The Tragedy of King Lear

By the End of the King Lear, the King Learns not Just Modesty in front of Men, but more Importantly, in front of Universe.

In exchange with Cordelia, who returned from France in an attempt to save him from his two evil daughters, Lear learns that neither evil nor good of this world are the result of simple causality. Their sources are mysterious, and originate in Heaven:

LEAR: I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind…

I know you do not love me; for your sisters
Have, as I do remember, done me wrong:
You have some cause, they have not.

CORDELIA: No cause, no cause.

Causality is the domain of simple-minded scientists and other rationalists. What was very clear to Job since the time immemorial, was highlighted again on the philosophical level by Immanuel Kant. Causality is the product of human mind, which tries to impose some order on the complex and unwieldy nature of things.

The so called friends of Job, were the original conspiracy theorists. They worked hard to establish causality behind the miseries that had befallen Job. They were eventually dismissed by God as inadequate losers peddling in simplistic explanations of the mystery behind good and evil.

It is indeed a mystery. I was reminded of that just recently, after the tragic violence that took over the Brown campus.

We can understand the envy, jealousy and anger that the murderer, Valente, could have directed against his college-years rival, Nuno Loureiro. Valente used to get higher marks that Loureiro, but now, Loureiro was appointed as the head of one of the most prestigious labs in the world, while Valente was wasting his time failing at everything except murders.

But why did Valente decided to enter a classroom at Brown and shoot innocent students who were not even born when he was taking his graduate classes in physics at Brown?

For me, what lies behind his attack in the classrom is a nothing but pure metaphysical evil; it can’t really be explained away by any cause, rational or irrational.

Such evil is there, diffused in our universe as much as goodness, and consequently, it takes all sort of forms and manifestations.

Yet, immediately after these murders were committed, we began to be inundated with conspiracy theories: liberal antifa warriors hunting religious students, antisemites hunting Jews, Islamists attacking bastions of western civilization, resentful anarchists striking the establishment.

Is the impulse behind these theories the same that drove Job’s friends? Ultimately, I believe, it is the impulse of a rational and therefore atheistic mind. Things have to have reasons. Lear himself was plagued with the same affliction: “nothing will come of nothing.” Really? In God’s world, something comes out of nothing, and nothing out of something. Lear had to learn it hard way, as he got absolutely nothing for the kingdom he gave to Regan and Goneril, and he got Cordelia’s unconditional love for nothing he gave her.

And so that’s where we are. Dismissing Divine’s mysteries, while chasing conspiracy theories peddled to us — of all people — by special divisions of CIA, MI5 and KGB.