Daily Times

One of the most knotty questions asked by all and sundry is why innocents suffer. This constitutes the most influential argument for disbelief in God. For those who believe in God or His good governance this calls for a response. And countless theologians have struggled to answer. One of the most difficult formulations of this problem – two children of the same father one dying before the age of maturity and one becoming quite old and leading a sinful life earning him hell and the later asking God why didn’t He cause him death with his brother so that he too would have escaped punishment – we find in the story of split between Mu’tazilites and Ash’arities. Much influential modern formulations of it are in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazarov through Ivan and in The Plague by Camus through Dr Rieux. In the days of coronavirus, the latter especially appears striking. The best response from a religious and metaphysical point of view is in the writings of Frithjof Schuon Shaykh Isa Nuruddin. Let us take a note of it and check how far we are able to penetrate these dense questions.

Schuon asserts that, in a way, we are all “sinners” as only God is perfect. To quote Schuon:

One should never ask why misfortunes befall the innocent: in the sight of the Absolute all is disequilibrium, ‘God alone is good’, and this truth cannot fail to be manifested from time to time in a direct and violent manner. If the good suffer, that means that all men would merit as much; old age and death prove it, for they spare no man.

Man’s very existence is an indirect manifestation of evil, a punishment for the “sin” of choosing to live on earth involving as it does separation from the Principle, the Absolute. To be is to be bedevilled by evil. To be is to suffer and die. Man is created in difficulty, asserts the Quran. The Prophet SAW noted the need for contemplation of tragic lot of humans – “if you knew that which I know, you would laugh little and weep much.” There is a profound truth in Abul Aala Maari’s (a famous Arabic ascetic and poet) famous statement that our very existence is the sin, the evil. This idea is frequently echoed in Sufi literature. Schopenhauer’s whole philosophy (though a heterodox interpretation of Buddhist wisdom) is a powerful expression of the same truth. From another perspective this is the conclusion of Sophocles and perhaps all great tragedies. The absurdist writers and philosophers emphasize the same point in their own way. Angels, in the Quranic narrative of genesis, foresaw the danger of evil or fasad that will enter in the world on account of man. The point to be made is that modern humanism’s sanguine estimate of man and his denial of evil and sin or fall is simply unwarranted.

To the question “why is there death?” Schuon has an answer. “The cause of death is the disequilibrium brought about by our fall and the loss of Paradise.” For him the levelling justice of death is infinitely more important for us than the diversity of earthly destinies. The experience of death is essentially the lifting of the veil. Its experience resembles that of a man who lived all his life in a dark room and suddenly finds himself transported to a mountain top where his gaze would embrace all the wide landscape. Projected into the absolute ‘nature of things’ man is inescapably aware of what he is in reality; he knows himself ontologically and without deforming perspective in the light of the normative ‘proportions’ of the universe. Death alone lets us perceive what we are, not as an insignificant dust or the “lusting and fighting animals” but theomorphic beings made in the image of God. Death allows us to see our real nature and realize our destiny as we meet the Beloved.

From Hume to Mill and Russell and of course their intellectual predecessor Epicurus, most critics of traditional theism on account of the problem of evil have narrow theological conception of the divine or personal God and they are not entirely in the wrong if we have purely theological conception of God before us. According to Schuon theological exegeses are unable to comprehend the real metaphysical purport of such religious narratives as the narrative of genesis. Here Marco Pallis and Schuon’s exegesis of the Fall is discussed.

Reading Frithjof Schuon on the meaning of suffering and why we can’t claim innocence

The Tree of Life in the center of the Garden of Eden corresponds to the axis of the universe. Adam, a primordial man, dwells at peace with all his fellow beings, and they along with him participate in the center so long as his attention remains focused there. Now comes the snake ( whose presence there will be explained later) and tempts Adam with a hitherto untasted experience, that of fragmented unity, of things unreferred to the center and valued for their own sake as if they were self-sufficing entities. From the moment on Adam and Eve feel imprisoned within their own fragmentary consciousness, their empirical egos (which are illusory and breed suffering). This fact is evidenced by their shame at their own nakedness, which they try to cover up with an artificial selfhood of their own contriving, the fig leaves that have become the prototype of all human disguise. It is not without reason that the Tree now becomes the other tree, the Tree of Good and Evil. A Tree “bowed under the weight of its fruits, light and dark, containing the seed of indefinite becoming… regarded from the viewpoint of ignorance, the Tree of Life becomes the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.” This tree is referred to as the other tree as for the first time they feel an acute sense of otherness, of I and you, and by this very fact they are cut off from those other beings with whom they formerly communed on free and fearless terms. Schuon attributes the origin of evil to Adam’s placing himself outside the Divine Centre by succumbing to the lure of exteriorizing separative fragmentary knowledge (this happens today as well as man continues to succumb to this separative knowledge and fails to see with God’s eye or eye of unity). The Tree of Life at the center of the Earthly Paradise is the tree of synthetic or unitive knowledge; this knowledge perceives accidents, or contingencies, in the Substance, or as coming from the Substance. The forbidden tree is the tree of separative knowledge which perceives accidents as being outside the substance. “Positively speaking, the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil is All-Possibility as Divine Freedom; negatively or in a limiting sense, it is that same possibility when, unfolding in existence and thus, one might say, in a downward direction, it necessarily moves far away from the Divine Source.”

Gide has a brilliant comment to make on the story of genesis “We have eaten of the fruits of the tree of knowledge and the taste of ashes is left in our mouths.”

Who doesn’t deep down feel guilt? Dostovesky and Levinas show why we must feel guilty as we all fall short of fulfilling demands of the other/neighbor/God. This shows we really blame ourselves and not God. Who can assert he knows about the mystery of life and death? Who can say he is not driven by senses/dunya away from truth (intellectual-spiritual world/akhira)? Who can deny he owes nothing to ancestors or posterity and deny life is one and thus shared responsibility? Seek to see with the eye of God/unity and seek unconditional forgiveness for being/living and transgressing against the other/fellow people, rights of other creatures and nature and the call of the Spirit/conscience and one finds peace from the guilt that weighs us down on account of not being innocent.

Harmonizing intellectual relationship between students and teachers.

The writer can be reached at marooof123@yahoo.com