Abba Dorotheus

From the tradition of the Church we know that man came into a world in which evil already existed. What is evil? Where did it come from? How should a Christian relate to him? Different religious systems resolve the question of the correlation between good and evil in different ways.

In dualistic models of perceiving the world, good and evil exist on an equal footing, and they are interpenetrating: in good there is evil, and vice versa. Such a model is very popular, and by accepting it, a person recognizes the original existence of evil and the lack of the possibility of a precise definition of what is good and what is evil, because they are equal to each other, can pass from one to the other, and have no external criteria for differentiation. Therefore, in many Eastern cults and religions, posthumous existence and salvation is not a dwelling in good, but a state that takes a person beyond the boundaries of good and evil. Nirvana, a very popular word in the modern world, is not being, but a way out of the painful circle of reincarnations and ideas about good and evil. And for a Christian, the meaning of salvation lies in uniting with God as the source of love and goodness, to enter into the fullness of being, into eternal life. But what is evil in the Christian understanding and what does it have to do with good?

The Church calls Satan the bearer of evil. The chapter in the book of the prophet Isaiah and the Apocalypse of John the Theologian lift the veil on the prehistoric catastrophe, the first rebellion of the creature against the Creator. Lucifer, the "first light-bearer," the most beautiful angel, created bright and good, became the personal representative of evil when, seeing that the world belonged to man, he became proud and fell away from God, did not want to submit to the law of God and recognize in man a creature higher than himself. From now on, the rebellious creature seeks to destroy everything that the Lord has created beautiful and sublime, and first of all the one whom He was meant to serve, man.

From the very history of the origin of evil, it becomes clear that evil is a falling away, a negation that does not carry a creative principle in itself. Perhaps that is why it is difficult to give an accurate definition to it. It is easier to draw such an analogy. What is darkness? The absence of light, it has no existence of its own: God is light, and there is no darkness in Him (1 John 1:5). But where there is no light, darkness takes its place. In the same way, evil is the absence of good or its distortion, it is good that has fallen away from God, has distorted its being, but it does not have its own ontological existence. Existence has only that to which the Lord said: Let it be! He did not create evil, nor did He say: Let it be! Sin. And what God did not create, strictly speaking, does not exist.

This means that absolute evil does not exist, there is absolute good. Therefore, evil is powerless: it has neither existence itself (the very nature of creation lies in God's plan for its goodness), nor its own continuation (its existence is limited by time), nor its own power (it uses only what it can seize and parasitize on).

Even the utterly disfigured bearer of evil is not absolute evil. The bright cherub, whom we call Satan, came out of the hands of the Lord full of goodness and power. It was then that his good nature was distorted to such an extent that it dared to oppose itself to God, to become anti-nature.

If God is absolutely good, infinite, and eternal in His goodness, then it is clear that Satan cannot be inherently a creature and possess absolute evil, no matter how much he would like to. This is simply not given to him: everything absolute belongs only to God. No matter how much Satan tries to appear to be a perfect god with a minus sign, to carry away this idea to indiscriminate angels, as it was at the beginning of creation, or to people who are capable of believing in such madness, his claims will still remain groundless, because such a thing simply cannot be.

Satan does not possess his own power, and therefore all that the fallen spirit parasitizes on is the energy and power of good, which were originally given to him as the greatest Divine gift. And that which is a gift of God, which the Lord created as good, in spite of everything remains a gift of God, although sometimes it can be distorted to such a terrible state from which, it seems, there is no return. The non-existence of evil deprives him of the opportunity to distort man in such a way that he completely loses the image of God. Even in his most extreme resistance to God and demonimonial, man still remains the image of God, capable of salvation.

With such blessings, what evil hast thou chosen! After such glory, what shame you bear! Why are you now so darkened, so disfigured, so perishable? After such a light, what darkness has covered you.

Pdp. Macarius the Great

The first man was created to have in himself both the possibility of becoming immortal and the possibility of dying. Being a Divine gift, and not the nature of man, the pledge of immortality gave him the opportunity, through self-perfection, through obedience to God, to grow spiritually to become his nature.

The gift of immortality is communion with God, with the very Source of life. But man did not join life in paradise. In paradise he partook of death. Man wanted to live without God, and life without God is death. It sounds terrible: you have joined death where you should have joined life. Man joined sin with all his being, and sin terribly distorted his nature. Creation has fallen away from its Creator. Sin opened the way to death. A person who had such an opportunity not to die became mortal and was expelled from the place of life, where everything that exists has eternal existence. Adam's sin, his falling away from God, could have become the eternal lot of all mankind, if God in His mercy had not expelled Adam from paradise to the temporary world, so that death would not become his eternal state, so that Satan would not defeat him to the end.

We are all involved in death through original sin, and although it is forgiven in Holy Baptism, the consequences of sin, unfortunately, remain. Damaged human nature must be healed by man himself, who is destined to overcome the consequences of the fall of Adam with his life, to go in the opposite direction, not eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but partaking only of good.