Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) was one of the most influential German philosophers of the early 19th century. In “Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters,” Schelling investigates a number of matters related to the problem of evil, including the following: man’s freedom to choose between good and evil suggests that evil had to exist before a choice for evil could be made. If God is wholly good (and, as such, cannot be the creator of evil), how was the very first choice between good and evil even possible? Once evil has come into being, does it ever come to an end? If so, how? Does creation have a final objective that is perfect and entirely good? If so, why is this objective not achieved immediately—from the beginning?
Schelling’s answers to these and related questions focus on the concept of the divine personality, as opposed to God’s system of creation: “God himself is not a system, but a life, and therein alone lies the answer to the question concerning the possibility of evil with reference to God…”
Excerpts from “Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters”
In the divine understanding there is a system; however, God himself is not a system, but a life, and therein alone lies the answer to the question concerning the possibility of evil with reference to God,… All existence requires a condition in order for it to become actual, i.e., personal, existence. God’ existence, too, could not be personal without such a condition, except that he has this condition within himself, not outside himself. He cannot annul this condition, for in that case he would have to annul himself he can only overpower it through love and subordinate it to himself for his glorification. In God, too, there would be a ground of darkness if he did not integrate the condition into himself, combining himself with it as one, in absolute personality. Man never obtains control of this condition, although in evil he strives to do so; it is only loaned to him, is independent of him; thus his personality and selfhood can never rise to perfect act. This is the sadness clinging to all finite life and if in God, too, there is a condition which is at least relatively independent, then within him there is a well of sadness, which, however, never comes to actuality, but serves only for the eternal joy of overcoming. Hence the veil of despondency spread over all of nature, the deep, indestructible melancholy of all life. Joy must have sorrow, sorrow must be transfigured into joy. Hence whatever comes from this mere condition or from the ground does not come from God, even though it is necessary for his existence. Neither can it be said that evil comes from the ground, or that the will of the ground is its originator. For evil can arise only in the innermost will of one’s own heart, and is never accomplished without one’s own deed. The solicitation of the ground or the reaction to the supercreaturely awakens the appetite for the creaturely, that is, one’s own will, but it awakens this will only so that an independent ground exist for the good, and so that it be overpowered and penetrated by the good. For aroused selfhood in itself is not evil, but only insofar as it has torn itself entirely free of its opposite, light or the universal will. But this very dissociation from the good alone is sin. Activated selfhood is necessary for the sharpness of life; without it there would be complete death, the good would slumber; for where there is no battle, there is no life. Thus the awakening of life alone is the will of the ground, not immediate evil in itself. If man’s will encloses activated selfhood in love and subordinates it to light as to the general will, then actual goodness first arises thereby, having become sensitive through the sharpness within him. Thus in the good the reaction of the ground works for the good; in evil it works for evil, as Scripture says: in the pious you are pious; in the perverse, perverse. The good which is without effective selfhood is itself ineffective good. The same thing that becomes evil by the creature’s will (when it tears itself free in order to be for itself, is in itself the good as long as it remains swallowed up in the good and in the ground. Only selfhood overcome, and thus retrieved from activity to potentiality, is the good; and as potential, having been over-powered by the good, it also remains in the good forever. If there were not a root of coldness in the body, warmth could not be felt. It is impossible to think of an attractive or a repellent force by itself: for upon what is the repelling force to act, if the attracting force does not make an object for it; or upon what is the attracting force to act if it does not have a repelling force within itself at the same time? Hence it is entirely correct to say dialectically that good and evil are the same thing, but viewed from different aspects; or evil in itself, i.e., viewed in the root of its identity, is the good, as, on the other hand, the good, viewed in its disunion or non-identity, is evil. For this reason the saying is also entirely correct that whoever has neither the material nor the forces for evil within himself is also incapable of the good—of which we have seen sufficient examples in our times. The passions against which our negative morality makes war are forces, each of which has a common root with its corresponding virtue. The soul of all hatred is love, and one sees in the most violent rage only the stillness that has been affected and provoked in its innermost center. In proper measure and in organic equilibrium these forces are the strength of virtue itself and its immediate instruments…
The arousal of the self-will occurs only so that the love within man finds a material or opposite in which it can actualize itself. To the extent that selfhood in its dissociation is the principle of evil, the ground indeed arouses the principle of evil as a possibility, but not evil itself, nor for the sake of evil. But even this arousal does not occur according to God’s free will, as he does not move in the ground according to this, or to his heart, but only according to his attributes.
Thus whoever asserted that God himself willed evil would have to seek the ground of this assertion in the act of self-revelation as creation, even as it has often been supposed that he who willed the world also had to will evil. However, in that God brought the disorderly births of chaos into order and spoke his eternal unity into nature, he much rather acted against darkness, and opposed the ruleless movement of the unintelligent principle with the word as a constant center and eternal lamp. The will to creation was thus immediately but a will to give birth to light, and thereby to the good. But evil came into consideration for this will neither as a means, nor even, as Leibniz says, as a conditio sine qua non of the greatest possible perfection of the world. It was neither the object of divine decree, nor even less of permission. But the question why God did not prefer to forgo self-revelation altogether, since he necessarily foresaw that evil would result, at least attendantly, indeed does not deserve a reply. For this would amount to saying in order that there be no opposition to love, love itself should not be, i.e., the absolutely positive should be sacrificed for what has existence only as an opposite, and the eternal should be sacrificed for the merely temporal. We have already explained that self-revelation in God must be viewed not as an unconditional, voluntary act, but as a morally necessary act in which love and goodness have overcome absolute inwardness. Thus if God had not revealed himself for the sake of evil, evil would have triumphed over the good and love. The Leibnizian concept of evil as a conditio sine qua non can be applied only to the ground, so that it arouses the creaturely will (the principle of evil as possibility) as the condition under which the will of love alone can be actualized. Furthermore, we have already shown why God does not resist the will of the ground or annul it. This would amount to God annulling the condition of his existence, i.e., annulling his own personality. Thus in order for there to be no evil, there would have to be no God.
After all this the question still remains: does evil come to an end, and how? Does creation have a final intent at all, and if so, why is it not achieved immediately; why is the perfect not there from the beginning? There is no answer to this except the one already given: because God is a life, not merely a being. But all life has a fate and is subject to suffering and becoming. To this, too, God has subjugated himself freely, ever since he separated the world of light from the world of darkness in order to become personal. Being becomes sensitive to itself only in becoming. In being there is no becoming, to be sure; rather being itself is posited as eternity in becoming; but in actualization through opposition there is necessarily a becoming. Without the concept of a humanly suffering God, which is common to all the mysteries and spiritual religions of ancient times, all of history remains incomprehensible; even Scripture distinguishes periods of revelation, and posits a time in the distant future when God will be all in all, i.e., when he will be entirely actualized. The first period of creation is, as has been shown earlier, the birth of light. Light or the ideal principle is, as an eternal opposite of the dark principle, the creating word which redeems the life hidden in the ground from non-being, raising it from potential to act. Spirit rises above the word, and spirit is the first being which unites the worlds of darkness and light, subjugating both principles to itself for the sake of actualization and personality. The ground, however, reacts against this unity and asserts the initial duality, but only towards ever heightening intensification and the final division of good and evil. The will of the ground must remain in its freedom until all has been fulfilled, all has become actual. If it were subjugated before this, then good and evil together would remain hidden within it. However, the good shall be raised from darkness to actuality to dwell immortally with God; but evil shall be separated from the good to be cast out eternally into non-being. For this is the final intent of creation: that whatever could not be for itself, should be for itself by being raised from darkness, as from a ground independent of God, into existence. Hence the necessity of birth and death. God yields the ideas, which within him were without autonomous life, to selfhood and non-being, so that by being called forth from this into life, they may be in him again as independent existences. Thus in its freedom the ground effects separation and judgment (chrisis), and precisely therein it effects the complete actualization of God. For evil, when it is entirely separated from the good, no longer is as evil. It had been able to act only through the (abused) good that was in it, itself being unconscious of it. In life it still enjoyed the forces of external nature with which it attempted to create, and it still participated mediately in God’s goodness. But in death it is divided from all that is good, and while it remains a desire, as eternal hunger and thirst for actuality, it can never step out of potentiality. Thus its state is one of non-being, a state in which its activity, or what strives within it to be active, is constantly being consumed. Thus the restitution of evil to the good (the restoration of all things) is in nowise required for the realization of the idea of a final, comprehensive perfection, for evil is evil only insofar as it goes beyond potentiality, but when reduced to non-being, or to the state of potential, it is what it always should be: a basis, subjugated, and as such no longer in contradiction to God’s holiness or love. Thus the end of revelation is the expulsion of evil from the good, the explanation of evil as complete unreality. On the other hand, the good that was raised from the ground is combined with original good in eternal unity; those born out of darkness into light join the ideal principle as limbs of its body in which is the perfectly actualized and now completely personal being.
…[W]hat purpose is served by that first distinction between the being insofar as it is the ground, and insofar as it exists? For either there is no common midpoint for these two—then we must declare ourselves for absolute dualism; or there is such a midpoint—and then in the final analysis the two coincide again. In this case we have one being for all opposites, an absolute identity of light and darkness, good and evil, and all the incongruous consequences which must befall every rational system, and which were detected in this system, too, some time ago.
We have already explained what we assume in the first respect: there must be a being before all ground and before all existence, thus before any duality at all; how can we call this anything but the original ground, or rather the unground? Since it precedes all opposites, these cannot be differentiated within it or be in any way present within it. Thus it cannot be designated as the identity of opposites, but only as their absolute indifference. Most people, when they come to the point where they must recognize a disappearance of all opposites, forget that these now have actually disappeared, and they repredicate the opposites, as such, of the indifference that had arisen precisely through their complete cessation. Indifference is not a product of opposites, nor are they contained in it implicite; rather it is a being of its own, separated from all opposition, on which all opposites are broken, which is nothing other than their very non-being, and which therefore has no predicate except predicatelessness, without therefore being a nothing or an absurdity. Thus either they actually posit indifference in the unground preceding all ground, in which case they have neither good nor evil…, and can predicate neither the one nor the other nor both at once of the unground; or they posit good and evil, in which case they at once posit duality as well, and thus no longer posit the unground or indifference. Let the following commentary be made on what was just said: real and ideal, darkness and light, or however else we wish to designate the two principles, can never be predicated of the unground as opposites. But nothing hinders their being predicated of it as non-opposites, i.e., in disjunction and each for itself; whereby, however, this very duality (the actual twofoldness of the principles) is posited. In the unground itself there is nothing that would hinder this. For precisely because the unground is related to both as total indifference, it is impartial to them. If it were the absolute identity of both, then it could only be both simultaneously, i.e., both would have to be predicated of it as opposites, and would themselves thereby be one again. Thus from this neither-nor, or from this indifference, duality (which is something entirely different from opposition…) immediately breaks forth, and without indifference, i.e., without an unground, there would be no twofoldness of the principles. Instead of annulling the differentiation as was supposed, the unground much rather posits and confirms it. Far from the differentiation between the ground and the existent being merely a logical one, or one called in only as a stopgap and then found to be a sham again in the end, it rather showed itself to be a very real differentiation which was first rightly proven and fully comprehended from the highest standpoint.
Following this dialectical discussion we thus can most definitely explain ourselves in the following manner: the essence of the ground, as that of the existent, can be only that which precedes a ground, thus the absolute viewed purely and simply, the unground. However it can be this (as has been proven) in no other way than by separating into two equally eternal beginnings, not that it is both simultaneously, but that it is in both in like manner, thus being the whole or its own essence in both. But the unground separates itself into the two equally eternal beginnings only in order that the two that could not be simultaneous or one in the unground as such, become one through love, i.e., it separates itself only in order that life and love may be, and personal existence.
F. W. J. Schelling, “Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters,” trans. Priscilla Hayden-Roy in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler (The German Library, vol. 23) (New York: Continuum, 1987), 217-84: 270-5.