It contains what is evil and destructive and transfigures it into something good and creative. of the divine spirit over the bestial flesh.
Civilization, then, is the triumph of virtue over vice, i.e. Socrates summed it up when he confessed that he shared all human vices, but that he had `put his dogs on the chain'. Those who do not share this belief in life as a prolonged moral examination seem nevertheless to accept a dualism in which the human mind is the civilizing force over our animal passions. What is evil and destructive in us emanates from our animal nature the good and the creative is the fruit of the spirit. In the Christian world view, evil is a moral challenge the individual must meet to prove himself and save his immortal soul. Every work of art is matched by a case of murder, every advance in technology is reflected in the brutality of war, and the plots of our literatures revolve around lovers and killers. History provides ample evidence to substantiate the argument. Hyde the forces of creation and destruction are deeply rooted in our psyche, and life unfolds in the dynamic struggle between them. On the face of it, the depiction of humanity engaged in a perpetual battle between good and evil is quite plausible: we are always both Dr.
Those who dismiss the Bible as a confounded mixture of fact and fiction, poetry and politics, seem nevertheless to have accepted the argument embodied in the Cain and Abel story, namely that murderous aggressivity is inherent in human nature. Christians accept Cain's fratricide as a manifestation of man's fall. It has, therefore, fundamentally determined the way in which people in the West have looked upon themselves. The biblical story of Abel's murder by his brother Cain is the first mythic event after their parents' expulsion from Eden recorded in Genesis.
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