The Nature of Evil

Many of us have had personal experience with dark, sinister, infinitely powerful forces that have manipulated us like toys, thwarted our every good intention, dangled irresistible temptations before us, corrupted our innocence, eroded our will, immersed us in filth, subjected us to unspeakable tortures, taken from us everything we hold dear, humiliated us, mocked our fragile dreams.  Even so, many of us still feel a lot of affection for our older siblings. 

Evil is a serious subject, though.  Really. 

Hitler was evil, for example, as everyone knows — deeply, horribly evil, for killing all those people in the Holocaust.  Now let me be clear, I think Hitler was a nasty, pathetic man who was instrumental in bringing about a vast amount of unnecessary suffering and death.  I would probably have been willing to die fighting the Nazis if I'd been of that time.  But for reasons I will proceed to explain, I'm not particularly interested in calling Hitler evil. 

The concept of evil has been central to Western religious traditions since Roman times.  Many people even today will tell you that we need evil because you can't have good without it, implying that good and evil are opposites.  This is dualism, one of the spiritual cornerstones of Western civilization, and whether we like it or not, we're all steeped in it. 

Dualists see the world as a battlefield in the cosmic struggle between a good God and a bad Devil.  God (our guy) embodies good.  The Devil (their guy), embodies evil.  God is going to win, of course, so those of us on God's side will get all the booty.  Nonetheless, the Devil is really, really powerful, and without help, no one can resist him. 

During the first few centuries A.D., this kind of dualism was a popular explanation for the unpleasantness of life, not only among various Christian sects, but also among many other fringe mystics.  In the third century A.D., it gained its best-known and most enduring expression in the religion of Mani, a Persian.  Mani claimed, along with Jesus and many others, to be the true Paraclete, the last and greatest prophet.  His religion, a blend of Christianity and Persian Magism or Zoroastrianism, preached the most extreme and literal dualism. 

For the Manichaeans, Satan was equal and opposite to God.  Light was literally good, and darkness was literally evil.  Almost everything in the world was tainted with Satan's evil, and the only way a person could be sure of being on the good side was to practice the most rigorous regimen of avoidance.  Many foods, including all meats, were unclean.  Most things were dirty, and any sexual activity was diabolic.  Above all, a Manichaean was forbidden to kill any living being.  Even breaking the twigs of plants or plucking their fruit was frowned upon. 

Mani traveled widely before he died around 276 A.D.  He gained adherents as far east as India and western China, but it was in Persia and Mesopotamia that he started a major religious movement.  Later, the movement spread westward, and 50 years after his death Manichaeism became wildly popular throughout the Roman Empire.  Its asceticism fitted well with the Mithraism of the Roman soldiers, and its dramatic rejection of the world appealed to some of the Gnostics, particularly the Marcionites. 

Although the Christian Church rejected Manichaeism as a competing faith and encouraged the Roman authorities to persecute it as much as possible, Manichaean ideas and attitudes profoundly influenced Christian thinking, creating a pervasive and abiding fear of the flesh and the Devil all through popular Christianity, from the Catholic monastic orders to Protestant preaching about hellfire and brimstone.  Even today, the Devil remains a favorite fixation among evangelical sects. 

The important thing is that in Mani's system, good and evil are opposites.  In such a system, good is a kind of positive infinity embodied by God, balanced by an equal and opposite negative infinity embodied by Satan.  This dualistic dichotomy has the effect of amplifying normal human perceptions of in-groups and out-groups, good guys and bad guys, and tends to reinforce just about anybody's prejudices. 

I vastly prefer a different way of looking at good, even though it was championed by Saint Augustine.  I've never enjoyed Augustine's writing much; he comes off to me as a whiny, neurotic, self-righteous 12-step fascist before his time, filled with guilt and obsessed with sin, who treated his girlfriends rottenly and then agonized about how bad he felt about it.  He was probably an interesting guy to hang around with, though, and I do like his attack on the Manichaeans. 

Augustine in his younger days was an enthusiastic if somewhat unsuccessful Manichaean himself (he just couldn't abstain from wine and women).  When he finally became a more successfully ascetic Christian, he wrote against dualism, arguing in effect that there is no active force of evil, no negative infinity.  Instead, he saw a continuum between good, infinitely embodied by God, and bad, the absence of good, zero.  In a system like this, there is no active evil, just failure to do good. 

I like this approach to goodness much better than the dualist one because it's more constructive.  Instead of focusing attention on how bad the other guy may be and encouraging paranoia about the vast evil forces arrayed against you, it tends to make you think about how you can do better, be more good. 

It also frees good from evil: We don't need evil to define or balance good. 

So what is "evil," then, if not the opposite of good?  As far as I'm concerned, its essential element is fear.  When you say, "Hitler is evil," you really mean, "I fear Hitler," but you are pushing the fear out of yourself and making it a characteristic of Hitler's, allowing your fear to be transformed into hate.  A good working definition of "evil" is "hateable." 

You're right to fear Hitler, of course, and all the other dangerous people out there whose individual combinations of pain, twistedness and stupidity may cause serious harm to you and the people and things you care about.  But when you push the justified fear out of yourself, you reject the connection such people have to your own psyche.  You lose contact with the Hitler within you. 

This is important because most of the time the real enemies are within ourselves.  The people or things we view as evil tend to reflect our own weaknesses, and the fear we push away in such cases is a justified fear of our own tendencies.  Rather than working painfully to transform ourselves in constructive and creative ways, we gratefully attach our problems to someone else and deny responsibility for them.  In so doing, though, we give up our power to solve them.  Instead of putting our energy into shaping our own lives, we squander it on attacking others. 

On a magickal level, focusing on those we hate gives them power over us.  On a practical level this translates into the aphorism that people come to resemble their enemies: When you hate someone, you reject them so thoroughly that you can do what made you hate them without recognizing how like them you have become. 

We pagans don't have such problems, of course, since we're never judgmental, unlike those stupid Christians....  Actually, of course, pagans are just as prone to fundamentalist leanings as anyone else, fear being a human universal.  At the same time, we have less excuse for falling into the fear/evil/hate trap than do monotheists or dualists, because our claims to comprehend the divine are considerably less absolute.  Our gods and goddesses individually reflect aspects of divinity rather than its unimaginable totality, and traditionally we find in each deity light and dark facets that we do not identify as good and evil.  Being more nature-based, our spirituality encourages us to understand that life is too complex to measure on one single human axis stretching from pleasure to pain, desire to fear, love to hate, good to evil, God to Devil. 

Recognizing life's complexity has also restricted pagan laws to "Do what you will, as long as it harms no one."  Beyond that, each of us must do the work to build ethical structures that suit us, as we seek our places in the harmonious chaos of life.  Not living under the threat of evil leaves us more courage and energy to struggle, however improbably, toward being as good as we can dream, or better. 

(originally published in 1996 in Widdershins volume 2, issue 5).