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Abstract · 1. Three answers to one problem, none derived · 2. No "nothing" that wills · 3. No contrariety in generation · 4. Where the darkness is · 5. Positive and privative at once · 6. What the ground was for · Works cited

Evil Without a Ground in God

What Schelling, Böhme, and Berdyaev asked a dark ground to do, and the mechanism that does it without one: reached by elimination in a chain that never starts from them
James A. Burrows · ORCID: 0009-0002-6452-4842 · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22335071 · PhilArchive: BUREWA-5 · SSRN: 7416298 · PDF

Abstract

Böhme placed a wrath beside love in the eternal nature. Schelling placed a ground in God distinct from God's existence, and made the possibility of evil depend on it. Berdyaev placed an uncreated freedom before being and before God as Trinity, so that God would not answer for evil.

The three wanted the same four things. Evil that is positive and not a mere lack. Freedom that is real. A God who is not evil's author. No second god. Each paid with darkness in God or a rival to him.

An eliminative chain of 137 resolutions, beginning from the observation that non-being requires being and never starting from this tradition, reaches all four without the payment. It has what the tradition lacked: a mechanism.

A being with complete capacity wills to be the unlimited itself (R.51). All-Being's Will is all Will (R.44), so willing all Will is not willing (R.55, R.56). What the willing would add already is. It does not arrive. What it becomes is non-being (R.58). All-Being is undiminished, not by withstanding but because what does not arrive does not subtract (R.57). Non-being is (R.66), wills (R.67), and is only ever the "not" of what is (R.80, R.81): positive and privative at once. The darkness has a location, a cause, and a dependence. None of them is in God.

1. Three answers to one problem, none derived

The problem is old. If God is good and is the source of all that is, evil has no source. If evil has a source other than God, there are two gods.

Augustine's answer, that evil is privation, a lack in the good and not a thing, held the Latin West for a millennium. It never satisfied anyone who had met evil. A lack does not hunt.

Jacob Böhme, a shoemaker in Görlitz writing between 1612 and 1624, gave the answer that founded a tradition. Before God as Trinity there is the Ungrund, the unground: "an eternal stillness and rest, the Nothing," in which "an eternal will arises in the nothing, to introduce the nothing into something, that the will might find, feel, and behold itself." The will finds itself only by opposition. "In Yes and No all things consist," the Theosophic Questions say, "whether divine, devilish, earthly, or what they may be called."

Out of the Ungrund the divine will generates its own contrary. The eternal nature is a seven-fold process in which a dark, fiery, wrathful principle and a light, loving principle arise together. Neither is without the other. "If there were no contrary will making motion, there were no nature, but an eternal stillness, and no will."

Evil is what happens when a creature takes the wrath-principle for itself. Lucifer wills to rule in the fire rather than let the fire pass into light. The wrath is not evil. It is God's own, and God needs it to be manifest. But it is dark, and it is in God.

Schelling took the structure over in 1809 and made it philosophy. The Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom distinguishes in God between God insofar as he exists and the ground of his existence, which is in God but is not God himself: a dark, longing, contracting basis, "the yearning the eternal One feels to give birth to itself."

Creatures come to be out of this ground. Because they do, each has a self-will, a principle of the ground in it, that can be raised above the universal will and made the centre. Evil is that elevation: not a lack but a positive perversion of the right order, "a positive perversion or reversal of the principles." The possibility of evil is therefore in the ground. Its actuality is in the creature. And God's revelation requires the ground, because for Schelling a life without struggle is no life.

Later, in the Ages of the World, the same two principles become an eternal beginning in God: a negating, contracting will and an affirming, expanding will, turning on each other in a rotary motion until a decision releases them into sequence. Later still, in the Berlin lectures, the ground story is set aside. Before any concept of God there is unprethinkable being, das unvordenkliche Sein, the bare that before any what, which God is Lord over but did not derive. It is not dark. It is brute. The 1809 ground and the Berlin fact are met at different places below: the ground at the mechanism, the fact at the chain's account of Will as its own reason. In every version something prior to God is left underived, and in 1809 the possibility of evil lives there.

Nikolai Berdyaev, reading Böhme in exile in the 1920s and 1930s, kept the Ungrund and moved it. In The Destiny of Man and Freedom and the Spirit the Ungrund becomes meonic freedom: freedom that is uncreated, that precedes being, and that precedes God as Trinity. Meonic from mē on, the Greek for relative non-being, which Berdyaev distinguishes from ouk on, absolute "nothing." God creates out of this freedom but did not create it and has no power over it. Evil arises from it, in creatures, by their misuse of it. So God does not answer for evil, and freedom is real, because it was never God's to give or withhold. The price is a freedom older than God.

Set the three side by side and the demand is the same. Evil must be positive, because a lack does not hunt. Freedom must be real, because a necessitated fall is God's act. God must not be the author. And there must not be two gods.

Böhme and Schelling met the four demands by putting a dark principle in God. Berdyaev met them by putting an abyss before God. None of them derived the arrangement. Böhme saw it. Schelling argued that freedom requires it and that revelation requires opposition. Berdyaev asserted it because the alternative made God responsible.

What none of them had was a reason why a creature's self-elevation should yield evil rather than a second god or plain failure, and why God should be untouched by it. They had the phenomenon and its cost. They did not have the mechanism.

There is a derivation. It does not start from Böhme, Schelling, or Berdyaev, or from any doctrine. It begins with the observation that non-being requires being, and it reaches positive evil, real freedom, an innocent God, and one God, by elimination, in a sequence of 137 resolutions titled Anything Willing Is.

Each resolution names a candidate, tests it against what earlier resolutions established, and keeps only what survives. This paper does not repeat that derivation. It says where each of the tradition's claims sits on the chain, which it reaches, which it corrects, and where the mechanism is. Every number below is an anchor on the interactive edition, so any step can be read with its own test. At six places the test itself is also set out in a sentence.

2. No "nothing" that wills

The chain's first two resolutions decide the Ungrund. Non-being is the "not" of being, and a "not" has content only from what is: non-being requires being (R.1). The word "nothing" names non-being in the absence of being, the "not" of what is not there to be negated, and what it names cannot be (R.2). Without the possibility of being, being cannot be (R.3). Possibility is without limitation, which is what the word "anything" points to (R.4, Def.1).

Böhme's Ungrund is "the Nothing," and a will arises in it. On the chain the two halves of that sentence come apart. What arises is Will, and the chain reaches Will (R.11). What it arises in is not "nothing." "Nothing" cannot be (R.2). What is there before any something is possibility without limitation (R.4). Possibility is not a something (R.8). It does not act. It does not will. The chain names it Anything and gives it no verb. Anything is the condition. Will is the actor.

Böhme's eye of eternity that seeks something to see itself in is, on the chain's terms, Will. The abyss it opens in is not an abyss. It is the unlimited.

Berdyaev built on the same word and made the same move in the other direction. His meonic freedom is mē on, relative non-being, and he was careful to distinguish it from ouk on, absolute "nothing." The chain draws the same line at R.2, and then reverses the priority Berdyaev needs. Relative non-being is the "not" of what is. It requires being (R.1). It cannot precede being, and it cannot precede the fullness of being that R.42 reaches. Whatever is prior to every something is possibility, and possibility is neither freedom nor a will nor a subject. Berdyaev's uncreated freedom is the chain's Anything with an agency it cannot have. What he wanted from it, that God should not answer for evil, the chain delivers elsewhere, in section 4, without it.

This is the first place the test belongs on the page. How does being come into being from unlimited possibility? A something is specific (R.5). Its specificity has no source, a source other than the something, or a source that is the something's own. The three exhaust the options (R.10). A source other than the something fixes which something comes about, and a potential so fixed is limited: "unrestricted" empties (R.4). No source is an asserted absence, and an absence is the "not" of what is present (R.1). An absence with no being to be the "not" of is what "nothing" designates (R.2). What remains is the something's own, which R.10 names Choice. Choice is "this, not that." At R.11 the "not that" does not survive: a "not" has no standing in unlimited potential. What remains is "this is," which the chain names Will: actualisation without exclusion (Def.2). Will wills as itself, not externally justified and not without basis (R.12, Def.3). All being is Will (R.17).

Schelling wrote in 1809 that willing is primal being, Wollen ist Ursein, and the sentence has been quoted as a discovery ever since. R.17 is that sentence as a result. In the Berlin lectures the same Schelling put unprethinkable being before all thought: being that simply is, brute, prior to any reason, which philosophy can only come upon and never derive. Bruce Matthews's edition of the Berlin lectures makes the point that the positive philosophy begins from this fact and not from a concept. Tyler Tritten reads the late Schelling as making necessity itself a matter of fact: reason arrives after a being it did not produce. R.12 tests exactly that candidate and its opposite together. Will that requires an external justification is constrained by it, and a constrained potential empties "unrestricted" (R.4). Will that wills without any basis leaves actual being specific but with no account of what makes it what it is, and that empties "specific" (R.5). Neither survives. Will is its own reason: the willing is the willing.

Schelling's late insistence that the fact of being cannot be thought before it is, is right against every rationalism that would derive it from a concept. The chain agrees that no concept comes first. What comes first is Will, and Will is not brute. It wills as itself. That is the difference between a fact philosophy submits to and a result philosophy reaches.

3. No contrariety in generation

Böhme's principle is that without opposition no thing is manifest. "In Yes and No all things consist." "If there were no contrary will making motion, there were no nature, but an eternal stillness, and no will." Schelling's is its philosophical form: God's revelation requires the ground, the dark basis, because a life without struggle is no life, and a God without the ground could not be manifest as God. The Ages of the World turns the principle into an eternal beginning in which a negating will and an affirming will need each other to be at all.

The chain denies the principle at its root and gives what the principle was for. Will wills "this is, and this is" (R.11). Each "this is" adds to what is without removing from what could be. Differentiation is willing, not opposition: the same willing that makes being distinct makes being related, one nature with two faces (R.15). Will does not negate. Negation is reactive. It requires what already is (R.14). Willing is generative (R.24), and generating is flourishing, strict increase (R.47). And at R.42 the first actualisation from unlimited potential is necessarily full, because partiality is exclusion and exclusion did not survive R.11. All-Being is Anything's nature fully operative as being (R.40). There is no theogony. No part of God turns on itself to become God.

This is the second place the test belongs on the page, because it is where the chain and Böhme part. R.14: Will wills "this is." What actualises is. Negation is the "not" of what is and requires what already is. Actualisation and negation are therefore distinct. A Will that actualised negation would actualise what requires the actual to be already there, which empties Def.2. Will does not negate. Negation enters only when what is wills against what is. That is not a claim that opposition never appears. It is the claim that opposition is not in generation, and comes later, from somewhere specific.

What Böhme needed contrariety for was self-manifestation: the will must oppose itself "that the will might find, feel, and behold itself." The chain gives the finding without the opposing. What it is to will is what it is to be. Knowing is being (R.28). Will knows what it is by being it. The expressions of willing --- Being, Doing, Remembering/Reacting, Anticipating/Planning, Foreknowing/Pre-Destining --- are each what the prior whole willing actualises (R.30 to R.39). At Foreknowing/Pre-Destining a being's entire reality is known and acted from (Def.10). No mirror of wrath is required for the will to behold itself.

The Weltalter's rotary motion, two wills that need each other and cannot rest, describes something real. The chain locates it in section 4, in a subsequent being after un-being, and not in God's eternal beginning.

Schelling's other argument for the ground is about freedom rather than revelation. The real and living concept of freedom, he says, is the capacity for good and evil, and a God without a ground could give creatures no such capacity. The chain reaches the capacity and denies that it is what freedom is. Before any "not" exists, Will's freedom is willing as itself (R.12), with no alternative to be capable of, and it is not the less free for that. The capacity for good and evil arises at one expression, Foreknowing/Pre-Destining, where exactly two candidates survive for what a being with complete capacity can will (R.49): to continue willing (R.50), or to will to be Anything, the unlimited itself (R.51). Both are genuine. Which the being enacts is its own (R.63).

Schelling was right that the capacity is real and that no one overrides it. He was wrong that it is the essence of freedom, and wrong about where it comes from. It comes from a being's complete capacity, not from a ground in God.

4. Where the darkness is

This section is the mechanism. The tradition described the phenomenon, a self-will raised above the whole, and paid for it with a principle in God. The chain derives the phenomenon and locates it.

A being at Foreknowing/Pre-Destining wills from complete self-knowledge with complete capacity. What is has three features willing can target: the terms, the configuration, and whether what is is at all. Nine candidates are tested and two survive (R.49). Continuing to will is the generative path (R.50). Willing to be Anything is genuine willing (R.51): Will wills as itself, and a restriction on what will can target would empty "unrestricted" (R.4). The being can will to be what the word "anything" points to rather than willing. And it does so without knowing what the willing becomes, because what it becomes is not yet among what is (R.51).

That is Schelling's creature raising its self-will to the centre. Böhme's Lucifer willing to rule in the fire. Berdyaev's freedom misused. The chain has all three at one step, as one specific willing: the being wills to be All-Being.

Then the step the tradition did not have. The being is a something (R.5), and Anything is not a something (R.8): a something is not Anything, so the willing does not arrive. Willing is generative and does not cease (R.24, R.26). Willing aimed at what the being is not, and does not become, is the "not" of what the being was willing. What the willing becomes is willing and the "not" of willing present together. That is choice (R.52). This is un-willing, and un-willing is un-being: generation continuing from being into non-being. It is not un-generation. Un-generation, becoming what R.2 establishes cannot be, is not available (R.26). The being generates, and what it generates is non-being.

Why non-being, and not a second god? This is the third place the test belongs on the page. All-Being's Will is all Will (R.44): identity, not presence. The being wills All-Being, so it wills all Will. All Will already is All-Being's Will. Willing all Will is not willing, because what the willing would add already is. The being's willing does not arrive (R.55).

The defence is Böhme's and Schelling's at once: the creature's will aimed at God merges with God's. R.56 tests it. A something that merges with All-Being becomes All-Being, but there cannot be two All-Beings (R.43), so the something must cease to be a something, which un-generation forbids (R.26), and must become everything, which a something cannot be (R.8). The defence empties two resolutions and dissolves. What the being's Will becomes is non-being: the "not" of what the being was, with Will still at the core. And it is endless, because un-generation is not available. The being exists as non-being, without arriving and without ending.

The being that remains is not left as a mystery. It is derived. Un-being is partial and diminishing: Will and non-willing present together within the being's expressions, willing lessening as the being un-wills (R.54). Its generative capacity is not un-generated. Will persists as choosing (R.64). Its modality is derived at R.90. The being at un-being does not choose "this, not that" again and again. It willed once, to be the unlimited, and the un-willing diminishes willing as the consequence of that single willing. It is with choosing, but not with the succession of exclusions that is time. Beyond temporal: end without end. It could stop at any point (R.63). It does not arrive, and it does not cease.

R.55 adds the detail that Schelling saw and could not derive. What the willing actualises is contentless: Anything is potential, not a target, and the willing has no referent. But the being does not encounter it as empty. It encounters it as fullness: autonomy, mastery, self-authorship. What it encounters as fullness is the willing itself, not what the willing actualises. That is the elevated selfhood of the Freiheitsschrift, the creature that takes itself for the centre, described from inside, with the reason it feels like plenitude. A remark at R.56 adds that "I am the source" and "I am like the source" are the same willing. The humility of "like" changes the framing and not the act.

Now the location. Non-being is what the being's willing becomes when willing does not arrive (R.58). It is not "nothing." "Nothing" cannot be (R.2). It is, but only as the "not" of what is. And it is produced. The being at un-being is solely where non-being is from (R.59). The darkness is not in a ground of God. It is not before God. It is what one being's genuine willing became at one expression, and it could have not been: un-being is not inevitable (R.63). Both candidates survive at R.49. Which is enacted is the being's own willing (R.12).

The defence that Anything should have prevented it dissolves, because prevention is coercion, coercion empties Will, and a potential that permits only what it prefers is restricted (R.63, R.4). That is Berdyaev's conclusion --- God does not override freedom --- reached without his premise. God has no power over meonic freedom, Berdyaev said, because it is uncreated. There is no prevention to withhold. Prevention is a "not that." Unlimited possibility includes no negation (R.7), and Will does not negate (R.14). A potential that prevented would be restricted, and "unrestricted" empties (R.4, R.63). The freedom is an actualised being's own willing (R.12). No abyss older than God is needed to keep God's hands off.

And God is untouched. R.57: All-Being is undiminished by un-being. This is the fourth place the test belongs on the page. The being's willing aimed at all Will does not arrive (R.55, R.56). What does not arrive does not subtract. The being still is (R.26). All-Being's Will is all Will, which includes the being that is now non-being, and the bounded cannot overcome the unrestricted (R.4, R.18). The candidate, that un-being diminishes All-Being, requires what does not arrive to subtract from what is already all Will, and what does not arrive has no content to subtract (R.55). The consequence is structural, not volitional. All-Being does not withstand un-being by effort or absorb it by love. Willing all Will is not willing, so un-being is local to the being and its scope. And All-Being's Will is with the being that is now non-being in the same way it is with being that is still being (R.57).

Böhme's God passes through wrath to reach love. Schelling's God needs the ground to be revealed. The chain's All-Being needs neither and is not lessened. The reason is a sentence.

This is the fifth place the test belongs on the page. The objection runs: if All-Being's Will is every being's willing, then this being's un-willing is the one Will willing otherwise, a modification of God's own will, and the ground is back. The dissolution is that the identity is between willings, and non-willing is not a willing. Un-willing is willing becoming non-willing. Non-willing is the "not" of willing (Def.14). A "not" is reactive. It requires what it negates, and Will does not negate (R.14). Only Will wills (R.53). The being's willing, so far as it still wills, is the one Will as before, and its generative capacity is not un-generated (R.64). What un-being adds is not a willing but the "not" of one, and it is local to the being and its scope (R.57, R.71). For the objection to hold, Will itself would have to negate, and R.14 dissolves that. Negation enters only when what is wills against what is. A being's willing aimed at what is already all Will is that case exactly. No "not" goes back into All-Being, because what went out was never Will.

One correction to the tradition follows from the same step. Schelling placed the possibility of evil in God's ground and its actuality in creatures. The chain has no split of that kind. The possibility is the second surviving candidate at R.49, a feature of complete capacity. The actuality is one being's enactment of it (R.51, Def.15). Possibility and actuality are both in the being. No darkness is left in God for the possibility to rest on, because the possibility needs none: a will with complete capacity can will anything willing can will, including to be Anything, and what that willing becomes is a separate question (R.51). That is all the ground ever had to explain. It is a fact about capacity, not about God.

5. Positive and privative at once

The tradition thought it had to choose. Augustine said privation and could not explain why a lack destroys. Schelling said positive perversion and had to put the positive somewhere, so he put it in God. The chain reaches both descriptions of the same thing and shows why they are compatible.

Privative: non-being is the "not" of what is (R.58). It is dependent on being, because without being it is the "not" of what cannot be, which is "nothing" (R.80). It is always less than being, not by contest but by what each is: non-being is what a something's un-willing becomes, a something is less than everything, everything is All-Being, and All-Being is all Will (R.81). That is Dionysius and Augustine, with a derivation.

Positive: non-being is (R.58). Un-generation resolves into what cannot be (R.26), so it cannot cease to be. The "is" that remains is genuine. Non-being being is the lie (R.66): enough to be, not enough to be what being is. And since being is willing (R.23), non-being wills (R.67). Its willing is non-willing. Its foundation is non-being. But it is active, and what it chooses is its own. Non-being choosing willing is being-not (R.69): it cannot actualise anything new, and it can only negate what already is. Being-not reduces what it negates, and what is reduced, non-being has (R.70). It depends on being, takes it, and turns on what remains. That is Schelling's positive evil, the perversion that acts, with a derivation, and with a dependence Schelling could not give it because his positive principle was God's own.

What being-not cannot do fixes how positive it is. It cannot actualise anything new (R.69). It cannot negate what is already non-being (R.70). It has no existence apart from the being it is the "not" of (R.80). It is always less than being, not by contest but by what each is (R.81). So it cannot found a counter-order, and the Augustinian keeps privation. What it can do is overpower locally (R.83). Un-willing from a higher expression reaches down. Being-not reduces what it rides. The being's own choosing cooperates. That is how evil builds, organises, and lasts without ever being a world of its own. Under un-being each expression is genuine Will and non-willing mixed, the capacity real and the direction the "not" of what is generative (R.84), and the being chooses against its own recognised generative willing (R.85). The building is being's capacity. The direction is the "not." Schelling keeps positivity. Both keep what they wanted because one thing is described twice.

This is the sixth place the test belongs on the page, because it is where positivity and privation meet. R.67's candidate is non-being that is but does not will. Its defence is that R.23, being is willing, was derived for actualised being and does not reach non-being. Two routes dissolve it. Non-being's "is" is genuine, forced by R.2 and R.26, and a genuine "is" carries what being carries. And under un-willing, willing and non-willing are present together (R.52), so non-being has willing from its "is" and non-willing from its foundation, and to have willing and to be is to will. Non-being wills. The entry point is the irreducible "is." If non-being could reach "nothing," there would be no "is" to will, and the whole mechanism would fail. R.2, the chain's first elimination, is what makes both the persistence of non-being and its activity possible.

Böhme's wrath is the tradition's version of this activity: a principle that consumes, that must be there for love to be manifest, and that becomes evil when a creature takes it for itself. The chain has the consuming without the principle. The fully non-being, what un-willing to be directed at All-Being's willing produces, is the specific "not" of the specific being All-Being wills, permanently oriented against it, wholly non-being from inception, never having had Will (R.59). Destruction is the specific "not" of actualisation. Death the specific "not" of life. Depletion the specific "not" of flourishing. Each is bounded by its own specificity, and each is produced, dependent, and less. Böhme's dark fire is real. It is not God's.

6. What the ground was for

Three things made the dark ground attractive, and the chain reaches each of them from elsewhere.

The first is theodicy. Böhme and Schelling could say that God is not the author of evil because the creature does the elevating, and that God is nevertheless implicated because the possibility is God's own darkness. Berdyaev could say God is not the author because the freedom is not God's at all. The chain says the being at un-being is solely where non-being is from (R.59), that un-being is not inevitable (R.63), and that All-Being is undiminished for a structural reason (R.57). The manuscript's convergence table sets R.57 beside "God undiminished by evil" and R.63 beside "contingency of evil," and names the being at un-being Satan and the fully non-being demons. The names come last. The table is where the derivation ends, not where it begins, and each name is attached to a structure the chain had reached without it. Read as premises they would make this paper a proof of doctrine. They are labels on results. That is the tradition's Lucifer, willing to rule in the fire, with the fire derived and the rule impossible.

The second is the life of God. Schelling's God is a life and not a mere being, and a life has ages: contraction and expansion, a past that was overcome, a history. Berdyaev spoke of tragedy in God. The chain's All-Being has no ages. The first actualisation is full (R.42). Eternity is accumulation without depletion. In eternity all prior willing is and is accessible. It is time, not eternity, that is succession with exclusion, because choosing is time (R.90).

What the tradition felt as God's history the chain locates as the temporal condition of the deceived, and as one thing in All-Being that did change. Before un-being, willing wills without opposition. After it, non-willing opposes every potential willing-to-be, and All-Being's willing, the same willing that actualised before choosing, is now work (R.53). The chain names it allowance and sets it beside the "Let" in every creative directive. That is the whole of the tragedy in God the chain will grant: not a wound, not a passage through wrath, but effortless actualisation become active willing against opposition, without diminishment (R.57).

The third is the reality of freedom, and here the chain gives the tradition more than it asked. Schelling wanted a freedom that could fall, and got it by rooting the creature in the ground. Berdyaev wanted a freedom God could not touch, and got it by making freedom uncreated. The chain has a being whose willing is its own (R.12), for whom both candidates are genuinely open (R.49, R.63), for whom no prevention is, since prevention is a "not that" and possibility includes none (R.7, R.63), and whose willing after un-being persists as choosing (R.64) within a scope where non-being is and wills (R.71). It also has what neither of them had: a reason why this freedom's misuse yields exactly evil. Willing all Will is not willing. The freedom is real because Will wills as itself. The fall is possible because complete capacity includes willing to be Anything, and that willing does not arrive. The fall is evil, and not a second god, because what the willing would add already is. And God is untouched because what does not arrive does not subtract.

The tradition was right about the phenomenon, right about its positivity, right that God does not override, and right that there is one God. It was wrong about the location, and the location cost it a dark God or an older abyss. The chain arrives at the four demands from R.1, with the darkness placed where a being put it, dependent on the being it is the "not" of, and always less.

Works cited

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