Going on with my project (4) - What Evil Reveals

I want to focus on what evil reveals about the human race, particularly the fear and horror that are in many forms the normal human responses to it. I will forgo citing terrible examples, which are legion. I just can’t bear to delve into this. I have just listened to a historical account of the Belgian Congo under the wicked King Leopold. Too much.

       Evil done to children I experience – like others – as so horrible as to call into question the purpose of Creation. Instead of citing real examples of evil, I will quote at length Ivan Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s character from Brothers Karamazov; he is reacting against arguments to justify God in the face of evil:

 Listen: if everyone has to suffer in order to bring about eternal harmony through that suffering, tell me, please, what have children to do with this? It’s quite incomprehensible that they should have to suffer, that they too should have to pay for someone else’s mill, the means of ensuring someone’s future harmony? I understand the universality of sin, I understand the universality of retribution, but children have no part in this universal sin, and if it’s true that they are stained with the sins of their fathers, then, of course, that’s a truth not of this world, and I don’t understand it. Some cynic may say that the children will grow up and will in time sin themselves, but he didn’t grow up, that eight-year-old torn apart by the dogs. Oh, Alyosha, I’m not blaspheming! I understand how the universe will shake when heaven and earth shall unite in a single paean of praise, and all that lives and has lived will cry out, “You are just, O Lord, for your ways are revealed to us!” When the mother embraces the murderer whose dogs tore her son apart, and all three shall cry out weeping, “You are just, O Lord” – that, of course, will be the summit of all knowledge, and all will be explained. But here’s the snag; that’s just what I can’t accept. …. While there’s still time I want to guard myself against this, and therefore I absolutely reject that higher harmony. It’s not worth one little tear from one single little tortured child, beating its breast with its little fists in its foul-smelling lock-up, and praying with its unexpiated tears to its “Dear Father God!” No, it’s not worth this, because those tears have remained unexpiated.

 

. . .

 I will keep this section brief. Others have written deeply about evil – Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity, for example. I will organize my brief remarks around three questions.

 

1. What does the horror and repulsion over evil reveal about reality? If such responses are revelatory, if we are not just puppets dancing on biology’s or society’s strings, what must be true about reality to authenticate these responses?

    If horror and repulsion at evil are revelatory, then they must disclose something fundamental about the nature of the world. The fact that we recognize evil as evil rather than merely as a biological or social inconvenience is linguistic and existential (spiritual) “proof” that morality is not an arbitrary construct or instinct but uncovers something very real, something that goes to the core of our reality as human beings. Our responses to evil of course presuppose that the universe is imbued with meaning (unless you don’t want to count us as part of the universe). Ivan Karamazov’s horror at the suffering of children is not an idiosyncratic whim but an indictment of reality itself. If our horror is not an illusion, then it reveals that reality is, or better: ought to resolve around moral truth. As Joseph Pieper put it:

Alles Sollen gründet im Sein. Die Wirklichkeit ist das Fundament des Ethischen. Das Gute ist das Wirklichkeitsgemäße. Wer das Gute wissen und tun will, der muss seinen Blick richten auf die gegenständliche Seinswelt. Nicht auf die eigene ‚Gesinnung‘, nicht auf ‚die Werte‘, nicht auf eigenmächtig gesetzte ‚Ideale‘ und ‚Vorbilder‘. Er muss absehen von seinem eigenen Akt und hinblicken auf die Wirklichkeit.

Everything of moral significance—from how to act in a particular situation to how to live—is grounded in being. Reality is the foundation of the Moral. The Good is that which corresponds to reality. Whoever seeks to know and do the Good must direct their gaze toward the objective world of being – not toward their own ‘disposition,’ not toward ‘values,’ not toward arbitrarily established ‘ideals’ and ‘role models.’ They must look away from their own subjective act and toward reality.

   Moreover, evil can only be seen as a violation or destruction of the Good. Therefore, the Good is ontologically prior. Classical theodicies (Augustine, Aquinas) thus rightly argue that evil is a privation of good, a disorder in Creation. Our horror over evil testifies to this. Evil is not a thing in itself but the perversion of an original good. The life and being of the nine-year-old child on the Christmas Market in Magdeburg in December, 2024, was precious, her destruction by the perpetrator of that attack evil.  Even if we judge the perpetrator unbalanced (of course he was!) the act itself is by definition evil: it destroyed something – someone – precious. This is why we experience evil not merely as a violation of something real.

     If a child is precious and a child is part of the universe, then it follows with necessity that we live in a meaningful universe and the Good and the Moral are part of the universe. If we were mere puppets of biology or society, our moral intuitions would be reducible to evolutionary conditioning. But if our horror at evil is more than just an adaptive reflex, it suggests that human moral responses correspond to something beyond mere survival mechanisms. To seriously live as though that were true would itself be wicked. To take our horror at evil seriously, at least one of the following must be true: either Good and evil are not subjective preferences/biological reflexes but disclose an objective moral reality (that the child was truly precious and her destruction was a destruction of something precious, love-able, i.e. having a claim on us to exist and be respected if not loved); or our inner life is a socially and/or biologically generated illusion – basically like the Matrix (the film). That latter, though logically-theoretically possible (no one can refute because no one can get outside of experience to compare metaphysical beliefs to factual states of affairs), this option is highly improbable and does the dirt on life. Our horror at extreme evil, therefore, ought not to be seen as just our brain chemistry reacting to stimuli or a social construct designed to ensure social stability; it is an encounter with a moral reality that demands acknowledgment.

      If our authoritative responses to evil are revelatory, then there must be a transcendent source of moral meaning – at least transcendent to our subjective life and indeed our science and philosophy.  If our sense of justice and outrage at evil is not reducible to blind evolutionary processes, then the universe is meaningful and moral. This is at least an intimation of an intelligence, a Goodness, perhaps a kind of love that infuses Being.

     Finally, if moral response is real, then we must in some certainly limited and conditioned but real sense be free to do good and refrain from evil. (One way of thinking about the original moral imperative.) And thus we must in a meaningful if not absolute sense (we are not angels) be responsible for our acts and lives. If we were deterministic machines, moral outrage would be meaningless. This relative responsibility is essential for it preserves the possibility of pity, mercy, forgiveness. We are not demons though at the extreme we can become like demons. There are certainly human limits to forgiveness such that only a Christ could find forgiveness intelligible. That subject I would treat later.

 

2. What does the absence of compassion reveal about the state of a person’s soul? What does the capacity for extreme evil reveal about human nature?

The absence of compassion, especially in cases of extreme cruelty, may reveal a profound spiritual deformation. The absence of compassion for victims of evil (and even for evil-doers: better for the soul to suffer than do evil, as Socrates said) means that a person has cut themselves off from the moral reality that binds human beings together. C. S. Lewis describes damnation as a soul collapsing inward, shutting itself off from the good. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” indicates another form of spiritual deformation. She claims that some perpetrators of great evil are not sadistic monsters but ordinary people who have lost their ability to see moral reality. This is a kind of meaning-blindness, where evil is carried out without awareness of its enormity. In any case, if our horror at evil reveals something about moral reality, then the absence of compassion indicates a soul disconnected from that reality. In extreme cases, this might not just be a moral failing but a metaphysical one: the soul becomes a kind of void, an absence of being. Nihilism as a philosophy eventually translates into a numbness to the reality of other people and Creation itself.

 

3. What does the capacity for extreme evil reveal about human nature?

That human beings can commit acts of extreme evil – often with deliberation and even pleasure – raises disturbing ideas about human nature. Unlike animals, which kill out of instinct, humans can kill out of ideology, resentment, or nihilism. Human freedom is dangerously open-ended; we are capable of great good but also of radical evil. The capacity for evil, then, may stem from the distorting one’s perception of the good. Moral failures are failures of love (Murdoch). Indeed, the Christian tradition speaks of mysterium iniquitatis: the mystery of evil’s existence. Unlike suffering caused by natural forces, evil has a deliberate, chosen quality that. This is why the worst evils leave us not just saddened but spiritually shaken. This is an opinion that I would have to defend, but I think the possibility of evil does stem from a kind of ignorance or meaning-blindness (Socrates), and this is cultivated in the more or less unjust societies into which we are thrown.

     Evil also, perhaps ironically, reveals our common humanity. It exposes the fragility of all human beings, the depths of our moral responsibility, and the fundamental reality that we are not isolated individuals but deeply connected to one another: any one of us is an absolute limit to the will of others (and even oneself). Ivan Karamazov’s protest in The Brothers Karamazov reveals a common humanity. He does not merely reject suffering in the abstract; he is outraged precisely because he recognizes the innocent child as one of us. The very capacity to be horrified by evil presupposes an intuitive sense that we share (ontologically, morally) in a common humanity that evil violates.

      If suffering and moral struggle reveal our shared humanity in its vulnerability, then love – both in its everyday expressions and in moments of great sacrifice – reveals this reality in its highest dimension (John 15:13). Compassion, in particular, acknowledges the reality of another person’s suffering and responds to it, affirming that we are not isolated but bound together in reality if not always in appearance. This touches on Dostoevsky’s vision: that true understanding of humanity comes not just through suffering, but through love. Ivan Karamazov protests against theodicy because he refuses to reconcile suffering with love, while Zosima and Alyosha embody the opposite conviction: that love is the answer to suffering, not its justification but its redemption.

     Any human endeavor must in the end be judged by that foundational experience of love and suffering. To sever oneself from it, to pursue greatness while denying the reality of suffering or the demands of love, is to risk a kind of inhumanity. This is why certain forms of ambition, ideology, or even utopian thinking (French Revolution) can become dangerous: they try to transcend the human condition by rejecting its most fundamental realities. By contrast, the highest expressions of human greatness – acts of heroism, artistic masterpieces, profound philosophical insights – seem to arise from an engagement with love and suffering, not an escape from them.