Why Ramchal Said Evil Was Built to Be Unmade

Most people picture evil as God's enemy. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, writing in Padua and Amsterdam in the 1730s, picture it as a stage prop. Useful for a while. Built to be struck.

The strange architecture of the four worlds

Luzzatto's Kalach Pitchei Chokhmah, his 138 gates of kabbalah, opens with a piece of cosmic history that almost no one knows. There were not always four worlds. At first there were three. Beriah, Yetzirah, Asiyah. Creation, Formation, Action. The fourth world, Atzilut, the world of Emanation, did not yet stand apart.

Then something shifted. The Ramchal teaches in a passage from gate 49 that the worlds reorganized themselves through what he calls "much gradation," the way a sculptor works clay. Atzilut rose above the other three. The cosmos acquired a top floor.

That sounds like architecture trivia. It is not. Because the lowest rung of the bottom world, the Malchut of Asiyah, is where evil takes root. Push Atzilut higher, and you have stretched the distance between God and the place evil lives. You have given the dark a basement to operate in.

Two kinds of evil, and only one of them bites

The Ramchal then does something startling. He splits evil into two species.

The first he calls actual evil. This is evil with its teeth in. Evil empowered to prosecute, to obstruct, to wound. Think of a dam jammed across a river so nothing flows through. In gate 49 opening 9, Ramchal writes that the worse this kind of evil becomes, the more it chokes off the supply of blessing meant for the world.

The second species he calls evil that has reverted to good. Same evil. Same shape. But it cannot act. The malice is still there, only now it is locked, defanged, drained of permission. The dam still stands across the river, except now it spins turbines. The thing that blocked the flow has become the reason the flow can be used.

And here is the line that makes Ramchal Ramchal. The greater the evil in its first state, the greater the blessing it releases when it flips into its second. The fiercer the obstacle, the brighter the light when it gives way.

Why God built a system that needs an enemy

Why include any of this? Why design a universe with a wound in it?

Because, Ramchal says, a soul that has never been pressed has nothing to demonstrate. Easy goodness reveals nothing about the person who carries it. Hard-won goodness reveals everything. The yetzer hara, the inclination toward wrongdoing, was not slipped into creation as a flaw. It was installed as a sparring partner.

In gate 49 opening 10, Ramchal pushes the idea further. As long as evil remains unrepaired, he writes, it sits on the cosmos like a stain on a king's robe. A flaw in the masterpiece. But the moment a person beats back their inclination, the very evil they overcame turns and gives evidence. It announces, in effect, how little power it had against this human. The struggle itself becomes a sign of our strength, and that sign feeds back into the honor of the King.

The dam, the river, the turbines

This is the move that makes the whole system coherent. Evil is not vanquished in some final battle of armies. It is rendered unnecessary. When enough souls have done enough repair, the function of evil expires. Nothing is left for it to test. Nothing is left for it to obstruct. The accusation cannot proceed because there is no longer a basis for punishment.

So evil does not die. Evil retires. Aspects of it remain, but only as fossils. They cannot operate, because the revelation of God's oneness is too loud in the room for them to be heard.

The light fills the basement

This is what the Ramchal means by tikkun olam in its sharpest sense. Not patching the world. Reorganizing it so the patches are no longer needed. The Malchut of Asiyah, the basement where evil once nested, is still there. It is simply flooded with light coming down from Atzilut, the world that took its place at the top after all that quiet gradation.

Luzzatto died at thirty-nine, in Acre, during a plague. He never saw a peaceful generation. He spent most of his short life under rabbinic ban for the visions he claimed to receive. And yet he wrote, with a steadiness that still surprises, that the worst things in the world are the temporary ones, and the lights behind them are the lights that last.

A scaffolding marked for removal

The dam is not the river. The shadow is not the room. The opponent in the sparring match is not the reason the match exists.

The Ramchal hands his reader a strange consolation. If evil seems immense right now, that is not proof of its strength. That is proof of how much light it is keeping in reserve for the day someone finally moves it.