Gardening as a Metaphor for Good and Evil

[kerravonsen]

Just started watching "Moon Knight". (yeah, yeah, late as usual.) Interesting show.

And there's a line from the first episode which has stuck in my head.

(about the goddess Ammit) "She grew weary of having to wait for sinners to commit their crime before punishing them. Would you wait to weed a garden till after the roses were dead?"

Would you wait to weed a garden till after the roses were dead?

That's pretty profound. Flawed, but profound. Because of course most people would say, "No, you wouldn't wait; you would weed the garden to protect the roses."

The God of Abraham is not most people; let me remind you of the parable of the wheat and the tares.

Another parable he set before them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like a man that sowed good seed in his field: but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares also among the wheat, and went away. But when the blade sprang up and brought forth fruit, then the tares appeared also.

And the servants of the householder came and said to him, "Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? Why then does it have tares?"

And he said to them, "An enemy has done this."

And the servants said to him, "Do you want us to go and gather them up?"

But he said, "No; because while you gather up the tares, you might root up the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, gather up first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them; but gather the wheat into my barn."

(Matthew 13:24-30)

There are a number of interesting things here:

• He would rather let the weeds grow in order to prevent the destruction of any of the wheat.
  • Whereas Ammit is more interested in the destruction of all the weeds.
• He waits until the harvest (death); there isn't any more growing to do for the wheat or the tares.
• It is harder to distinguish between wheat and tares than between weeds and roses. But it is easier to distinguish between tares and wheat at harvest time, because their fruits are different.
  • Ammit's judgement, which includes all the crimes a person will do in the future, assumes that people cannot repent or change.
  • Consider Jonah -- not the whale, but the fact that he was pissed off that his mission worked; the people of Nineveh repented.

To strain the gardening metaphor even further, it isn't that weeds (or tares) are Inherently Bad. It is simply that they are growing in the wrong place. Wickedness isn't what you are (being a weed) but what you do (interfering with other plants).

Which also means that destroying all the weeds is impossible, because it isn't their weediness which makes them weeds. Any plant could be a weed if it is in the wrong place. If you want to eradicate all the weeds, you're eventually going to kill all the plants. That is the "Peace of Death"; the moral equivalent of a pesticide which poisons that which it is supposed to protect. Jehovah already tried the "kill all the evildoers" method; it was called The Flood. Didn't work. Not going to do that again.

Would I kill Hitler? No. I'd try to get him into a different career.

Comments

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Or you could just plant species roses that can take care of themselves. I mean, why bust your ass weeding when you don't have to? Weeds have their own role in the ecosystem.

... Pagan perspective.

Re: Well ...

[kerravonsen]

8-)

[marta_bee]

This is quite nice, this thought that weeds is more a function than a species. It's definitely worth thinking about. And I do love the distinction between not wanting any to be destroyed vs. all. I'm not entirely sure I agree with it entirely, that it lets any god-head off the hook for the problem of evil entirely, but it seems like a more fruitful (no pun intended) way to think about these things than the old dilemma of how an all-powerful God could let suffering occur.

If I could offer another way of thinking about this: I was talking over on Tumblr not too long ago about the Valar in Tolkien's The Silmarillion. I'm not sure how familiar you are with that, but they're something a little similar to small-g gods like the Greek or Norse pantheons, or possibly archangels, with important differences but they're in that same basic neighborhood of the mythos. Powerful, timeless celestials who incarnate themselves so they can play a role in a more time-bound cosmos. They're basically given a preview of the cosmic history and so want to make it a reality that they lay aside a lot of their power, enter into time at the beginning and try to start the process so that history can unfold.

Of course as is usually the case with these things, one of them goes rogue and becomes the Ur-Villain, and they have to decide how to resist him. There's great god-level wars with all the destruction you'd expect, earthquakes and flooding and the like, and eventually most of the Valar withdraw into this paradise they can control, and leave their brother to basically rule over the rest of the world. So there's a lot of destruction and pain you could lay at their feet, first by engaging in a way that basically ruined the world and then by withdrawing and abandoning the elves and men and other people that are also on the scene. They're not all-powerful (the Valar) but neither is Melkor the chief baddie, They have resources. So the big question I was coming up against was: why are they so bad at preventing all this suffering to begin with? Is it just incompetence or their limitations, or what exactly?

(I hope I'm not telling you what you already know, or telling it badly!)

The thought I eventually came up with was, the Valar were there in the first place to make things happen. They had a sneak-peak, as it were, of something they knew needed to be made real and that was important enough they basically made it their life's work. They committed themselves to it entirely to the point they made themselves part of it all. It's part of the mythos that good (or God-intended is perhaps a better word) can often come from bad, that Melkor thinks he's rebelling but he's really bringing the Big Plan into action. So by keeping bad things from happening they're really just keeing things full-stop from happening, which is not why they're there.

Putting it in terms of your garden metaphor: even if you could tell weeds from roses, or tares from wheat, if you eliminated them in a very real sense you wouldn't have a garden anymore. Or at least you wouldn't have something as alive as if you let things grow naturally. Maybe the point isn't individual plants at all, but the whole ecosystem, which becomes something else entirely if you try to interfere too much?

I'm not sure how I feel about that once you move beyond metaphor to real life, or even narratives where the characters are supposed to be thought of as "real" at some level. Where there's real (or "real") suffering at work. Frankly, the thought makes me a little uncomfortable, like our pain doesn't count for as much as I feel like it should. But as a thought experiment, it's reorienting and humbling enough that it seems worth thinking through.

Enough blathering. Thanks for sharing this. I did enjoy thinking through what you said.

[kerravonsen]

Yes, I'm familiar enough with the Valar (though I do have "re-read the Silmarilion" on my to-do list). I vaguely recall that the War of Wrath was stopped because the Valar realised that in order to destroy Melkor, they'd have to to destroy so much that there wouldn't be anything left, no elves or men or anyone. That the price was too high.

So the big question I was coming up against was: why are they so bad at preventing all this suffering to begin with? Is it just incompetence or their limitations, or what exactly?

There's the thing... how much of a "sneak peek" did they have? Did they know enough to know that the War of Wrath would be pointless, or not? I think what you're saying here, correct me if I'm wrong, is that while it appears to have been pointless and a waste, there was some hidden point to it, that in order to get from A to C, the War was a necessary point B in between. That doesn't sit easy with me either, and yet...

The Problem of Suffering is a biggie, and I don't think any of the answers people have given are really satisfactory, not when they attempt to tie it all up in a neat bow. Life is demonstrably Not Fair. And yet we demand of God that it ought to be, because if He was Just and Loving and Omnipotent, He wouldn't let bad things happen. Here's the thing, though. If there was no suffering at all, would we have any empathy for others? If nothing ever went wrong, would we ever appreciate things going right? If we had nothing to overcome, would we ever grow up?