Age old questions indeed, used as arguments both for an against the existence of a God. These questions were recently raised during an interesting discussion with some friends, so I decided to give a short summary here of the way in which Martines de Pasqually approached the matter in his Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings.

The suffering that people experience everyday is obviously the main argument for the idea that an evil force is opposing human happiness, and the urge to find explanations for this matter of fact has been just as strong. As far back as we look in written history, the world has been described as both a good and a hostile place. Gnostic sects have taken the view that the world is all evil, created by an evil demiurge. Many others, like Plotinus and many christians (for instance St Francis of Assisi), took the view that the world is a mixed bag: there is some evil (caused by Man, the Devil, etc.) and some good (Plotinus would speak of the Beauty in natural world, or good deeds, love, etc.).

What was Martines de Pasqually’s view on the origin of Evil?

There are 2 principles on which Martines bases his cosmology (which is actually a cosmosophy):

1. God is good and manifests himself by emanating immortal beings through immutable laws and to whom he gives commandments. Thus, Martines posits that all of creation is attributable to God himself, creating beings as his agents. Hence, there is no separate demiurge in martinism.

2. Evil is defined as those beings’ voluntary departure from those commandments.


Those 2 premises have 5 consequences with regards to evil:

1. God did not create evil. Evil, being the result of disobedience to God’s commandments, is necessarily the responsibility of the evildoers, who are in the first instance ‘angels’, and then man (Adam’s fall) who followed the nefarious influence of those fallen ones. That nefarious influence continues - click here for one particular example.

2. Divine laws being immutable, denial (refusal of God) and even rebellion don’t modify the fundamental laws by which beings are created, and thus even demons cannot loose their immortality. Consequently, God cannot have “prevented” evil, nor can he annihilate rebellious beings as that would be a violation of his own laws.

3. The act by which rebellious beings separated themselves from God is what formed a “place” in which they are exiled, and that place was given boundaries: the material universe is that prison. Thus, all material, natural, physical (including geological) features, events and accidents that we experience are the consequence of original and stubbornly perpetuated rebellion.

4. However, because, as we have stipulated, all creation comes from God, the boundaries of time and space themselves result from divine laws. Indeed, in Martines’ view, all creation comes from and is permeated by the divine. Those “laws of creation” allow every being to work at their own reconciliation with the Creator, through the observance of commandments, understood and practised because of their desire to migrate back towards divine Good and Beauty. Additionally, God intervenes in his Creation to help this process of reconciliation, through prophets and especially through the figure of the Repairer, Christ. Therefore, the material universe is both a prison and a school, but in which the classes are not made compulsory out of respect for the beings’ free will: every fallen being is responsible for its own re-education.

5. Because the persistence of a separation from God depends on the existence of even a single rebellious being, and because all beings are created immortal, the resorption of that place, which is the temporal material universe, will only occur when every single being has completed its personal reconciliation with God.



Martines de Pasqually thereby provides both an explanation and a purpose for human suffering, be it at the hand of fellow humans or because of natural disasters. He provides guidelines for the betterment of each individual through the accomplishment of divine commandments. His view accommodates, and gives perspective to, the scientific explanation for the existence, preservation, and evolution of the universe and of the life that inhabits it. His approach is gnostic, in the sense that the knowledge of how and especially why the world is the way it is holds the key to everyone’s betterment. Knowledge of the Universe, of Man and of God, as Louis Claude de Saint-Martin put it in the title of one of his books. This knowledge excites Man’s desire for spiritual beauty, and through constant effort, men and women develop an ever stronger desire for unity with their Creator, which is the foundation of all religion. This is about a combat between Good and Evil, a fight that one brings first on oneself, since that is the condition for man’s reconciliation. The battleground is first and foremost our own minds, hearts and bodies, because just like the world, we are a mixed bag of good and evil.

Tags: Martines de Pasqually, Treatise, Commandments, Universe, Exile, Desire, Reintegration, Reconciliation, Creation, Beauty