Posted on 08/29/2016 7:54:32 AM PDT by Salvation
We human beings are inclined to thinking categorically and absolutely. But not all (or even most) categories are absolute. Is there such a thing as absolute goodness, with no error admixed? Yes, most assuredly. God is so, as are the saints He has perfected in Heaven. But is there such a thing as absolute evil, in which there is no admixture of goodness? St. Thomas Aquinas and others say that there is not.
On one level, this is because evil is a privation, the absence of something that should be there. Hence if someone (or something) were wholly evil, he (it) would not exist at all. There would be no “there” there.
St. Thomas says,
Now in things it is impossible to find one that is wholly devoid of good. Wherefore it is also impossible for any knowledge to be wholly false, without some mixture of truth. Hence Bede says that “no teaching is so false that it never mingles truth with falsehood.” Hence even the teaching of demons, with which they instruct their prophets, contains some truths whereby it is rendered acceptable. For the intellect is led astray to falsehood by the semblance of truth, even as the will is seduced to evil by the semblance of goodness (Summa Theologica II, IIae, Q. 172, Art. 6).
Jesus warned us, Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits (Matt 7:15-16). The essence of temptation is including or alluding to something that is good or true. It is the good and the true that attract and serve as the lure. A fish would not be tempted by a rock attached to a hook. The bait is designed to attract the fish; it hides the hook. Similarly, we are not attracted by what is evil, ugly, and awful.
Scripture describes Eve’s temptation to partake of the forbidden fruit as follows: The woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom (Gen 3:6). Food, beauty, and wisdom are all good. Thus even in the archetypal temptation, good things were proffered. But these concealed and were admixed with terrible ingratitude, disobedience, pride, and lack of trust in God.
Though the good can be absolute and categorical, evil cannot. Why is this important?
1 – It helps to make our battle with temptation and evil more informed, more prudent. It helps us to recognize the sly tactics of those who tempt us to evil by way of something good (but it is only apparently—not actually—good for us, due to the evil wrapped up in it).
This helps us to discern more carefully. We learn to distinguish what seems good (or as St. Thomas says, has the semblance of good) from what is truly good. Because nothing is absolutely evil, we can note what is good within any proposal, but also look beyond it to grasp the evil lurking there.
2 – It teaches that evil has no good of its own. Whatever good it has is stolen from what is truly good. Evil steals the good by misappropriating, misapplying, exaggerating, or deforming it in some way. Evil in itself appeals to no one, so it must steal from the good and dress itself up, luring us with what is good and cloaking its true emptiness.
Evil in itself is unappealing and devoid of anything it can claim as its own. It lives like a parasite on the good and must take something good in order to be anything at all.
So, while evil may appear powerful and enticing, in itself it has nothing to offer. Though evil scoffs at the good, it ultimately depends upon it.
3 – It helps us to avoid hatred and disdain of human persons, even those deeply wounded by sin and marked by rebellion or arrogance. There remain in them things that are good. They still have existence (from God). They still have intelligence and will, and not everything they do or desire is evil. Thus good can still be found in them; we can hope to appeal to those still good qualities as a basis for conversion before it is too late.
4 – It helps us find what is true even in false doctrines and philosophies. Heresy and error usually involve some exaggeration of what is true, but they fail to regard other truths that balance and distinguish them. Hence it is usually imprudent to wholly dismiss erroneous teachings as lunacy or to ridicule their proponents. A time-tested method is to find what is true, meet the proponent there, and then disclose the error by showing how it fails to account for other truths meant to balance it. St. Thomas Aquinas was a master at this.
5 – It teaches us patience and fortitude. The Lord told the parable of the wheat and the tares. Having sown good wheat in his field, the owner (God) acknowledges that an enemy sowed the tares. What is interesting is that the wheat and the tares look very much alike until just before the harvest. Nevertheless, an impatient field hand proposes to the owner that all the tares be removed immediately. The owner (God) urges caution, saying, No, because while you are pulling the weeds, you may harm the wheat with them (Mat 13:29).
While it is true that wheat cannot become tares and tares cannot become wheat, the same is not so with us. Too easily can we who would be wheat become tares. Yet also we who are tares can become more and more like wheat.
Thus in our battle against evil we must show care not to destroy what is good in us or in others. Even in evil people, some good can be found and nourished. This does not mean that strong medicine is never required, but the goal is to preserve what is good and to expose clearly what is evil.
So there will be a day of judgment, but not yet. God permits time so that we and others may repent. He seeks to grow what is good from within otherwise bad situations.
This often requires patience, admixed with resolve to expose evil for what it is. To be patient is not necessarily to be quiet. The word patience is rooted in the concept of suffering (patior = I suffer, I endure). To be patient is to stay at the work of preaching and calling to repentance until the very day of the harvest. To be patient involves suffering and endurance, because evil is stubborn and hides, pretending to be good.
The virtue of fortitude helps us to be courageous and to persistently stay at this work in spite of obstacles, disappointments, and setbacks.
6 – It provides us with insight as we endure suffering. God permits evil so that something good and better can come from it. There are hidden and paradoxical gifts in suffering and enduring evil. We are taught patience and humility. We learn to thirst for justice and the paradise of Heaven. Error can help us to better understand truth and hone our skills in apologetics as we seek to refute error. Because evil is not absolute, God can draw good from it; in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose (Rom 8:28).
7 – It teaches us a subtlety about God’s justice in relation to Hell and the damned. While Heaven is perfection and pure goodness, Hell is not pure evil. St. Thomas teaches,
It is impossible for evil to be pure and without the admixture of good …. [So]those who will be thrust into hell will not be free from all good … [And even] those who are in hell can receive the reward of their goods, in so far as their past goods avail for the mitigation of their punishment (Summa Theologica, Supplement 69.7).
This can assist us in understanding that God’s punishments are just and that the damned are neither devoid of all good nor lacking in any experience of good. Even though a soul does not wish to dwell in God’s Kingdom due to that person’s rejection of God or the values of the Kingdom, the nature of suffering apart from God in Hell is commensurate with the sin(s) that excluded the person.
This would seem to be true even of demons. In the Rite of Exorcism, the exorcist warns the possessing demons, “The longer you delay your departure, the worse your punishment shall be.”
In his Inferno, Dante wrote of levels within Hell and that not all the damned experience identical sufferings. Thus, an unrepentant adulterer might not experience the same suffering in kind or degree as a genocidal and atheistic head of state directly responsible for the death of millions. Both have rejected key values of the Kingdom: one rejected chastity, the other rejected the worship due to God and the sacredness of human life. But the degree of their sin and the consequences of that sin are very different.
So Heaven is a place of absolute perfection, a work accomplished by God for those who say yes. But Hell, though a place of great evil, is not a place of absolute evil. It cannot be, because God continues to sustain human and angelic persons in existence there (despite their final rejection of what He offers), and existence itself is good. He also judges them according to their deeds. Their good deeds may ameliorate their sufferings; this, too, is good and allows for good in varying degrees there. Hell is not in any way pleasant, but it is not equally bad for all. And thus God’s justice, which is good, reaches even Hell.
In summary, good can be perfect and whole, but evil can never be pure and total. The implications to this are many. Pray carefully over the insights presented above and apply them well, for the days are evil. Thanks be to God that total evil is not to be found. Our job is to find what is good and, by God’s grace, to grow it.
Monsignor Pope Ping!
Good article.
But often I hear the words “necessary evil” and it throws me for a loop.
“Evil, Thy name is Hillary.”
That’s for sure!
I have met pure evil. Sat and talked with it. I worked in a prison. Now most people in prison are criminal, bad people, do things wrong, commit crimes, etc. But occassionally you come across evil and once in a great while pure evil. Pure EVIL was 5 foot 8 inches 165 pounds and looked like Howdy Doody!(Look it up kiddies). At my now 64 years of age I have never met or come across anything in life scarier, more dangrous,or more evil.
pPing to food for thought.
Pain, in itself, is an evil ... even though it can lead to goods.
Before effective anesthetics, setting a broken collar bone could be incredibly painful. Believe me, I know. But NOT setting it would be ... terrible.
So, the evil pain of the setting was, ceteris paribus, necessary. -> necessary evil.
Part of the confusion can be the blurring of specifically moral evil with other sorts of evil. The pain, an evil in itself, is not moral. The act of promoting healing is morally good.
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In war, collateral damage, if it's truly not the object of an action, is an evil but not, in itself, of moral evil. If the war is otherwise just and conducted justly, the evil of collateral damage is understood as an unintended concomitant ... a necessary evil.
I hope that's neither pompous not fatuous.
Your post makes me think of all the evil that Jesus went through to redeem us from our sins.
But the “formal” response is that this person could talk, digest, enjoy simple pleasures, think, and generally show many of the simple skills and “goods” of being a human person.
He may have had a deeply corrupted will and utterly foul notions of what others owed him and he owed them. It may have been unlikely to the point of unimaginable that he could or ever would understand the evil he had done and embraced — much less turn from it. But, as you might say, he did that evil with “goods,” goods like intelligence, focus, physical strength, and the faculty of choice.
All of these goods were horribly distorted, tainted, fouled by his misuse of them. But that they were there to be misused was, in itself, good.
However despicable and contemptible a sinner may become, there is, I think, an inescapable tragic aspect to sin because to the destruction of wonderful capacities.
I like to say that the Cross, viewed in anticipation, is a clear evil and requires a multitude of persistent and deliberate sins.
Viewed in retrospect, the Cross proclaims the deeply powerful and redemptive character of Divine Love ... so great that it turns evil to good.
God can make it good that evil was chosen and done. Now THAT’s power on a more than cosmic level.
There used to be a popular poster, in which a kid said “I know I must be something good, because God doesn’t make junk” (or something similar). It gets you thinking - if God made a murderous skinhead, there must be SOMETHING good in him, or else God would have never created him.
However, the older I get, and the more stories I read about where people are brutally murdered, the harder it is to believe that there aren’t people in this world who are nothing but evil. Maybe they aren’t created evil, maybe there is a shred of decency left in the corrupted soul...but its hard to see.
Don’t say that about your mother’s cooking!
:P
The “formal” discussion, as I see it, leaves open the possibility of being thoroughly MORALLY evil. The “will” is a good in itself. We think plants have no will, and animals don't think well, so their will is weak ... if they can really be said to have one.
So, the will, which somehow is a part of our being “above” plants and beasts, is in itself a good. In that sense the felon represents SOME good, so something less than pure evil.
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Where it gets interesting for me is that I think there's the possibility of a kind of suicide of the will.
Analogy:
If I don't exercise, I will grow weak.
Further, I can actively do things (eat badly, jump off high walls, tell people to hold my beer and watch this) which will make me weaker still.
In my experience on both sides of the pshrink’s divan, just “knowing what's going on,” is rarely enough for health. One has to PRACTICE healthy thought patterns; one has to form new habits of reaction. The best exemplars of, say, AA are those who have “worked the program” for a decade or more. They are, in a sense, reprogrammed.
So, I can imagine that some, even if at birth they had the potential to develop normally and with at least moral aspirations, might destroy or severely injure their capacity to choose and to do good. Habits of vice are deeply ingrained.
Since he's in the news, Carlos Danger is a fun case. At this point we have to ask if he is capable of choosing NOT to sext. For years, I bit my nails unconsciously. Does he send pictures of his privates with a similarly inattentive compulsion? Does he actively CHOOSE to do this disgusting and imprudent thing? Or is he more like an addict who seems unable to divert his focus from his behavior and who will make elaborate, persistent, and even wily schemes to gratify his compulsion?
Is he really CHOOSING this behavior? Or is he FAILING to choose to avoid it? I don't know, I really don't. I'll say this: Addicts don't strike me as “free.” If there's any freedom there, it's like a small ember buried under ashes. It will take clearing away, blowing on, and careful tending if it's ever to be a fire again.
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So while the scheme of moral evils making use of good “faculties” is the right way to approach the problem, it doesn't make everything easy to understand all the way down. And that's before we get to people who seem to be congenital psychopaths.
Awesome post. Thanks for all your efforts.
Msgr. Pope has become as necessary (moreso) than my morning coffee.
This Aquinas theme was discussed in far less sublime terminology in my RCIA class prior to my baptism.
I remember the deacon reminding us that the devil doesn’t look anything like his cartoon depiction-—horns, tail, pitchfork. He doesn’t stink of burning, rotted flesh. Because if he did, nobody would ever be tempted by evil. We’d take one look and run away.
No, he said. The devil is good looking, charming, wears an Armani suit, drives a hot sports car. He’s successful, rich, and sexy as hell.
bump
And what did these Catholic experts base their conclusion upon, that Hell ain’t so bad after all??? Must be LSD...Or Meth...Or guilt, because they are lost as a bunch of bats coming in backwards and they know they may end up in hell one day...
Any who reads and believes the scriptures knows there will be no pleasant places in hell...It is a place of weeping and wailing an gnashing of your teeth...
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