On Gandhi, Tolstoy, and the Problem of Evil
Readings and sermon preached by Reverend Carolyn Patierno
April 23, 2006

By William E. Connolly from his essay entitled “Faith, Territory, and Evil” in Modernity and the Problem of Evil

Evil surprises; it liquidates sedimented habits of moral trust; it foments categorical uncertainty; it issues in a fervent desire to restore closure to a dirempted world; and it generates imperious demands to take revenge on the guilty parties. When you experience evil, the bottom falls out of your stomach because it has fallen out of your world. If you have experienced other such traumas, they help to color the experience of this one. The accumulation of such events becomes layered into the soft issues of personal and cultural life …
In thinking about evil, it is wise to attend to its phenomenology. For the regime that takes charge of the experience of evil will find itself free to mobilize energies of response in a variety of possible directions, and the response mobilized sometimes engender new evils. If the most compelling task is to forestall evil, it becomes pertinent to work upon ourselves so that we respond firmly to it without extending the phenomenon we seek to expel.

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Leo Tolstoy from “A Letter to a Hindu”

Love and forcible resistance to evil-doers involve such a mutual contradiction as to destroy utterly the whole sense and meaning of the conception of Love.

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Mahatma Gandhi

Real beauty, and that is my aim, is in doing good against evil.

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When I was a young adult I stopped saying the “Our Father” because I had a philosophical disagreement with the prayer. For those of you who may not be familiar or others of you who may not have heard it or prayed it for a long time: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” And although when I was growing up Protestants continued on with an additional line to this prayer, the Catholic version ended right there: deliver us from evil. Amen. I would have none of it. “Evil.” Ha! I didn’t believe in evil. How evolved of me, I thought.

Well, of course I didn’t believe in evil. I was cared for: fed, sheltered, clothed, and loved. What did I – could I – possibly know of evil? And then I grew up. I understand now that there is no other way to name certain atrocities than with that word, complex and problematic a concept as it may be. Something evil lurks in the minds, hearts, and souls of us all. Inherent worth, dignity, and free will notwithstanding, it is right for us to be aware of our need to be delivered or to deliver ourselves from evil.

“In thinking about evil, it is wise to attend to its phenomenology.” So wrote Alan D. Schrift, the editor of the book from which the reading was culled. So, how are we going to define evil? I didn’t know how I would approach teasing out my gut feelings from what is rational (not that gut feelings are by nature irrational.) I started this endeavor knowing that liberal religionists are accused of not doing justice to the consideration of evil and then I wondered, “Who are our accusers?” When I read the January 2002 issue of The UU World that considered evil (think of the timing) I found I had to agree. I myself became an accuser.

Brothers and sisters, why do we shy away from this conversation?

This is how much I’ve shied away from this conversation. I thought that I would shield myself, and perhaps you, too with Gandhi and Tolstoy. Remember this was to be the second of the series of Gandhi and Tolstoy? In beginning the research for this second consideration, I found myself getting exasperated, “Tolstoy and Gandhi think everything is evil!” How are they going to help me? “How can I get them to shield me?” was really the question.

I began to think that these two literary and moral giants may not speak to 21st century issues as much as I would have liked. For I thought that modernity offers little to no escape from some of the things they called evil … industry, for example.

You can imagine how relieved I felt when I came across this book on the library shelves: Modernity and the Problem of Evil. I could have done a dance right there in the stacks when I read the following from preface:

Is the rhetoric of “evil” inherently tied to a religious or theological framework, … or can the concept of evil function within a secular but normative discourse that strives to understand the modern world? Is “evil” just “bad + God,” or do we need a concept of “evil” that is distinct and different from “bad” or “wrong”? To put the question most bluntly: What is it that we add to the statement “What the hijackers did when they flew those planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11/01 was wrong, or bad” when we say, instead, “What the hijackers did when they flew those planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001 was evil?”

I thought, maybe that’s why it’s so difficult for liberal religionists to consider the matter of evil. It was finally making sense to me! What good Unitarian Universalist would utilize a construct such as “bad + God = evil?” I was so relieved. Things were unfolding. I was feeling hopeful that I might feel comfortable … with a conversation on evil???? I chided myself, “What are you, out of your mind!?”. This “comforting book” has on its cover an image of a pile of skulls found in Cambodia and another image borrowed from the Holocaust Museum.

Fear not, I came to my senses. It didn’t take long. A quarter of the way through the first essay and the way was clear: there was no clear way through a discourse on evil.

For all my doubt about whether Tolstoy or Gandhi could possibly have imagined the world that has evolved (can we imagine the devastation Gandhi would suffer in the face of the tensions that have only escalated between India & Pakistan? Or Tolstoy in the face of the continued violence between Russia and Chechneya?) for all my doubt, theirs was a profound conclusion – (one that was inspired by Universalist Adin Ballou and Unitarian Henry David Thoreau, by the way.)

But again, what is the meaning of evil? Can we distinguish a theological meaning from a secular meaning? In other words, I suppose, can we take “God” out of the “God & bad” equation?

I don’t know. But as to utilizing the term “evil” or not, I believe we must. Because, for me at least, “What the hijackers did when they flew those planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11/01 was bad.” just doesn’t cut it. But certainly neither does an equally violent – and thus, equally evil response.

Again the definition offered in the reading:

Evil surprises; it liquidates sedimented habits of moral trust; it foments categorical uncertainty; it issues in a fervent desire to restore closure to a dirempted world; and it generates imperious demands to take revenge on the guilty parties. When you experience evil, the bottom falls out of your stomach because it has fallen out of your world. … The accumulation of such events becomes layered into the soft issues of personal and cultural life …

And the natural instinct is flight or fight. We want to fly away or fight back. One night when I was in college, I was out with my boyfriend and another beloved friend of mine. We had a fun and early night together and then left to go home. On the way, the driver behind us began to drive wildly. He followed us to my friend’s house and when we got out of the car, he attacked both my friend and my boyfriend. This man was a very big man – he managed to pin each of these two under his knees – one knee under each chest. He was out of control – and very angry and we didn’t know why. Much to my absolute shock, I bolted from the car and jumped on this man’s back, pulling his hair and head back. He reared himself up and clocked me so hard that I went flying, finally landing in a pile of leaves at the base of a nearby tree. Someone had called the police and when several people came running out of their houses, this man let my friends get up. At which point I walked straight up to him pointing out that what he had done was animalistic and wrong.

I felt horrible about this experience. The bottom fell out of my stomach. But my friend Michael kept telling me that we got a good story out of the experience. I wasn’t buying it. In the 25 years since, I’ve told this story twice before today, actually – once to my parents and once to my partner. What I got out of the experience was the self-knowledge that I wasn’t the pacifist I claimed to be. I had to reckon with this understanding. I wanted to hurt this man. I believed that I needed to hurt him.

Perhaps it is less complicated to consider non-violent resistance to evil over the long haul than is it to consider non-violent resistance to an immediate and surprising evil. Which makes Aleb, the central character in Tolstoy’s tale, Evil Allures, Good Endures*, that much more stunning. In the face of a despicable violence, he breathes deeply and withholds punishment, even.

But I met violence, with violence. To this day, I don’t know what I could have done in that instance, truthfully. I behaved in the way I expected I would only after my beloved friends were seemingly out of danger.

Gandhi said, “My first fight is with the demons inside of me, my second fight is with the demons in my people, and only my third fight is with the British.”

Theologian Walter Wink wrote an essay entitled, “My Enemy, My Destiny: The Transforming Power of Nonviolence”. He wrote, “To engage evil is a spiritual act because it will require of us the rare courage to face our own most ancient and intractable evils within.”

I began to fall deeply into this idea espoused by Tolstoy, Gandhi, and apparently philosophers and theologians from Spinoza to Wink that the first step in non-resistance is to look to the evil within.

And yet, compelling questions kept emerging such as these:

Can the use of [the concept of evil] be justified in purely philosophical terms, or does it require a rethinking of the relation between religious and philosophical discourse?
Can human beings be motivated by the sheer perverse desire to do harm or wrong, or, as Kant claimed, must there always be some underlying motive of self-interest?
Can evil be “explained” or at least made intelligible (for example, psychoanalytically or sociologically)? Or is our notion of evil essentially intertwined with a sense of ultimate resistance to comprehension?

These were the questions that provided the impetus for the collection of essays that are included in Modernity and the Problem of Evil.

However, one contributor responded thusly, “The reigning ethical discourses are not pitched at a depth adequate to the horrors of history, and especially modern history with its totalitarianisms and genocides.”

“Do we fall into this category?” I wondered?

And on the other hand, in exploring the problem of evil perversely folded within faith, Connolly says,

The tendency to evil within faith is this: The instances in which the faith of others incites you to anathematize it as inferior or evil can usher into being the demand to take revenge against them for the disturbance they have sowed, even when they have not otherwise limited your ability to express your faith … The more relentless the drive to purify and universalize an existential faith, the more its supporters experience otherwise tolerable differences to be forms of blasphemy or persecution demanding reprisal.

This description does not apply to Unitarian Universalism as a faith tradition. We do not feel threatened in our own faith by other faith traditions and in fact, espouse to embrace and be inspired by world religions. And so, there is not this particular tendency toward evil among us.

But on the other hand, what I do fear is the following from Walter Wink:

"The easiest temptation to unmask is self-righteousness. What a wonderfully expansive feeling it is to denounce evil grandly. … to forget our own complicity in, or past complacency toward, the evil we now so tardily oppose. During such seizures of summer saintliness, it is virtually impossible not to demonize the enemy; indeed, part of the payoff of demonizing others is to feel so good about ourselves.”

We can sometimes be that brand of self-righteous that makes it pretty easy to resist a fierce self-examination or avoid believing that a conversation on evil applies to us. Deliver us from evil, indeed – said once claimed the young woman once so sure but now grown and unsure and standing before you.

A man has been living outside of our church for two weeks. Two weeks. Sure, I’ve been in conversation with him … have tried to connect him with services … we’ve invited him to our pancake breakfast last week … But for two weeks we’ve all been walking past him. It’s been torture for me. Hasn’t it been torturous for you? I wonder about our complicity, the kind to which Wink refers.

This sermon is messy. I know that. For the life of me, I could not tie this one up in a neat bow (or even a semblance of trimming as my sermons are by and large bow-less.) But here’s where I’m landing: we need to talk about this one. We are living in a world where this word is thrown around an awful lot. We need to know how to both counter the dangerous manner in which it is thrown around while also delving deeply into a productive – and likely disturbing – conversation about what this means to us. In our small group ministries, humanist discussion group, Christian Fellowship, Sangha … today at coffee hour, the discussion needs to continue. How do you understand evil?

One among you described it this way:

Evil is in a lot of things we don’t understand. The animals and other things of the earth – they don’t fight – only to survive, to stay on earth. We have a passion to have more. We believe that there is always more and we kill to get it. That’s evil. That we have that in us, that no other creatures have, to keep wanting more, things that we don’t need and a strong enough feeling to kill for [it] – that’s evil.

That’s a pretty great definition that was offered by Jessica Massey, budding theologian and philosopher, during her coming of age ceremony last year.

I found it impossible to contemplate evil without also contemplating non-violence. And so we return to Tolstoy whose profound conclusion I referenced at the start was this: “Love and forcible resistance to evil-doers involve such a mutual contradiction as to destroy utterly the whole sense and meaning of the conception of Love”.

When my head really began to spin I desired a simple kernel of truth. As providence would have it, I read the following from Tolstoy, “If people only freed themselves from this terrible accumulation of futile exercises of our lower capacities of mind, the simple law of love, natural to man, accessible to all and solving all questions and perplexities, would of itself become clear and obligatory.”

After all, that’s what we strive to be about, right? Love. Real beauty. Truth - all three so that we may deliver ourselves from evil.

Amen.

* This tale was shared as the story for all ages.

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