The Symbolism of Evil

"Ricoeur’s book is brilliant at teasing out what it means to have taken on this particular myth, as opposed to—going full circle to where we started—the Babylonian myths. Those myths do not explain suffering and death as the consequence of human responsibility and sin. They center instead on the simple fact that human beings are incredibly noisy. Infants in particular make an appalling racket. That’s what the senior god is furious about. Unable to take his afternoon nap, the god reduces the population by introducing death—particularly death in childbirth and infant mortality—to keep the population down. The Bible offers an alternative account, one that involves love and pair bonding. And then in the Bible, a human choice, a deliberate act, brings down the catastrophe. Ricoeur is not saying that freedom is evil. He’s saying you cannot have a conception of responsibility without developing a conception of evil. As opposed, let’s say, to the myth of Philoctetes from Sophocles, where the disaster comes simply from inadvertently wandering into a sacred precinct you’re not supposed to be. Ricoeur teases out the tiny piece of intentionality that needs to be there for the whole tangled philosophical history of evil and responsibility to be developed. You have to make a choice—Eve’s choice."