historic translations, listed in the references under a single
entry. The value of these translations is that they are available free online. There are other more recent
online sources listed in the Further reading section.
2 The Sanskrit–English Dictionary by Monier-Williams gives many interpretations of ‘Brahman’, the first
of which are ‘growth’, ‘expansion’, ‘evolution’, and ‘development’ (Monier-Williams [1872] 1995: 737–
8).
3 Philosophy is filled with interesting allegories of the chariot, all proving something different. Whereas
Death employs the allegory to show that there is a self distinct from the mind, body, senses, and
intellect, the Buddhist Questions of King Malinda (Milindapañha) argues the opposite: if we take the
chariot as an allegory for the self, no such self is to be found. Plato uses the model to explicate the
nature of the soul. All souls are comprised of a charioteer and winged horses. The charioteer (the
person) is the intellect, but the characters of the horses differ. Gods have noble horses, while humans
are stuck with one good horse and one troublesome horse (Phaedrus 246a–54e).
4 Vishnu is the deity of preservation. In Hindu lore, his consort is depicted as Bhumi Devi: Mother Earth.
To go the realm of Vishnu is never to be far from Earth.
5 Ideas that are old in the West can be new in the East too. One prime example is the importance given to
temple idol worship in Indian practices. While originally Hellenic (Brown 1940: 40) and Persian, and
traditionally looked down upon by Brahminical orthodoxy as foreign to ancient practices (Olivelle
2010), temple idol worship has become synonymous with popular Hinduism and has been roundly
affirmed by modern, Brahminical purveyors of Hindu ‘orthodoxy’ (e.g., smārta-s). Recent scholarship
on Indic temples has not done anything to unseat the late date of the Hindu temple (Meister 2010, 1983).
Hindu temples with idol worship appear to be a largely late phenomenon of the Common Era.
6 See note 4.
7 I find this also in the excellent A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy (Grimes 1996), not to mention
translations such as Müller’s. The term ‘śreya’ is peculiar to the Vedic Sanskrit of the Upaniṣads. It is
not part of scholastic Sanskrit of the Common Era. The closest Sanskrit term to it is ‘śrāya’ –
‘protection’. This is close to what Death appears to mean by ‘śreya’.
Further reading
Armstrong, A. H. 1936. ‘Plotinus and India’, Classical Quarterly, 30(1): 22–8.
Doniger, W. 1976. The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Milindapañha: The Questions of King Milinda, trans. J. Kelly,
www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/miln/miln.intro.kell.html.
Müller, F. M. (trans.) 1879. The Upanishads, 2 vols, www.sacred-texts.com/hin/upan/index.htm.
Narayanaswami Aiyar, K. (trans.) 1914. Thirty Minor Upanishaḍs, www.sacred-
texts.com/hin/tmu/index.htm.
Paulos, G. 2002. Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Plato 1925. Phaedrus, trans. H. N. Fowler, www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=plat.+phaedrus.
Rig Veda 1896, trans. R. T. H. Griffith, www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/index.htm.
Rodhe, S. O. 1946. Deliver Us from Evil: Studies on the Vedic Ideas of Salvation. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup.
The Upanishads [in Vedic, with some translations], www.gayathrimanthra.com/Library.html.
Upanishads [108, translated into English], www.celextel.org/upanishads/.

References
The Aitareya Brahmanam of the Rigveda 1922. Trans. Martin Haug, ed. the Sacred Books of the Hindus, Vol.
2. Allahabad: Sudhindra Nath Vas.
Bharadwaja, V. K. 1984. ‘A Non-Ethical Concept of Ahimsa’, Indian Philosophical Quarterly, 11(2): 171–7.
Brown, P. 1940. Indian Architecture: Buddhist and Hindu Periods. 3rd ed, Bombay: Taraporevala.
Doniger, W. 1976. The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Grimes, J. 1996. A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Hobbes, T. [1651] 1994. Leviathan: with Selected Variants from the Latin edition of 1668, ed. E. M. Curley.
Indianapolis: Hackett.
Inden, R. B. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwell.
Madhva [Ānandatīrtha] 1904. The Vedānta Sūtras with the Commentary by Sri Madhwacharya, trans. S.
Subba Rau. Madras: Thompson; summarized in B. N. K. Sharma, History of the Dvaita School of Vedānta
and its Literature. 2nd rev. ed., Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1981, pp. 127–60.
Meister, M. W. (ed.) 1983. Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture. Philadelphia: American Institute of
Indian Studies/University of Pennsylvania Press.
——2010. Temples of the Indus: Studies in the Hindu Architecture of Ancient Pakistan. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Monier-Williams, M. [1872] 1995. A Sanskrit–English Dictionary: Etymologically and Philologically
Arranged, with Special Reference to Cognate Indo-European Languages. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Müller, F. M. (trans.) 1879. The Upanishads, 2 vols, www.sacred-texts.com/hin/upan/index.htm.
Nietzsche, F. W. 1994. On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. C. Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Olivelle, P. 2010. ‘The Temple in Sanskrit Legal Literature’, in H. P. Ray (ed.), Archaeology and Text: The
Temple in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 191–204.
Patañjali 2008. Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra: Translation, Commentary and Introduction, trans. S. Ranganathan.
Delhi: Penguin Black Classics.
Plotinus 1969. The Enneads, trans. S. Mackenna. 4th ed., London: Faber.
Rāmānuja 1991. Śrī Rāmānuja Gītā Bhāṣya, trans. S. Adidevanada. Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math.
——1996. (Śrī Bhāṣya/Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya) Vedānta Sūtras with the Commentary of Rāmānuja, trans. G.
Thibaut. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Ranganathan, S. 2007. Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Rodhe, S. O. 1946. Deliver Us from Evil: Studies on the Vedic Ideas of Salvation. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup.
Said, E. W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Śaṅkara (Ādi) 1983. Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya, trans. S. Gambhirananda. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama.
Santucci, J. A. 1976. An Outline of Vedic Literature. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press for the American Academy
of Religion.
The Satapatha-brâhmana, according to the Text of the Mâdhyandina School 1882. Trans. J. Eggeling, 5 vols.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Schopenhauer, A. 1909. The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp. 7th ed., London: Kegan
Paul, Trench, Trübner.
Schweitzer, A. 1936. Indian Thought and its Development, trans. C. E. B. Russell. New York: Henry Holt.
Taliaferro, C. 2015. ‘Cambridge Platonism’, in C. Taliaferro and C. Meister (eds), The History of Evil. London:
Routledge.
18 Buddhism
Peter Harvey

The Buddha and his context

‘Buddha’, the ‘Awakened One’ or ‘Enlightened One’, is a title applied to
Siddhattha Gotama (Pali; Sanskrit, Siddhārtha Gautama) who lived and taught in
north-east India, and recent scholarship assesses his dates as around 484–404 BCE.
He came from a small republic in the foothills of the Himalayas, his father having
been elected as its ruler by a council of household heads (perhaps qualified by age
or social standing). Later tradition saw Gotama as having been a ‘prince’. Brought
up in considerable comfort by the standards of his day, he nevertheless came, in
his twenties, to reflect on the limitations of such a life. Realizing that, like others,
he was not immune to ageing, sickness, and death, the ‘vanities’ of youth, health,
and life left him (A.I.145–6). He therefore set out to find the ‘unborn, unageing,
undecaying, deathless, sorrowless, undefiled, uttermost security from bondage –
Nirvāṇa’ (M.I.163) by becoming a wandering religious seeker, a samaṇa (Pali; Skt,
śramṇa).
Samaṇas or ‘renunciants’ belonged to various different groups – Jains, fatalists,
materialists, and sceptics – who were critical of the dominant Vedic tradition (see
chapter 17), with its ‘revealed’ body of sacred oral texts passed on by brahmin
priests. The samaṇas sought their own routes to liberating truth. These had in
common a renunciation of normal family life and worldly comforts, so as to live
simple lives, supported by donated alms food: lives that facilitated ascetic
mastery of sense desires and attachments and provided scope for religio-
philosophical investigation and debate. Overall, this questioning of a received,
‘divinely based’ tradition by a range of new perspectives parallels the situation in
ancient Greece around the time of Socrates (469–399 BCE). The idea of beings as
subject to repeated rebirths, which had been enunciated in the brahmanic
Upaniṣads in the previous few centuries, was becoming increasingly influential
among samaṇas, though some rejected or doubted it.
Gotama became a samaṇa and spent six years in his quest. First, he learnt how
to attain two subtle, mystical, ‘formless’ states: ‘nothingness’ and
‘neitherperception-nor-non-perception’. These transcended the body and
perceptual ‘forms’, but he found them still subject to impermanence and hence
death. Next he tried harsh asceticism, involving no washing and extreme fasting,
to master bodily desires and develop self-mastery. While he became very
proficient in such practices, he came to see them as unhelpfully harsh and one-
sided (S.V.421).
Having tried the methods then available, he nearly gave up his spiritual quest
(M.I.246). However, he then remembered a meditative state known as the ‘first
jhāna’ (Skt, dhyāna), which he had once spontaneously entered when sitting at
the foot of a tree. He recollected that this was beyond involvement in sense-
pleasures, which he had been attempting to conquer by painful ascetic practices,
but was accompanied by deep calm, blissful joy, and tranquil happiness. He thus
resolved to use this as a path to awakening/enlightenment.
Once he had taken replenishing food, Gotama sat down to meditate through
the night, using mindful awareness of breathing to develop deep states of mental
unification. This approach neither focused beyond physicality, as in ‘formless’
mystical states, nor sought forceful mastery of the body and its needs and desires,
as in painful ascetic practice. It is said (M.I.247–9) that he entered the first jhāna,
then gradually deepened his state of concentrated calm till he reached the fourth
jhāna, a state of great equanimity, mental brightness, and purity. He then
developed the ‘threefold knowledge’ – i.e., memory of many of his countless
previous lives, seeing the rebirth of others according to their karma/actions (with
good actions leading to pleasant rebirths and bad ones to unpleasant rebirths),
and the destruction of the āsavas (Skt, āśravas) – spiritual ‘taints’ or ‘intoxicating
inclinations’ – which fester in the mind and keep it unawakened. As a
consequence, he was now, at the age of thirty-five, a Buddha, with joyful direct
experience of the unconditioned Nirvāṇa (Skt; Pali, Nibbāna), also known as the
‘Deathless’.
Over 45 years, Gotama then taught his monks or nuns – his core disciples –
together with lay followers and supporters. These included many who became
spiritually transformed so as to become ‘noble ones’, who were fully liberated
Arahats (Pali; Skt, Arhat), like him, or who were at least ‘stream-enterers’, certain
to attain Arahatship within seven lives (at most).

Saṃsāra – the conditioned realm of repeated rebirths

The Buddha taught that past rebirths were innumerable and that the process of
‘wandering on’ (saṃsāra) from life to life would continue indefinitely if nothing
was done about it. Each birth was the key condition for the ageing, sickness, and
eventually death that would follow it, and it entailed many mental and physical
pains as well as fleeting pleasures. Some rebirths would be in long-lasting, but
not eternal hellish realms, like prolonged nightmares, or as a frustrated ghost, or
as some form of animal (whether mammal, reptile, bird, fish, or insect), or as a
power-hungry asura spirit: these were the unfortunate kinds of rebirths that were
the natural karmic results of unethical actions. The fortunate rebirths were as a
human or as a god (deva or brahmā) in one of many kinds of long-lasting,
heavenly realms, which correspond to and are seen as caused by human ethical
actions and meditative attainments. Yet even these more positive rebirths are
marked by death, limitations, and pains, however subtle.
The Buddha did not see the gods as having any hand in the creation of the
world. Many brahmins believed in an overarching creator God, Great Brahmā.
While the Buddha accepted that Brahmā existed, as a being rich in loving-
kindness and compassion, he taught that Brahmā was mistaken in believing that
he had created other beings (D.I.18; Harvey 2013: 36–7). The Buddha saw the
entire universe, with its many world-systems spread out in space (A.I.227), and
the many kinds of being (as above) that inhabited many of them, as governed by
natural laws, leading them to go though vast cosmic cycles of arising, sustained
existence, destruction, quiescence, and rearising.

The painfulness of things: its causes and the path to

overcoming it
The Buddha’s teachings focused on the existential problem of suffering. He
taught ‘I set forth just this: dukkha and the cessation of dukkha’ (e.g., M.I.140).
The word dukkha (Pali; Skt, duḥkha) refers to the mental and physical pains of
life, gross or subtle – grief, disappointment, frustration, unease, dissatisfaction, a
sense of existential fragility – and the painful, stressful, unsatisfactory aspects of
life that engender these. It is both a noun, meaning ‘pain’, ‘suffering’, ‘the
painful’, and an adjective, meaning ‘painful’, ‘stressful’, ‘unsatisfactory’. It does
not mean ‘evil’, but it does encompass the kinds of things denoted by ‘natural
evil’ in the West.
In his first sermon (S.V.420–24), the Buddha summed up dukkha thus:

Now this, monks, for the spiritually ennobled, is the painful (dukkha) true
reality (ariya-sacca): birth [i.e., being born] is painful, ageing is painful,
illness is painful, death is painful; sorrow, lamentation, (physical) pain,
unhappiness and distress are painful; union with what is disliked is painful;
separation from what is liked is painful; not to get what one wants is painful;
in brief, the five bundles of grasping-fuel are painful.

This describes various unwanted aspects of life in a changing and conditioned

world. The ‘bundles of grasping-fuel’ are material form, including the body;
pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral feeling; perceptual interpretation of sense-input;
volitional activities in the form of will and various emotional reactions; and
consciousness. These are each bundles (Pali, khandha; Skt, skandha) of
impermanent and conditioned processes that make up a person and are the focus
of grasping (upādāna), so as to be wrongly taken as, or as the possession of, an
autonomous, permanent self. While the brahmanic Upaniṣads saw the route to
liberation as coming to know one’s inner Self (Skt, ātman) as an eternal and
inviolable essence, the Buddha taught that taking anything as Self that was not
Self would lead to suffering, as what one took to be one’s permanent Self came to
change and slip away. While the Upaniṣads thought a true, genuine Self could be
found, the Buddha saw everything as non-Self: there is not anything, not even
Nirvāṇa, which is worthy of grasping as one’s supposed real Self; it is in letting
go, non-clinging, that liberation lies.
 In his first sermon, the Buddha identified the key condition for the arising of
the pains of life and repeated lives as craving (Pali, taṇhā; Skt, tṛṣṇa): craving
sense-pleasures, the attainment of a certain identity or mode of being in this or a
future life, or the ending of disliked experiences or situations, which in extremis
might lead to suicide. Taṇhā, literally ‘thirst’, is not just any ‘desire’ – for desire
(chanda) can be wholesome and for good things. Taṇhā refers to demanding,
clinging desires, a driven restlessness ever on the lookout for new objects to focus
on ‘now here, now there’. This propels people into situations that are open to
pain, disquiet, and upset. The stronger a person craves, the greater the frustration
when the demand for lasting and wholly satisfying fulfilment is perpetually
disappointed by a changing and unsatisfactory world. Craving also brings pain in
that it leads to conflict between individuals and groups (D.II.59–61) and
motivates people to perform actions with karmic results shaping further rebirths,
with their attendant dukkha.
Craving is fed by spiritual ignorance (Pali, avijjā; Skt, avidyā): an ingrained
misperception of reality that does not recognize how conditioned things are
dukkha, and thus wrongly seeks from them true and lasting happiness. Another
cause of dukkha is ‘views’ (Pali, diṭṭhi; Skt, dṛṣṭi): beliefs, theories, opinions or
worldviews, especially when they become fixed or dogmatic, so that one
identifies fully with a way of looking at something, a way of explaining it. One is
then wounded if that theory is criticized and is willing to be underhand in its
defence. It becomes a pair of blinkers which enables one to see only certain
things, narrowing one’s whole outlook on life. It may contain some truth, but one
always needs to be open to a deepening of that truth or to a balancing by a
complementary one. ‘Views’ are seen as hidden forms of self-assertion (Sn. 842–
3), which lead to conflict with those of other opinions (A.I.66), be this in the form
of verbal wrangling or ideological wars and bloody revolutions that ‘justify’
horrors. Indeed, Buddhism holds that a wrong view feeds bad behaviour (A.I.30–
32), and that the worst way of doing a bad act is when it is accompanied by a
view that perversely sees it as ‘right’ (Harvey 2000: 55–6). Moreover, there are
harmful views that see one’s actions as beyond one’s control, or as of no
significance, with no karmic consequences.
Buddhism sees affective and cognitive faults as feeding into each other:
misperception of the nature of reality leads to unskilful mind-states and actions,
and mental agitation makes it more difficult to see things as they truly are. Hence
it is necessary both to still the mind, by cultivating meditative calm, and to cut at
the deep roots of spiritual ignorance, by means of experientially based insight.
Dukkha is the first of the four key dimensions of reality, the ‘True Realities for
the Spiritually Ennobled’ (Pali, ariya-sacca; Skt, ārya-satya).1 The second of them
is craving, the key condition for the arising of dukkha; the third is the cessation
of craving, entailing the cessation of dukkha – i.e., Nirvāṇa; and the fourth is the
way leading to the cessation of dukkha: the ‘Noble Eight-Factored Path’: right
view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right
mindfulness, and right mental unification. In practising this, increasing joy and
happiness arise as the mind calms down and becomes less stressed. Yet even the
bliss of deep meditation is to be contemplated as impermanent, subtly dukkha,
and non-Self. Only the unconditioned, timeless Nirvāṇa is beyond all dukkha.

The mind and negative mental states

A common list of states that hinder the cultivation of wisdom and meditative
clarity is constituted by the five ‘hindrances’: sensual desire, ill will, dullness and
lethargy, restlessness and worry, and wavering doubt as regards what is
wholesome. These are suspended both when a person intently listens to inspiring
teaching and when the mind enters the jhānas. In the latter, the mind experiences
its background lucid clarity and brightness, normally obscured by the hindrances:
‘This mind is brightly shining, but it is defiled by defilements which arrive’
(A.I.10). That is, the deepest layer of the mind is bright and pure. Yet, while such
a state presents an excellent opportunity for developing liberating insight, it alone
is not enough to be permanently free of the hindrances and other defilements.
The natural radiance of the mind can again become obscured, when the mind
leaves jhāna, if one mishandles one’s relationship with and responses to sense-
objects.
Even a newborn child is not seen as having a wholly pure mind, for it is said to
have unskilful latent tendencies – for example, to lust and ill will – which are
carried over from a previous life (M.I.433). For true liberation, there must be
destruction of the four deep-seated ‘taints’, or ‘intoxicating inclinations’ towards:
sense-pleasures; ‘being’ and a prized identity; clinging to views; and spiritual
ignorance (M.I.54–5).

The roots and nature of moral evil

Buddhism has a strong ethical emphasis, understanding karma in terms of
intentional ethical or unethical action rather than in mainly ritual terms (as did
the brahmins). There are two basic kinds of terminology for good and bad
actions. The first draws on pre-Buddhist terminology: good actions are puñña
(Pali; Skt, puṇya) ones – they are fortunate, auspicious, and bring beneficial
karmic fruits in the form of happy experiences and fortunate rebirths. Puñña is
often translated as ‘meritorious’, but this wrongly suggests that such actions are
deserving of reward, whereas the concept is of good actions as naturally leading
to happy results. The opposite of puñña actions are called either apuñña,
inauspicious or harmful, or pāpa: ‘evil’, ‘bad’, ‘infertile’, ‘barren’, or ‘bringing ill
fortune’ (Cousins 1996: 156).
As well as this kind of terminology, focusing on what actions lead to due to the
workings of the law of karma, another, more particular to Buddhism, focuses on
the nature of the actions themselves. Good actions and inner states are described
as kusala (Pali; Skt, kuśala), ‘wholesome’ – coming from a morally healthy state
of mind and nurturing this – and ‘skilful’ – informed by wisdom (Cousins 1996).
Bad actions are akusala – unwholesome, unskilful – and the early texts say in
relation to such actions that (Harvey 2011; 2013: 265): 1) unwise attention,
focusing on the alluring or irritating aspects of existence, feeds greed, hatred, and
delusion, which are both ‘the unwholesome’ and the roots, along with fear, that
sustain 2) ‘the unwholesome’, that is the killing of any sentient being, theft and
cheating, sexual misconduct; lying, divisive speech, angry speech, frivolous
chatter; covetousness, ill will, and wrong views, that are all criticized by the wise
and 3) are intentional, of unwholesome volition, corrupt, dark, and blameable (by
the wise), as they bring pain and injury to oneself or to others in a way that is
anticipatable by correct perception of the immediate facts of the situation, such
that one should not inflict on others what one would not like inflicted on oneself,
4) which, in its karmic results, brings harm and pain to the agent in this and later
lives, 5) as well as unwholesome character tendencies, obscuring wisdom and
moving one away from Nirvāṇa.
 Wholesome actions and states of mind have the opposite qualities and are
sometimes summarized as ones rooted in non-greed (generosity, renunciation),
non-hatred (loving-kindness, compassion), and non-delusion (wisdom,
mindfulness).

The influence of other people

Buddhism also emphasizes that friends may influence one for good or ill, so one
should choose them carefully (D.III.18–88). Moreover, it accepts that social
conditions can influence people towards evil. In an account of a line of past
emperors, it is said that when, for the first time, one of them allowed poverty to
develop it led to the development of theft. When poor thieves were then given
what they needed, theft increased, so that thieves were then executed, leading on
to their killing those they robbed, so that they could not bear witness against
them (D.III.64–8).

The results of karma

Particular bad or good things that happen to one are seen as potentially the result
of past bad or good intentional actions (i.e., karma) done in this or earlier lives.
Bad things are not all seen as due to karma, though, for it is said that unpleasant
feelings or illnesses can arise ‘from bile, phlegm, or wind, from union (of bodily
humours), from seasonal changes, from disruptive circumstances through
exertion (of oneself or another person), or from the fruition of karma’ (S.IV.230–
31; A.V.110). While all voluntary actions are seen as having karmic results, this
does not mean that all that happens is a karmic result; karma is one cause among
many in life. The Buddha saw it as wrong to hold that all experiences and
associated actions are because of past karma, or to the diktat of a God, or to pure
chance (A.I.173; M.II.214).
Karmic results include one’s form of rebirth, social class at birth, general
character, some of the crucial good and bad things which happen to one, and
whether it is pleasant or unpleasant things that one tends to notice more. As a
person never knows what aspect of any situation may have been determined by
karma, difficult situations are not to be passively accepted, but one should do
one’s best to improve them; only when things happen in spite of efforts to avert
them can they be put down to past karma.

Mahāyāna perspectives
In the centuries following the Buddha’s death, Buddhism gradually developed a
number of monastic fraternities with slightly different monastic codes and small
doctrinal differences. Of these, the only fully surviving one is the Theravāda.
From the first century BCE, a new movement with a range of new teachings also
came to develop, the Mahāyāna or ‘Great Vehicle’. It put greater emphasis on
compassion and came to see the conditioned world as non-different from
Nirvāṇa, for, if seen with wisdom, the problems of life were empty of any
substantial reality.
The Mahāyāna also developed the idea of the Tathāgata-garbha, a radiant seed
of Buddhahood present in all beings (Harvey 2013: 138–45). Some interpretations
of this – also known as the ‘Buddha-nature’ – saw it as the potential for
Buddhahood; others saw it as already existent Buddhahood, which just needed to
be uncovered and acted on. It was seen as ‘brightly shining’, as early Buddhism
viewed the basic nature of mind (see above, p. 260), and as free from greed,
hatred, and delusion. The Śrīmālā-devī-siṃhanāda Sūtra (Srim., c. 300 BCE) says
that such defilements are ultimately rooted in beginningless ignorance but that
only a Buddha can comprehend how this can co-exist with the pure
Tathāgatagarbha. Here, one can see a Buddhist version of the problem of evil –
i.e., how does evil originate? Buddhism avoids the ‘theological’ problem of evil,
or how an omnibenevolent, all-powerful, and omniscient God can allow evil, but
a similar problem arises. This is because the Tathāgata-garbha is seen as the
foundation and support of both ‘inconceivable Buddha qualities’ (Srim. ch. 13)
and saṃsāra, which must include the defilements. The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra (fourth
century CE) actually says that the Tathāgata-garbha ‘holds within it the cause for
both wholesome and unwholesome actions, and by it all forms of existence are
produced. Like an actor it takes on a variety of forms’ (220). This was probably
meant in the sense that the minds of sentient beings – and the Tathāgata-garbha
is seen as the inner nature of the mind – are both what sustain the round of
rebirths and what have a potential for the realization of Nirvāṇa. It can also be
pointed out that only when there is a mind can there be evil. Anything non-
sentient, such as a stone, can be neither good nor evil.
It is also said that the defilements are insubstantial, unreal, but are imagined
by the deluded mind. Why these illusions should be imagined is not explained,
however; only a Buddha can know.

Māra, the Evil One

Buddhism recognizes many different kinds of beings, including a variety of
earthbound spirit-beings such as yakkhas (Pali; Skt, yakṣa), as also recognized by
Vedic and popular Indian religion, who can cause fear and disruption in people’s
lives (Ling [1962] 1997: 15–29). In Buddhism, protection against them is afforded
by living an ethical life and chanting certain Buddhist texts (parittas), seen to
have a protective power on account of their enunciation of the Buddha’s truth
and encouragement of such qualities as kindness.
A Buddhist innovation consists in the idea of a being who is the overarching
embodiment of evil tendencies and an enemy of those on the path to liberation
(Malalasekera 1974). Trevor Ling says that Buddhism recognized

a ‘power’ which is opposed to Enlightenment, an enemy who besets the way

of all who would enter into that state. This power seeks to disturb the
disciple in his meditation and to prevent knowledge of Enlightenment being
communicated to others. With the majority of mankind his work is easy;
against those who threaten to leave his realm, his greatest efforts are put
forth; against those who are Enlightened, he is totally powerless, and all his
attempts are folly.
(Ling [1962] 1997: 52)

This is the deity known as ‘Māra’, who ‘emerges from the background of popular
demonology, and has obvious affinities with it’ (ibid.: 44). He often makes loud
noises, appears in various forms, beautiful or ugly, upholds traditional forms of
religion, and can possess people and enter their bodies (ibid.: 45). He ‘reviles,
inclines toward sense desires, attacks; blinds and perplexes; obstructs and
interrupts; possesses and holds in bondage; and kills and destroys’ (Boyd 1975:
77).
Māra is also known as ‘Pāpimā’, the ‘Bad/Evil One’, whose name echoes the
Pāpmā Mṛtyu, ‘Evil Death’, enemy of the Vedic deity Indra. In Buddhism,
however, Māra is the more important figure. As regards the meaning of ‘Māra’

the name is closely connected with Maccu (Skt, Mṛtyu). But the form Māra
expresses the character of this allegorical-mythological form more
intelligibly than Mṛtyu, for, while Mṛtyu indicates death itself, Māra is a
nomen actoris to the causative mārayati; thus, etymologically, Māra
indicates the god who slays or causes to die.
(Ling [1962] 1997: 56)

So the word māra means ‘death-bringing’, ‘deadly’, and Māra is ‘the Deadly
One’. One commentary says: ‘He is Māra since, in inciting beings (to do) that
which is to their detriment, he kills (māreti) them’ (Ud–a.325).
Māra’s name highlights his deathly nature, as with Vedic Mṛtyu, but his
activities are typical of Kāma, the Vedic god embodying the creative impulse of
sensual desire (Ling [1962] 1997: 65). Māra tries to weigh people down by keeping
them within his sphere of influence, namely the field of sense-pleasures. He is a
tempter-deity, intent on encouraging both bad behaviour and conventional
behaviour, even religious behaviour such as brahmanic sacrifice, which keeps
people entranced by the attractive aspects of the conditioned world and hence
closed to the path of liberation. He is a living embodiment of spiritual ignorance
and the clinging attachment fed by it.
Each inhabited region of the universe is said to have its Māra, and a Māra is
not eternal but the current holder of a kind of cosmic position. The structure of
things is such that there will nearly always be a Māra in a world-system, but, like
all gods, individual Māras eventually die. In the course of time, they may change
their ways and even attain enlightenment. Indeed, the Arahat Moggallāna says
he was once a Māra during the life of a past Buddha (M.I.333–8).
A Māra is one of the main kinds of being in the world, for the Buddha is said
to know ‘this world with its devas, Māra(s), brahmās’ (D.I.87), and the most
significant beings include Māra, Sakka (see below), Great Brahmā, and the
Buddha (M.III.66). Only the Buddha and his enlightened disciples, however, can
recognize Māra behind his wily disguises. The early texts give only hints as to his
location within the levels of reality, levels pertaining to any world-system as
described by Buddhism. These levels are as follows: four ‘formless’ heavenly
worlds beyond anything pertaining to the five senses; sixteen heavens of the
elemental form-level, populated by brahmā deities, with the most notable being
the Great Brahmā of the third lowest of these worlds; and beings of the ‘realm of
sense-desires’ (kāmaavacara), in which perception is coloured by sensory
attraction and aversion.
We can break down the realm of sense-desires in the following way.

1 The devas of the sense-desire realm. These consist in the Masters of the
Creations of Others; Those who Delight in Creating; the Contented Ones;
the Yama gods; the Thirty-Three gods, headed by Sakka; and the gods of
the Four Kings, whose subjects include various nature-spirits such as
yakkhas.
2 Humans
3 Unfortunate rebirths. These are as asuras, hungry ghosts, animals and
hell-beings.

The assembly of Māra’s retinue is listed between the assembly of the Thirty-
Three gods and the assembly of brahmās (D. II.109; M.I.72), and Māra is
occasionally called Vasavatti (Jat.I.232), who is elsewhere the chief deity of the
highest deva realm, that of ‘Masters (Vasavatti) of the Creations of Others’. The
Theravādin commentaries thus come to say he is ‘the ruler of the six spheres of
sense-desires’ (It-a.II.188, cf. Jat.I.231). Moreover, the deity Pajāpatī,2 listed at
M.I.2 between devas and Brahmā, is identified with Māra:

Māra alone is intended here by the word ‘Pajāpatī’, for he is overlord of this
generation (pajāya) of living beings. Where does he reside? In the deva
world of Masters of the Creations of Others. Some say that the king of the
Masters exercises rule there, while Māra lives in one region wielding
sovereignty over his own retinue, like a rebel prince in the frontier region of
a kingdom.
(M-a.I.33–4)
 Māra seeks to rule the realm of sense-desires rather than to transcend it, and,
given his dwelling place, he sits in the middle of the levels of existence. As he
dwells in a heaven, he has good karma behind him but, like the ‘Satan’ of
Christianity, who is seen as a fallen angel, his previous goodness has gone awry.
Like a charismatic but ego-driven cult leader, he uses his powers to try to
manipulate other beings into coming under his sway, rather than helping them.
The Buddha says ‘I do not consider any power so hard to conquer as the power
of Māra’ (D.III.78–9; cf. A.II.17). Accordingly, his influence extends even into
heavens that are higher and subtler than his own, thereby influencing Baka the
Brahmā, for instance, to view what is impermanent as permanent (M.I.326–7).
The commentaries say that all worlds of rebirth, however subtle, are ‘Māra’s
realm’ (M-a.II.266), for any rebirth inevitably ends in death.
Alternative names for Māra are Kaṇha/Dark One, Adhipati/Ruler, Antaka/
End-Maker, Antagū/Gone to the End, Namuci/Non-Releaser (a drought demon in
the Vedas, opposed to Indra), Pamatta-bandhu/Kinsman of the Negligent. His
dark, deluded nature is contrasted with the brightness of the ardent meditator,
who disperses Māra’s army like the sun illuminating the sky (Ud.3; cf. It.51).
Māra is the opponent of the Buddha – one who works at cultivating bad qualities,
just as the Buddha has perfected good qualities. On the night of his
enlightenment, the Buddha is seen to have attained victory over Māra, being
‘crusher of Māra’s host’ (D.III.96).
The Padhanā Sutta (Sn.425–49) outlines a temptation sequence occurring when
Gotama was ‘intent upon striving’ for his goal, which later texts (e.g., Ndk.72–4)
see as just prior to his attaining jhāna and then enlightenment. Māra – here
called Namuci and Kaṇha, and also a yakkha – urged Gotama to abandon his
quest and to take up a more conventional religious life of sacrifice and good
works, so as to generate good karma. In response, Gotama said he had no need of
more good karma, and he scorned Māra’s ‘armies’: sensual pleasures (kāma),
discontent, hunger and thirst, craving, dullness and lethargy, fear, wavering
doubt, hypocrisy, obstinacy, gain, renown, self-praise, and disparaging others. He
says that these will not move him from where he meditates, and he will defeat
them with wisdom. Namuci replies that he has followed him for seven years,
seeking an opportunity to gain power over him, but he has failed, being like a
crow pecking a stone after thinking it was a lump of fat.
 This account, clearly portraying the final inner struggle of Gotama, gains
dramatic colour in the biographies/hagiographies of the Buddha of the first to
third centuries CE: the Mahāvastu, Lalitavistara, Buddhacarita, and Nidānakathā
(Guruge 1997: 11–17; Strong 2001: 70–73; Thomas 1949: 71–80). Passages from
these texts describe how Māra’s ‘army’ of spiritual faults bore witness to the fact
that he had done many charitable acts in previous lives. Taunting Gotama that he
had no one to bear witness to his good deeds, Māra tried to use the power derived
from his own good karma to throw Gotama off the spot where he was sitting.
Gotama did not move, however, but meditated on the spiritual perfections that he
had developed over many previous lives, knowing that he had a right to the spot
where he sat. He then touched the earth, so that it should bear witness to the
good karma he had generated in past lives. The earth shook, and the earth
goddess appeared, wringing from her hair a flood of water, accumulated in the
past when Gotama had formalized good deeds by a simple ritual of water-
pouring (Strong 2001: 72). At the quaking and flood, Māra and his army fled. This
is commemorated as a victory over evil by countless Buddhist images and
paintings (Guruge 1997: 18–22). These show Gotama seated cross-legged in
meditation, with his right hand touching the earth – the ‘conquest of Māra’ (Pali,
māra-vijaya) or ‘earth-witness’ (Skt, bhūmi-sparśa) gesture.
The Māra-saṃyutta (S.I.103–27) describes several occasions when Māra tried
to tempt the Buddha, whether through actions or through words in verse, though,
at the end of each episode, ‘Māra the Evil One’ realizes ‘The Blessed One knows
me’ and, sad and disappointed, disappears. These occasions can be grouped into
four types. In the first of these, one sees Māra or his ‘daughters’ trying to
persuade the Buddha or monks, as young persons, to delight in family life and
possessions, not to live in woods beyond normal social interactions, and not to be
concerned over the shortness of life. Once, probably in the fifth week after the
Buddha had attained enlightenment, it is said that Māra had been following him
for seven years, ‘seeking to gain access to him but without success’. Māra now
asks him whether he meditates alone in the wood because he is sorrowful, or
pines for lost wealth, or has committed a crime, and why doesn’t he find
companions? The Buddha repudiates Māra’s charges, saying he is without the
clinging thoughts of ‘mine’ that Māra encourages (S.I.122–4). Māra then goes
away dejected, and his daughters – ‘Craving’, ‘Discontent’, and ‘Lusting’ – say
they will use lust to bring whoever has grieved him back under his control; but
Māra says the Buddha has gone beyond his realm. Nevertheless, they go to the
Buddha to tempt him, each appearing as a hundred women, of various
appearances, to try to find a form that will attract him – all to no avail. Māra
later says that what they have been trying to do is like battering a mountain with
a flower or chewing on iron; the Buddha had swept them away like the wind
blows a tuft of cotton (S.I.273–9). In some later texts, this episode is added to that
of Māra’s attempt to tempt the Buddha on the night of his enlightenment.
Another time, the Buddha was teaching his monks that life is short and that
there is no avoiding death (maraṇa), so one should act in a wholesome way to
aid a good rebirth or transcend rebirth. Māra appears and says that the human
life-span is long, so one should, like a baby, be unconcerned by death and be
attached to life; the Buddha replies that one should always be aware of death
(maccu; S.I.108). On another occasion, some monks are intently practising near
the Buddha, and Māra appears to them in the form of an old man, who asks them
why, being young, they do not enjoy sensual pleasures, saying, ‘Do not abandon
what is directly visible in order to pursue what takes time.’ While they do not,
like the Buddha, recognisze him as Māra, they reply that it is sense-pleasures that
are time-consuming and problematic, while the Dhamma they practise brings
results immediately (S.I.117–18).
In a second type of Māra-saṃyutta passage, Māra praises harsh asceticism and
questions the need to sleep. The first two types represent Māra seeking to get
Gotama to follow two extremes, respectively sensual indulgence and harsh
asceticism, to be avoided by the Noble Eight-Factored Path as the middle way
(S.V.421). Soon after his enlightenment, when the Buddha was alone and
reflecting that it was good that he had given up ‘useless, gruelling asceticism’,
Māra came to him, saying that such asceticism is the true path to purity.
Recognizing him as ‘Māra, the Evil One’, the Buddha said he knew otherwise
(S.I.103). At another time, as the Buddha was going to sleep after meditating for
much of the night, Māra appeared and criticized him for giving way to sleep. The
Buddha says he has ended all craving, so why should he not, as an Awakened
One, sleep (S.I.107)? On another occasion, he says, ‘I can sleep in peace, full of
compassion for all beings’ (S.I.111).
In a third type of Māra-saṃyutta passage, Māra warns the Buddha of the
dangers of teaching others and encourages him to turn mountains into gold and
become a righteous ruler. These represent another pair of opposite distractions:
remaining alone with no impact on others and seeking to have a direct
sociopolitical impact. When the Buddha is teaching a large number of people,
Māra appears to him and says that doing this is not suitable, as he may get
caught up in attraction and repulsion. The Buddha points out that he is beyond
these and that he teaches from compassion (S.I.111). At another time, the Buddha,
when in seclusion, wondered if it were possible to rule in a righteous,
compassionate way, non-violently and without causing anyone suffering. Māra is
aware of this, appears to him, and encourages him to be such a ruler (hence
giving up his role as an enlightened teacher – already having been such a
Cakkavatti ruler in several past lives (A.IV.89)). The Buddha asks why he so
encourages him, and Māra replies that he has great meditative power, so he
could, if he wished, turn the Himālayas into gold (perhaps to give him the
resources to be a ruler). The Buddha replies that there is never enough gold for
one who seeks it (S.I.116–17).
In a fourth type of Māra-saṃyutta passage, Māra conjures up fearful and
beautiful forms. Soon after his enlightenment, the Buddha was sitting outside in
the drizzle in the pitch black of night, and Māra appeared in the form of a giant
elephant in order to arouse fear in him. The Buddha recognizes him as a trickster
who creates beautiful and hideous shapes, and thus defeats him (S.I.103–4).
Another time at night, in the drizzle, Māra makes a loud noise by shattering a
number of boulders, in order to excite fear in the Buddha. This does not have the
desired effect (S.I.109).
These Māra-saṃyutta passages can be seen to represent both questions that
may have arisen in Gotama’s mind and external distractions or hindrances. They
are said to arise both when the Buddha is alone on a dark night – when inner
thoughts can take on visible or audible form – and when teaching others, when
there is a flow of ideas that may prompt reflection on various possibilities.
Nevertheless, as the passages concern the Buddha, one who is seen to have
destroyed the roots of any unwholesomeness, the potentially distracting forms or
tempting suggestions are not presented as coming from unresolved tensions
within the Buddha himself. They can perhaps be seen as neutralized echoes of
pre-enlightened thoughts, as when one calls to mind things one would no longer
do now – and with Māra as a real external being who is trying to encourage
them back to life, like a sophisticated email scammer seeking to find a ‘hook’ to
tempt someone into a foolish action. In an oral culture like Gotama’s, problematic
and possibly tempting views cannot be presented in written form, as in
newspapers, magazines, books, websites, and emails, but can be presented only in
person-toperson verbal form. And here the presenter is Māra, the manipulator.
Following the above passages, the Bhikkhunī-saṃyutta (S.I.128–35) discusses
how Māra tried to tempt several enlightened nuns who are alone and about to
meditate. One rebuffs Māra’s suggestion that she should go and enjoy sensual
pleasures, saying that ‘Sensual pleasures are like swords and stakes; the bundles
[of processes making up a person] are like their chopping block’; another rebuffs
his suggestion that women can’t attain enlightenment.
Elsewhere, it is said:

For whatever they grasp at in the world, by that very thing Māra follows a
being.
(Sn.1103; cf. S.III.74)

Whoever lives contemplating attractive things, with senses unguarded,

immoderate in food, indolent, inactive, him Māra truly overthrows, like the
wind a weak tree.
(Dhp.7)

If a person welcomes and clings to any desirable objects of the five senses or
mind, then he

has entered Māra’s lair, has come under Māra’s control; Māra’s snare has
been fastened to him so that he is bound by the bondage of Māra and the
Evil One can do with him as he wishes.
(S.IV.91; cf. D.II.262; It. 56, 92–3)

Again, anger is ‘death’s snare hidden in the heart’ (A.IV.98), and Māra’s hook is
in the form of ‘gains, favours and flattery’ (S.II.226, 227).
Among the early schools, the Pubbaseliyas and Aparaseliyas believed that a
Māra-related deity could cause an Arahat to have a wet dream, so as to cause
others to doubt his attainment. The Theravādins, though, denied that a genuine
Arahat could have a wet dream (Kvu.163–72; Vin.I.295). Nevertheless, the
discourses in the Theravāda collection say that Māra once entered the belly and
bowels of one of the Buddha’s enlightened disciples, Moggallāna, making them
heavy, but he is recognized, and so leaves by his mouth (M.I.333). They also say
that the Buddha’s attendant monk, Ānanda, admits that, when he failed to ask
the aged Buddha to live for a kappa (D.II.103, 115) – which normally means an
aeon, but here may mean a full human span of a hundred years – his mind was
possessed by Māra (Vin. II.289) – though, at that time, he was not yet fully
enlightened.

Non-personalized māras
As well as the name of a tempter-deity, the term māra is also used to refer to
other ‘mortal’ or ‘deadly’ things, namely anything impermanent and subject to
death, summarized as the five ‘bundles’ of mental and physical processes making
up a person (see p. 258) and also as the negative, pāpa, traits found in the human
mind, which stifle its potential for enlightenment (basically, the first two of the
four True Realities for the Spiritually Ennobled).
In one passage (S.III.189; cf. S.IV. 38–9), the Buddha is asked: ‘it is said “māra,
māra”. In what way … might māra be?’ In reply, he says: ‘When there is material
form … there might be māra, or the killer (māretā), or the one who is killed
(mīyati)’, saying the same of each of the other four ‘bundles’ making up a person.
Thus one should see each of these ‘as māra, as the killer, as the one who is killed.
See it as a disease.’ Likewise, each of the bundles is ‘of the nature of māra’ (māra-
dhamma) (S.III.195), so one should abandon desire and lust for whatever is māra
– i.e., the five bundles (S.III.198).
Accordingly, it is said that one of the benefits of contemplating things as
dukkha is that disenchantment will arise towards all conditioned things, just as
towards ‘a murderer with an uplifted dagger’ (A.III.443). Moreover, the
commentary on S.III.189 says that māra here means māra as death (maraṇa) and
as the bundles. The commentator Buddhaghosa (fifth century) talks of the five
māras – namely the defilements (kilesa), the bundles (khandha), karmic activities
(abhisaṅkhāra), māra qua deity (deva-putta), and māra qua death (maccu)
(Vism.211).

Going beyond Māra

To escape Māra’s influence, it is emphasized that a Buddhist practitioner must
not wander in Māra’s domain, the five ‘cords of sensual pleasure’ (kāma-guṇa),
by indulging in them:

Monks, there are these five cords of sensual pleasure. What are the five?
Forms cognisable by the eye that are wished for, desired, agreeable and
likeable, connected with sensual desire, and provocative of lust. Sounds …
Odours … Flavours …Tangibles cognisable by the body that are …
provocative of lust. As to those renunciants and brahmins who are tied to
these five cords of sensual pleasure, infatuated with them and utterly
committed to them, and who use them without seeing the danger in them or
understanding the escape from them: ‘They have met with calamity, met
with disaster, the Evil One may do with them as he likes’
(M.I.173)

Monks, sensual pleasures are impermanent, hollow, false, deceptive; they are
illusory, the prattle of fools. Sensual pleasures … are Māra’s realm, Māra’s
domain, Māra’s bait, Māra’s hunting ground. On account of them, these evil
unwholesome (pāpa, akusala) mental states such as covetousness, ill-will
and presumption arise, and they constitute an obstruction to a noble disciple
in training here.
(M.II.261–2)

A Buddhist practitioner should keep to his or her ‘own pasture’ (D.III.58), namely
the four applications of mindfulness (satipaṭṭhāna): calm but diligent
contemplation, without desire or aversion, of the nature of the body, feelings,
mental states and spiritually relevant patterns in the flow of experience. To do
otherwise is to be like a quail who wanders away from its safe refuge in a freshly
ploughed field, where there is protection from a hawk (S.V.146; cf. S.IV.178), or
like deer attracted to a dangerous marshy area (sense-pleasures) by a man
desiring their ruin by use of a decoy (delight and lust) and a dummy (ignorance)
(M.I.117–18).
Mindful alertness combined with strong meditative concentration can also take
the mind further beyond Māra’s reach, into the jhānas that correspond to the
brahmā heavens, which are ‘above’ the heaven in which Māra dwells and are
actively immune from Māra. It is said that a monk is like a deer wandering
without fear in the forest, out of the hunter’s range, when:

Quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states,

[he] enters on and abides in the first jhāna … This monk is said to have
blindfolded Māra, to have become invisible to the Evil One by depriving
Māra’s eye of its opportunity.
(M.I.174; cf. M.I.151–9)

It is also said that a person in any of the jhānas can justly think: ‘Now I am
secure from danger and Māra cannot do anything to me’ (A.IV.433–4). We can
thus say that being in a jhāna is comparable to being in a safe citadel, while
practising mindfulness when not in jhāna is like being a well-armed, alert soldier
outside a citadel. Indeed, cultivating the seven factors of awakening –
mindfulness, Dhamma-investigation, energy, joy, tranquillity, meditative
concentration, equanimity – is ‘doing battle with Māra’ (It.75). Yet full and final
immunity from Māra requires enlightenment – the final ending of lust, hatred,
and delusion; in jhāna, these are only suspended.

Conclusion
Western philosophy and theology talk of three kinds of ‘evil’:

1 ‘moral evil’ (freely chosen bad actions);

2 ‘natural evil’ (natural disasters and illnesses);
3 ‘metaphysical evil’ (the limitations and imperfections of conditioned,
finite things).

Buddhism sees moral evil as unwholesome, unskilful, with unfortunate results,

evil/ barren, springing from greed, hatred, and delusion fed by unwise attention,
dogmatic views, and also fear. Of natural evils, it sees illnesses as sometimes the
result of past bad karma – i.e., evil actions, while they may alternatively be due
to some present physical cause. Natural disasters are not seen as a result of
karma, but karma may lead to a person’s being caught up in and affected by
these. The category of metaphysical evil broadly fits the Buddhist idea of
saṃsāra, the conditioned world of rebirth, in which ‘all conditioned things are
impermanent, are painful’. The key causes of remaining in saṃsāra, which
includes being subject to various natural evils, are craving and spiritual ignorance
and the moral evils to which these often lead, and with the figure of Māra, the
deadly ‘Evil One’ seeking to tempt people to remain engrossed by the attractions
of saṃsāra, so that they do not attain Nirvāṇa. Nirvāṇa is the destruction of
craving and ignorance, as expressed in lust/greed, hatred, and delusion, and the
consequent attainment of the timeless, ‘Deathless’ realm which lies beyond all
rebirths and their gross or subtle pains.

Abbreviations
Texts are generally referred to above by the volume and page number in the Pali
Text Society (PTS) edition of the Pali text, with published translations indicating
these page numbers in square brackets. Dhp and Sn references are to verse
number. Translations are not always the ones listed below.

A. Aṅguttara Nikāya: The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha, trans.

Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom, 2012.
D. Dīgha Nikāya: Long Discourses of the Buddha, trans. M. Walshe. 2nd
rev. ed., Boston, Wisdom, 1996.
Dhp. The Dhammapada, trans. Valerie J. Roebuck. London: Penguin, 2010.
It. The Itivuttaka, trans. P. Masefield. London: PTS, 2001.
It-a The Commentary on the Itivuttaka, trans. P. Masefield. Oxford: PTS,
2008–9.
Jat. Jātaka with Commentary: The Jātaka or Stories of the Buddha’s
Former Births, trans. by various hands under E. B. Cowell, 6 vols.
London: PTS, 1895–1907.
Kvu. Kathāvatthu: Points of Controversy, trans. S. Z. Aung and C. A. F.
 Rhys Davids. London: PTS, 1915.
M. Majjhima Nikāya: The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, trans.
Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom, 1995.
M-a. Majjhima Nikāya commentary (untranslated).
Ndk. Nidāna-kathā: The Story of the Buddha (Jātaka-nidāna), trans. N. A.
Jayawickrama. Oxford: PTS, 2002.
S. Saṃyutta Nikāya: The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, trans.
Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom, 2005.
Sn. Sutta-nipāta:The Group of Discourses, Vol. II, trans. K. R. Norman.
London: PTS, 1992.
Ud. The Udāna, trans. P. Masefield. London: PTS, 1994.
Ud-a. The Udāna Commentary, trans. P. Masefield. Oxford: PTS, 1994–5.
Vin. Vinaya Piṭaka: The Book of the Discipline, trans. I. B. Horner, 6 vols.
London: PTS, 1938–66.
Vism. Visuddhimagga: The Path of Purification: Visuddhimagga, trans.
Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli. Onalaska, WA: BPS Pariyatti, 1999.

Notes
1 While these are generally translated as ‘Noble Truths’, they are not teachings (which could be
considered ‘truths’) per se but, rather, what these refer to.
2 ‘Lord of Creatures’ – in the Vedas, Prajāpatī (Skt) is the name of the creator deity.

Further reading
Boyd, J. W. 1975. Satan and Māra: Christian and Buddhist Symbols of Evil. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Harvey, P. 2013. An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices. 2nd ed., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Jackson, R., and Makransky, J. 1999. Buddhist Theology: Critical Reflections by Contemporary Buddhist
Scholars. London: Routledge.
Ling, T. [1962] 1997. Buddhism and the Mythology of Evil: A Study in Theravāda Buddhism. Oxford:
Oneworld.
References
Boyd, J. W. 1975. Satan and Māra: Christian and Buddhist Symbols of Evil. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Cousins, L. S. 1996. ‘Good or Skilful? Kusala in Canon and Commentary’, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 3: 136–
64; http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/files/2010/04/cousins12.pdf.
Guruge, A. W. P. 1997. ‘The Buddha’s Encounters with Māra the Tempter: Their Representations in Literature
and Art’, www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/guruge/wheel419.pdf.
Harvey, P. 2000. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values and Issues. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
——2011. ‘An Analysis of Factors related to the Kusala/Akusala Quality of Actions in the Pali Tradition’,
Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, 33: 175–209.
——2013. An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices. 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ling, T. [1962] 1997. Buddhism and the Mythology of Evil: A Study in Theravāda Buddhism. Oxford:
Oneworld.
Malalasekera, G. P. [1937–8] 1974. ‘Māra’, in Dictionary of Pāli Proper Names, London: PTS, Vol. II, pp. 611–
20.
Strong, J. S. 2001. The Buddha: A Short Biography. Oxford: Oneworld.
Thomas, E. J. 1949. The Life of the Buddha as Legend and History. 3rd ed., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
19 Ancient China
Randall L. Nadeau

Introduction: evil and the grammatical nominative

As an abstract, metaphysical entity, conceptually distinct from actions or
behavioural traits to which it might be applied, ‘evil’ did not exist in ancient
China.
It is well known that Chinese ‘characters’ (the memetic units of expression in
written Chinese) are ‘pictographic’ – that is, they represent things, actions, and
qualities through ‘image’ rather than ‘sound’. As such, they are tied to ‘things
seen’ – ‘objects’ of experience or observation. Any given Chinese character
retains its ‘meaning’ (the things, actions, or qualities that it signifies) regardless
of its ‘sound’. Since there are eight major dialects of Chinese (of which Mandarin
and Cantonese are just two examples) and many subdialects, any given character
can be pronounced in at least eight different ways. With so many spoken dialects,
Chinese speakers are confronted with mutual unintelligibility in oral
communication; Mandarin speakers and Cantonese speakers simply cannot
understand one another. But the characters can be understood as soon as they are
written down. Whether appearing in an imperial decree, a classical essay, or a
modern newspaper, the characters mean the same thing, regardless of how they
are pronounced. As a consequence, in spite of the existence of mutually
unintelligible spoken dialects across a wide geographical expanse, by virtue of its
system of writing, Chinese culture has remained linguistically unified for over
two thousand years. Chinese characters are the basis of cultural unity.
The structure of classical Chinese – the language of expression of the ancient
philosophers – is not conducive to abstraction. Nor are parts of speech distinct in
the way that they are in English, where certain words (‘Chinese characters’) are
designated as nouns (with objects as their referents), verbs (with actions as their
referents), adjectives (with qualities or states of being as their referents), and so
on. In classical Chinese, characters can take on any of these roles, their syntactic
structure determined by grammatical context. Nominal memes (‘nouns’) are
syntactically inseparable from their verbal and descriptive functions (as ‘verbs’
and ‘adjectives’) and are less subject to reification. There is no such thing as a
meme – a unit of expression – that can be understood only as a noun referring to
an object, whether concrete or abstract, apart from its descriptive and dynamic
qualities. Attributes of things are not abstracted or nominalized. Consequently,
classical Chinese lacks the reified abstractions of ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘beauty’, ‘virtue’,
‘justice’, ‘rights’, and so on, even though it certainly does have expressions for
evil persons, beautiful scenes, and righteous behaviours.
For an illustration, we can examine the use of the character (shàn), the word
that most closely approximates ‘goodness’ in the classical texts.

1
‘The Master said: “If I see three people walking, there must be a teacher
for me among them. I choose their good and emulate them, and their not-
good and avoid them.”’1
In this example, (shàn) is used nominally.
2
‘Yenzi replied: “An excellent question!”’2
In this example, (shàn) is used attributively and is employed to modify a
noun.
3
‘[Mengzi] said: “I understand words. I am skilled at cultivating my flood-
like qi.”’3
In this example, (shàn) is used attributively and is employed to modify a
verb.
4
‘Lord Wenhui said: “Excellent! I have heard the words of Cook Ding, and
gained the means to nourish my life.”’4
In this example, (shàn) is used as an exclamation.
– and so on. A Chinese character can be used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, or
an adverb, depending upon context. Consequently, the syntactic range of any
character includes many parts of speech and rarely, if ever, just one. As abstract
nouns, Chinese characters never lose their attributive qualities: they are
syntactically dynamic and relational.
In Western thought, the attribution of qualities and characteristics to a thing
produces two (or more) abstractions. A ‘white horse’ suggests, in the Platonic
understanding of words and concepts, two memetic elements placed in relation to
one another: ‘whiteness’ and ‘horseness’. In order for a horse to be white, there
must be some thing – ‘whiteness’ – that exists as a nominalized abstraction in
dyadic relation with the thing to which it adheres. Similarly, a ‘good man’
describes a sub-genus of the category ‘man’, specifically a man who is
characterized by ‘goodness’. To be ‘good’ or ‘evil’ (and both of these memes are
descriptive – they are adjectives) means to display qualities of ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’
(as nominalized abstractions). Other chapters in this volume explore the linguistic
roots of good and evil. Here we can simply conclude this: in Western thought, as
soon as descriptive terms are used to characterize a thing, they are (Platonically
at least) abstracted from it. Every adjective is nominalized and becomes an
abstract entity. In this sense, as soon as there are ‘evil persons’, ‘Evil’ exists.
While modern Chinese has adopted Western linguistic conventions, identifying
certain characters with certain parts of speech, classical Chinese is notoriously
difficult to understand or to translate because of its syntactical fluidity.
Translation is subject to widely varying interpretations, and a false certitude in
the representation of certain characters as nominal memes, others as active or
descriptive memes, and so on, is inevitable when translation choices are made. In
his Language and Logic in Ancient China, Chad Hansen writes,

No Chinese philosophical system of the classical period in China was

committed to the existence of or had roles for abstract (universal) entities in
any of the traditionally important ways that Western semantics,
epistemology, ontology, or philosophy of mind had roles for abstractions.
(Hansen 1983: 37–8)

That is to say, classical Chinese philosophy does not nominalize qualities of

existence or attempt to abstract those qualities as separable conceptual entities.
Surely, the philosophers knew that people do evil things and that there are odious
acts and states of existence, but this does not mean that the ancient Chinese had a
‘concept of evil’. Such nominal abstractions are foreign to ancient Chinese
thought. Similarly, among the records of popular religious belief in the pre-Qin
period, such as appear in the Zuozhuan, the Spring and Autumn Annals, or the
Mozi, there are descriptions of ‘noxious spirits’, ‘sinister cults’, and ‘evil beings’
(often of indeterminate nature, both animal and spirit) but never an abstracted,
general, reified concept of ‘evil’ as something ‘incarnate’ within evil things. Evil
was, in other words, a quality ascribed to things and not separable from them.

The concept of ‘evil’ in Confucius’ Analects

The classical Chinese character that is most closely related to the English concept
‘evil’ is , pronounced è or wù, depending on syntax. The character can function
as a noun, an adjective, or a verb. In some contexts, it is nominalized and means
something like ‘wrongdoing’ or ‘ill intent’ (in such contexts it is pronounced è);
in other contexts, it is descriptive and means something like ‘odious’, ‘base’, or
‘disgusting’ (also pronounced è); and, in yet other contexts, it is verbal or active
and means ‘to hate’ or ‘to revile’ (and is in such contexts pronounced wù).
All three of these polysemous meanings are found in the Analects (Lúnyŭ) or
‘sayings’ of Confucius. The Analects is a collection of ‘conversations and sayings’
(the meaning of ‘Lúnyŭ’) of the ‘First Sage’, purportedly as collected by his
followers and compiled within two generations of his death. The work consists of
420 vignettes in 20 chapters. Very few explicitly address the ‘concept of evil’, but
we can examine the various contexts in which the character (è or wù) is used.

as ‘to hate’
In several passages in the Analects, the character (pronounced wù) is used as a
transitive verb and means to ‘hate’, ‘revile’, or ‘disfavour’. The Master himself
‘hates’ certain things, behaviours, or types of person.

1
‘The Master said, “It is only the benevolent man who can love others, or
 who can hate others.”’5
In this instance, (wù), to hate or ‘disfavour’, is contrasted with (hào),
to love or ‘favour’. Only the benevolent man (a concept of ‘goodness’
which we will revisit below) has the moral authority to stand in
judgement over (‘favouring’ or ‘disfavouring’) other persons.
2
‘The Master said, “Wealth and status are what men desire, but if they
cannot be reached in accordance with the Dao, they should not be
attained. Poverty and meanness are what men hate, but if they cannot be
[avoided] in accordance with the Dao, they should not be avoided.”’6
(wù), ‘to hate/dislike’, is contrasted with (yù), ‘to love/like’. Here,
‘loving’ or ‘hating’ (liking or disliking) particular goals or outcomes
should be secondary to conformity with the Way of righteousness.
Following the Way of righteousness as taught by the sage kings is more
important than both getting the things (wealth and status) that most
people want and avoiding the things (poverty and meanness) that most do
not want.

In both these examples, ‘hating’ in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing – in
other passages in the Analects, Confucius is praised for ‘hating’ gossips and
discordant music. Moreover, he praises ‘virtuous people’ who are ‘hated’ by
unvirtuous ones – for them, and for Confucius himself, to be the object of (wù)
(hatred) is a badge of honour. So, throughout the acts and sayings attributed to
Confucius, the term most often associated with ‘evil’, (wù), does not have a
negative connotation. Used verbally, meaning ‘to hate’ or ‘disfavour’, the term is
viewed positively; it is appropriate to disfavour unrighteous persons, ill-
mannered behaviours, or ill-gotten gains.

as ‘disgusting’, ‘mean’, ‘odious’

A second use of the character (è) is adjectival: it is ascriptive. Appearing before

characters used as nouns, (è) means ‘undesirable’, ‘plain’, ‘coarse’, ‘disgusting’,
and so on. What is especially interesting here is that the Master is often portrayed
as favouring conditions and things that have the quality of ‘undesirability’.
 1
‘The Master said, “A scholar who seeks the Dao and yet is ashamed of
mean clothes and coarse food is not worth talking to.”’7
(è) is used ascriptively, to describe ‘mean clothes’ or ‘coarse (even
unsavoury) food’. Here and elsewhere, Confucius expresses admiration for
gentlemen who eschew beauty and frills, the ‘good’ things in life, in their
pursuit of righteousness. Whenever the word (è) is used in this way in
the Analects, the simplicity and self-sacrifice of ‘meanness’ is praised.

as ‘wrong-doing’, ‘wickedness’, ‘things reviled’

The use of (pronounced è in this context) in the abstract, nominal sense is
relatively rare in the Analects. It is contrasted with benevolence, beauty, and
‘things preferred’. This is the only semantic structure where the character is used
in a negative sense.

1
‘The Master said, “If one seeks benevolence, there will be no
wrongdoing.”’8 Here, (è) is contrasted with (rén), wrongdoing with
benevolence. Where there is the pursuit of benevolence, there will be no
‘evil’. This is a significant contrast, since benevolence, (rén), is one of
the most important concepts in the Confucian canon. Benevolence
receives far more attention than wrongdoing, however: whereas the
nominal (è) appears only three times in the Analects, (rén) is used 110
times.
2
‘The Master said, “The gentleman completes the good qualities of others,
not their bad qualities. The petty man does just the opposite.”’9
Syntactically, (è) is being used as a noun: ‘the evil of others’ is
contrasted with ‘the good (more literally ‘beauty’, (mĕi)) of others’.
Since (mĕi) clearly means ‘beauty’ or ‘beautiful qualities’, by contrast
(è) can be translated as ‘ugliness’ or ‘odious qualities’. The passage
suggests that people have qualities of (ethical) beauty and qualities of
ugliness and should be encouraged to cultivate their beauty and to
 suppress their ugliness.
3 …
‘Zi Zhang asked Confucius, saying, “In what way should a leader conduct
government administration?” The Master replied, “He should uphold the
Five Excellences and abolish the Four Evils; he should conduct his
administration in this way” … Zi Zhang then asked, “What are meant by
the Four Evils?” The Master said, “To condemn people to death without
having instructed them – this is cruelty. To subject them to corvée labour
without proper notice – this is oppression. To issue orders in an untimely
fashion, just when the dire need arises – this is exploitation. And to be
parsimonious in rewarding the people – this is petty.”’10
The Four Evils ( ) are four kinds of action, nominalized as ‘cruelty’,
‘oppression’, ‘exploitation’, and ‘parsimony’. These behaviours are
contrasted with the Five Excellences ( ) – again the term ‘beauty’,
(mĕi), is used – describing behaviours of a virtuous ruler. This passage
contains what inductively might be the closest we find to a ‘definition of
evil’ in the Analects. However, Confucius merely illustrates petty
behaviours (subjecting the people to harsh treatment) and does not
explore evil as a universal, abstract concept.

In these three instances, we would seem to have a ‘concept of evil’ in (è). It

means ‘wrongdoing’ in contrast with benevolence, moral ‘ugliness’ in contrast
with beauty, and ‘oppressive measures’ in contrast with reasonable or
magnanimous ones. In the Analects as a whole, however, the term is used rarely
in this sense, and the positive qualities with which it is contrasted receive far
more attention.
Looking at all the instances of the word that we would most readily translate
as ‘evil’ from the Analects of Confucius, we find no concept with the
metaphysical weight or syntactical independence of religious notions of evil in
the West. As a meme of action (a transitive verb), it means ‘to hate’, and yet it is
in most instances used positively: Confucius ‘hates’ flashy things and praises the
good man who is ‘hated’ by petty persons. As a descriptive meme (an adjective),
it means ‘base’, ‘mean’, even ‘unsavoury’, and yet Confucius has nothing but
praise for the good man who is satisfied with ‘mean’ clothes and ‘unsavoury’
foods. As a meme representing a thing (a noun), it comes closest to our idea of
‘evil’, but it is limited in power and scope to wrongdoing in particular contexts
and never represents the metaphysical source of sin that we in the West associate
with ‘evil’. It does not exist independently of particular persons, things, and social
relations. Rarely abstracted, and never anthropomorphized, ‘evil’ appears rarely
in the Analects.

Discussions of good and evil in the early Confucian

corpus
The previous discussion demonstrates that the term most often translated as
‘evil’, (è, wù), does not designate abstract depravity or sin so much as a quality
of specific actions or things – and, moreover, not something (as in the case of
‘mean clothing’ and ‘unsavoury foods’) necessarily to be avoided. This is not to
say, however, that the ancient Chinese – particularly the Confucians – were not
interested in what we would call ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Despite the fact that classical
Chinese does not contain universal concepts abstracted from particular situations,
the early Confucians did speculate both on human nature and on human
tendencies to act in socially beneficial or injurious ways. In fact, they debated
this area explicitly and often.
Mencius ( , Mengzi), the so-called second sage of the Confucian tradition,
was especially interested in the moral capacities of persons. A significant
proportion of the writings attributed to him were dedicated to the topic, and he
became known in Chinese history as the philosopher who ascribed ‘innate
goodness’ to human nature. In taking this stand, Mengzi contrasted himself with
his contemporaries, especially a philosophical rival (known only by what is
reported of him in the Book of Mencius) named Gaozi ( ). <

1
‘Gaozi said, “Human nature is like rushing water. If you create an opening
for it towards the east, it will flow to the east; if you create an opening for
it towards the west, it will flow to the west. Human nature is not divisible
into ‘good’ and ‘evil’, just as water is not [inherently] divisible into east-
flowing or west-flowing.”’
 2
‘Mengzi replied, “Water indeed is not inclined to flow towards the east or
the west, but is it not inclined to flow up or down? Human nature tends
to the good just as water tends to flow downwards. No human lacks the
tendency to goodness, just as all water flows downhill. Now, by paddling
water and causing it to splash, you can make it go above your forehead,
and, by damming and redirecting it, you may force it uphill. But is this in
accordance with the natural flow of water? It is because of external force
that it behaves in this manner. The fact that humans can also be made to
do not-good is a consequence of a similar violation of their basic
natures.”’11

How did Mengzi contrast himself with Gaozi? For Gaozi, human nature is
contingent: it can be either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, depending on circumstances. If
conditions are one way, human nature ‘flows east’; if another, it ‘flows west’. Just
as water has no ‘natural tendency’ to flow one way or the other, so human nature
has no particular tendency towards good or evil. By contrast, Mengzi affirms a
natural tendency towards the good, analogous to the natural tendency of water to
flow downhill.
Mengzi’s response to Gaozi does discuss the possibility of water ‘flowing
uphill’ – and of persons doing non-virtuous things. Clearly, however, the uphill
flow of water and the doing of evil are unnatural and can be the result only of
external force or manipulation. Evil exists, but it is contra nature.
The passage cited above does not use the word ‘evil’, (è, wù), but simply ‘not
good’, (bú shàn), and describes ‘good’ and ‘not good’ as tendencies or
inclinations, like the tendency of water to flow downhill. The point of the
analogy is not so much that ‘human nature is innately good’ but, rather, that
human nature has a natural inclination towards goodness. Virtue, in other words,
is dynamic. This point was illustrated by the sinologist A. C. Graham in his
discussion of the early Chinese conception of human nature ( , xìng). In the Book
of Zhuangzi ( ), a swimmer comments on his comfort in the water, a capacity
that is so practised that it now ‘comes naturally’ to him:

1
‘I was born on land and I feel completely at ease on land: that is my basic
 endowment ( , gù). But I have grown up in the water and now I feel
completely at ease in the water: that is my nature ( , xìng).’12

Graham’s point in citing this passage is that ‘human nature’ is not something
that we are ‘born with’ but, rather, a growth potential that becomes natural to us.
For Mengzi, the tendency towards the good is a natural outgrowth of innate
capacities. Mengzi taught that this natural inclination – the seeds of virtue – was
present in us from the start. He argued that we have ‘four sprouts of virtue’: the
sprout of compassion, the sprout of disdain for wrongdoing (sometimes translated
as a ‘sense of shame’), the sprout of respect for others (sometimes translated as
‘deference’), and the sprout of approval and disapproval (the ability to distinguish
between right and wrong). Allowed to develop naturally (with guidance, not
coercion), these ‘sprouts’ develop into full virtues: compassion gives rise to
benevolence ( , rén), disdain for wrongdoing gives rise to righteousness ( , yì),
yielding gives rise to propriety ( , lĭ), and judgement gives rise to wisdom ( , zhì).

1
‘Mengzi said: “All persons have the heart which cannot bear to see the
suffering of others … When I say that all persons have the heart which
cannot bear to see the suffering of others, I mean this: if any person were
suddenly to see a toddler about to fall into a well, they would react
immediately with concern. This feeling would not arise from concerns
about the child’s parents, or from the expectation of praise from strangers
or friends, or from anxieties about a reputation for callousness if one
remained unmoved. Based on this, we know that anyone lacking
compassion is not human, anyone lacking disdain for wrongdoing is not
human, anyone lacking respect for others is not human, and anyone
lacking the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong is not
human.”’13

As for evil or wrongdoing, there is plenty of it, especially, says Mengzi, in

‘times of famine or turmoil’.14 But such behaviour is no more ‘natural’ to persons
than a mountain denuded by animals’ grazing or carpenters’ axes is ‘naturally
bare’:
 1
‘When people see it wiped clean [of vegetation], they think it was always
like this. But is that the mountain’s basic nature? And for people who lack
a heart of benevolence and righteousness, the situation is the same: their
loss of a virtuous heart is like the denuding of the mountain by axes.’15

Just as a mountain is naturally luxuriant, humans are naturally good.

Mengzi’s favourite analogy for human goodness is the growth of plants: just as
plants should receive proper sunlight and water, by analogy humans should
receive the instruction and guidance of good parents and teachers. This is the
dynamic quality of human nature cited by A. C. Graham. It is not so much that
Mengzi affirms the ‘innate goodness’ of humans as that humans are naturally
inclined to the good over the course of life; evil is an aberration and arises from
exposure to noxious influences.
There is a famous story about Mengzi that illustrates his point. The story did
not appear until several centuries after Mengzi’s death, but it became well known
and is widely repeated. The story is called ‘Meng’s mother moved thrice ( ,
Meng-mu san-qian)’, a title which is employed today as a common expression to
describe a loving parent.

1 ’ ’

‘Mengzi’s father died when he was very young. His mother, surnamed
Zhang, raised her son alone. At the beginning, they lived near a burial
ground. Mengzi picked up the habit of crying and wailing, and he and his
friends together mimicked the anguish and pain of the mourners. His
mother said: “I can’t let my son live here.”
‘So they moved next to a marketplace. Mengzi learned how to haggle
and cajole. His mother said: “This is also not a good place to live.”
‘So they moved next to a meat market, and Mengzi learned how to
butcher animals, and how to earn a living on their suffering. Again his
mother said: “This is not a place I want to raise my son either.”
‘Finally they settled down near a school, and on the first day of every
month, Mengzi witnessed the ritual performances and the gestures of
respectful greeting. Seeing this, he learned things one by one and took
 them to heart. His mother said: “This is the place where my son should
live.” And they stayed there.’16

As long as there is a proper environment for us to grow up in, our ‘sprouts’ will
naturally grow into full-fledged virtues. In fact, Confucians place great emphasis
on one’s social environment: one’s community, school, workplace, and country.
As long as these are places that encourage what is best in us – to be responsible,
caring, and involved – we will be good people. Anytime someone does something
‘anti-social’ (theft, violence against persons), it is assumed that their environment
was deficient. The pressure to preserve the reputation of one’s parents began with
Mencius and remains an abiding social psychological force in Chinese societies.
Clearly, virtue in the early Confucian corpus depends upon relationality – the
social identity of humans. Confucius expressed this value as ren ( ), meaning
‘love’, ‘kindness’, ‘benevolence’, or, literally, ‘co-humanity’. ‘Co-humanity’ works
well for this character, because graphically it is made up of two parts: the left side
referring to something ‘human’ and the right side to the number two. Persons
exist as humans in co-human contexts, in pairs, or, by extension, in relation to
others (the number two here should not be taken literally: it means ‘more than
one’). Mengzi put it very simply: ‘Being human means being co-human ( ).’17
This dynamic conception of the human capacity for good is disputed by the
‘third sage’ of the Confucian tradition, Xunzi ( ).

1
‘A man’s nature is evil; his goodness is artificial. As for human nature,
people are inclined towards self-benefit from birth. If one acts in
accordance with it, strife is strengthened and cooperation is weakened.’
2
‘From birth, there are feelings of envy and hate. If one acts in accordance
with them, thievery increases and civic-mindedness decreases.’
3
‘From birth, there arise the desires of the eyes and ears – the desires for
pleasant things to see and pleasant things to hear. If one acts in
accordance with them, chaos is strengthened and civility is weakened.’
4
 ‘So, if people follow their natures and act in accordance with their desires,
strife is inevitable and leads to discord and violence. That is why we
require the trans-formative work of our teachers and [instruction in] the
ways of righteousness. Only then will cooperation, civility, and
governability ensue. Based on these observations, it is clear that human
nature is evil and goodness is artificial.’18

In the entire Confucian corpus, this is the clearest statement that human nature
is innately ‘evil’ and that goodness is ‘artificial’ (literally ‘man-made’) and
requires personal transformation at the hands of teachers and civil society in
order to become ‘good’. As opposed to Mencius, Xunzi argued that the natural
inclination of a person is to the satisfaction of selfish desires. Xunzi agreed with
Mencius that motivations for action begin with ‘feelings’, but he did not describe
feelings in the same morally positive terms – not the moral senses of
‘compassion’, ‘shame’, ‘deference’, and so on, but rather the emotions of love,
hate, pleasure, anger, sorrow, and joy. In response to outside stimuli, these
emotions manifest themselves as desires, the satisfaction of which is self-centred
and anti-social. Since human desires are inexhaustible, their natural expression is
chaotic and competitive. If persons indulge their emotions without restraint, the
result will be wrangling and strife, violence and crime, licentiousness and
wantonness.
Whereas for Mencius the natural development of basic human feelings
produces virtue or ‘goodness’, Xunzi maintains that the natural development of
feelings produces suffering or ‘evil’. Acts of virtue (benevolence, trustworthiness,
filial piety, loyalty to the state, and so on) ‘are all contrary to a person’s nature
and run counter to the emotions’.19 Evil is the consequence of the unchecked
expression of human emotions and desires. In this sense, humans tend to be self-
interested, animalistic, and unrestrained and must acquire the ability to harness
and control their natural inclinations.
Despite his view that human nature is innately evil, Xunzi was thoroughly
Confucian in his conviction that humans are perfectible, that ‘any man can
become a sage’. This can be accomplished by the guidance of rulers and teachers,
the implementation of universal standards of behaviour, and the proper ordering
of society. ‘Goodness is acquired’ through a process of gradual ‘accumulation’ of
models of behaviour from the outside. Xunzi’s is not a doctrine of metaphysical
evil, such as that found in the West. Humans are ultimately perfectible by their
own efforts.
The key word employed by Xunzi in this context is wèi: ‘to contrive,
manipulate, or create’; ‘to deliberate’; as an attribute, ‘artificial’ (the character
literally means ‘man-made’); and, as a noun, ‘activity’, ‘construct’, or ‘artifice’.
Goodness is a human construct, invented by the sage kings of the early Zhou in
the form of laws and rites. These standards of goodness are passed down from
rulers to subjects and from teachers to students, and they can be cultivated
within individuals through education. Xunzi concluded from his negative
evaluation of human nature that education is fundamentally a moulding process
that ‘civilizes’ the young, and that public ritual ( , lĭ) is the primary means for the
creation of a prosperous and peaceful culture.
Lĭ was, of course, a defining idea for Confucius, who emphasized the broader
meaning of ‘propriety’ and ‘decency’ in all interactions, and Xunzi’s indebtedness
to Confucius on this point defined him as a Confucian thinker. In Xunzi’s terms,
lĭ are the rules of proper conduct, in both ceremonial and everyday contexts,
which can shape individuals to think less often of themselves. He does not deny
that this is a manipulative, ‘unnatural’ process. Just as straight wood can be
shaped into a wheel by a wheelwright or dull metal can be sharpened by an
artisan, a person can ‘become clear in thought and faultless in action’ through
education and the practice of lĭ.
The distinction between the natural and the artificial also applies to the
feelings and to the mind. While feelings are natural, thought is ‘artificial’ or
‘contrived’, deliberate ( , wèi).

The likes and dislikes, happiness and anger, sadness and joy of human nature
are called ‘emotions’. When the emotions are aroused and the mind chooses
among them, this is called ‘thought’. When the mind is capable of action on
the basis of deliberation, this is wèi.20

Deliberation is an ‘artificial’ moulding activity that functions to harness emotions

and to suppress their natural, selfish expression.
This capacity for overcoming natural desires distinguishes persons from
animals. It also makes social life possible, as the unchecked expression of emotion
would preclude the possibility of civil society. In Xunzi’s terms, what
distinguishes persons from animals is ‘differentiation’, ( , fēn), both as a function
of rational thought and as the basis for communal existence. ‘We are not as
strong as oxen … yet they are used by us. Why? … Because we differentiate
among ourselves.’21 Condemning the social egalitarianism of the Taoists and
Mohists in the strongest terms, Xunzi underscored the ideals of social hierarchy,
division of labour, and clarity of roles described by him and his Confucian
predecessors as the ‘rectification of names’.22 Successful statecraft involves the
proper identification of duties, the creation of models and standards for
behaviour, and the judicious implementation of rewards and punishments.
Within such an environment, goodness can be ‘constructed’ and society made
harmonious.

‘Good’ and ‘evil’ in early Taoism

The early Taoists demonstrated a studied indifference towards the ‘problem’ of
good and evil. Zhuangzi famously quipped that he ‘knew nothing about such
discriminations’,23 and the Dàodé jīng (a compilation of early Taoist sayings
attributed to a legendary author named Laozi) said that the ‘Way fell into decline
when the [Confucian] virtues arose’.
‘Goodness’ ( , shàn), said Laozi, is ‘like water’: ‘Because water excels in
benefiting the myriad creatures without contending with them and settles where
none would like to be, it comes close to the way.’24 How different this analogical
comparison of virtue with water is from the parallel analogy employed by
Mencius! It is ‘lowliness’ that Laozi affirms, not a natural tendency towards the
Confucian virtues:

When the great way ( , dà dào) falls into disuse

There are benevolence ( , rén) and rectitude ( , yì);
When cleverness ( , zhì) emerges
There is great hypocrisy ( , wèi);
When the six relations25 are at variance
There are filial children;
When the state is benighted
 There are royal ministers.26

The Dàodé jīng thus recommends that the Confucian virtues of benevolence ( ,
rén), righteousness ( , yì), and so on, be ‘exterminated’ or ‘discarded’.27 Notice
how dismissive Laozi is of the ‘artifice’ ( , wèi, translated here by D. C. Lau as
‘hypocrisy’) so praised by Xunzi. The coercive actions of parents and teachers in
moulding and correcting their charges, as advocated by Xunzi in order to
transform their selfish natures, are utterly rejected by Laozi. ‘Do nothing’ ( ,
wúwéi), and become like an infant, a fool, an ‘uncarved block’, and only then will
the people know peace and contentment.
This is hardly the ‘natural goodness’ advocated by Mencius, however. Recall
that, for Mencius, people have an innate capacity for the good, which unfolds
over time. In this respect, Mengzi and Xunzi do not vary at all: both have a place
for the nurturing activity of sage kings, parents, and teachers. Laozi, by contrast,
advocates returning to one’s natural state – a state of purity, not ‘virtue’.

Turning back is how the way moves;

Weakness is the means the way employs.
The myriad creatures in the world are born from
Something, and Something from Nothing.28

For the early Taoists, ‘goodness’ was not something that requires ‘cultivation’,
and they made no comment on evil at all. When it came to the ‘discriminations’
so clearly affirmed by the Confucians, the Taoist philosophers adopted a
relativistic stance:

1
‘What way do I have of knowing that, if I say I know something, I don’t
really not know it? Or what way do I have of knowing that, if I say I
don’t know something, I don’t really in fact know it?’
2
‘If a man sleeps in a damp place, his back aches and he ends up half
paralysed, but is this true of a leech? If he lives in a tree, he is terrified
and shakes with fright, but is this true of a monkey? Of these three
creatures, then, which one knows the proper place to live?’
 3
‘Men eat the flesh of grass-fed and grain-fed animals, deer eat grass,
centipedes find snakes tasty, and hawks and falcons relish mice. Of these
four, which knows how food ought to taste?’
4
‘Monkeys pair with monkeys, deer cavort with deer, and fish play around
with fish. Men claim that Mao-ch’iang and Lady Li were beautiful, but if
fish saw them they would dive to the bottom of the stream, if birds saw
them they would fly away, and if deer saw them they would break into a
run. Of these four, which knows how to fix the standard of beauty for the
world?’
5
‘The way I see it, the rules of benevolence ( , rén) and righteousness ( ,
yì) and the paths of right and wrong are all hopelessly snarled and
jumbled. How could I know anything about such discriminations?’29

Despite their protests, the Taoists had a conception both of ‘the good’ and of
behaviours and attitudes best avoided. However, they did not characterize these
as ‘evil’ and seemed to think, rather, that neither good nor evil were their
concern.

Conclusion
As moral philosophies, the Confucians and Taoists were opposed, but not in
virtue of asserting competing conceptions of good and evil. Neither school had an
abstract, reified conception of evil and, with the exception of Xunzi, generally did
not treat it as a distinct category. We can extrapolate an idea of evil only as the
‘absence of good’ or the inability to pursue a good life (as variously conceived),
but neither school ever regarded evil as a substantive force or entity – as it
became in the West.
In the 1940s, the sociologist Ruth Benedict wrote an influential book on
Japanese culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, in which she claimed that
Western cultures are ‘guilt’ cultures and Eastern cultures are ‘shame’ cultures.
She traced these psychological states to the Christian and Confucian heritages of
Europe and East Asia respectively.
The concept of ‘guilt’ assumes wrongdoing as an offence against an external
authority – the all-knowing and all-seeing divine Father, who rewards and
punishes human agents for good and evil respectively. One’s internalized sense of
guilt in the face of wrongdoing propels one to the good, regardless of the social
consequences. One’s ethical behaviour is grounded in psychological dread.
Benedict’s approach was indebted to Freudian psychoanalytic theory; Freud, in
Moses and Monotheism and other works, analysed the relationship between the
divine Father and his people in terms of the father–son relationship in infancy
and adolescence. For Freud, the sense of guilt in the face of wrongdoing was the
oppressive, often neurotic presence of the father within the ego. It was the
internalization of external authority – and consequently a palpable, immovable
sense of evil – from which the individual could be delivered only by the grace of
the Father himself. ‘Guilt’, therefore, though arising from social wrongs, requires
no social context.
‘Shame’ cultures, on the other hand, were for Benedict those value-systems
that describe good and evil in purely ‘human’ social terms. In shame cultures, the
sense of wrongdoing is relational and internalized only in the context of social
identity. There is no ‘wrong’ in itself, only wrong in relation to the family and
community. Therefore evil is not abstracted as something independent of
communal life. Shame cultures, Benedict concluded, have no sense of guilt, and
their conception of evil is wholly non-abstract.
Benedict was playing out what she took to be a fundamental difference in
orientation between Judaeo-Christian and Confucian conceptions of personal
identity. The Western self, on her view, is conceived in vertical relationship with
God, capable of being abstracted from its social roles, whereas the Eastern self is
conceived in horizontal relationship with fellow humans, inseparable from its
socially constructed and socially situated markers (father, son, mother, daughter,
teacher, student, ruler, subject, brother, sister, friend, etc.). As a paradigm of the
Western self, one might take St Augustine’s Confessions, in which St Augustine,
having lived a profligate life of whoring and thievery, and having turned away
from his doting mother and weak father, finally confronts the evil of his ways
and the depravity of his heart and faces an existential choice. He says: ‘Truly no
one understands me; only God in Heaven knows me.’ And, from that moment, he
repudiates the social life that had encouraged and enabled his sinful nature and
turns to Christ for salvation from evil.
For the Confucian wrongdoer, to be anti-social is fundamentally self-denying.
The repentant ‘sinner’ recognizes a self conceived in purely social terms: to be
‘true’ to oneself is ultimately to be benevolent towards others and to fulfil one’s
social responsibilities.
Following Benedict, then, if ‘evil’ is something wholly abstracted from social
roles, a quality of existence that is grounded in divine–human relationality, the
existential cause and condition for a sense of guilt that propels the sinner to seek
salvation, then Eastern cultures lack the concept of evil. In Confucian thought,
and the East Asian cultural sphere in general, evil is inconceivable apart from
roles, duties, and responsibilities in concrete social situations. To put the contrast
in its simplest terms, both Western and Eastern cultures conceive of evil in terms
of alienation, but arguably they conceive of alienation quite differently:
alienation from God in the Abrahamic traditions and alienation from one’s
family and community in the Confucian tradition.
The predominance of ‘shame’ as a psychological reaction to wrongdoing is
grounded historically and culturally in the absence of a concept of evil in the
religious and philosophical thought of the early Chinese philosophers. There is no
concept in early Confucian or Taoist thought of metaphysical or ontological evil,
abstracted from concrete social contexts. Rather, evil is the denial of what makes
persons fully human: their relations to one another.

Notes
CTP = Chinese Text Project, ctext.org.

1 Analects of Confucius (CTP), 7: 22.

2 Book of Mencius (CTP), 1B: 11.
3 Ibid., 2B: 2.
4 Book of Zhuangzi (CTP), ‘Yang shengzhu’: 2.
5 Analects of Confucius (CTP), 4: 3.
 6 Ibid., 4: 5.
7 Ibid., 4: 9.
8 Ibid., 4: 4.
9 Ibid., 12: 16.
10 Ibid., 20: 2.
11 Book of Mencius (CTP), 6A: 2.
12 Book of Zhuangzi (CTP), ‘Outer Chapters’: Dasheng 10.
13 Book of Mencius (CTP), 2A: 6.
14 Ibid., 6A: 7.
15 Ibid., 6A: 8.
16 . • • • trans. the author.
17 Book of Mencius (CTP), 1B: 22.
18 Xunzi, Xìng’è (CTP): 1.
19 Xìng’è (CTP):
. 6.
20 Zhèngmíng (CTP): 2.
21 Wángzhì (CTP): 19.
22 Zhèngmíng, in a chapter by Xunzi with this title.
23 Zhuangzi, ‘Qiwulun’ 2: 11 (CTP), trans. Watson 1964.
24 Daode jing 8 (CTP), trans. Lau 1963: 64.
25 Father–son, mother–daughter, husband–wife.
26 Daode jing
. 18 (CTP), trans. Lau 1963: 74.
27 Daode
. jing 19 (CTP), trans. Lau 1963: 75.
28 Daode jing 40 (CTP), trans. Lau 1963: 101.
29 Zhuangzi, ‘Qiwulun’ 2:11 (CTP), trans. Watson 1964.

Further reading
Confucius 2002. The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press.
Lau, D. C. (trans.) 1963. Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——1970. Mencius. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Nadeau, R. L. 2009. Confucianism and Taoism: A Volume in the Student’s Guide to World Religions.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
——(ed.) 2012. The Blackwell Companion to Chinese Religions. Oxford: Blackwell.
——2014. Asian Religions: A Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

References
Augustine 1951. Confessions, Book 2, trans. E. B. Pusey. London: J. M. Dent.
Benedict, R. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Graham, A. C. [1978] 1986. ‘The Nung-Chia “School of the Tillers” and the Origin of the Peasant Utopianism
in China’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 42(1): 66–100; repr. in Graham, Studies
in Early Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Hansen, C. 1983. Language and Logic in Early China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Lau, D. C. (trans.) 1963. Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——1970. Mencius. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
—— 2002. The Analects. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press.
Watson, B. (trans.) 1964. Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings. New York: Columbia University Press.
20 Representations of evil
Dale Jacquette

Representation
To explore the representation of evil we must first try to say what we mean by
‘represent’. Suppose that someone explains what evil is. Then we ask what is it
for evil in that sense to be represented in thought and language, in art and
artefacts, and in practices more generally, both individual and social. We cannot
argue at length for a particular concept of evil or its effects, but we can consider
some generalities about what it would take to represent evil concretely.
Evil can be represented only in perceivable things. We can represent evil
symbolically even in primitive artefacts, and we can depict its personification and
more generally its objectification along with its effects in language and art.
Symbolically, anything can represent evil, however evil itself is understood. A
stone with no special marks on it will do. We let the stone soak up as much evil
as possible, and then we throw it in the river. In this type of case the stone
represents evil, which encourages people to believe evil can be drowned,
whereupon they will have rid themselves of it (at least for a while). The stone
symbolically represents, but does not artistically depict, evil or any intrinsically
evil thing. No frowning eyebrows or lightning bolts are scratched into the stone.
It is just an ordinary stone, designated as the evil stone. Instances of symbolic
representation of evil undoubtedly can occur. Since, however, they exhaust their
semantic interest in an otherwise unexplained social consensus concerning a non-
artistic, purely symbolic representation, there is nothing more interesting to say
about the symbolic representation of evil at such a semantically primitive level.
We have the stone and whatever the stone users think of as evil. One thing, the
stone, is intended to represent the other. If we believe that the stone is identical to
evil, then it follows that we can put evil in our pockets or offer evil itself a
bargain or bribe. We can also directly threaten evil, grind it to smithereens or
drown it in the river. The stone-is-identical-to-evil belief-framework nevertheless
puts a limitation on how evil can stand in relation to its symbolic representation.
The concept makes sense only if it is logically possible for the stone, in
representing evil, thereby also to represent itself. This means that things can
represent themselves as well as other things. Does this implication make sense?
We say that Switzerland represents itself at a conference, but this form of
representation involves less than the material substance of all Switzerland. It is
not as though the entire country, with all its geographical features, mountains
and rivers and cities, with all its property and populations intact, was in some
way internationally representing the entire country in the manner of a gigantic
signboard signifying Switzerland itself. Rather, there is in all such cases a
delegation of diplomats or sports or entertainment figures or the like that stand,
and may even speak, for the will or interests of a larger social entity.
Generally we say that the entire country is or is identical to itself, to the entire
country. Other things within or without the country, such as talk and writings,
pictures or other artistic images, can symbolically and artistically represent the
entire country. We expect whatever represents something to be distinct from
whatever it represents. We are hard-pressed to say that the evil stone represents
itself by virtue of representing evil, because then every physical object potentially
represents itself, there being nothing physically special about the chosen evil
stone. Evidently, intentionality plays a decisive role in understanding whether
and how an object represents evil rather than good, or neither, or something in
between, or something else altogether. If, alternatively, the stone is not identical
to evil, then it can be only that the stone symbolically represents evil. If I put the
stone in my pocket, in that case I do not put evil in my pocket – only its
representation. The stone, if it is not identical to evil, in some sense still
represents evil.
It is obvious, but nonetheless noteworthy, that the same stone could equally
represent good or specific good things, or nothing at all. How can this be? We
must be prepared to say more exactly what it means for a stone symbolically to
represent evil or an evil thing, what kind of relation it is for evil to be represented
in its most basic symbolic form. Intentionality is once again indispensable to
understanding how a stone can symbolically represent evil or anything else.
Stone users must intend the chosen stone to signify evil. Otherwise it is just
another pebble. Evil-stone believers must consider the stone as a focus for their
thoughts about evil. It must become the case, through their own decision, and in
that developmental stage of their culture, that they consider the stone not as
identical to but merely as symbolically representative of evil. They effectively
make the stone into what social anthropologists call a ‘fetish’. Throwing the stone
into the river, for such a society, is then understood as a symbolic act. Despite
their symbolism, such practices can nevertheless have further desirable
consequences, such as to help steady morale, to provide a focus for human
energies, and to serve as an occasion for social bonding. It is only the fine-
grained referentiality of intentional states that guarantees the possibility of
representing specific evils.
Beyond symbolic representation, where (collective intentions aside) any object
can symbolize good or evil, there is a world of artistic depictions of evil. We need
to consider extant art and artefacts to see how selected objects might be
interpreted as representing evil, just as other works presumably represent good,
and still others other, more specific moral or aesthetic values, such as justice,
courage, or wisdom. If evil is artistically as well as symbolically represented, then
we should be able to consult our reactions to artworks that represent evil, just as
we can in the case of actual instantiations of evil. We should both feel that a
given object is being used to represent evil and be able to explain what it means
for the object to represent evil. We often believe ourselves to know evil when we
see or hear it ‘in the flesh’, or as an embodiment, objectification, or
personification, in the world at large, or in concrete artistic representations that
are not merely symbolic.
Evil is often artistically depicted as menacing. The test can be what looks
bizarre and scary, assuming that what scares us is the bad things evil can do, and
imagining that we may be the future targets of its wrongdoing. The obvious
choices here seem to favour a wicked, malicious-looking face, a face with a
visibly malevolent attitude and expressive (in paintings, sculptures, or
photographs) of the wilful desire to cause harm. Artists in this spirit like to depict
a nasty, ill-wishing, twisted scowl, the venomous eye, or the ‘stink eye’. Against
its power one wears or hangs – over the bed, from the car rear-view mirror, or on
a key chain – a round piece of dark blue glass with a white eye-like centre.
Perhaps it reflects evil back upon the evil eye. By these devices, a generalized
personification of evil or of evil character, of a will to fashion evil, to do evil
things, is at least crudely represented in art. We may find the same or similar in
artistic representations of the effects of evil in its toll of human misery. Such
works embody the artist’s interpretation of how evil might appear in concrete,
perceivable form, personified as an agent of evil thoughts and actions, human or
supernatural. Putting a face on evil artistically is obviously a far cry from the
ungrounded, symbolic representation of evil by the evil stone. To represent the
good, by comparison, we can (for example) show peaceful, harmonious, pastoral
coexistence with nature and other people, from which all stress and strife are
banished. We readily recognize the artistic representation of justice as a
blindfolded woman, with a scale in one hand and a sword in the other. But we
need to explain further the logical conditions for representing good and evil, as
opposed to embodying these in objects.
What is it, then, for anything to represent something? Can anything represent
itself? Or must representing always occur through something representing
something else? These, among other preliminary questions, must be addressed
before we can begin to say what we mean by ‘representing evil’. They make a
significant difference to our understanding of what it means to represent evil not
merely symbolically, by bare intentionality, but also artistically. For this
undertaking, we will need a test case concept of evil against which we can select
examples from the world of art.

Representing evil
We can represent evil artistically in at least two main ways: (1) by human or
supernatural personifications of evil moral character, agency, intention, and will;
or (2) by the effects of moral or natural evil, reflected in depictions of human
misery and suffering, as in the aftermath of crime, war, natural injuries, and fatal
disasters.
These are evil and specific evils, moral and natural. The world does not always
cooperate with a human being’s wishes for personal or greater social well-being.
Personal or wider social tragedies have often been represented by the results of
earthquake, flood and tidal wave, volcanic eruptions, plagues, and the
phenomena involved in criminal behaviour, violent invasion by armed forces, and
the like. As often as not, such evils conspire and converge in still more lethal
combinations than the sums of their individually evil parts. The harsh facts of life
for people worldwide offer artists a wide array of choices for artistic as well as
symbolic representations of moral and natural evil. There is the threatening
grimace of the agent of evil in the prayer-book woodcut, or at the entrance to the
cathedral carved in stone or moulded in bronze, or the demon dragon beneath St
Michael’s armoured boot and lance or about to be slain by St George. There is the
face of agony at the senseless death of a child or in large-scale war and Holocaust
art.
The artistic face of evil is culturally mediated. Different cultures conceive of
and try to represent evil in a variety of different ways, relying on different kinds
of artistic media, styles, and conventions. There is (at least in our public
imagination) an image of what an evil person looks like, with twisted features
and slavering tongue, fierce eyes and threatening eyebrows. Such images make a
certain impression, especially on children, and from these and other kinds of
reinforcement they can learn to avoid evil long before they have the slightest idea
of what evil is or what the concept means. In the primitive religion example
above we have an exclusively symbolic representation of evil, with no artistic
contribution beyond (perhaps) the selection and placing of the stone.
A purely natural object like the stone can symbolically represent evil. If it
remains untouched by art, however, it cannot be said artistically to represent evil.
If we rule out wine-making and its ilk as arts but not as expressive arts, then we
can say we are interested in all expressive art that not only symbolically but also
artistically represents evil. That is, we are interested in any of the literary, plastic,
or performance arts in which concepts of evil and evil things, against a cultural
background of conventional expressive practices, are both symbolically and
artistically represented. We can deliver such an account only if we provide a good
general semantics according to which the same stone can represent good and
good things as well as evil and evil things. We need to explain the fact that the
very same stone, so long as it is just a stone, can be either the evil stone or the
good stone. When we intend the stone to represent evil rather than good, or good
rather than evil, then the stone represents evil or represents good tout court.
There is nothing further to decide the matter.
Representation for the most part lets us do whatever we want, just as we can
name a goldfish anything we choose. The difference is only in the psychological
facts – i.e., whether we intend the stone to represent good, evil, or something else.
The stone itself represents without complaint, as it were, allowing itself to be the
intended object by which evil or anything else is symbolized. Wherever there is a
need for symbolic representation, of evil or anything else, the stone is ready to
play whatever representational role is required. The intentionality of
representation implies that the representation of evil is also intentional. An artist
must intend something, a myth or story or painting or sculpture, to represent evil
– whether it is personified humanly or supernaturally or objectified as an evil
thing.
We represent evil both qua evil agency and qua evil effects. This tells us
something interesting about the concept of evil: that intention is explanatorily
indispensable. Representation, on the proposed account, is not merely a
correlation of things but a correlation supported by the intention that some
particular things stand in place of other particular things, as designating them in
thought and linguistic and artistic expression. The stone, by itself, does not
represent anything, and certainly not anything in particular, even in semantically
the most uninteresting sense. It is only through the mind’s intention that the
stone comes symbolically to represent evil rather than good, or the reverse, or
anything else, or nothing. We must intend to represent evil in order to do so, and
this means that we must already have a sufficient grasp of a particular concept of
evil in order to target it intentionally in thought. We can intend only that to
which we can specifically refer, so we must already know at least something
about our concept of evil, what we mean by and think of in connection with evil,
in order symbolically to represent it.
Since the most refined artistic representation of evil is also a symbolic
representation of evil, we expect that without symbolic representation there can
be no artistic representation of evil. Hence, artistic representation of evil also
implies that a subject intend to objectify evil agency or its effects, and that an
audience participate in this intention at some level, in order for the representation
to succeed. For this the artist must have a concept of evil that is communicated to
others by the evil-representing artwork. What John R. Searle has called a
background of facts and assumptions must be presupposed in order to make sense
of the particular evil things represented. Against such a cultural background, just
as in the case of the stone, any artwork or artefact can be understood not only as
symbolically but also as artistically representing evil. Even a painting of a
newborn baby, adorable puppies in a wicker basket, or a field of wild flowers can
be used to represent evil. It all depends on the intentions behind the artistic
representation and the culture in which it is attempted. If all of nature is assumed
to be evil, then evil is intelligibly represented by the most appealing examples of
natural beauty, innocence, and purity. If to exist at all is evil, then any artistic
depiction of existing things represents evil.
The cultural background against which most European art represents evil
would not take the beautiful, happy baby in its cradle as artistically representing
evil. We suppose the contrary. The same image nevertheless could be used to
represent, and thereby intend, evil rather than good (or something neutral). The
ways in which evil seems most often to be artistically represented in a given
culture is evidence of its predominant values. We take harmful purpose, not
smiling joy, as a sign of evil. Agents caught in the act of causing harm, laughing
diabolically, or taking joy in the misery and disadvantage of others, along with an
open-ended list of related codes and devices, all signify evil. Evil is frequently
personified as a devil, Satan, or an evil force, known by many names, active in
the world and responsible for the pain and suffering experienced by virtually
every person. Such a supernatural evil-doer’s agency may be represented by the
loss of the victim’s immortal soul. Believers may live in terror or defiance of such
evil, which acts every moment to ensnare the unwary through a variety of
temptations. The beast seeking to devour men’s souls and the temptations
themselves can be represented in a variety of ways, as can the terrors of hell for
those who succumb to the allures of the evil one.
Indeed, there are numberless ways in which evil can be artistically represented
– for instance, a psychological novel that follows the twisted thinking of a serial
killer, such as Lew McCreary’s 1991 The Minus Man, James Ellroy’s 1996
investigative memoir My Dark Places, which sees human moral evil only from
the perspective of an imaginary external observer, or Jim Thompson’s 1952 The
Killer Inside Me, which represents a killer’s stream of consciousness. The children
brutally persecuting Piggy on the island of lost feral boys in William Golding’s
1954 Lord of the Flies is another literary depiction of a tendency towards evil,
even among intelligent young people who initially recognize their mutual needs.
Golding represents evil in one of its forms. So does the Book of Job. So does John
Milton’s Paradise Lost: his depiction of Satan apparently terrified people in the
late seventeenth century. It is often cited, along with the silence of Ajax in Book
XI of Homer’s Odyssey, as among the most prominent examples of the literary
sublime. Or we might highlight Lucifer in the guise of Hilarion, in Gustave
Flaubert’s 1874 The Temptation of Saint Anthony, or the human mien of evil in
Charles Dickens’s Fagin, in his 1838 novel Oliver Twist, based on the real-life
story of a petty criminal, Ikey Solomon. Or one could cite some of the notorious
immoralists in Dostoyevsky’s tales. These persons are also evil, or they are
themselves the victims of an evil agent or natural evil, if we think that their
brains are diseased, or that they have been psychologically damaged by a brutal
and hence evil social environment.
All these masterpieces of world literature portray evil either as a human
character, or as demonic, or in the effects of natural evil arising from
environmental catastrophe or devastating disease. Daniel Defoe’s classic 1772
faux reportage A Journal of the Plague Year is a brilliant example of this last. Or
consider any of the ‘disaster art’ projects arising in the wake of Hurricane Sandy
in the north-eastern United States in early winter 2012. Or take Nathalie
Miebach’s Hurricane Noel, commemorating the disaster in Maine in 2007, or Luke
Jerram’s printed model of a seismogramme of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami
on the coast of Japan, entitled Tohoku Japanese Earthquake Sculpture. We might
in the same spirit include Voltaire’s Candide, insofar as it touches on the events of
the 1775 earthquake in Lisbon, which may have killed as many as 100,000 people.
Nor should we exclude or downplay scientific documentation of natural evils,
which abound in world literature and are intended as historical information
sources and data for research rather than entertainment. These are exemplified by
many sources, of which we here cite only Pliny the Younger’s eye-witness
account (Letters to Tacitus, 6.16 and 6.20) of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79
CE, an event in which the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum
were buried under metres of volcanic ash. Pliny was too far away to have
witnessed any of this, but he must have been able to imagine and infer what the
results would be as the volcano gathered force and exploded with unforeseen
strength. Surely this kind of event, with all its devastating effects, qualifies as an
instance of natural evil. If so, then it means that, insofar as Pliny succeeds in
describing the event in his letters, he succeeds in artistically representing a
natural evil. The same is true of anyone who records the facts or their
impressions of a natural disaster on however large or small a scale.
If we think of moral evil, generally, as doing and delighting in rationally
unjustified, deliberate harm to other sentient beings, these are certainly among
the kinds of things that can be artistically represented. But what no
representation can guarantee is that the exact thing the artist intends to represent
will automatically be understood by everyone who encounters the representation.
A mediaeval viewer of a painting or sculpture might understand evil itself as
represented, whereas a more sceptical, urbane contemporary viewer might
understand only a certain, quaint idea of evil as represented, one of historical,
anthropological interest but of no special moral significance. What a
representation of evil succeeds in representing is culturally dependent on what
opinion considers to be evil, even if from culture to culture there does not seem to
be that much difference in the things considered natural or moral evils.
Different concepts, and different theories of evil, can coexist within the same
culture. This is why, even today, we can understand as intended representations
of evil both Milton’s poetry and Thompson’s gritty killer and detective narratives.
It is why we are able to see some of William Blake’s lithographs as representing
evil, part of the content of which we can hope to learn from the intended
representation. It is why we understand evil as represented in some of the
paintings of the fifteenth and sixteenth century masters, such as Hieronymus
Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder – the latter portraying the evil and sufferings
that can befall a person as the wages of divine justice. Or compare Dante’s Satan,
who has octopus-like tentacles and many heads with mouths for chewing on
victims, and who sits at the centre of hell manipulating punishments for the
eternally damned souls and their colleagues in purgatory. Indeed, Dante has
Satan imprisoned in ice at the lowest depths of hell in the Inferno, Canto XXXIV,
lines 28–55:

The Emperor of the kingdom dolorous

From his mid-breast forth issued from the ice;
And better with a giant I compare

Than do the giants with those arms of his;

Consider now how great must be that whole,
Which unto such a part conforms itself.

Were he as fair once, as he now is foul,

And lifted up his brow against his Maker,
Well may proceed from him all tribulation.

O, what a marvel it appeared to me,

When I beheld three faces on his head!
The one in front, and that vermilion was;

Two were the others, that were joined with this

Above the middle part of either shoulder,
And they were joined together at the crest;

And the right-hand one seemed ’twixt white and yellow;

The left was such to look upon as those
Who come from where the Nile falls valley-ward.

Underneath each came forth two mighty wings,

Such as befitting were so great a bird;
Sails of the sea I never saw so large.

No feathers had they, but as of a bat

Their fashion was; and he was waving them,
So that three winds proceeded forth therefrom.

Thereby Cocytus wholly was congealed.

With six eyes did he weep, and down three chins
Trickled the tear-drops and the bloody drivel.

At every mouth he with his teeth was crunching

 A sinner, in the manner of a brake,
So that he three of them tormented thus.

Throughout Dante’s journey there is exhibited an extraordinary range of

punishments, reflecting what the poet imagines earns each victim a place in hell.
If ice would relieve you, then there is none to be had. The devil locked in ice
could use some heat, but, for a fourteenth-century Florentine Italian, the ultimate
punishment is freezing cold. That Satan is imprisoned in ice allows the cantos
finally to constitute a divine comedy. Dante is poet, philosopher, and theologian,
but in his poetic philosophical theology he does not artistically represent the devil
as free to act in the world. Otherwise, Satan would presumably already be
reigning over and totally ravaging the world. There is moral evil, for Dante, and
it is the cause of all natural evil, but it does not run absolutely free in the world.
What restrains it, metaphorically at least, nevertheless seems unsettling. Dante
does not believe that only a small number of evil-doers, consigned to the deepest
part of hell in greatest proximity to Satan’s icy prison, can be gnawed on by a
finite number of heads throughout eternity. With multiple torso-gnawing heads,
Satan awaits the worst evil-doers in hell. Facing fire, ice, or being eaten alive for
eternity, unrepentant sinners are taking a chance on any of these fates – fates that
we, in the meantime, can only try to avoid.
We can say something definite about artistic representations of evil that
focuses not on the doers of evil but on the effects of moral and natural evil in the
world. Human beings suffer miserably when evil is visited upon them, either
deliberately or through accidents of nature. These events are artistically as well as
purely symbolically represented in art and artefacts. Facial expressions, manifest
causes of pain, a starved or otherwise damaged physique – all of these results of
evil are among the widely recognized, conventional ways of representing evil. A
prime example of this is the work of great European expressionist painters such
as Otto Dix (1891–1969), Emil Nolde (1867–1956), and Oskar Kokoschka (1886–
1980), which confronts the viewer with the horror and absurdity of war. We may
also think of the famous Vatican sculpture of Laocoön and his sons, entangled
with ferocious snakes, the frozen look of pain on the father’s face, and the subject
of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 treatise on aesthetics, Laocoön, or On the
Limits of Painting and Poetry. The purpose of Lessing’s investigation is to
determine whether the evil expressed in poetry can be translated into a totally
different, plastic medium. Lessing is thus interested in one aspect of our question:
namely whether some kinds of art are inherently better than others at
representing evil.

Depictions of evil in literature

We can now consider, in more detail, selected fragments from artistic
representations of evil. We shall try to understand exactly how these artworks
represent evil and whether, and to what extent, they semantically and
aesthetically succeed. Until this point, we have spoken only in generalities as to
the meaningfulness conditions for artistic as well as purely symbolic
representations of evil. Now we need to test our analysis by applying it to some
widely accepted, intuitive paradigms.
For purposes of illustration, we choose Milton’s poem Paradise Lost and
Thompson’s previously mentioned novel The Killer Inside Me. The basis of
comparison is that both writers personify evil, the first as Satan, and the second
through the first-person thoughts and criminal behaviour of a small-town deputy
sheriff. Both of these writers seek to portray evil in very different cultural
contexts, one supernatural and the other human-phenomenological.

Study 1: John Milton, Paradise Lost

Here is how moral evil, personified in the form of Satan (God’s most prominent
fallen angel), is represented in one memorable passage from Milton’s Paradise
Lost (lines 51–74):

To mortal men, he with his horrid crew

Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery Gulfe
Confounded though immortal: But his doom
Reserv’d him to more wrath; for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes
 That witness’d huge affliction and dismay
Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate:
At once as far as Angels kenn [know] he views
The dismal Situation waste and wilde,
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d onely [only] to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d:
Such place Eternal Justice had prepar’d
For those rebellious, here thir [their] Prison ordain’d
In utter darkness, and thir [their] portion set
As far remov’d from God and light of Heav’n
As from the Centre thrice to th’ utmost Pole.

Evil is epitomized in several ways in this poetic portrait. Satan dwells in Hades.
There is a boat by which some denizens of the pit can move about upon the
molten lava. It is a fiery gulf in a fiery deluge or flood of ever-burning sulphur
that is never consumed, which burns white hot and stinking for all eternity.
The circumstances already seem evil. There is unbearable pain. The possibility
of death offers no release from torment, either for Satan or for the vanquished
humans who reside with Satan in the pit of fire. They are past dying, but not past
sensing pain and merciless anxiety. The eternity of agony is a still greater
occasion for the kind of abject despair that accompanies the agony of burning,
without hope of relief, in the ‘dungeon’ that Milton projects, drawing on imagery
that would be familiar to his seventeenth-century readers. Milton’s art magnifies
and extends these known evils, depriving the prisoners of rest or hope, allowing
only such light as the fire affords to witness the misery all around. Satan himself
is represented as evil by Milton, as are the souls of human beings who have fallen
into the abyss. They have been evil when tested during their lives, and they are
now suffering evil, presided over by the punishing Prince of Evil. This is the
justice they have deserved in virtue of their evil actions, their obstinate refusal to
accept salvation. Evil begets evil in this world, which is represented with such
consummate artistry in Milton’s stanzas. Nonetheless, souls in hell must be
recognizable as our fellow citizens, for we must understand that it is people like
us who are at risk of eternal damnation.

Study 2: Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

Thompson, in his frighteningly believable excursion into the warped thinking of
a methodical, cold-blooded killer, offers a pencil sketch of an evil mind. Human
moral evil is concealed beneath a thin veneer of civility until the opportunity for
expressing its true nature arises. The deception is facilitated, and the evil made
proportionately greater, by the fact that Thompson’s psychopathic killer is a
deputy sheriff charged with protecting people from the kinds of moral evil that
might otherwise befall them, but of which, in many instances, he himself is
guilty. In one revealing passage in chapter five, Thompson writes:

Yes, maybe I was taking things pretty calmly, but I’d gone through the deal
so often in my mind that I’d gotten used to it. Joyce and Elmer were going to
die. Joyce had asked for it. The Conways had asked for it. I wasn’t any more
cold-blooded than the dame who’d have me in hell to get her own way. I
wasn’t any more cold-blooded than the guy who’d had Mike knocked from
an eight-story building.

Seething beneath the thin surface of respectability and the authority of law,
Thompson’s character Lou Ford acts out his deeply submerged rage against
persons who fall under his power. He is grotesquely misogynistic. Comparing his
homicide under cover of his deputy sheriff’s badge with the attitude of a ‘dame’
who would have him ‘in hell to get her own way’ is clearly unjustifiable. Where
cold-bloodedness is concerned, it might be objected that it is one thing to will
another person in hell and another to kill them. Ford displays an evil
consciousness and acts in an evil way. He becomes increasingly homicidal,
hinting at a previously more sporadic pattern that may have gone unchecked in
the past. Nor is there any other source of information besides Ford’s evil thoughts
and actions. It is fiction, true enough. But that does not prevent it from being
psychologically acute and highly disconcerting.
Ford’s behaviour is psychotic, a symptom of psychological illness. As we start
to anticipate his thinking, however, and what his character will do, we of
necessity begin to think that way ourselves. As book reviewers say, the author
takes us inside the mind of the killer. We learn, through Thompson’s artistic
representation, to enter into thoughts and actions that deserve to be called evil. If
we look closely at what Thompson reveals as occurring in Ford’s consciousness,
we encounter increasingly disturbing stages of a seriously disordered mind. The
analogy Ford relies on to excuse himself from homicidal cold-bloodedness is, we
recall, to the cold-bloodedness of a woman who would wish him in hell – with
what justification we do not stop to wonder.
Wishing him in hell nevertheless cannot actually harm Ford, as he
understands. By contrast, cold-bloodedly killing someone for no good reason
constitutes serious and profound harm. Does Ford delusionally think that he is
justified in cold-bloodedly committing murders, along with all his other abuses,
under pretence of enforcing the law, because he knows of a woman who cold-
bloodedly wishes him in hell? Suppose that it is the same unequivocal cold-
bloodedness at work in both cases, and that you can be harmed by someone cold-
bloodedly wishing you in hell. The fact that Ford knows of one such ‘dame’ does
not warrant his treating other persons cold-bloodedly, let alone committing acts
of cold-blooded murder. Even if every woman in Ford’s experience sooner or
later cold-bloodedly wishes that he were in hell, that still would not justify him
in treating anyone else cold-bloodedly, and certainly not in cold-bloodedly killing
them. If hell is relevant to Ford’s thinking at all, if he believes in it and has any
regard for avoiding its evils, then his reasoning is all the more conspicuously
flawed. He ignores the fact that, by his own actions, on the popular conception,
he would have earned himself eternal damnation in hell anyway, without the
further impetus of cold-hearted people in this world wishing him there to further
their own ends.
Thompson’s Ford beats prostitutes with a belt, and he finds one who likes it.
He puts out a cigar in the hand of a vagrant asking for spare change. He does
what he wants, what his tortured mind, driven by nagging memories of his
father, urges him to do, and regardless of who suffers the consequences. In a
word, he may not be iconically or archetypally evil, but in his own frighteningly
believable, provincial way he is nonetheless evil. He is evil not only because no
person should ever do the things he does but because he does them relying upon
the social trust established by the authority of law. He has the badge and all the
trappings. He has the boots and the sharply pressed uniform, a commanding
Stetson hat and a revolver on his hip, and no door in that part of the country is
closed to him.
Perhaps Ford chose law enforcement as a career precisely in order to have
authority and supremacy over others, contrary to his father’s wish, as we are
told, that he become a physician. As deputy sheriff, Ford wields power over
others that he increasingly abuses for his own selfish ends. He knows how the
police work, and he thinks he can avoid detection, though at another level he
does not care or may even want finally to be caught. Ford gives corruption free
rein, including permitting himself lethal violence, telling himself afterwards that
his victims deserved it, that he is actually doing right, while on other occasions
berating himself for losing control. He understands, in some remote part of his
tormented psyche, that what he is doing is wrong, and he tries, through the
power of suggestion and by keeping distant from certain temptations, to control
himself until the next triggering incident sets him off again. Nevertheless, he does
observe certain self-imposed limits and professional scruples, such as never
harming prisoners within his jurisdiction or under his control. None of which
prevents him from repeatedly punching a pregnant prostitute in the face and
leaving her for dead, only to be alarmed to learn that he did not actually kill her,
and knowing that she could now with perfect justice turn witness against him. In
Ford’s world, good seldom triumphs in the expected way, and she does not testify
against him, although Ford is soon brought to justice anyway.
Thompson’s fiction has implications for the concept of evil in a more general
sense, beyond the fact that Ford thinks and does evil things. What we learn from
Thompson’s artistic representation of evil, among other things, is that evil can
look like good; that evil profits from such deception, and in particular from the
exploitation of social conventions that have been instituted for the public good;
that evil can use good to good’s disadvantage; and that evil is evil regardless of its
dimensions, large or small. Thompson shows how moral evil does not require the
dictatorship of a nation bent on plunder and destruction. An evil, small-town
deputy sheriff can cause the kind of damage, on a more modest scale, which
Thompson artistically represents. Ford is not Satan, just an evil human being
causing local havoc until he is finally apprehended. Ford and what he thinks and
does – independently of any specific concepts of or beliefs about a supernatural
Satan or the evils of hell – represents a chilling, next-door neighbour example of
evil.

Further reading
Auerbach, E. 2013. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Oksenberg Rorty, A. (ed.) 2001. The Many Faces of Evil: Historical Perspectives. London: Routledge.

References
Dante 1871. The Divine Comedy, trans. H. W. Longfellow. Boston: James R. Osgood.
Milton, J. 1821. Paradise Lost. To which are prefixed The Life of the Author, by Elijah Fenton; and a Criticism
on the Poem, by Dr Johnson. London: Printed for John Bumpus Holborn-Bars.
Searle, J. R. 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 65–71; 141–59.
—— 1992. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 175–96.
Thompson, J. 1952. The Killer Inside Me. New York: Fawcett.
Index

Achilles, character 132, 225, 226

Acta Archelai, anti-Manichaean polemical text 78, 79, 85
Aeneas, character 234
Aeneid, Roman epic 233–4
Aenesidemus 187
Aëtius 106, 118n6
Against the Ethicists (Sextus) 188, 189, 190, 191
Agamemnon, character 129, 226
Agamemnon, Greek tragedy 230
Ahriman see Angra Mainyu
Ahura Mazda (Wise Lord): challenges to 68; destructive spirit and 63; dispelling of evil spirit by 66; elevation
to status of supreme god 57, 60; false gods (daevas) and 58, 60; impact of cosmic lie on 61; merge of
creative force with 64; orderly existence generated by 58; see also Zoroastrian religion
Akoman (bad thought) 60
al-Bruni, Abū Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad 77
Alexander of Aphrodisias 206
Alexander of Lycopolis 78, 79
Alexander Polyhistor 222n15
Alt, Albrecht 12
Amesha Spentas 60, 66
Ammonius Saccas 198
Anahita, daevic being 67
Analects (Confucius) 275–8
Anaxagoras 114–15, 117
Anaximander 5, 104, 105, 106, 107, 118n2
Anaximenes 104, 106, 107, 118n8
Anchises, character 234
Angra Mainyu, destructive spirit 4, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69
Annas, J. 172n15
Anselm 207
anti-Manichaean literature 76, 78
Antiochus of Alexandria 215, 216
Antiochus of Ascalon 215
Antisthenes 214
Antoninus Pius, Roman Emperor 92
apeiron (boundless), meaning of term 104, 105, 117n1
Apostolic Age 39, 41
Apuleius 91
Ardeshir I, king of Persia 69
Areimanios (spirit) 65
Arendt, Hannah 125, 153
aretê (excellence) 143n11, 147
Aristobulus of Paneas 217
Aristotle: on action and desire 147, 150, 159n9; on ‘brutishness’ 158–9n8; on casual conditions of blame 150–1;
on conditions for bad actions 149; on destructive nature of evil 154; discussion of induction 172n25; on
downfall of heroes 229; on eternal beings 155; on ethical ignorance 152; on good and bad spirit 65; on
Greek tragedy 128, 229; on happiness 168; on human being’s capability of action 172n13; on human desire
154; idea of living viciously 156–8; on ignorance of particular circumstances 152; on involuntary action
159n14; on knowledge and experience 169; on limits of good and limitless of bad 158n7; metaphysics of
actuality and potentiality 155; on moral praxis 148; notion of ‘mean’ 146–8, 149; notion of privation 200; on
opinion of the many and the wise 159n13; on opposite cosmic principles 65; on options of virtuous man
156; on passions 148; on path to goodness 158, 160n26; philosophical views of 145–6; on rational activity
150, 169, 172–3n26; on reason and desire 164; on responsibility for vicious actions 151, 153, 159n22–3; on
source of things 105; theory of good and evil 6; on threat to justice 147; on vice 146–7, 154–5, 158n4; on
virtue 146, 147, 148, 154; on wicked actions 150, 151
Arius Didymus 175
Artapanus of Alexandria 217, 222n15
Artaxerxes II, king of Persia 65
ārya-satya see True Realities
asceticism of Indian thought 248–9
asha (truth), concept of 61, 62, 63
atomism 165
Augustine, Saint: anti-Manichaean writings 78, 79, 83, 88n18; Confessions 83; on God 11; on holy land and
land of darkness 83; on second death 86; on social life and God 286; on substance of evil 85
Augustus, Roman Emperor 232
Avesta see Old Avestan texts; Young Avestan texts
Avicenna 198, 206
Azi, daevic being 67

Bacchae (Euripides) 231

bad, concept of 126–7
Bahram I, king of Persia 76
Basilides 91, 92
Beall, E. F. 235n5
Beere, Jonathan 159n19
Benedict, Ruth 286
Bentham, Jeremy 36
Bett, Richard 7
Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche) 126
Blackson, Thomas 6
Bosch, Hieronymus 295
Boyd, J. W. 72n64
Brickhouse, Thomas 157
Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder 295
Bruno, Giordano 198
Buddha (Siddhārtha Gotama/Gautama): asceticism of 266–7; on deadly things 268–9; disciples of 257; early
life 256; encounters with Māra 266–8; on power of Māra 265; on process of rebirth 257; spiritual quest
256–7; teaching of 258, 259, 266, 267; on world creation 258
Buddhaghosa 269
Buddhism: allegories of chariot 253n3; characteristics of 9; on craving 259; on deity of Māra 263–8;
dimensions of reality in 259–60; five cords of sensual pleasure 269; on good and bad actions 260–1; on
influence of people 261; on karma 260, 261–2; kinds of evil in 9, 270–1; Mahāyāna (Great Vehicle)
 movement 262; monastic fraternities 262; on negative mental states 260; on physical suffering 258, 259;
process of ‘wandering on’ (saṃsāra) 257, 262, 271; recognition of spirit-beings 263; on roots and nature of
moral evil 260–1; on Self 258; wandering religious seekers (samaṇas) 256; on world creation 258
Burkert, W. 110

Cain and Abel 14, 47

Calcidius 179, 180
Callicles, character 135, 136, 138
Candide (Voltaire) 142, 294
Carneades 166–7
Cartesian dualism 80
Cato 176, 232
Chappell, Sophie Grace 5, 148
Chinese characters: characteristics of 273–4; lack of abstractions of good and evil 274, 275; problem of
translation 274–5; related to concept of evil 275, 276, 278
Christianity: debates on relations of church and state 42; development of creeds 43; on evil 42, 43–4; on fight
of Jesus with demonic forces 34–5; on illness 35; Jewish roots of 34; on mission of Jesus Christ 35, 38; as
official religion of Roman Empire 39; role of scripture in 38; on sin 137; source of truth in 91; on use of
lethal force 42
Christian theology 3, 35
Chronos, divinity of time 69
Chrysanthemum and the Sword, The (Benedict) 286
Chrysippus 180, 183
Cicero: De Finibus 175; on experience of genuine evil 177; On Fate 166; notion of life 176, 216; Philo’s
influence on 215; speeches of 232
Clement of Alexandria 93, 118n9, 213, 215
Clement of Rome, Saint 40
Cologne Mani Codex 76
compassion and human nature 280, 281
Concept of Mind, The (Ryle) 164
Confessions (Augustine) 83, 286
Confucianism: conception of personal identity 286; discussion of idea of evil in 9; on emotions 283; on human
goodness 280, 282, 283; on human nature 279, 282; on importance of social environment 281; meanings of
evil in 275; on moral capacity of person 278; story of Mengzi 281; on virtue 279–80, 281; on wrongdoing
 280, 286; see also Analects
Confucius 275, 276, 277, 281, 283
consequentialism 253
Constantine, Emperor of Roman Empire 35
Cordero 119n24
Cornea, Andrei 207
Corrigan, Kevin 7
cosmos: atomists on 116; mathematical analysis of 111
country: representation of 290
Crenshaw, J. L. 26, 28, 31
Crosby, D. A. 72n64
Crowley, Aleister 143n18
Curd, P. 112

daevas (false gods): as creators of chaos 58; definition of concept of 59, 71n18; demonization of 60; early
concept of existence of 72n64; etymology 58; impact of 59; names of 66–7; Old Iranian usage of 60; power
and status of 59; Xerxes’ condemnation of 59; vs. yazatas (beings who are worthy of worship) 67
Damascius 198
Dante Alighieri 295–6
Darius I, king of Persia 60, 61, 64, 65
David, king of Israel 42
Dead Sea Scrolls 21
death: Augustine on second 86; Manichaeism on 87; in Vedic tradition 242, 243, 244–6, 250, 263
De Finibus (Cicero) 175, 176, 184n3
Defoe, Daniel 294
De Haeresibus (Augustine) 85, 86
De Legibus (Cicero) 176
Deliver Us from Evil: Studies on the Vedic Ideas of Salvation (Rodhe) 240
Dell, Katherine 2, 3
Demeter, cult of 234
Democritus 116, 165
demons 19
deontology 253
De Providentia (Seneca) 175, 181, 185n48
Descartes, René 80
desire and reason 164–5
Dews, Peter 145
Dharma (Duty) 245
Dialogues with Trypho 42
Dickens, Charles 294
Diogenes Laertius 65, 104, 106, 111, 114, 177
Diogenes the Cynic 214
Dion (tyrant of Syracuse) 139, 140
Dix, Otto 297
Doniger, Wendy 240, 252
Dostoevsky, Fedor 206, 294
dragon, as representation of chaos 18
druj (lie), concept of 61–2, 66
dualism 80

early Christianity see Christianity

Eckhart, Meister 206
Eichmann, Adolf 143n18, 153, 159n15
Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt) 153
Eliade, Mircea 13
Ellroy, James 194
emotions 282, 283
Empedocles 114, 115–16
Enneads (Plotinus) 198, 199–200
Epictetus 179
Epicureanism 167, 168
Epicurus: classification of justice and injustice 116; on control of behaviour 167; discussion of evil 6, 163, 164,
167, 170–1; on human beliefs and fears 6, 167–8; on human knowledge 167–8, 169; idea of swerve 165,
172n15; on implications of fate 165–6; interest in problem of living well 163; Letter to Herodotus 169; Letter
to Menoeceus 165–6, 172n20, 173n34; literary works 171n2; on memory 169; philosophical views 163–4; on
pleasure 169–70, 172n21, 173n31, 174n34; school of 171n2
Eris, goddess 229, 235
Eriugena 206
Eudorus of Alexandria 215, 216, 217
Eudoxus of Cnidus 65
Euripides 230, 231
Eusebius of Caesarea 213
Euthydemus (Plato) 138, 143n10, 178
Exposition of the Law of Moses (Philo of Alexandria) 217

Fate, idea of 129

Ficino, Marsilio 198, 206
Filoramo, Giovanni 4
Flaubert, Gustave 294
Foot, Philippa 142n3
Francis, of Assisi, Saint 35
Frede, Michael 179
free will, concept of 163, 164–5, 171–2n8
Freud, Sigmund 286
Furley, David 153

Galen 195n2
Gardner, I. 82
Gathas, Old Avestan text: characteristic of 57; on cosmogonic split 63–4; on daevas (false gods) 58–60; on
ethical choices 62–3; on life-giving and destructive spirits 63; on origin of evil 63; publication of translation
of 68
Gemistus Pletho, Georgius 206
Gnosticism: characteristic of 4–5, 41, 90, 91–2; conception of the Son 99–101; concepts of god and man 93–4;
controversy of 75; cosmogony of 95; creation in 41; deconstructionists of 95; eschatology 95; evil in 5, 92,
94, 97; evolution of Knowledge in 101; on fallen soul 97–8; first woman as origin of evil 97; as form of
definitive and total revelation 91; heavenly voyage of soul 95; history of 90, 92–3; impact of Platonic texts
on 90–1; levels of being in 98; nature of god in 98–9; nature of myth of 93–5; origin of evil 98, 102;
postulate of inferior world of darkness 96; recurring themes in 95–6; salvation in 96; schools of 92–3; on
Self 95, 96; Sethian groups 93; story of Sophia 96–7, 101–2; theology of 95; transcendent god in 95;
transmission of myth in 94; types of dualism 96–8
God: conversation with Cain and Abel 47; as creator 31; definitions of 11–12; expectation of justice from 31;
moral ambiguity of 2–3; relationship between Israel and 31; relationships with humans 31
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 127
Gogol, Nikolai 206
Golden Ass, The (Apuleius) 233
Golding, William 294
Gombis, Timothy 3
good: artistic representation of 291; Oxford English Dictionary on 142n2
good actions 260
goodness: Chinese philosophy 274, 279–81, 282, 283, 284–5; in Greek philosophy 104, 109, 128, 138, 158,
160n26; Jesus Christ as agent of divine 39
Gorgias (Plato) 135, 136, 168
Gotama see Buddha
Graham, A. C. 279–80
Greek literature: Agamemnon 230; characteristics of tragedy 128; evil in Homeric epic 225–7; evil types of
behaviour in Odyssey 235n3; Hesiod’s accounts 227–8; justice in 228; myth of Prometheus 227; Oresteia
229–30; on origin of evil 224–5; Pandora story 227–8; representation of evil in tragedy 229–31
Greek philosophy: characteristic of 215; treatment of evil in 65, 224
Greenberg, H. 28
guilt cultures 286

Hadrian, Roman Emperor 92

Hammadi, Nag 90
Hansen, Chad 275
Hare, R. M. 142n3
Harnack, Adolf von 92
Harper, Vicki 5
Harvey, Peter 9
Haug, Martin 68
Hebrew Bible (Old Testament): conception of divine 12; on demons 19; ethical dimensions of evil 16; on fallen
angels as origin of evil 20–1; on forces of chaos 21; on God’s punishment of humans 14–15; on human
behaviour and fate 16–17; on human sins 14; natural vs. revealed law 31–2; nature of evil in 11, 13–14, 21;
on Satan 20; on witchcraft 17
Hector, character 227
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 206
Heracleon 5, 93
Heracles, son of Zues 132
Heraclitus: comments about soul 108; conception of evil 109; on cosmic goodness 109, 114; on cosmos 107,
108; interpretations of 118n9; observations of ordinary experience 107; philosophical views 106–7;
postulate of logos 5, 108; on role of fire 107; on sound thinking 108; on strife for justice 107; on world-
system 107; writing style 106
Herodotus 68
Hesiod 227–8
Hillar, Marian 7
Hippolytus 118n2
Hobbes, Thomas 252
Hoffman, Y. 26
Homeric epic 130, 225–6
Homiliae Cathedrales CXXIII (Severus of Antioch) 78–9, 82
Huffman, C. 110
Hurricane Noel (Mielbach) 294

Iamblichus 198, 203

Ibn Gabirol 198, 206
idol worship 253–4n5
Ignatius of Antioch, Saint 39, 40
Iliad (Homer) 131, 225, 226–7
Irenaeus 41, 93, 95, 101, 102
Irwin, Terence 159n22, 172n26
Israel: as God’s special possession 52–3; mission of 46; religion of 17–18

Jacobson, Thorkild 13
Jacquette, Dale 9
Jahi, daevic being 67
Jerome, Saint 213
Jesus Christ: as agent of divine goodness 39; birth of 37; in Christian thought 39; divinity of 38; fight with
demonic forces and diseases 34; forgiveness of sin 40; in Gnostic tradition 41; humanity and divinity of 39;
liberation from sin 40; regeneration of 40; role in overcoming evil 38; temptation by Satan 34
Jewish literature: on creation 34; on origin of evil 20–1
Job: arguments against God 30; calamities imposed by God on 25–6; dialogue with friends 27–8; dialogue
 with God 28–9; evil in 29; personality of 24, 27; restoration to prosperity 27
Job, book of: appearance of God 28, 29; blame of God 27; central theme 24; Dialogue 27–8; on evil 29, 31, 32;
on God’ reasons to test Job 25–6; on God’s dialogue with Job 28–9; issue of righteousness 24; literary parts
25; natural vs. revealed law 31–2; on nature of knowledge 30; origin of 24–5; Prologue and Epilogue 25–7;
representation of God 25; on Satan 26; speeches of God 29–30; study of 2–3
John, Gospel of 37, 41
John the Baptist, Saint 36, 37
Jones, H. S. 127
Jouanna, J. 195n2
Journal of the Plague Year, A (Defoe) 294
Jubilees, Book of 20, 21, 52
Judaeo-Christian philosophy 286, 287
Judaism: characteristic of 214; dominant tradition of God in 2; evil in 2; as narrative religion 214;
philosophical justification of 213
Julian, of Norwich 35
Jung, Carl 26, 29
justice, notion of human and divine 32
Justin Martyr, Saint 95, 213
Justus Lipsius 185n48
Juvenal 232

Kahn, C. 110, 118n6

kakos (bad, evil) 127, 143n5–6, 224, 226
karma 241, 260, 261–2, 265, 270
Katz, E. C. 159n19
Kekes, John 151
Kerdir, priest 60, 61, 69
Killer Inside Me, The (Thompson) 294, 297, 298–301
King, William 142
Kokoschka, Oscar 297
kosmoi (world-systems) 118n2, 118n6
Kraeling, E. G. 30
Kronos, god 69
Lamech, descendant of Cain 14
Language and Logic in Ancient China (Hansen) 275
Laozi 284
Laws (Plato) 130, 138
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 142
Lesher, J. 112
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 297
Leucippus 165
Leviathan (Hobbes) 252
Liddell, H. G. 127
Lieu, S. N. C. 82
Ling, Trevor 263
Logos 100, 106–8
Lord of the Flies (Golding) 294
Love, as liberation from sin 40
Lovejoy, Arthur 141, 142
Lucretius 164, 165, 166, 171n7
Lucullus, Roman general 215
Luke, Gospel of 35, 37
Luther, Martin 12

Magus, Marcus 93
Magus, Simon 92
Mahāyāna 262
Maimonides, Moses 198, 206
Mani: apostolic lineage of 77–8; historical sources about 76, 87n10; summary of doctrine of 79; time spent
with Elchasai group 77; visions of 77
Manichaeism: on asceticism 84; canon 78; in comparative perspective 80; cosmology 81–6; denial of divine
omnipotence 76, 81; distinction between material and immaterial 81; on dualism of good and evil 76,
78–80, 83–4; eschatology of second death 87; features of 4, 75–6, 78, 87; Hellenistic philosophy and 81; on
idea of Jesus 76; lack of conceptual strategy 82; legacy and influence of 86–7; link to Zoroastrianism 77; as
moral dualism 81; origin of 76; as personal experience of Mani 82; relation to Gnosticism 75, 87n2–3;
representation of evil 75, 80–1, 84
māra (deadly things) 268–9
Māra (deity): alternative names of 263, 265; Buddha on power of 265; comparison with Satan 264; as
embodiment of spiritual ignorance 263; encounters with Buddha 267–8; as evil deity 263–4; on harsh
asceticism 266–7; influence on people 263; realms of 264–5; resistance to 270; sensual pleasure and 269–70;
temptations of 265–6, 268
Marcion 4, 92
Marcus Aurelius 178, 183
Mardanfarrokh 68, 69
Marius Victorinus 206
Mark, Gospel of 35–6
Marlowe, Christopher 127
Matthew, Gospel of 35, 37
McCreary, Lew 294
McDowell, John 147
McKirahan, R. D. 112
Meditations and The Principles of Philosophy (Descartes) 80
Mencius see Mengzi
Mendelson, Michael 4
Mengzi 278–80, 281, 282
Mephistopheles, interpretations of 127–8
Metamorphoses (Ovid) 228, 235
Metaphysics (Aristotle) 154, 169
Meyer, Susan Sauvé 153
Middle Platonism 213, 215; see also Neoplatonism; Platonism
Miebach, Nathalie 294
Miles, J. 28, 29
Milton, John 125, 127, 294, 295, 297–8
mind 262
Minus Man, The (McCreary) 294
Miscellanies (Pseudo-Plutarch) 105
Moggallāna, disciple of Buddha 264, 268
moral evil 246, 260, 270–1, 295–6, 297, 299–301
morality 127, 239
Moses and Monotheism (Freud) 286
Moss, Jessica 159n9
Mourelatos, A. P. D. 112, 118n21
Müller, Max 253n1
My Dark Places (Ellroy) 294
mysterium tremendum (overwhelming mystery): conception of 12–13

Nadeau, Randall 9
Narbonne, Jean-Marc 206
Narseh, king of Persia 69
natural vs. revealed law 31
Nehamas, A. 119n24
Neoplatonism: characteristic of 7; definition 198; influence of 206, 207–8; on matter 207; views of evil 7, 198,
204, 206–7; see also Middle Platonism; Platonism
New Testament: debates on historical reliability of 36; diversity of 38; endorsement of Trinity 37; on equality
between Jews and gentiles 42; evil in 35–8; on Jews who rejected Jesus 41–2
Nicea, Council of 43
Nicene Creed 43
Nicholas of Cusa 206
Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 146, 158n3, 169
Nietzsche, Friedrich: on asceticism 248; on difference between ‘bad’ and ‘evil’ 126–7; on ethical thinking 128;
on morality 127, 239, 248; slave-morality notion 127
Nirvāṇa 9, 256, 257, 260, 262, 271
Nolde, Emil 297
non-Self 258, 260
Numenius 99

object: as fetish 290; as representation of country 290; as representation of evil 289–90, 292; as representation
of itself 290
O’Connor, Timothy 171n8
Odysseus, character 225, 226
Odyssey (Homer) 225, 234, 235n3, 294
Oedipus, character 129, 149, 229
Oedipus the King (Sophocles) 230–1
Old Avestan texts: Ahuna Vairya prayer 63; daevas (false gods) 58–9; date of creation 57, 70n1; on elevation
of Ahura Mazda 57–8; on essence of good and evil 57–8; see also Young Avestan texts
Old Testament See Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)
Oliver Twist (Dickens) 294
On Fate (Cicero) 166
On Nature (Anaximander) 104
On the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche) 248
On the Nature of Things (Lucretius) 164, 171n4
Oresteia (Aeschylus) 129, 229–30
Orestes, character 129
orientalism 247, 248
Origen 91, 93, 213
Oromazes (spirit) 65, 69
Orpheus 90, 217, 222n17
Orphism, definition of 228
Otto, Rudolph 2, 12
Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Sextus) 187, 188
Ovid 228
Owen, G. E. L. 119n24

pain 195n9, 259

Panaino, A. 72n64
Pandora, story of 227–8
Paradise Lost (Milton) 294, 297–8
Parmenides (Plato) 111
Parmenides of Elia: on allegory 112; conception of evil 114, 117; concept of knowing 118–19n21; description
of chariot journey 111; disjunctive syllogism of 112–13; interpretation of prologue 112; interpretation of
Truth 112, 113, 119n22; life of 111; normative principle 117; rejection of philosophy of Heraclitus 113, 114;
scholars on 119n22, 119n24; transcendental experience 112
Patañjali 246, 247
Paul, Saint: on corruption of humanity 54–5; on cosmic powers 51–4; on creation 46; criticism of toleration of
sexual immorality 50; on enslavement of humanity 53; on evil 3–4, 45, 51–2, 54–5; on image and glory of
God 46; impact of Israel’s scripture on 45–6; on Jesus 3; on power of sin 47–8; on rebellion of archangelic
rulers 52, 53; religious heritage of 45–6; on Satan 48–9, 50, 51; on suffering 49; on ‘thorn in the flesh’ 49–50;
on triumph of God over evil 55; works of 45
Peake, A. S. 30
Peter, Saint 39
Phaedo (Plato) 115, 117, 129, 130, 138, 140, 168, 203
Phaedrus (Plato) 130
Philippika (Theopompus) 65
Philolaus of Croton 111
Philo of Alexandria: adherent of Pythagorean ideas 215; allegorical technique of 214; concept of soul 218; on
creation of man 219; on difference between philosophy and wisdom 218; education of 215; ethical doctrine
219–20; on evil 7–8, 213, 220; on human behaviour 219–20; interpretation of Jewish sacred writing by 217;
life of 213; on man’s final goal 218; on material world 216; on origin of human wisdom 218–19;
philosophical views of 213, 217, 219; on physical body 217–18; on pleasure 216, 219, 220; praise of
contemplative life 217–18; on virtue 219; works of 214
Philo of Larissa 215
Plato: conception of evil 5, 128, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141; on equation of goodness and pleasure 138; on ethical
constraints 135, 136; on God as source of good 132; idea of Fate 129; on knowledge and expertise 168;
methods of 143n12; on mistake 137; picture of tyrant 139–40; portraits of amoralist characters 134–5;
principle of plenitude 141; on reason and desire 164; on soul 139–40, 168, 203, 250; speculations on afterlife
130; on teaching of virtue 138–9; texts attributed to 143n7; on universe 141; on vice 136, 137–8; view of
God 132; on virtue 136–7, 139; on world as work of God 140–1
Platonic dialogues 5, 80, 97, 111
Platonism: philosophical impact of 90–1, 97–8; resurgence of non-sceptical forms of 163; see also Middle
Platonism; Neoplatonism
pleasure as criteria of good 116
plenitude, principle of 141
Pliny, the Younger 295
Plotinus: on audacity 199; education 198–9; on evil 137, 198, 199, 201–2, 203, 207; on forms of matter 199–200,
201, 202, 203; as founder of Neoplatonism 7, 215; polemic against gnostics 98, 99; on problem of
indeterminacy 200–1; on relation of soul and matter 203–4; on wickedness of soul 204; see also
Neoplatonism
Plutarch 65, 91, 170, 173n33, 180, 214
Polansky, R. 159n19
Polemarchus 133, 134
Porphyry 198, 199, 204, 206
Presocratic philosophers: Anaxagoras 114–15; atomists 116; colony of Miletus 104; conception of cosmic good
106; conception of evil 104, 116–17; on consequences for evil life 111; cosmogony 104–5; cosmology and
 world-order systems 104–6, 114; disregard of moral questions 5; Empedocles 115–16; on goodness 104, 109;
Heraclitus 106–9; on justice 106; Parmenides of Elea 111–14; primary sources 117; Pythagoras 110–11;
scepticism about transcendent values 116; on source of things 105; Xenophanes 109–10
Primavesi, O. 116
Proclus: criticism of Plotinus 204; as founder of Neoplatonism 7; interpretation of Aristotle 205; on matter
204, 205; on opposition of good and bad 205; philosophical views of 207; view of evil 198, 204, 205–6; see
also Neoplatonism
Prodicus, of Cos 214
Prometheus, deity in Greek mythology 227
Protagoras (Plato) 5, 136, 137, 138
Pseudo-Dionysius 198, 206
Pseudo-Plutarch 118n6
Ptolemy II Philadelphos, king of Egypt 221n3
Ptolemy the Gnostic 93, 101
Ptolemy VI Philometer, king of Egypt 217
Pyrrho of Elis 187
Pythagoras 109, 110–11

Ranganathan, Shyam 8, 9
Ransom Theory 39–40
reason and desire 164–5
Renan, Ernest 12
Republic (Plato) 5, 130, 131, 136, 139
Ritual Manuals (Brāhmaṇas) 239, 241
Robertson, D. 29
Rodhe, Sten Olof 240
Roman literature: Aeneid 233–5; concept of evil 232, 235; on decline of moral values 232; depiction of
underworld and afterlife 234–5; Metamorphoses 228, 235; representations of gods 233
Roman philosophy 231
Roman religion 232–3
Roochnik, David 157, 158
Rose, Jenny 4
Ross, W. D. 172n13
Ryle, Gilbert 164
Sallust 232
Sarpedon, character 225
Satan: in biblical tradition 48; depiction of evil as 294–5, 297–8; enslavement of humanity by 48; in Hebrew
Bible 20; Māra and 264; as opponent to God 50; in Ransom Theory 39–40
scepticism 187–8, 191, 194–5
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm 206
Schmidt, H.-P. 72n64
Schmitt, Rüdiger 2
Schopenhauer, Arthur 248, 251
Schweitzer, A. 249, 253
Scott, R. 127
Searle, John R. 293
Sedley, D. N. 119n22
Self 258, 260
self-governance 248
self-indulgence 146–7, 159n21
selfishness 282
Sellars, John 6
Seneca: on danger of good fortune 182–3; on disaster 182; on experience of adversary 182, 184; on experience
of misfortune 181, 182, 183; on good man 181; on providence 181–2
sensual pleasure 269–70
Sethian groups 93
Seth, son of Adam and Eve 93
Setiya, Kieran 150
Severus, of Antioch 78
Sextus Empiricus: on actions according to laws and customs 192, 193; allegory on soul and senses 112; on
anxiety and distress 196n15; on appearances of things 188, 191, 192; conception of technê 196n12; dates of
life 195n2; on differences in human behaviour 188; on evil 195; on freedom from definite beliefs 192–3; on
natural tendencies 194; on nature of things 188–9; notions of good and bad 189, 190, 191, 192; on
observance of piety 192; on perceptual and cognitive capacities 191; philosophical views of 7, 187, 189, 190;
on sceptical ability 188, 194; on sceptic’s attitude to religion 196n13; shortage of information about 195n4
Shabuhragan (book of Shapur) 76
Shaked, S. 72n64
Shakespeare, William 128
shame cultures 286, 287
Shapur I, King of Persia 69, 76
Siddhattha Gotama see Buddha
Simplicius 104, 114, 198, 204, 206
sin 47–8
Smith, M. F. 171
society: concept of guilt and 286; possibility of civil 283; slave-morality 127
Socrates: conception of evil 128, 131, 132, 134, 136; on cosmology of Anaxagoras 115; on God as source of
good 131–2; on happiness 178; on harm 132–3, 134; on horror stories 130; idea of Fate 129; on just man 133,
134; on knowledge and expertise 168; on notion of ‘bad’ 132, 133; on people’s desire 149–50; on poetry 131;
on punishment 134; on teaching of virtue 138; texts attributed to 143n7; on vice 136; on wealth and health
178
Sophocles 120, 132, 230, 231
śreya (control) 248, 254n7
Stobaeus 175–6
Stoicism 163, 215, 216
Stoic physics 180, 183–4
Stoics: on achievement of happiness 178; attitude to evil 6–7, 175, 177, 179, 181, 183; on categories of things
175–6; on contradictory actions 179–80; on health and wealth 177–8; on offenses 179; on preferred and
dispreferred indifferents 176, 216; on soul 176; on unhappy life 176; value theory 175–7, 178–9, 183; on vice
176, 179, 180; on virtuous life 179; works of 184n1; on wrongdoing 179
Syrianus 198

Taliaferro, Charles 3
Taoist conception of evil 9, 284–5
Temptation of Saint Anthony, The (Flaubert) 294
Tertullian 41, 93, 95, 213
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy) 129
Thales of Miletus 104
Theaetetus (Plato) 140, 216
Theagenes, of Rhegium 214
Theodotus 93
Theogony (Hesiod) 227, 228
Theophilus 213
Theopompus of Chios 65
Therapeutae, Jewish sect 213, 218, 221n3
Thomas Aquinas, Saint 11–12, 80, 137, 206
Thompson, Jim 294, 295, 297, 298–9
Thraetaona, mythological hero 61, 68
Thrasymachus, character 135, 136, 138
Timaeus (Plato) 5, 138, 140
Tohoku Japanese Earthquake Sculpture (Jerram) 294
True Realities 259–60
Tsevat, M. 27, 28, 29

Upaniṣads 241–53

Valentinian I, Roman Emperor 86

Valentinus 4, 90, 91, 92–3, 98
value theory 175–6
Varro 215
Vedas: approaches to evil 8–9, 240–1, 247, 248; characteristic of 8; on death 242, 243, 244–5; deities in 241;
Dialogues (Upaniṣads) 239; Forest Books (Āraṇyaka) 239; Formulas (Mantras) 239; on gods of nature 253;
Platonic reading of 249–50; question of self-governance 248; Ritual Manuals (Brāhmaṇas) 239, 241, 243; on
sacrifice 241–3; on self-control (yama) 245; on shift from meat to vegetarian diet 242; structure of 239; on
universal soul 249
Vedic naturalism 241–3, 248, 253
Vedic non-naturalism 243–6, 253
Velleman, David 150
Verdi, Giuseppe 128
vice: Aristotle on 146–7, 154–5, 158n4; as ignorance 137; Plato on 136, 137–8; Socrates on 136; Stoics on 176,
179, 180
Videvdad, Young Avestan text 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 71n22, 71n31
virtue: Aristotle on 146, 147, 148, 154; Confucianism on 279–80, 281; in Graeco-Roman literature 8; as
knowledge of good 139; Philo of Alexandria on 219; Plato on 136–8, 139; social environment and
development of 281
Vishnu, deity 244, 253n4
Vogt, Katja 150
Voltaire 142
Volz, Paul 12

Weiss, M. 28
Wentzel, Rocki 8
William, of Moerbeke 204
Williams, Bernard 134, 147
wisdom 260–1
Women of Trachis, The (Sophocles) 132
Works and Days (Hesiod) 227, 228
wrong-doing 277, 280, 286, 287

Xenophanes 5, 109–10, 117

Xerxes, King of Persia 59, 60, 65
Xunzi 282–4
xwarenah (divine fortune) 64, 71n46

Yahweh (Hebrew name of God): dark sides of 12, 13; disobedience of fallen angels to 20; as judgement for
human evil 15; as origin of evil 12–14; struggle with dragon 17–18; as warrior 13
Yama, God of Death 243
yazatas (beings who are worthy of worship) 59, 60, 67, 68, 69
Yoga 8–9, 246–7, 253
Yoga Sūtra (Patañjali) 246, 247
Young Avestan texts: on aeshma (violence) 58, 66; on daevas 59; depiction of Zarathushtra 63; on evil 65–6,
68; on fravashis (pre-souls) 62–3; on merge of creative force with Ahura Mazda 64; see also Videvdad,
Young Avestan text

Zarathushtra 57, 62, 63, 65, 66, 70

Zeno 115, 175–6
Zeus, god 131, 132, 225, 226, 227
Zhuangzi 284
Zhuangzi, Book of 279
Zoroastrian religion, Zoroastrianism: characteristic of 57; concept of hell 66, 72n58; concept of limited time
72n72; daevic beings 66–7; on defeat of evil 69–70; on ethical choices 63–4; gods in 60–1; Greek references
to 65; hierarchy of evil 65–7; on impact of evil on conceptual and material world 69; link to Manichaean
dualism 77; metaphysical evil 67–8; mixture of good and evil 67; monotheistic nature of 68; problem of
origin of evil 68–9; representations of evil in 4