The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [121]
Yet God created everything, Augustine believed, including our bodies. God is the ground of all being, for “if there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, the truth itself is God. So in either case you cannot deny that God exists.” As the ground of being, God is perfectly good—Goodness itself—and all things created are also good as a result, in varying degrees. But since evil was not created by God, it either must have had a different source or it doesn’t really exist. Augustine opts for the second alternative, writing that “evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name ‘evil.’”54
This is where Augustine’s interest in human personality meets his theory of evil. Evil is not a thing or a positive force, but instead “a swerving of the will which is turned toward lower things” (Confessions, p. 121). The free will is crucial: the best world must have moral freedom in it, because only moral freedom allows for moral goodness to come forth. God would want a world where evil exists, because moral virtues can only exist in a world where evil exists. Courage would not exist, if neither natural evils such as floods or hurricanes, nor moral evils such as the Holocaust or slavery, existed. So God is neither the creator of evil, nor its helpless victim. Rather, he co-exists with evil understood as a privation of goodness. On the other hand, Augustine believe that evil sometimes leads to good in ways that humans cannot see or understand. As Goodness itself, God can see the big-picture-benefits of having evil around, which may sometimes elude our human understanding.
For Augustine, all this moral freedom means that our lives face a constellation of simple yet powerful opposites that we must navigate: soul versus body, pride versus humility, God versus man, good versus evil, temporal versus eternal. We not only have to think about these issues, but live with them and through them in order to approach philosophical truths.
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“Sympathy” suggests a very different interpretation of evil. It begins with the Devil’s introducing himself and boasting of his conquests and his taste. The suggestion is that evil is as charming and likeable to us as this “man of wealth and taste.” When we reach the refrain:
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game.
—the song’s psychological punch becomes clearer. In the first two lines, Satan says, “I am happy to make your acquaintance, but if you can identify me, you might have a better chance against me and my wiles.” And then comes the crux of the matter: Is it the nature of the devil’s game to make us puzzled? Or are we just puzzled about the nature of his game? Or is it even more fine-tuned, so that the Devil is referring to how hard it is to tell good from evil—his eternal game? In any case, the song implies that this devil is no mere lack of goodness, but rather a force, a person, in his own right, present at each of the tragedies and wars he describes in subsequent verses.
In a 2002 interview in Rolling Stone, Richards said: “You might as well accept … evil … and deal with it any way you can. Sympathy is a song that says, ‘Don’t forget him. If you confront him, then he’s out of a job.” Richards’s comment, coming on the heels of 9/11, updates the song by adding a modern tragedy to those in the song—Christ’s crucifixion, the Russian Revolution, World War II, and later, the Kennedy assassinations. Evil is real, the Stones are pronouncing, and its destructive powers should be given credence and, of course, sympathy.
But are, or were, The Stones serious about being