What Is Evil?

In the light of multiple mass shootings over the weekend, it is natural to ask some important questions about why these events happen. Why do people learn to hate? Why do people devise a plan to end the lives of others? Why are humans the way we are? Why is there evil in the world?

In order to understand why there is evil in the world, it helps to know what evil is. It is easy to describe an event as evil. Sandy Hook was evil. The shooting in El Paso was evil. The shooting in Dayton was evil. That, however, is to give examples of evil, not to define it. One could say that evil is one of those things that “you know when you see,” but even that is looking at examples not evil itself.

The earliest Christian thinkers called evil privatio boni, the privation of good. Evil has no existence of its own; it is the absence of good. It is not the presence of something else. Evil is non-existence. Good is to evil as light is to dark. Darkness is not a thing in itself, it is the absence of light. Evil is not a thing itself, it is the absence of the good.

I want to be careful here. I am not saying that evil is an illusion. It most certainly is not. It is real and truly horrible. I like to think of evil as a vacuum in space. A vacuum is not so much a thing, but the absence of something. It can be powerful and destructive. So is evil.

Evil only comes into being when a thinking person renounces the good. When I think of the terrible events of this weekend, I look at all good that had to be extinguished in order for the events to happen. The men who perpetrated these evil, demonic, monstrous deeds had to have their minds poisoned. Somehow they concluded that other people were not as valuable as they were. In Christian terms, they denied the Image of God in their victims. The doctrine of the Image of God teaches us that every human being is a reflection of God and worthy of life. Not holding to the image of God in others is a precedent to racism, sexism, crime, and all other attacks on other people. Not treating others as people created in the image of God is a privation of the good.

The perpetrators had to, at least implicitly, conclude that they would not love the people that were their targets. Jesus taught that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. What he meant is that we are to seek the highest and best good for our neighbors just as much as we seek it for our selves. Further, Jesus taught us to love our enemies. In expanding the circle of love to our neighbors and enemies, Jesus has taught us that love has no boundaries. One cannot seek mass harm to unarmed victims without contradicting Jesus.  One cannot commit a mass atrocity without extinguishing the good of love.

I think also of the power of the human mind. We are created with amazing capacities. We can build buildings. We can write sonnets. We can tame wildernesses. We can create cures. These good possibilities are what the mind is designed to do. It is a privation of a mind to turn its power toward harming others. These men used their minds which were created with the potential for great good to conceive a terrible plot. This turning of the mind from the good for which it was created loses unimaginable evil on the world.

The thing about evil is that it develops momentum. Seldom does turning away from the good happen in one fail swoop. It is usually a long process. If the process is not interrupted a person can become completely callous to the suffering of others. When a person has completely extinguished the light of good in their soul, the natural consequence is death. Simply put, because evil is non-existence, it drags those who continuously practice it into non-existence. When goodness is fully extinguished in a person, he or she will naturally seek to cause harm to others.

Unfortunately, the world in which we live is filled with evil. Sometimes evil is loosed on unsuspecting people and causes great carnage. As believers in Christ, our response to evil is twofold. 1) We are to be examples of the good. Since evil is the privation of good, we can be ambassadors of good. We can love, show respect, show concern, and eschew any ideology which dehumanizes others. 2) We can pray. As long as we live in this world evil will be with us. So, we pray for God to intervene and save us from the evil around us and the evil in ourselves.

“Thy Kingdom Come.”