in Shakespeare’s imagination. Why did he commit such a horrible crime as the murder of Duncan? He may have had exalted ambitions for himself, such as taking Duncan’s place as King of Scotland. But what finally led him to do the deed wasn’t his ambition but his fear of displeasing Lady Macbeth. In other words, he was a coward. His was the tragedy of a hen-pecked husband. So many people have been led into a life of crime by cowardice. Then, once they’ve begun, they can’t go back, and so they go on and on, till they become hardened criminals.”
“But why are our wills weak in the first place?” insisted Iwao. “Did God make us like that? Can we throw the responsibility for our sins back on him? I don’t feel like doing that. It seems so dishonest. I think I ought to bear the responsibility for my own sins and defects, without blaming poor God. Still, I can’t help seeing I’m not the only person with a weak will. Most men are like me in this respect, I should imagine. So must we say that the will of man is naturally weak?”
“I don’t think the human will is naturally weak,” I replied. “There is in the will a natural inclination to goodness, and with this inclination God has surely given us the strength to resist all temptations to evil. Only, there are different kinds of good outside us, and there are different kinds of desire within us. In our senses, for example, we may be inclined towards what is good to see and eat, like an apple on a tree. But in our mind we may know it isn’t good to take and eat it, if the tree isn’t ours and the apple doesn’t belong to us. Then if we follow our senses rather than our mind, we commit a sin. This is the story of the first sin, as told in the Bible, though there’s no mention of an apple there. It’s just a small sin of stealing, followed by a lie to excuse the sin. Then all too easily one thing leads to another, and one sin to another and greater sin. So the sin of Adam is followed by the sin of Cain. What we find in man from the beginning isn’t weakness, but the freedom of will to choose one kind of good over another, when one kind of good may be right and the other wrong. When man chooses the wrong kind of good, his will is weakened, because he has preferred his senses to his mind and acted against his better conscience.”
“But in the Bible story,” objected Hiroshi, “wasn’t there also a serpent tempting Adam to eat the fruit and so to prefer his senses to his mind? How did that serpent get into paradise in the first place? Doesn’t it show that evil was already present in the animal world?”
“Of course,” I answered, “the serpent can be explained as a personification of man’s desire to eat the fruit, whatever his conscience might tell him to the contrary. So when he gives way to this desire, he prefers not only his senses to his mind, but also himself to God. And there you have the essential nature of sin. But it’s better to understand the serpent as a form of the devil, or evil spirit, who tempts man to his ruin. But then you come upon the further problem of who the devil is, and why he exists? Is he independent of God’s creation, like the enemy in Christ’s parable of the wheat and the tares? Or is he, too, a creature of God, and it is he who has first fallen into sin by preferring himself to God? Then he goes around trying to induce others to follow his example? What do you think, Nobuo?”
Once again Nobuo had been content to leave the talking to the others, while himself listening in silence. But now I had put him the question, he was forced to break his silence. “Well,” he said slowly, “I don’t really know who the devil is, or whether he exists in the singular or the plural. But if he does exist, as I suppose he does, seeing how much evil there is in the world, I think he must have been created by God. After all, everything has to be created by God, or they wouldn’t exist. So if the devil is evil, and the father of evil, he must have become so by disobeying God and preferring himself to God.”
“In other words,” I concluded, “all beings are created by God, and so they are all good. There wasn’t any evil in the world in the beginning. But some beings were originally endowed with reason and free will, and that means they could choose either to obey God or disobey him. It was those who freely chose to disobey him, for whatever reason, who brought evil into the world, first upon themselves and then upon others as well. So they put God as it were in a dilemma. Naturally, God never intended evil to come into the world. Still, he had to respect the freedom of his creatures, whom he had made free in the first place. He had no wish to enforce their obedience, and so he had to let evil run its course, while at the same time, as Chieko says, somehow controlling it and making it subserve his higher purpose. As for ourselves, we have to be patient for the time being and endure what Hamlet calls ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. In the end, however, I’m sure the mystery of his providence will be justified in the sight of all men.”
There we decided to break off the discussion, where Nobuo had broken his silence. It was almost time for lunch, and we felt the need of a little fresh air outside – which was so much fresher, we found, than the smoggy air to which we were accustomed to breathing back in Tokyo.
What can we do?
When we gathered in the sitting-room after lunch, I could see from the cloud over Iwao’s brow that he wasn’t altogether satisfied with the way our discussions had been proceeding. “Why, what’s the matter, Iwao?” I asked him. “You’re looking so gloomy. Has something we’ve said got on your nerves?”
“It’s not that,” he said. “What we’ve been saying has no doubt helped to clear up some abstract problems in my mind about human existence. But I’m still left with all my problems of daily life. It’s all very well speaking about God’s loving providence and everything coming out all right in the end. But that providence seems so abstract and remote from present reality, and the end seems so much out of sight. In the meanwhile, all you can tell me is to endure, like Hamlet, ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. Such endurance seems to me a very negative attitude. It doesn’t give me any positive inspiration. I want to do something with my life.”
“In some circumstances,” I pointed out, “such as those of Hamlet in Denmark, the most we can do is to endure them, to hang on to life, with a kind of hope against hope. We have to believe in the fundamental goodness of life, in spite of appearances to the contrary in the world around us. When we take a calm, reasonable view of things, as we did in our last two discussions, we find them pointing to the bright truth of God’s loving providence. To this truth we have to cling, even or especially when human events seem to obscure it for us. We have to remember that the sun is still shining, even when our day is overcast with heavy clouds. There is such a thing as faith. But faith has to be tested, like gold in the fire, and that’s where endurance comes in. This isn’t just a negative exhortation to grin and bear it. It’s a positive assertion of our faith in divine love, however abstract and remote it may seem in the present.”
“But that isn’t all,” objected Hiroshi in support of his friend. “What Iwao was saying is only half the problem. There remains the difficulty that to explain the existence of evil in the world you have to bring in a couple of myths from the Bible. I mean the myth of the devil as a fallen angel, or Satan, and the story of Adam and Eve with their loss of paradise. Today nobody believes in the devil, any more than they believe in ghosts or fairies. Such creatures belong to the world of fairy tales. As for Adam and Eve, their story hardly stands up against what we know from paleontology about the prehistoric origins of man. How can such myths be of any practical help to people nowadays?”
“I don’t deny they are myths,” I replied. “But it seems to me that they are of as much practical help to us as they were to our ancestors. You have to remember there are myths and myths. Some of them are merely fictitious inventions of wild fantasy, but others touch upon deep psychological truths in the human heart. Many of the old stories of gods and heroes in classical legend may well belong to the former category, but the two myths you reject belong, I think, to the latter. They may not be accepted by modern paleontologists or historians, who are only interested in facts. But they are highly esteemed by modern psychologists, who look to the inner truths of the spirit of man. At all times, and not only in Jewish history, men have been aware of a spirit or spirits of evil at work beneath the level of historical events. Such spirits seem to be necessary to explain, if not the smaller sins we commit, at least the more terrible crimes we read about. Perhaps that’s why Shakespeare was so fond of introducing ghosts and witches into his tragedies,