The latter view—and here I return to Christianity—is, in fact, that of Augustine. For the great bishop of Hippo, God is wholly good. There can be no evil in Him. Thus, God could not have created evil as a force. To this end, Augustine argues that evil is a privation of the good; it is a loss of a thing’s intrinsic goodness. It is no more than a leach. It has no power of its own; we consent to it by choosing a lesser good (since all created things are necessarily good). Take, for example, this thought experiment from his City of God:
Therefore it is not an inferior thing which has made the will evil, but it is itself which has become so by wickedly and inordinately desiring an inferior thing. For if two men, alike in physical and moral constitution, see the same corporal beauty, and one of them is excited by the sight to desire an illicit enjoyment while the other steadfastly maintains a modest restraint of his will, what do we suppose brings it about, that there is an evil will in the one and not in the other? What produces it in the man in whom it exists? Not the bodily beauty, for that was presented equally to the gaze of both, and yet did not produce in both an evil will. Did the flesh of the one cause the desire as he looked? But why did not the flesh of the other? Or was it the disposition? But why not the disposition of both? For we are supposing that both were of a like temperament of body and soul. Must we, then, say that the one was tempted by a secret suggestion of the evil spirit? As if it was not by his own will that he consented to this suggestion and to any inducement whatever! This consent, then, this evil will which he presented to the evil persuasive influence—what was the cause of it, we ask?
The evil will, then, for Augustine has no “cause” in the sense that some force makes us act a certain way. The evil person is not intrinsically evil, but rather corrupted by a misperception:
Let no one, therefore, look for an efficient cause of the evil will; for it is not efficient, but deficient, as the will itself is not an effecting of something, but a defect. For defection from that which supremely is, to that which has less of being—this is to begin to have an evil will. Now, to seek to discover the causes of these defections,— [sic] causes, as I have said, not efficient, but deficient—is as if some one [sic] sought to see darkness, or hear silence. Yet both of these are known by us, and the former by means only of the eye, the latter only by the ear; but not by their positive actuality, but by their want of it.
He ends up saying this:
This I do know, that the nature of God can never, nowhere, nowise be defective, and that natures made of nothing can. These latter, however, the more being they have, and the more good they do (for then they do something positive), the more they have efficient causes; but in so far as they are defective in being, and consequently do evil (for then what is their work but vanity?), they have deficient causes. And I know likewise, that the will could not become evil, were it unwilling to become so; and therefore its failings are justly punished, being not necessary, but voluntary. For its defections are not to evil things, but are themselves evil; that is to say, are not towards things that are naturally and in themselves evil, but the defection of the will is evil, because it is contrary to the order of nature, and an abandonment of that which has supreme being for that which has less.
What exactly does all this mean? The important point for our purposes here is that evil has to do with consent. It is not a matter of choosing to do wrong to harm others (because evil has no being and thus cannot be “chosen” in and of itself). Evil, thus, has no face; not even Satan himself is fully evil, because he is a creation of God. But what do we call Satan? The Father of All Lies. This makes perfect sense. We mistake lesser goods for greater ones (we are “lied” to), and thus slowly develop deficient wills. Our desires are, of course, conditioned by the societies in which we live (not to mention the times in which those societies exist). Thus there is a sense in which we end up consenting to evil through accepting the desires we have drilled into us. We may not feel racist, but, our societies subtly condition us to act otherwise (whether this is a sin or not is not a question I shall address here; I’ve gone on long enough already). The avaricious man may not recognize that he is avaricious (because he’s been taught from a young age that he ought to want to make a good deal of money—to give his family a comfortable life, perhaps). And yet, while he makes one-million dollars a year, people starve. He does not recognize that he is choosing wrong, that his society has tempted him. But such is the case.
Thus evil, in most forms of Christianity, does not have a face. It is not a bunch of people deciding to harm others, laughing about it, acting secretly to destroy society in the name of taking power for themselves (surely they may do so in their self-interest, but, on Augustine’s reading, it’s hard to imagine his locating evil in a visible personage, deciding to poison people’s water because “gay is good” or some such). Evil is nebulous. It strikes when we least expect it; it tempts us and pulls us toward lesser goods (take, for example, a police shooting. Often cops say “I was trying to protect myself” or “He looked suspicious.” The desire to protect oneself is good, but it is not the greatest good) such that we end up consenting to evil.
In this sense, conspiracy theories appeal to Christians precisely insofar as they present an un-Christian view of evil. Evil with a face “makes sense.” It lends real and meaningful fears (say, about the workings of government) a concrete referent that can be called “evil” and thus written off as a secret determiner of events.
One needn’t agree that structural racism exists to see my point. What I have discussed here is the logic of evil—whether it is nebulous or concrete. If you think structural racism does not exist, it is still entirely possible to see how the view of evil as a discernible and locatable force is both appealing (because who doesn’t want to have some individual or group to blame for their problems?) and un-Christian.
We ought to remember that such a notion of evil is easy. But the Church teaches something else: that evil is more sinister, that the Father of All Lies wins us over with his nebulousness and his temptation, not by incarnating himself in secret cabals that can be glimpsed and destroyed.
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