Evil

I recently assigned a class of college students to write an essay addressing the prompt What is Good? I told them to think about Good in terms of ethics, morals, ideals. We were beginning a survey course of world literature, and as a theme for the class I wanted to have them look at the ways literature deals with our perceptions of Good. We can take the same approach with Evil: What is it?

Is evil a thing that exists outside us or is it something within us or is it just what we call bad things that happen? What, exactly, are we asking God to deliver us from? (From what, exactly, are we asking God to deliver us? Is evil a preposition at the end of a sentence?) We talk about evil in much the same way we talk about love--that is, we use the word in many different contexts and with many different meanings. In Christianity, we know that Satan is evil incarnate; is everything that we call evil, then, Satan? Or is evil bigger than Satan?


Why do we have to separate these ideas? It seems to me that evil is all of this (and probably more). We tend to want to limit things. It helps us, I think, to put things into neat little boxes. We can label them and stack them on the shelves of our psyches. If you will indulge me yet another reference to teaching: in high school, we teach math or science or social studies or (if we are lucky) English/language arts; and, upon closer inspection, we don't just teach science, we teach biology or chemistry or physics. And our students go from Anatomy & Physiology to Pre-calculus to English III to American History. Everything is separate. Really good teachers (and schools) help students see connections among the disparate disciplines, so it is not like the kid who will not allow any of his foods to touch on his plate but more like having a pot of stew. Real life is like stew, and that means that the ideas are not always neatly separated and easy to identify.

Not that I am encouraging anyone to embrace Zen Buddhism, but the concept of the yin-yang serves as a good illustration of how evil exists within us. None of us is wholly evil, and none of us is completely good. We are, for the most part, good people with a touch of evil (an unintentional Orson Welles allusion). We all have some evil in us, and I am not falling back on the idea of Original Sin for this; I am not arguing against the idea of Original Sin, either--it is just that for our purposes here and now, the O.S. argument is not necessary. We all have evil within us--that is, we have experienced evil, done evil, been both the victim and the vehicle of evil--because we have free will. God gave us the ability to make choices, and because we are not perfect, we have sinned. Sin is evil.

So, where does Satan fit into all this? We commit evil because we make imperfect choices. We make imperfect choices because there is something out there providing the Other choice. Christ was able to choose wisely and well, even after forty days of fasting in the desert. We are not Christ--which is why we need Christ. Satan is the force which promotes wrong choices in our lives. All wrong choices are a distancing of ourselves from God.

The idea that evil is either completely inside or completely outside any individual is patently ridulous. In one direction it reeks of hubris; in the other, it screams blindness. To assume that evil is something lurking outside us and unable to actually enter into us is akin to believing that God is something completely outside us, that we are separate--which dismisses Christ and the Holy Spirit as any aspect of who we are. It suggests something like the Deist view of the cosmos: God is out there, we are in here, and never the twain shall meet, more or less. The God-is-out-there philosophy, aside from its X-Files mood, again places us all by ourselves, makes us the center. In an ironic way, this view is the Ptolemaic Universe of theologies. At first glance, it might seem that in this model, God can be at the center and we are adrift out on the periphery--which would be the case, I think, were the model at all valid. However, since the model is flawed at its heart, then it cannot be held to that standard. Since it is a faulty model, it cannot be expected that it would adhere to the proper logic. If we were to accept this model, we would be actually placing ourselves at the center of our own universe(s).


The idea that evil is limited to someplace within us, whether we call that place heart or mind or soul, suggests that we are in control, that there is no outside influence. I have asked my high school students, at various times, who (or what) influences their decisions most, and I always have the handful of kids who say that they influence themselves--they are not able to admit that anyone or anything outside themselves could supersede their autonomy.

So, in essence, relegating evil either to only outside or to only inside ourselves is tantamount to the same thing: we are dismissing the supernatural from our lives--and that applies both ways. We cannot have one without the other.

Evil is at once both outside and within us--and is also an entity. Satan is real. Many people, it would seem, want to believe in God without believing in Satan. They want to limit those forces that are beyond our comprehension (which is why we label them as supernatural to begin with) in an attempt to confine them and define them in a way that might allow us to more easily grasp them.

Looking at things from a medieval world view, we as humans are by nature impure. This does not necessarily require a belief in the concept of original sin; we are human, we have free will, we are not perfect, we will make mistakes. We cannot live without making wrong decisions--we are weak.

One of the problems with evil--which is much like saying one of the grains of sand on the beach--is that we do not always recognize it. The bad guy does not always wear a black hat, the devil does not necessarily have cloven hooves and a tail and horns. Like the stepmother in Snow White (or Enchanted, for those trying to stay current and trendy), evil can be disguised, can present itself as attractive or harmless. Too often we expect evil to appear as a monster, an overwhelming presence from which we cannot escape. Actually, evil is usually much more insidious. Evil often starts small and worms itself into our beings where it can take hold and begin to grow.

This should not come as a shock, but evil does not play fair.

Evil sometimes even appears in forms that seem separate, somehow, from the Good and Evil debate: complacency, ignorance, indifference--things we might not identify with evil, things that are not wholly evil in and of themselves, but things which can (and do) allow evil to flourish in our lives. There is a reason that Odysseus whipped his men back to the ship when he found them with the Lotus Eaters--they had succumbed to the Lotus and allowed it to take away their will. We, too, often succumb to the temptation of doing nothing, and that has a tendency to lead us into temptation--we get caught in the flow and we do not fight against the current.

Edmund Burke said "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." The context may have been different, but the meaning remains the same: evil happens and we have to do something. Being aware is one step toward doing something. We have to act.

Evil, then, is a separation from Good. Evil is a force outside us which can--and, because of our humanness, does--exist within us. Evil incarnate is Satan, and Satan has set himself up in opposition of God. To oppose Satan is to oppose evil. To align oneself with God is to oppose Satan. This opposition requires action, and inaction will allow evil to prevail.

We have been given free will, and we have not only a right but a responsibility to make choices. We choose Good and Evil. Sometimes we mess up. God forgives us, but He expects us to keep trying. In Greek mythology, Pandora was sent to earth to punish man, and she brought with her a container which held all the evil of the world--pestilence and disease and sorrow and the whole set--and after these had been released, the only thing left in the container was Hope, the thing that would allow man to survive. In the real world, the gifts that God has given us to allow us to survive are so much more amazing: Love and Grace and Mercy. Evil shouldn't stand a chance.