Don’t Become the Evil that you Oppose.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you. Friedrich Nietzsche

There he took up again his great Ring in Barad-dur, and dwelt there, dark and silent, until he wrought himself a new guise, an image of malice and hatred made visible; and the eye of Sauron, the Terrible Few could endure. JRR Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. St Paul

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster. That admonition should become part of our daily prayers. It is the easiest thing to trip and fall into monsterdom, even for the most well-intentioned among us. 

I say this advisedly. I’ve done it. I keep on doing it. 

We live in a society that is rotten with the worship of evil. Everything we touch, our entertainment, our news, our internet convos, even the way we treat our own families, is soaked through with the love of evil. 

We watch one movie after another with graphic depictions of sadistic rapes and a long series of consequence-free murders. In Movieland the “solution” for every problem is to pick up a weapon and start killing. Movie good guys are usually grim, wordless killers with no meaningful human attachments. No matter how many people they kill, they never go to jail. Nobody even has to clean up the mess. As for rape, well, that’s the only reason for having a female character in most movies; so she can be raped and murdered. 

We’ve become so inured to this that it doesn’t bother us overmuch when the movie trash steps down off the screens and into our lives. More and more, we are practicing brutal carnality in our own lives. When one in five women and one in 71 men will be sexually assaulted during their lifetime, there are a lot of rapists running around.

None of us is immune to evil. Evil is insidious and it is a liar. The devil deceived in the garden about the apple. God lied to you, he hissed, you will not die. He lied then, and he lies now. 

It makes no difference if you are one of the people who has given yourself over to the culture and allowed it to subvert your morals into societal morals, or if you are one of those who fight against it with every breath you breathe. It doesn’t even matter if you are one of those who stand at a distance from the fray.

Cultural evil is still the shiny red apple of temptation that can lure you away from God. You can become a monster by blindly following it. And you can become a monster by blindly opposing it. Either way, you become the devil’s disciple, and you do evil, not good, with your life. 

I am just as likely to fall into this pit as anyone else. My greatest weakness, the way the devil can get into me, is through my willingness to do battle with evil. The worst things I’ve ever done I did because I was trying to do something good. I know that I can fall down that same rabbit hole again. 

People who see evil and pull themselves up out of the garbage dump to stagger off and fight are important. It’s taken me a long time to see this, but they are the instrument that God picks up and uses to do that work. But without God they are easy marks for the devil. 

When you go out to fight monsters, the temptations to become a monster yourself runs to meet you. They surround you and hurl angry taunts at you every step of the way.  Evil is ugly. The suffering it causes is real. The indifference of the self-righteous to this suffering, their almighty, overweening hardness of heart, is enraging. 

When they combine this indifference with constant preening about their own moral superiority and they link this with Christ, it can be incendiary. Suddenly, they are not just hurting other people, they are defaming your Savior. 

Faced with this, anger can trip over into rage in one step. Rage is unthinking and uncaring. It is monster-making, and the monster it makes is you. It allows you to do things you would never have considered because rage justifies it to you. 

Evil is not a blind force without reckoning, like gravity. Evil is a person. It is a malicious personality, a cold darkness and a gnawing hunger that cannot be satisfied and craves annihilation. It feeds on hatred and death. 

When the abyss looks back at you, when you look into the unblinking Eye of Sauron, you are soul to soul with that Evil. No one is immune. Eve ate the apple, David murdered Uriah, Peter betrayed Jesus, Saul persecuted Christians.  .

Our task is to stand against evil in our own lives and in the world at large without hatred, and without wrathful rage. 

I’ll talk about the particulars of how to do that in the tomorrow’s post. 

Note: I expect someone will see the irony of me using a quote from Nietzsche as the basis of a call to prayer. But what Nietzsche describes is real, even if he understood it incorrectly. The Abyss, Satan, will look back at you.