Monastery of the Holy Cross

This important comment from “Tom” came in to a recent post on this blog:

Although I can say, through many experiences, many homicides and “villainies” are related to a love of money. I have seen though, on occassion, true evilness, in man. There is no doubt that the devil is out there.

This was in response to St. Augustine’s claim that even evil deeds partake, in some disfigured way, in love.  In posting the quote from Augustine, I was mainly taken by the lovely rhetoric and the idea that asceticism and self-denial do not mean a denial of love, only a realization that love must be directed properly.  The Augustine of the Confessions famously wrote about philosophers, himself included, falling in love with the loveliness of God’s creation and missing out on loving the Creator.

On the other hand, I share Tom’s reservations about the full theological implications of this particular passage in Augustine, as well as some of his more developed ideas on evil.  Intellectually, evil as a ‘privation of good’ makes perfect sense, and at the same time, leaves something out.  Similarly, evil as ‘misdirected love’ is also arguably correct. But it seems to give evil, which is bad, some admixture of love, which is good.  So to say that murder happens because of love seems to dignify an evil act in a way that I’d prefer not to.

Tom mentions a further species of ‘true evilness’ and implies that this is evidence of the devil’s existence.  I agree.  I also believe that evil of this sort is mysterious and that attempts to define it as a philosophical category will not only fall short, but can at times become a snare.  Tolkien captures this when Gandalf laments that Saruman spent too much time studying the devices of Sauron and was ensnared by evil as a result.  There is a certain Gnostic tendency in this approach to evil, which suggests that what is lacking in evil is a better education or more research.  ”If only the devil could see that his wrongful love is harming himself…” well, this is obviously a problematic avenue to explore.

Now, in Augustine’s defense, at other times he recognized the inscrutability of evil for evil’s sake, that is, evil as something other than a species of poor choices.  Tellingly, his most famous meditation on this problem, the pear episode in Book Two of the Confessions, often seems to irritate modern persons.  Why make such a big deal about stealing and ruining a few pears?  Well, it’s not about the pears.  It is about motive.  Augustine didn’t steal the pears out of a wrongly directed love (hmmm…they look tasty!).  Rather, what bothers Augustine such a great deal is precisely that he had no other motive than to revel in evil.  He didn’t need more education; he knew perfectly well that what he was doing was wrong.  The fact that it was wrong was the reason he chose to do it.  ”Our real pleasure consisted in doing something that was forbidden….I loved my own perdition and my own faults, not the things for which I committed wrong, but the wrong itself.”

Now it is worth noting that Augustine uses ‘pleasure’ and ‘love’ to describe his attachment to evil, but I believe that this is figuratively stated here and refers more to what elsewhere he would call libido: desire, longing, lust.  So perhaps what we should have Augustine say in his Psalm commentary is more like this: “Desire as much as you like, but take care what you desire.”  That keeps love firmly on the side of the (theological) virtues.