From the spiritual point of view, which alone takes account of the true cause of our calamities, evil is not by definition what causes us to suffer, it is that which – even when accompanied by a maximum of comfort or of ease, or of “justice” so-called – thwarts a maximum of souls as regards their final end. [GTUFS: TransfMan, The Impossible Convergence]

Manifestation is not the Principle, the effect is not the cause; that which is “other than God” could not possess the perfections of God, hence in the final analysis and within the general imperfection of the created, there results that privative and subversive phenomenon which we call evil. This is to say that the cosmogonic ray, by plunging as it were into “nothingness,” ends by manifesting “the possibility of the impossible”; the “absurd” cannot but be produced somewhere in the economy of the divine Possibility, otherwise the Infinite would not be the Infinite. But strictly speaking, evil or the devil cannot oppose the Divinity, who has no opposite; it opposes man who is the mirror of God and the movement towards the divine. [GTUFS: PlayMasks, Man in the Cosmogonic Projection]

With the intention of resolving the problem of evil, some have maintained that evil does not exist for God, and consequently that for Him everything is a good, which is inadmissible and ill-sounding. What ought to be said is that God sees the privative manifestations only in connection with the positive manifestations that compensate for them; thus evil is a provisional factor in view of a greater good, of a “victory of the Truth”; vincit omnia Veritas. [GTUFS: PlayMasks, Ex Nihilo, In Deo]

In order to resolve the thorny problem of evil, some have claimed that nothing is bad since everything which happens is “willed by God,” or that evil exists only “from the standpoint of the Law”; which is by no means plausible, first because the Law exists on account of evil and not conversely. What should be said is that evil is integrated into the universal Good, not as evil but as an ontological necessity, as we have pointed out above; this necessity underlies evil, it is metaphysically inherent in it, without however transforming it into a good. [GTUFS: TransfMan, The Mystery of Possibility]

Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility – and necessity – of evil; seen from this angle, what we term evil is thus indirectly a result of Infinitude, hence of the Divine Nature; in this respect, God cannot wish to suppress it; likewise, in this respect – and only in this respect – evil ceases to be evil, being no more than an indirect and distant manifestation of a mysterious aspect of the Divine Nature, precisely that of Infinitude or of All-Possibility. One could also say that Infinitude engenders Possibility, and Possibility engenders Relativity; now Relativity contains by definition what we could term the principle of contrast. Insofar as a quality is relative – or is reflected in Relativity – it has ontological need of a contrast, not intrinsically or in virtue of its content, but extrinsically and in virtue of its mode, thus because of its contingency. Indeed, it is the relative or contingent character of a quality that requires or brings about the existence of the corresponding privative manifestation, with all its possible gradations and as a result, its defect, vice, evil. Evil is the possibility of the impossible, since relative good is the Possible approaching impossibility; for it is from this paradoxical combination of Possibility with impossibility – impossibility becoming real only in and through Possibility – that Contingency or Relativity originates, if one may be allowed an ellipsis that is complex and daring, but difficult to avoid at this point. If God cannot eliminate evil as a possibility, it is because in this respect evil is a function of His Nature and, being so, it ceases as a result to be evil; and what God cannot do, on pain of contradiction or absurdity, He could never will. However, the Divine Will opposes evil inasmuch as it is contrary to the Divine Nature, which is Goodness or Perfection; in this relationship of opposition – and in this alone – evil is intrinsically evil. God fights this evil perfectly since, on all planes, it is the good that is finally victorious; evil is never more than a fragment or a transition, whether we are in a position to see this or not. [GTUFS: FormSR, The Question of Theodicies]

The nature of evil, and not its inevitability, constitutes its condemnation; its inevitability must be accepted, for tragedy enters perforce into the divine play, if only because the world is not God; one must not accept error, but one must be resigned to its existence. But beyond earthly destructions there is the Indestructible: “Every form you see,” says Rumi  , “has its archetype in the divine world, beyond space; if the form perishes what matter, since its heavenly model is indestructible? Every beautiful form you have seen, every meaningful word you have heard – be not sorrowful because all this must be lost; such is not really the case. The divine Source is immortal and its outflowing gives water without cease; since neither the one nor the other can be stopped, wherefore do you lament? . . . From the first moment when you entered this world of existence, a ladder has been set up before you . . .” [GTUFS: LightAW, The Shamanism of the Red Indians]

Now, if we start out from the idea that, metaphysically speaking, there is no “evil” properly so called and that all is simply a question of function or aspect, we shall then have to specify on the following lines: an evil being is a necessary fragment of a good – or an equilibrium – which exceeds that being incommensurably, whereas a good being is a good in itself, so that any evil in the latter is but fragmentary. Evil, then, is the fragment of a good and the good is a totality including some evil and neutralizing it by its very quality of totality. [GTUFS: TreasuresB, Cosmological and Eschatological Viewpoints]

Evil / Good: The distant and indirect cause of what we rightly call evil – namely privation of the good – is the mystery of All-Possibility: that is to say that the latter, being infinite, necessarily embraces the possibility of its own negation, thus the “possibility of the impossible” or the “being of nothingness.” This paradoxical possibility, this “possibility of the absurd” – since it exists and since nothing can be separated from the Good, which coincides with Being – has of necessity a positive function, which is to manifest the Good – or the multiple “goods” – by means of contrast, as much in “time” or succession as in “space” or co-existence. In “space,” evil is opposed to good and by that fact heightens the latter’s luster and brings out its nature a contrario; in “time,” the cessation of evil manifests the victory of the good, in accordance with the principle that vincit omnia Veritas; the two modes illustrate the “unreality” of evil and at the same time its illusory character. In other words: since the function of evil is the contrasting manifestation of good and also the latter’s final victory, we may say that evil by its very nature is condemned to its own negation; representing either the “spatial” or “temporal” absence of good, evil thus returns to this absence, which is privation of being and hence nothingness. If one were to object that good is likewise perishable, we would answer that it returns to its celestial or divine prototype in which alone it is wholly “itself”; what is perishable in the good is not the good in itself, it is this or that envelope limiting it. As we have said more than once – and this brings us back to the root of the question – evil is a necessary consequence of remoteness from the Divine Sun, the “overflowing” source of the cosmogonic trajectory; the mystery of mysteries being All-Possibility as such. A remark is necessary here: one might object that evil likewise, by its very nature, tends to communicate itself; that is true, but it has this tendency precisely because it is opposed to the radiation of the good and thus cannot help imitating the latter in some fashion. For evil is by definition both opposition and imitation: within the framework of opposition it is ontologically forced to imitate; “the more they curse God the more they praise Him,” said Meister Eckhart  . Evil, insofar as it exists, participates in the good represented by existence. Good and evil are not, strictly speaking, existential categories as are the object, the subject, space and time; because the good is the very being of things – manifested by the categories precisely – such that they, the things, are all “modes of the good”; whereas evil indicates paradoxically the absence of this being, while annexing certain things or certain characteristics at the level at which they are accessible and by virtue of predispositions allowing it. But despite this reservation, one may consider good and evil as existential categories for the following reasons. The good includes on the one hand all that manifests the qualities of the Divine Principle, and on the other hand all things inasmuch as they manifest this same Principle by their existence, and also inasmuch as they fulfill a necessary ontological function. Evil for its part includes all that manifests a privation from the standpoint of the qualities or from that of Being itself; it is harmful in various ways, even though this harmfulness be neutralized and compensated, in given cases, by positive factors. That is to say that there are things which are bad or harmful in principle but not in fact, just as there are others which are good and beneficial in the same way; all of which contributes to the unfolding of the cosmic play with its innumerable combinations. [GTUFS: HaveCenter, Universal Categories]

Evil / Good / Absoluteness: Evil cannot be absolute, it always depends upon some good which it misuses or perverts; the quality of Absoluteness can belong to good alone. To say “good” is therefore to say “absolute,” and conversely: for good results from Being itself, which it reflects and whose potentialities it unfolds. [GTUFS: FaceA, Islam and Consciousness of the Absolute]