What Does it Mean to Be Evil: A Medieval Perspective
Medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas says of Augustine that he believes that “evil cannot exist except in the good.” Aquinas goes on to state that “evil cannot have an essential cause.” In other words, a person doesn’t go about committing evil unless he sees in the action some good. A person does not consciously choose to perform an evil act, it is only evil when viewed from the correct perspective. Therefore evil should be considered an accidental circumstance of the desire to do a good. The good gets perverted and instead an evil is perpetrated, even though the person committing the act may not see it that way.
Then there is the question of man’s free will. If a man has the right to choose between good and evil, what will prevent him from choosing evil? What if there were some way to create a world in which everybody choose good over evil every time. According to the theory of evil being a lack of good, this would be impossible because every good could be viewed as evil if seen from the right perspective. If someone gets a job that someone else wanted, would that decision be seen as evil in the case of the one who didn’t get the job?
So maybe evil is a necessary thing to have in the world. Maybe it’s through the acts of evil that we learn exactly what good actually is. Perhaps the view of evil as a learning resource is the only correct way to go about this kind of thinking. If evil is absolutely necessary for the growth of the human race, then what does that say about the perpetration of great acts of evil? Can anyone carve out a lesson from the Holocaust?
The incredible evil which took place in Germany in the 30’s and 40s is the ultimate test for the theory that evil is necessary. How can anyone think the Holocaust was necessary? Perhaps so we will recognize it when it happens and we will make sure it will not happen again. (Obviously that’s a lesson we failed to learn.) If this is the case, then why didn’t God just give us the power to recognize evil of this great proportion in the first place? Because the struggle for knowledge is part of the importance of living. Life is a struggle and knowledge can only be gained through experience. If we had all knowledge handed to us at birth, we wouldn’t be able to develop the virtues we require. This theory flies in the face of that which views evil as merely being the absence of good. Merely because good was absent from the Holocaust does not make it evil. Evil acts were committed by thousands every single day. It wasn’t that they were lacking goodness so much as they were purposely committing acts they had to know were heinous and inhuman. There was lack of good, but there was a solid base of evil and those taking part in it had to know they were committing evil. And it’s doubtful that they thought they were committing evil acts in order to educate us about virtue.
For me personally, I don’t believe that evil can be described as merely the lack of good. Some people commit evil knowing it’s evil and getting off on it. Just because they are doing it for enjoyment doesn’t mean that they are doing it for good. All human evils may be sin, but one man’s sin is another man’s virtue. We admire aggressiveness on the playing field, but in other aspects of life we may think that an overly aggressive person is somehow on a lower par committing evil acts. Especially in the workplace, where politics and gamesmanship is so prevalent.
The word evil is thrown around quite a bit these days. The locus of great evil shifts continually. For most of the latter half of the 20th century, Evil Central was located in the Soviet Union. For most of the first half of this century, I predict it will be located along the Persian Gulf. But we need to remember that evil really does truly rely on perspective.
And perhaps only time will give us the perspective we need to decide which was the greater evil, 9/11 or the invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and resulting deaths of an ever-mounting number of Americans.
