9. Not Out of Frivolity
-From A Theological Treatise byCzeslaw Milosz
Not out of frivolity, most reverend theologians, I busied myself with the secret knowledge of many centuries, but out of the pain in my heart when I looked out at the atrocity of the world.
If God is all-powerful, he can allow all this only if he is not good.
Wherefrom then the limits of his power? Why such an order of creation? They all tried to find an answer, heretics, kabbalists, alchemists, the Knights of the Rose Cross.
It’s only today that they would find their intuitions confirmed in the assertions of astrophysicists that space and time are not at all eternal, that they had once their beginning.
In one unimaginable flash, which set ticking the clock of minutes, hours, centuries.
For that was what interested them precisely, what had happened in the bosom of the Deity before the flash, how Yes and No, good and evil came to be.
Jakob Boehme believed that the visible world arose as the effect of a catastrophe, as an act of God’s mercy to prevent the further spread of pure evil.
We complain that the earth is hell’s antechamber: it might have been hell complete, without beauty, without goodness, not a ray.