Some people find validity for their own views by deeming as good those who agree with them and evil those who disagree with them. These terms, strong as they are, become meaningless or even laughable when they are applied so indiscriminately. But these terms are not meaningless in the cosmic order. In fact, without both good and evil, humanity would never develop free will.
When we look back to civilizations from Egypt to the present, we find abundant evidence of humankind’s endeavor to understand its place between heaven and hell. Before that, humanity had an instinctive clairvoyance; we didn’t have to believe in spiritual beings, we experienced them. This state of being did not cultivate free will. With the consciousness we’ve developed since then, we don’t directly experience the spirit, nor are we are likely to believe in things simply because an authority has told us what to believe. Our thinking of today, based on logic and reason, demands an approach to the concepts of good and evil that makes sense, especially if we hope to incorporate these concepts into our understanding of karma and reincarnation.
Karma is continually playing out so that we can fix our error (evil) in order purify our souls, to evolve as souls, to become good. If we are willing to identify a virtue as being good, our natural inclination is to identify the opposite of that virtue as evil. So, for example, we could say that courage is good, so cowardice is evil. But it is more complicated than that. Aristotle said, “Virtue is a human capacity or skill guided by reason and insight, which, as regards man, hold the balance between the too-much and the too-little.” What does he mean?
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
… The pupils of the Mysteries were shown that free will can only be developed if a person is in a position to go wrong in one of two directions; further, that life can only run its course truly and favorably when these two lines of opposition are considered as being like the two sides of a balance, of which first one side and then the other goes up and down. True balance only exists when the crossbeam is horizontal. They were shown that it is impossible to express the true attitude of man by saying; this is right and that is wrong. It is only possible to gain the true idea when the human being, standing in the center of the balance, can be swayed each moment of his life, now to one side, now to the other, but he himself holds the correct mean between the two.
Let us take the virtue valor, bravery. In this respect human nature may diverge on one side to foolhardiness—that is, unbridled activity in the world and the straining of the forces at one’s disposal to the utmost limit. Foolhardiness is one side; the opposite is cowardice. A person may turn the scale in either of these directions.
In the Mysteries the pupils were shown that when a man degenerates into foolhardiness, he loses himself and lays aside his own individuality and is crushed by the wheels of life. Life tears him in pieces if he errs in this direction, but if, on the other hand, he errs on the side of cowardice, he hardens himself and tears himself away from his connection with beings and objects… the pupils were told that goodness cannot merely be striven for as goodness obtained once and for all; rather does goodness come only through man being continually able to strike out in two directions like a pendulum and by his own inner power able to find the balance, the mean between the two.
You have in this all that will enable you to understand the freedom of the will and the significance of reason and wisdom in human action. If it were fitting for man always to observe the eternal moral principles, he need only acquire these moral principles and then he could go through life on a definite line of march, as it were, but life is never like this.
Freedom in this consists rather in man’s being always able to err in one direction or another. But in this way the possibility of evil arises. For what is evil? It is that which originates when the human being is lost to the world or the world is lost to him. Goodness consists in avoiding both these extremes. In the course of evolution, evil became not only a possibility, but an actuality; for as man journeyed from incarnation to incarnation, by his turning now to one side and now to the other, he could not always find the balance at once, and it was necessary for the compensation to be karmically made at a future time.
Excerpt from: Anthroposophical Ethics, Lecture III by Rudolf Steiner. May 30, 1912. Norrkoping.
If we sit with this for just a moment, we can see how this way of looking at good and evil helps us to become less judgmental of others – instead of being evil, they are off balance. It helps us be less judgmental of ourselves, too. In a way, we can see that we already possess the virtue; however, we may have too much or too little of it. We must swing to the other side to become more centered.
As we explore this method of viewing virtue or good as the mean between two extremes, we find a practical way to work on ourselves. For example, we may admire someone we know who always keeps their temper, who exhibits the virtue of patience. By placing patience as a mean between its two extremes—its deficiency is irascibility, and its excess is apathy—we can see which side of the scale we tip to and work toward the center. Likewise with all the virtues. Here is the spiritual work/life balance.