A Little Bit from Terry Eagleton on Evil

Here’s a juicy morsel from Terry Eagleton’s recent book, On Evil:

The damned refuse to be saved, since this would deprive them of their adolescent rebellion against the whole of reality. Evil is a kind of cosmic sulking. It rages most violently against those who threaten to snatch its unbearable wretchedness away from it. Only by persisting in its fury and proclaiming it theatrically to the world can evil provide damning evidence of the bankruptcy of existence. It is living testimony to the folly of creation. If it wants to remain itself for ever and ever, rebuffing death as an insufferable insult to its pride, it is not only because it regards itself as too precious to die. It is also because for it to vanish from the scene would be to let the cosmos off the hook. People might then mistake it for a benign sort of place, gullible swallowing the sentimental propaganda of its Maker. Yet part of the rage of the damned, as we have seen, is the knowledge that they are parasitic on goodness, as the rebel is dependent on the authority he spurns. They are obsessed with the virtue they despise, and are thus the reverse of religious types who can think of nothing but sex. As Kierkegaard writes, they want to ‘hang on to [that power] out of malice,’ vex and harass it constantly, like some stubborn old codger who refuses to die because he enjoys being a constant irritant to his long-suffering wife (116-17).