It is easy to make the mistake of thinking “Since there is only One Being which permeates all things, God is present in everything, the good and the evil alike. Therefore, there is no difference between good and evil and all is permitted.”
We must see that evil is real on its own level and exists precisely so that man faces the predicament as real as himself — to be forced by his own nature to choose between the straight path which leads to balance, harmony, and felicity and the crooked paths which lead to imbalance, disequilibrium and wretchedness.
From God’s point of view, all paths are “straight,” but that is the point of view of God as Being who comprehends all names and all possibilities. It is not the point of God as Guide, who desires the perfection and felicity of mankind.
From the point of view of Sheer Being, there is nothing but good. But as soon as existence is taken into account, good is by definition mixed with evil. Human beings do not dwell with Sheer Being, and are faced with choices between good and evil. Human beings are placed within the cosmos in a context of other existing things and are forced to choose the good, the better, the bad and the worse. Though goods and evils all manifest God as Sheer Good, in relationship to the criteria set up by the nature of things and willed by God they cannot be considered equivalent in respect to human beings. Hence we cannot escape the reality of good and evil in our actual situation.
Human beings are forced to discern between good and evil at every stage of their existence in this world. The secondary causes assume the properties of His names, and the cosmos is full of life giving and slaying, forgiveness and vengeance, exalting and abasing, guidance and misguidance on all sorts of levels. In each case where human interests are involved, man has to see the secondary causes as good or evil. Hence, human beings must always separate God’s point of view from their own point of view. A lot of folks run amok on this one.
Just as there is nothing but good in existence and all paths lead to God, so also all character traits are noble and none is base. But all character traits are noble only in relationship to their ontological roots. As soon as the four levels of good and evil are taken into account, some are noble and some base.
In order to tell the difference between noble and base in what concerns ultimate felicity, human beings have need of Perspicacity.
Perspicacity is a divine light, which God gives to the person of faith in the eye of his insight, just like the light that belongs to the eye of sight. When a person has this perspicacity, its mark is like the light of the sun through which sensory objects appear to sight. When the light of the sun is unveiled, sight differentiates among the sensory objects. It discerns the large from the small, the beautiful from the ugly, the white from the black, red, yellow, the moving from the still, the far from the near, and the high from the low. In the same way, the light of perspicacity through faith discerns the praiseworthy from the blameworthy, the movements of felicity pertaining to the next abode, and the movements of wretchedness.
Some of the possessors of perspicacity have reached a point where, upon seeing a person’s footprint in the ground — though the person himself is not present — they are able to say that he is a felicitous person or a wretched person. This is similar to what is done by a tracker who follows footprints.
The Light of Perspicacity comes directly from God, from the source, so to speak. That is why it is able to see not only the praiseworthy but the blameworthy as well.
