3.6 Destruction and Renewal
Necessary Destruction and Abusive Destruction
Destruction is a law of nature. It is necessary for everything to be destroyed in order to be reborn and regenerated. What is called destruction is no more than transformation aimed at renewing and improving living beings.
The instinct of destruction has been given to living beings for providential purposes. God’s creatures are the instruments God uses to attain the divine ends. In order to feed themselves, living beings destroy each other with the dual purpose of maintaining the balance of reproduction, which might otherwise become excessive, and utilizing the remains of their external envelopes. But it is only the envelope that is destroyed; the envelope is only an accessory and not an essential part of the thinking being. The essential part is the indestructible intelligent principle, which develops through the various metamorphoses it undergoes.
If destruction is necessary for the regeneration of beings, nature also surrounds them with the means of self-preservation and conservation in order to prevent their destruction before the proper time. Any destruction that occurs too soon delays the development of the intelligent principle. That is why God has given each being the need to stay alive and reproduce.
Although death should lead to a better life and deliver us from the ills of this world, and should therefore be desired rather than dreaded, human beings nevertheless have an instinctive horror of it and see it as a cause for apprehension. This is because they should seek to prolong life in order to accomplish their task. That is why God has given them the instinct of self-preservation: it sustains them in all their trials. Without it, they would frequently give in to discouragement. The secret voice that tells them to avoid death also tells them they may yet do something more for their progress. Whenever danger threatens, it warns them that they must take advantage of the time God has granted them. But the ungrateful usually give thanks to their lucky star instead of their Creator.
Nature has placed the agents of destruction side by side with the means of self-preservation, as the remedy beside the illness, in order to maintain balance and serve as a counterweight.
The need for destruction is not the same on all worlds. It is in proportion to how material each particular world is, and it disappears altogether in a purer physical and moral state. On worlds more evolved than yours, the conditions of existence are altogether different.
The need for destruction will not always exist for humankind on Earth. It diminishes among human beings to the degree that spirit overcomes matter. That is why the horror of destruction follows intellectual and moral development.
In their present state, human beings do not have an unlimited right to destroy animals. That right is limited to what is needed for food and safety. Abuse has never been a right.
Destruction that exceeds the limits of need and safety—hunting, for instance, when it has no objective other than the pleasure of destroying needlessly—is a predominance of the animal nature over the spiritual nature. All destruction that exceeds the limits of need is a violation of God’s law. Animals destroy only to satisfy their needs, but human beings, who have free will, destroy without need. They will be called to account for abusing the freedom granted to them, because in such cases they yield to evil instincts.
Cultures that carry their scrupulousness regarding the destruction of animals to excess have no special merit. Such excess is a sentiment that is in itself praiseworthy, but it becomes abusive and its merit is neutralized by other kinds of abuse. They act more out of superstitious fear than true humaneness.
Destructive Calamities
Destructive calamities are inflicted in order to impel humankind to progress more quickly. Destruction is necessary for the moral regeneration of spirits, who attain a new degree of perfection during each new existence. The end must be seen in order to appreciate the results. Such afflictions are judged as calamities only from a personal point of view because of the injury they cause; however, these hardships are often necessary in order to bring about a better order more quickly, and to accomplish in a few years what would otherwise require many centuries. (See no. 744)
God could employ other methods instead of destructive calamities to improve humankind, and these are employed every day. Through the knowledge of good and evil, God has given each person the means of progressing. However, human beings do not take advantage of them; thus, it is necessary to afflict them in their pride and make them feel their own weakness.
The moral person succumbs to these calamities along with the wicked. Throughout life, human beings relate everything to the body, but after death they think differently. The life of the body is almost nothing; a century in your world is but a flash in eternity. The sufferings that last a few months or days are nothing, and are only a lesson that will serve in the future. Spirits, who have preexisted and survived everything else, comprise the real world (see no. 85). They are the children of God and the objects of divine kindness. Bodies are no more than disguises behind which they make their appearance in the world. In the great calamities that decimate humankind, moral persons who succumb are like an army which, during war, sees that its uniforms have become tattered, worn out, or lost. The general is more concerned for the soldiers than for their uniforms.
The victims of these calamities are victims nonetheless. If life were considered as it is in itself, and in comparison with the infinite, less importance would be attached to it. In another life, those victims will find ample compensation for their sufferings if they endured them without complaining.
Whether death results from a calamity or an ordinary cause, it cannot be escaped when the hour for departure has come. The only difference is that in the former case a greater number depart at the same time.
If thought could be elevated so as to encompass all humankind in a single glance, these terrible calamities would seem no more than passing storms in the destiny of the world.
Destructive calamities are useful from a physical point of view, notwithstanding the hardships they cause. They sometimes modify the conditions of a region, but the good that results from them is usually felt only by future generations.
Calamities can also be moral trials for humankind by exposing people to the most afflictive needs. They are trials that furnish human beings with an opportunity to exert their intelligence and to demonstrate patience and resignation before the will of God. At the same time, they enable them to develop the sentiments of self-denial, detachment, and love for their neighbor, if they are not dominated by selfishness.
Calamities that afflict humanity may be averted in part, though not as is generally supposed. Many calamities are the consequences of human improvidence. As knowledge and experience are acquired, human beings become able to avert them—that is, to prevent them—if they know how to study their causes. Among the ills that afflict humankind, however, there are those of a general nature that belong to the designs of Providence and from which all individuals receive, in greater or lesser proportion, the share for which they are responsible. Human beings can do nothing about these except resign themselves to God’s will. But even these ills are usually aggravated by human carelessness.
Among the destructive calamities that are natural and independent of human action are plagues, famine, floods, and inclement weather conditions fatal to the productions of the earth. But in science, in works of art, in improvements in agriculture, in crop rotation and irrigation, and in the study of hygienic conditions, humankind has found the means to neutralize or at least mitigate such disasters. Certain regions formerly devastated by terrible calamities are now protected. Therefore, what will humankind not accomplish for material well-being when it knows how to make use of all the resources of its intelligence, and when, while caring for its own self-preservation, it also knows how to unite that care with true charity toward fellow beings? (See no. 707)
War
The cause that leads humankind to war is the predominance of the animal nature over the spiritual nature, and the satisfaction of passions. In a state of barbarity, nations know only the right of the strongest, and that is why war is a normal state for them. As human beings evolve, war will become less frequent, since they will avoid its causes; and when it does become necessary, they will know how to make it more humane.
War will someday disappear from the Earth, when men and women understand justice and practice God’s law. Then all nations will live as brothers and sisters.
The goal of Providence in making war necessary has been freedom and progress.
If war is meant to bring freedom, it has nevertheless usually had subjugation as its objective and result, because temporary subjugation enables cultures to evolve more quickly.
Those who stir up war for their own gain are truly guilty and will require many lives to expiate all the murders they have caused, for they will have to answer for every individual whose death they caused in order to satisfy their ambition.
Murder
Murder is a great crime in God’s sight because those who take the life of another human being thereby cut short a life of expiation or mission; hence the evil.
There is not always the same degree of culpability in murder. God is just and judges the intention rather than the deed.
In cases of legitimate defense, only necessity can excuse murder; but if we can save our own life without taking the life of the aggressor, we must do so.
Persons are not culpable for the killings they commit in war if they are coerced by force; nonetheless, they are responsible for the cruelties they commit. Likewise, their display of humaneness will also be taken into account.
Parricide and infanticide are equally culpable in God’s sight, for all crime is crime.
Infanticide is a custom condoned by legislation among certain cultures that are already intellectually evolved, because intellectual development does not necessarily imply moral development. Spirits of superior intelligence may be evil. They are those who have lived many lives without improving themselves.
Cruelty
The sentiment of cruelty may be linked to the instinct of destruction. It is that instinct in its worst form because, even though destruction is sometimes necessary, cruelty never is. It is always the result of an evil nature.
Cruelty is the dominant characteristic of primitive peoples because, among such peoples, matter dominates spirit. They abandon themselves to their animal instincts, and since they have no needs beyond those of the body, they care only for their own self-preservation. This is what usually makes them cruel. Moreover, peoples of imperfect development are under the dominion of equally imperfect spirits. These imperfect spirits remain sympathetic to them until more advanced peoples come to destroy or weaken their influence.
Cruelty results from a moral sense that is not yet developed, not from one that is absent, since it exists in principle in all human beings. This moral sense is what later transforms them into good and humane beings. It exists in the primitive person as the aroma exists in the bud of a flower that has not yet opened.
All faculties exist in human beings in a rudimentary or latent state and develop according to how favorable the circumstances are. The excessive development of some impedes or neutralizes that of others. The overexcitement of the material instincts stifles, so to speak, the moral sense, just as moral development gradually weakens the purely animal faculties.
In the most advanced civilizations there are individuals who are at times as cruel as barbarians, for the same reason that on a tree loaded with good fruit there is always some that is rotten. Such individuals have, if you wish, only the appearance of civility, like wolves in sheep’s clothing. Low-order, very backward spirits may incarnate among advanced people in hope of their own progress. However, if the trial is too difficult, their barbaric nature prevails.
The society of moral individuals will someday be purged of evildoers. Humankind is evolving. Those who are dominated by the instinct of evil and who are out of place among moral people will disappear little by little, like bad grain separated from the good when threshed; but they will be born again in other envelopes. Then, with more experience, they will comprehend good and evil better. There is an example in the plants and animals that you have learned how to perfect by developing new qualities in them. It is only after many generations that perfection becomes complete. This is a picture of the different existences of human beings.
Dueling
Dueling cannot be considered a case of lawful self-defense. It is murder and an absurd custom worthy of barbarians. In a more advanced and moral civilization, people will understand that dueling is as foolish as the combats of antiquity that were regarded as “the judgment of God.”
Dueling may be considered murder on the part of one who, knowing his own weakness, is almost certain to be killed. It is suicide.
When the odds are equal, it is both murder and suicide.
In all cases, even when the odds are equal, the duelist is culpable: first, because he coolly and deliberately attacks the life of a fellow human being; second, because he exposes his own life needlessly and without benefit to anyone else.
In dueling, what is called “the point of honor” has the value of pride and vanity, two sores of humankind.
Whether there are cases in which honor really is at stake, and where refusal would be cowardice, depends on customs and usages. Each country and each epoch has a different way of regarding such matters. Nevertheless, when human beings are better and more advanced morally, they will understand that the true point of honor is above earthly passions, and that a wrong is not redeemed either by killing or by being killed.
There is more greatness and true honor in recognizing wrongdoing if we err, or in forgiving if we are right, and in all cases in not attaching importance to insults that cannot harm us.
The Death Penalty
The death penalty will assuredly disappear, and its suppression will signal progress for humankind. When human beings become more enlightened, the death penalty will be completely abolished on Earth. They will no longer need to be judged by others. This concerns a time still very distant for you.
Social progress still leaves much to be desired, but it would be unjust toward modern society not to recognize progress in the restrictions imposed on the death penalty among more advanced nations, and in the nature of the crimes to which its application is limited. If we compare the safeguards by which justice is enforced to protect the accused nowadays, and the humaneness with which they are treated even when found guilty, with what was practiced in the not-too-distant past, we cannot fail to recognize the path upon which humanity is progressing.
The law of self-preservation gives the right to defend one’s own life, but this right does not apply when a dangerous member is eliminated from society. There are other means of protecting yourselves from danger without killing. Moreover, it is necessary to open the door of repentance to the criminal rather than close it.
Although the death penalty may be banned from civilized societies, it was considered necessary in less advanced times. Necessary is not the right word. People always think a thing is necessary when they cannot find anything better. But as they become enlightened, they better understand what is just and unjust, and they repudiate the excesses committed in times of ignorance in the name of justice.
The restriction on the cases in which the death penalty is applied is an indication of the progress of civilization. How can you doubt that? Does not your spirit revolt when you read reports of the human slaughters formerly perpetrated in the name of justice and frequently in honor of the Divinity, and of the tortures to which the condemned—and even the accused—were subjected in order to wrest from them, through excess pain, a confession to a crime they often had not even committed? If you had lived in those times, you would have thought it all quite natural, and perhaps, as a judge, you would have done even more. Thus, what seems just in one era seems barbaric in another. Only the divine laws are eternal. Human laws change with progress, and they will continue to change until they are brought into harmony with the divine laws.
Jesus said, “Whoever kills by the sword shall perish by the sword,” but these words do not represent a consecration of the penalty of talion, and the death imposed on the murderer is not an application of that penalty. The penalty of talion is the justice of God; it is God alone who applies it. You all suffer this penalty at every moment because you are punished in the very thing wherein you have sinned, either in this life or in another. Those who have caused their fellow human beings to suffer will be placed in a situation in which they themselves will suffer in like manner. This is the meaning of Jesus’ words. He also said, “Forgive your enemies,” and taught you to ask God to forgive your offenses as you yourself forgive—that is, in the same proportion in which you yourself have forgiven. Understand this well.
The death penalty imposed in the name of God is equivalent to taking God’s place in the administration of justice. Those who act in this way reveal how far they are from truly understanding God, and how much they still have to expiate. The death penalty is a crime where it is applied in the name of God, and those who do so will be responsible for such killings.