For your consideration. The following theologist says (debatably, as you like) as soon as philosophy considers the question of evil it becomes theology. In ideal forms he says being begins in innocence, which is neither good nor evil. It develops crudely, with an element of self-centeredness (taken to a comic extreme as Dr. Evil incarnate). Then Dr. Evil has an epiphany - has a sort of self-death and becomes selfless, good!
- Primorial Evil
Perhaps evil is the most ultimate of all mysteries. Evil finally
defies the comprehension of all our philosophies and theologies, and
above all so when it is understood as being quite simply nothingness,
and precisely thereby is not finally understood at all. At no point is
Western thinking more distant from Eastern thinking than in its
refusal of the problem or mystery of evil. In Western thinking, it is
as though evil is quite simply an illusion, or at best a pure
ignorance, an ignorance or illusion wholly dissolved in pure thinking.
As opposed to Eastern thinking, such ignorance or illusion cannot be
deep or ultimate, cannot be possible in a purely logical or purely
rational thinking. Thereby, too, Western thinking is deeply opposed to
the Western imagination, and at no point is Western literature more
distinctive or unique than in its centering upon an ultimate or
absolute evil, an evil fully opaque to the Western mind, or is so
until the full advent of modernity. German Idealism was the first
philosophy fully to incorporate the Western imagination, and all too
significantly it is in German Idealism that there is first drawn forth
a conceptual understanding of the actuality of evil, one decisively
occurring in Schelling and Hegel. Heidegger regarded Schelling's
Treatise on Freedom as the acme of the metaphysics of German Idealism, a metaphysics which is a "system of freedom" as present in
Schelling's treatise, but here an absolute freedom is present only in
God, and present only in the becoming of that Godhead that strives
against the "darkness" or "evil" of itself. This is a darkness which
Schelling can speak of as "that within God which is not God himself"
(359), but it is the very ground of God's existence, and one releasing
a primordial longing to give birth to itself.
Here, as elsewhere, Schelling is under the deep impact of Eckhart and
Boehme, and can even speak of that "Nothing" which has long since been
the cross of reason (373 n. 2), a "Nothing" which is the second
principle of darkness or the spirit of evil, for it transcends that
dark principle that had made possible the original creation. In God,
too, there would be a depth of darkness if He did not make it His own
and unite it with Himself, and it is this union which makes possible
both the love and the glorification of God (399). This is that love
which is the absolute freedom of God, but it is finally a human
freedom, too, or is so when we exist "in God" (347). Hegel differed
most deeply from Schelling in realizing an absolute negativity as the
very center of his thinking, a center making possible the first
philosophical understanding of the death of God, and while Hegel
follows Augustine and Christian tradition in understanding evil as a
withdrawal into self-centeredness, he wholly transcends that tradition
in understanding this withdrawal as occurring from the beginning in
the "externalization" and "alienation" of the Divine Being. For
Absolute Being becomes its own "other," thereby it withdraws into
itself and becomes self-centered or "evil"; but this is that
self-alienation which leads to death, a death which is the death of
the abstraction or alienation or "evil" of the Divine Being
(Phenomenology of Spirit, 778–80). So it is that Hegel can
understand the "Bad Infinite" or Abstract Spirit as the consequence of
God's own self-alienation, an alienation which is an absolute
self-alienation, and one which is the ultimate ground of all
alienation. Hence even in the Science of Logic Hegel can unveil all
abstract spirit as "Evil" (I, One. 3, c).
Now it is truly remarkable that so little attention is given to evil
in Western philosophy. One could search in vain in our philosophical
dictionaries and encyclopedias for a serious treatment of evil, and in
the twentieth century (as opposed to the nineteenth century), no major
philosopher has even examined the question of evil as such. This is
despite the fact that, in our common understanding, evil has never
been so incarnate as it has been in the twentieth century. So, too,
the twentieth-century imagination has far more profoundly and more
comprehensively been immersed in an absolute evil or abyss or
nothingness than all previous expressions of the imagination. Whereas
Dante's Inferno is inseparable from the Purgatorio and the
Paradiso, and Milton's Paradise Lost is inseparable from an apocalyptic redemption, the redemptive moments of a uniquely
twentieth-century imagination can only be realized in the depths of
darkness or abyss. Is our darkness so deep that it defies all
conceptual understanding whatsoever, and is this the reason why the
question of evil is perhaps our most forbidden question, that very
question which embodies a truly apocalyptic darkness?
Finally, the question of evil is inseparable from the question of the
origin of evil. The Christian symbol that most clearly illuminates
this question is the felix culpa or the "fortunate fall," one deeply
reborn in the very advent of modernity, as epically enacted in
Paradise Lost. Here, only an original fall makes possible redemption, or an apocalyptic redemption, and not only an original but
a total fall, a total fall whose dialectical correlate is a total
redemption. This is a symbolic core underlying Hegel's dialectical
philosophy, too, for only an original or primordial self-negation or
self-emptying of Spirit makes possible the evolution or
self-realization of Spirit itself, one wholly alienating Spirit from
itself, as the "in-itself" and the "for-itself" of Spirit become
wholly divided and self-estranged, and yet this is the very condition
that makes possible a reconciliation of Spirit with itself. This is
the reconciliation that Hegel could know as "theodicy," and an
absolutely necessary theodicy, one wherein "evil" or an absolute
self-division and self-estrangement are absolutely necessary for
apocalypse. This apocalypse is the absolute transfiguration of Spirit,
one wholly and absolutely transcending the totality of an original or
primordial Spirit, and only the self-negation or the self-emptying of
that totality makes possible such an absolute transfiguration of
Spirit itself.