Another thought: if sin is darkness, blinding not only the sinner but any human being (including the sinner) who seeks to make the sin intelligible, then perhaps the so-called Problem of Evil inherits the darkness of individual sin, at least in so far as the Problem collects the individual sins together? Of course, this would not make intelligible the full unintelligibility of the Problem, since the Problem traditionally not only collects individual sins but also non-agential tragedies like earthquakes, cyclones and mudslides. Still, it would shed some light on some of the darkness of the Problem. If individual sins are mysteries, so, too, I would think, is the collection of them. (Anyway, this doesn’t immediately strike me as a fallacious inference from a “part” to a “whole”.)
I’m reminded of Plotinus, who in his On the Descent of the Soul, struggles to render intelligible the soul’s fall from union with The One. There, at least, Plotinus ends by treating the fall both as unchosen and as chosen. St. Paul’s famous and famously difficult confessional at the end of Romans 7 structurally seems to me to look similar—a phenomenological description of the blending of the unchosen and the chosen. Also: “I believe, help my unbelief”?
Filed under: philosophy or religion
