Good and Evil: The Instability of Evil

In my prior post, Good and Evil: Simpler Than We Pretend, I noted that St. Augustine of Hippo taught that evil is a privation in being rather than a positive substance. I also noted that a creature in this universe, this phase of God’s Creation, is not a firmly defined being of immutable substance but rather a series of states of being which necessarily change as that creature moves through time. We’re not creatures formed once and for all at our conception, creatures who then move through God’s story, dying as the same creatures we were at conception. We’re creatures who are formed by our participation in God’s story, by our responses to our environments, including our fellow-creatures, and by our responses to God.

If evil is a privation in a creature which doesn’t have immutable substance but rather a past, present, and possible future consisting of states of being, then we would expect a creature who chooses evil to be unstable, moving through a biography which is a story of decreasing order and coherence, of dissipation of being. Death would seem to be the fate of all deprived being, the fate of all entities which are not their own act-of-being. A radical deprivation of being would seem to imply a relatively rapid death. A lesser deprivation of being would allow a more natural movement towards natural death, and a lesser deprivation is the condition of all creatures in this universe. Any possible fullness of being comes from Christ infusing Himself into us, from Christ making us part of His Body.

St. Augustine had a way of justifying the continuing existence of those who choose evil, during this mortal life and in a never-ending Hell on the other side of death. He speculated that Satan, and evil men, have good substance which comes from God but a free will which is somehow independent of God as it chooses evil.

Unfortunately for that line of thought, modern brain research places the will, actually our entire moral nature, firmly in our biological substance. (See How Brains Make Up Their Minds by Walter J. Freeman or my reviews of that book starting with What is Mind?: Is Christian Morality a Natural Morality and the ensuing articles with the major title What is Mind?.) Centuries before the discovery of the cell or the invention of brain-scanning devices, St. Thomas Aquinas understood the biological underpinnings of human nature and provided a framework for understanding human moral nature, a framework which Professor Freeman adopted for his understanding of his own research results and the research results from other brain scientists.

The moral will and other aspects of the moral nature of a creature are found in its substantial, God-given nature and not in some eerie entity which seems merely a hand-wave of an explanation for the mysterious freedom we have been granted by the Almighty. When a creature wills evil, when he wills moral disorder, he begins to nurture a cancer of sorts in his own nature, his own substantial being. He begins to empty himself of his partially ordered being.

Let me try saying this in somewhat different words. We aren’t born as God wishes us to be but rather as potentially that which He wishes us to be. That which He wishes us to be is a creature in a state of being which is God-centered and hence good. Nature is good in its own lesser way but nature is a battleground for a war between order and disorder which can’t be won by any creature. To be God-centered is to say “Yes” to that grace which can perfect nature and bring us into a state of perfect order, the Peace of Christ. But even to say “Yes” to what is good in nature can bring a man to that state of being which we can call “noble”. This is a state that calls to mind such great men as the Emperor Cyrus, Julius Caesar and his opponent Cato, and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. When grace completes nature, we get saints such as St. Paul, St. Francis, and Dorothy Day.

Now think about the evil ones of history, remembering as a guiding insight the insanity of Nebuchadnezzar, his mental and emotional decay into a beast of the field after his efforts to claim divinity. Hitler began a rapid decay into insanity during his years in Vienna which began in a conventional way for an artist with ambitions greater than his talent and eventually he entered a slide into hatred of Jews, perhaps because those who fed him during the tough years were charitable Jews. His decay was probably accelerated by abuse of the same sorts of amphetamines preferred by Skinheads and Neo-Nazis in recent decades. There’s more than one way to damage your human stuff.

To think rightly is to move with the grain of God’s world, that is, to shape yourself to think the thoughts God wishes you to think. The virtuous pagans got this only partly right but they sometimes did as well as possible without the more direct revelations from the Transcendent God. (The truths in pagan philosophy come from their clear understanding of many of the aspects of God’s contingent acts as Creator. That is, they saw God but only in His freely chosen role as Creator of this world.)

To choose evil is to move against the grain of God’s world. To choose evil is to choose to think wrongly. Why do those who speak of God as all-powerful think that there are no immediate consequences to such disobedience to God’s commands which are implicit in Creation or those which are explicit in His revelations? Why do they think that we have substantial existence apart from God so that we, or Satan, can continue to exist after pulling away from He who is the source of all being? To sin, to rebel against God in specific ways — perhaps misbehaving sexually, might leave us as no more than disobedient or spiteful children of a gracious Father. An ordinary sinner has not moved away from the source of being so much as he has allowed himself to be distracted by that which is not good. I speak not of such sinners but of those who choose a radical rebellion against God and against the natural good.

If being comes from God, if God-given being is itself good, then to choose a privation of being — evil — is to move away from being, to move towards oblivion. If Satan had existed as a creature of this universe, if he had chosen evil over good — that is, oblivion over God-gifted being, he would have long since ceased to exist or at least would be a shadow not able to do much. At the risk of being redundant:

To choose evil is to reject the good, including God-given being. To choose evil is to move towards non-existence.

The logic of my argument forces me to speculate that we have only two choices: good or evil. To choose good is a more specific decision than we morally spineless modern men would think. To just set out to be passively good, to be a nice guy, is to choose evil, though a lesser sort of evil, but it’s not to choose good. Adolf Eichmann, nice guy and logistical genius of the Holocaust, showed a great stupidity in not even understanding why so many hated him. He was on a more gradual incline towards non-being than Hitler, making him more useful to the more rapidly decaying Nazis, but Eichmann was following them at a slower pace.

We should be careful about literalizing apocalyptic pronouncements, but I think it meaningful that the cowardly and faithless are grouped with more active sinners such as murderers and fornicators in the condemnation found in Revelation 21:8. We should also remember that Holy Scripture gives credit to those with a more aggressive sort of courage, King David in the Old Testament and St. Stephan in the New Testament, but the main thrust is to advocate the courage which shows up as a quiet persistence in attending to God and His commands. If we persist in moving towards God, He will make up what still is lacking in us, whether it be courage or eloquence. We should persist in worshiping and obeying God and we should persist in seeking human moral good. To do otherwise, even when our environments allow us to relax, is to choose evil and the path of decay into total death — oblivion.