The Devil Is Still to Blame

Ibe Ikwechegh

She must have walked back into the room to find her husband’s face swollen and in pain from the first stab she dealt him earlier. Amid what should have given cause for rethink, she dealt the final stab to him and so we are likely to think of Maryam Sanda as Evil. But the problem of evil is deeper than humans can comprehend. Why is man so evil? Why is there evil in spite of the omnipotence of God? Does evil have different genres? All evils are equal but, to employ Orwellian-grammar, some evils are more equal than the others. Who is the real author of evil? And above all, who is to blame for man’s evil?

We think of the recent Guatemala volcano, killing over 109 persons; the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami that wiped out 230,000 people and the 2017 flooding that displaced over a 100,000 people living by River Benue banks. In our pantheistic world-view, insisting that the universe and nature are the alter egos of God, we see such disasters as His act; actus dei. But natural disasters are not the only evil, if at all they are.

In December 2005, parents waited happily at Port-Harcourt Airport to receive their children, returning from School for Christmas Holidays. The DC9-32, bringing home these angels, slammed on the runway and burst into flames. Only one of them survived with a heart rendering disfigurement. Auto crashes, fire accidents, miscellany of diseases in our hospitals, are nothing but plain evil. In this genre of evil, the theist and the most of us will curse the devil.

So, what about the murder allegedly committed by Maryam and the reported Udeme Odibi’s movie-like killing and chopping off her husband’s genitals and giving herself some scuffs as a ruse? What about Evans, who built an empire at the expense of fellow men, whom he held hostage like caged birds. A few years ago, a daughter of a General, met a guy online. It seemed like a prospect for life’s beautiful things. In the innocence of her upbringing, it was lost upon her, that there were many beasts in designer-suits. She went to meet him and experienced the most gruesome manner of dying.

Murder, rape, arson, treachery, stealing, kidnapping and other evils are easily designated as the evil of man for which only he is accountable. These are neither natural disasters nor accidents and so we hold man as the sole author and ‘give the devil a break’.
The story is told of Adam and Eve who lived as man and woman in nakedness and were not ashamed. This illusive state of affairs in which ignorance was bliss prevailed until ‘the serpent’ entered the scene. He re-educated them on what might, in every sense in which empiricism may be conceived, have seemed to be the advantages of the ‘forbidden fruit’; ‘enlightenment’, ‘godlike status’ and ‘knowledge of good and evil’. The first bite brought them to a new dawn of amazement and shame. This story, offered in many forms, to most theists, provides the first account of the antagonism between God and the Devil. Maybe, our atavistic instinct that God is the antithesis of the Devil and that there is always in the human heart, a tension between good and evil derived essentially from the Adam and Eve field experience. It seems that upon a preponderance of many theological philosophies and moral opinions, our deeds are either good or bad. Our discussion assumes that the Devil is the personification of that evil.

Good and evil are often prescribed as a choice. James Russell Lowell wrote, “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, in the strife of truth and falsehood, for the good or evil side some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight, and the choice goes by forever between that darkness and that light”. Marvel at Lowell’s selection of antonyms, with choice as a nucleus. Our named actors in this discussion, one might think, had choices; to kill or not to kill; to kidnap or not and so forth.
In the volumes, it is written that there is a way which seems right to a man, but the end of it is death. Does this not defy the assumption that choice is an antidote? If the choice ‘seemed’ right, has such a man not exercised best judgment albeit towards a fatal end? It is possible that evil attacks the very faculty for good choices. The prescription of choice assumes that man is ever capable of rational decisions and inferentially accords man undeserving qualities.

Maybe, evil is not just a matter of choice but an attestation to the philosophies and ideas that we are a product of our environment. At a conference, a young man asked Dr. Ravi Zacharias about his response to the view that evil is not within man but outside of man since he is a product of his environment. Dr. Zacharias quipped that in that case, ‘we should not be imprisoning people like Madoff but their neighbours’. The philosophy of environmental impact on conduct will run aground if it cannot show us that Maryam grew up in an environment of husband-stabbing women or that Evans was raised in a hamlet of kidnappers.

Also, it may be argued that man is born evil and so evil comes as part of the non-optional features as he rolled out of creation’s mill. The Minnesota Crimes Commission once published a report claiming that, “Every baby starts life as a little savage. He is completely selfish and self-centered. He wants what he wants when he wants it: his bottle, his mother’s attention, his playmate’s toys, his uncle’s watch, or whatever. Deny him these and he seethes with rage and aggressiveness which would be murderous were he not so helpless….This means that all children ….are born delinquent. If permitted to continue in their self-centered world of infancy, given free reign to their impulsive actions to satisfy each want, every child would grow up a criminal, a thief, a killer, a rapist.”

Against this realisation, education forcefully recommends itself. The labours of parents to instil good scruples in children and societies’ corporate involvement in education are testimonials of our acceptance of the idea that education can recreate man.
But sad as it may seem, experience has shown that choices, environmental influence and education, have not fully and sufficiently addressed the question of man’s evil.

Some modern Christians are perhaps more eager to debunk the idea that all evils come from the Devil, either because, it will accord the Devil a pride of place next to God or it will minimize all notions of God’s redemptive power. The rest of society simply thinks this would be passing the buck for man’s inhumanity to man.

It is possible that the answer to this quandary lies in the mystery of things that are beyond us and the spheres of rationality since our scientific and epistemological insights into the question have not really proved much meaningful, even though we reckon with them as infallible and go upon them as such.

Choice, environment and education focus on the actor of the evil. Yet, it is not enough to find the direct actor of the evil but that which connects to such an actor. Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables, “Everything terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation, …if a soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness”. It might not suffice us to find Husband-killing Maryam or grand-kidnapping Evans, but the devil that connects to these actors, for man is not an end in himself, but a subject to the arbitrary use of things far beyond his control and comprehension.
A prophet, Jeremiah, understood the frailty of the human spirit and its subject to mysterious impacts when he cried out, “Oh Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself”. Thomas a’ Kempis offers yet a profound perspective to this when he wrote that the purpose of just man depends not upon their own wisdom, but upon God’s grace;…For man proposes, but God disposes neither is the way of man in himself.

Conscious effort, self-discipline, control, choice and learning have all helped man but so little.
The discussion of evil of any kind rekindles the argument that the three propositions that God is powerful, loves and created all things, cannot all co-exist at the same time. Arguably, a powerful God who is love cannot create evil. And if He is love and created evil and cannot stop evil then He is not omnipotent. These seemingly inconsistent epicurean propositions are resolvable when a fourth proposition, ‘God is mystery’, is thrown in. God is Love, powerful, created all things and is a mystery. His thoughts are not mundane neither is His ways the same as man’s. It is written that as the heavens are higher than the earth so are His ways and thoughts higher than man’s. Zopher, the Na’amath-ite argued this point well that one cannot by searching find out about God. Indeed, man’s greatest religious tragedy is in his effort to intellectualize, philosophise and rationalize God and His creation.

We can be clear on this, the Devil exists and its existence is not an argument against the existence, neither of God nor of any of His divine attributes. Christians, for instance, receive a finite caution to anticipate the Devil and be alert, and sober minded for he is an enemy prowling around like a roaring-lion looking for whom to destroy. We cannot limit his modus-oparandi. He invades man’s thoughts and forces his hands and methodology. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, the devil sows in the thoughts of man, from which man reaps actions and then habit and then character and finally, destiny.

Doubtlessly, not all men have murdered, kidnapped, raped or even pondered on such grievous malevolence. But that is no argument to debunk devil’s invasion of man’s thoughts if it can be shown that he ever struggled with evil of any degree. Lust, lies, pride, hatred, envy, unforgiveness etc, all afflict men in varying proportions. If evil of any rank has ever invaded, that it was not so heinous makes no difference. It is the substance and not the degree that counts. And if the man who overcame ‘gravitation’ to evil, owes his victory to something more profound, so also may the fallen man blame his tragedy on something outside of himself.

Poignantly, the Christian worldview of grace resolves this better so that the one who overcomes evil recognises in humility that it was the grace of God. Not that environment, education, discipline and choice are irrelevant to the regenerated man, but he adopts an attitude which sees those factors only as vehicles for grace to manifest. Maybe, much the same way, should we in demonstration of humility and humanity acknowledge sometimes, if not always, that the human race lose control of its decisions and deeds so that when they accomplish evil or bring about misery, we can still hold the one who is evil’s personification as vicariously liable.

The devil is not an illusion conjectured in our minds to explain evil or a failure on the part of humanity to accept a world of contrarieties in an objective sense. The discussion of evil is just as eerie as one which on the surface seems to exonerate man from his evil deeds. But such discussions may, nonetheless, bring to the fore, notions already suspected

Therefore, when next we hear that another woman has ripped open the husband’s belly, or that a man abducted and raped a child at will, let us remember also that but for the grace of God, man is only a screwdriver in the hands of the Devil.

–Ibe Ikwechegh, Lawyer, Training Consultant and Public Speaker