Preparing for the Miraculous

theodicy: “nature does not make mistakes” 219of an extracosmic personal God, not Himself the universe,one who has created good and evil, pain and suffering forHis creatures, but Himself stands above and unaffected bythem, watching, ruling, doing His will with a suffering andstruggling world or, if not doing His will, if allowing theworld to be driven by an inexorable law ... then not God,not omnipotent, not all-good and all-loving.” The Vedanta,on the contrary, establishes that “all that is, is He. If thenevil and suffering exist, it is He that bears the evil and sufferingin the creature in whom He has embodied Himself.The problem then changes entirely. The question is nolonger how came God to create for His creatures a sufferingand evil of which He is Himself incapable and thereforeimmune, but how came the sole and infinite Existence-Consciousness-Bliss to admit into itself that which is notbliss, that which seems to be its positive negation.” 10Suffering and evil are ethical problems which we measureaccording to moral norms. Sri Aurobindo, thirdly, drawsour attention to this and makes us realize that “we do notlive in an ethical world. ... Material nature is not ethical ...Animal or vital Nature is also non-ethical, although as itprogresses it manifests the crude material out of which thehighest animal evolves the ethical impulse.” (Evolutionarypsychology will agree with this.) Ethics is a matter of themind and therefore a stage in evolution. It is “man the mentalbeing” who evaluates God as obligatorily “good” – anattribute which is not there in the Vedantic trinity. 11It is only from the human standpoint that the world hasthree layers: infra-ethical, ethical, supra-ethical. “The ethical10 Id., pp. 94 and 95.11 To Plato “the Good” was synonymous with the Supreme Being.This adjective, with its ethical associations, applied to “God” has causedenormous confusion in all subsequent philosophy and theology referringto the great Greek.