Fear? Bewilderment? Respect? Righteous Anger? Secret fascination?
Those are the usual suspects when it comes to fear—those are what our culture and even our tradition and I suppose our psychological makeup teaches and encourages us to feel.
What’s your attitude toward evil? The question is practical and timely. It always is. Evil is a reality, it has been as long as humankind can remember; but we do seem to be living through particularly nasty times. Our leaders keep letting us down very conspicuously. Our culture seems to be rotting. And mere terror seems to have been loosed upon the world. Just last weekend terrorists struck in Britain.
But it’s our attitude I am interested in. I believe it needs adjustment. I was watching television at the time the story broke. And the newsperson ended with “but who is going to protect US?” And the next day the tabloids had the usual impudent, hateful headlines and mug shots.
That is the sort of attitude I believe needs adjustment. That is the kind of response that has proven completely useless. We need a lesson in handling evil. We do it poorly.
We might ask a variant of what evangelicals ask—how did Jesus handle evil? So often the Gospels in particular and Scripture in general gives us not so much a teaching to learn as a perspective to try. So think, now, of the occasions when Jesus dealt with demons, Satan, human adversaries. Or notice what happens in today’s Gospel story, when the seventy disciples return and tell him they can cast out demons. What’s his attitude?
Well, none of the above–no our various attitudes. And not what one might expect–when we look at the Gospels with honest eyes, Jesus almost always will surprise us. So often Jesus seems un-Christlike.
Now in the Gospel we have been reading through this year, the theme is The Magnificat: that is, everything is turned upside down. The poor, widows and orphans, children in general, foreigners, invalids–people most others look down on–Jesus treats with reverence and respect.
On the other hand Jesus treats evil, which most people fear and treat with respect and awe, not with fear, respect, not with anger. He treats evil with contempt. And the more powerful the evil being, the more contempt he shows.
Check the record for yourself: throughout the Gospels, all four very different pictures that they are, and you will never once find Jesus angrily bracing himself to fight evil. Nor of course runic in panic from it, or shrinking in horror. Nor facing it with respect as we would and should confront say a chess opponent.
Whenever he confronts demons, he treats them like nasty little vermin he orders about. They cringe in terror before him and he practically sneers. He treats the Sadducees and the Pharisees–who were trying to kill him, we are told over and over– like a fencing master challenged by a beginner. Before Pilate, he keeps stony silence–and Pilate is startled at his contempt, and asks, do you not know what I can do to you? As Anthony of Egypt says, his silences are eloquent. Satan, he treats like a nagging pest who is simply wasting his time which he has so precious little of. His last word to Satan in the Desert was “get behind me”—get out of my way. St. Nazianzus says Satan was embarrassed by the failures of his temptations in the wilderness—not infuriated, not inspired, not any of the things a heroic villain would feel—embarrassed. Perfect. You feel embarrassed when you turn out to be pathetic.
Pilate, Pharisees, Roman thugs, Jewish cowards, stupid followers, Herod the Great—Jesus Christ treats them all the same way, with contempt. I’m certain that’s one of the reasons he infuriated so many of them. He does not respect or fear or burn with rage. He despises them. And he shows it.
In today’s Gospel, the seventy disciples–one for each of the Gentile states-- return to him expecting him to be impressed with the fact they can tell the demons what to do and here is his reaction. He reacts as though they had said, we stomped our feet and the mice ran away, isn’t that amazing?
His response? In effect, Jesus says, that’s nothing. That in the Gospel of Luke is his usual response when someone expresses awe: do not be impressed.
I saw Satan fall like lightning from the sky, don’t be impressed with yourselves for that. These demons are nothing. “Lightning from the sky” may sound impressive, but think of it as the most colossal demotion in history. Satan and his minions are beneath contempt.
Then he underscores this. He says the disciples have his sanction to tread these vermin underfoot, to step on these snakes and scorpions. We are too used to his words so we don’t see the scorn. But think of creatures you have stepped on. One treads upon things for which one has contempt.
He despises and disdains evil and sweeps it out of his way whenever he find it there.
Now this is quite different from what most of us feel, think, and do.
Our psychological makeup, our tradition, and our contemporary culture condition us to handle evil in ways quite opposite to what jesus does.
Our psyches tell us to fear evil. Which of course is in a way valid; fear is the natural reaction God has equipped us with to handle danger. You are supposed to have it; Aristotle, whom Christian discovered works very well with the Gospel teachings, says that courage is not fearlessness–fearlessness is folly-- but the tension between fear and daring.
But to fear evil, for fear to be our primary attitude, has all kinds of weaknesses. First, it makes us equate danger with evil. We start calling whatever we fear “evil.” But lots of dangers are not evil. Spiders, hurricanes, and viruses aren’t evil. They can’t be; only beings with spirit can possibly be evil. One of Jesus’ smaller challenges was making people stop thinking demons were behind it whenever the earth quaked or somebody sneezed–which is what everybody in Jesus era did think.
On the other hand all evil IS dangerous. We should be afraid of it. But that should not make up our attitude. ; but fear is just a signal, it is not a response. If we keep sounding the alarm we will never find a good response—and that is exactly what many have done with the threat of terror—make it a constant fear. When an alarm has done its work we are supposed to turn it off, not turn it up.
Our western tradition, by contrast, amplifies our tendency secretly to admire evil. Here I mean the western imagination. The western tradition treats evil as intriguing, enviable, and heroic. If I were an actor I would want to play Richard III, not Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, not poor Macbeth himself, and so forth. The so called heroes are actually boring; the villains have all the spice and color. From Herod the Greta to Hannibal Lechter, it’s the evil ones who are interesting. I think Milton’s Paradise Lost bears a large blame here. It is a poem so good it is astonishing. But as theology it is rubbish. Silly rubbish. Jesus would have scoffed at that defiant, noble, courageous Satan Milton gives us. Jesus’ Satan is a whimpering, sneaky coward.
We keep doing this. Bob Herbert, whom I make part of my conscience, he is so moral, in his editorials regularly lashes out against the inner city tendency to make heroes out of thugs—but this is hardly confined to the inner city. All of us do this. We romanticize evil people. The movies make hoodlums sexy and sharp—always have.
That is fun and there’s nothing the matter with it–until we confuse fact and fiction, art and real life, and start believing that evil people really ARE fascinating and attractive. It is fun and if Bruno Bettleheim is right even healthy to be fascinated and scared by Hannibal Lechter in the movies, the real life psychotic, even the brilliant one, is banal. They published the Unibomber’s notes a few years ago after they apprehended him. I read them and I know that for me, an hour with the Unibomber, Ted Kazinsky, would indeed be dangerous because he would bore me to death.
Romanticizing the evil one is very bad thinking, according to the real Christian tradition. When we admire daring, intelligence, wit, or an independent spirit in an evil character we are not admiring evil: we are admiring shreds of goodness. For every one of those things is a good thing.
Great villains make good fiction, but very poor theology. In theology, the word great and the word villain cannot go together. Villains are always small, no matter how much harm they do.
Thirdly, Our contemporary culture is probably least helpful of all. The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a famous work called “Christ and Culture,” whose thesis was the various ways Christianity and the prevailing culture can relate. Ours today I believe manages to be completely divorced from Christian teaching, orthodox with a little o, catholic with a little c, traditional Christian teaching. Our culture plays on our fears and exploits our grudging admiration of evil. But the basic attitude toward evil our culture encourages is one of hatred. We are taught and encouraged to hate the enemy. And that is exceedingly dangerous. Because in order to hate, we must simplify. Natred brings down the intelligence. We must eliminate all subtlety and ambiguity. Which means, in an ambiguous and subtle world, we must ignore reality.
On September 11 six years ago, this is precisely what happened. Here was an adversary we could demonize, something we had been missing since the Cold War ended. He was absolutely evil in our imaginations. And that made us completely blind to his ambiguities and contradictions, made us unable to grasp his context, his loyalties, his history, unable to get at his humanity. Today finally people are beginning to realize our folly–but I wonder–how many in this Church room right now could explain the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite to a twelve year old?
And for weeks all I heard on this side was whats right with America. Do you realize how unbiblical that is? Whenever Israel suffered a disaster, they asked what’s wrong with us, not whats right. Sometimes I think those who wave the Bible around have never gotten around to reading it. In the New Testament, note this. Rome was, as everybody knows, up to a great deal of evil. Everybody wanted to make Rome the great Adversary. But Jesus wouldn’t allow it, Jesus would not let Rome be the villain. Hating Rome would not do any good.
But he did treat Rome with contempt. Like everything evil. He did not stand up to it, he looked down upon it. Most Christians fail to note this at al.
A few have noticed. A few have seen evil as Jesus did. They have realized for example that anarchy is not stupendous and awesome–it is “mere,” as the poet put it.
Very significantly, there was Hannah Arendt. She knew evil and its consequences first hand, she fled from the Nazis and suffered for years. But when she came to cover the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1963, she found him not to be a monster, not an interesting psychopath, and not one bit scary. And neither did the team of psychologists who examined him in prison—they found a very ordinary kind of man. He wasn’t brilliant, be wasn’t awesome, he was pathetic–evil always is, up close. And so she called her report “On the Banality of Evil.” She was criticized because people wanted an Eichmann who conformed to the Miltonic model—someone horrible and frightening and perversely fascinating, a real-life ogre they could cringe from and hate back. But instead she gave them what she found—an Eichmann who conforms to the Satan Jesus embarrassed.
So it was with the villains who committed so many huge crimes in the last centuries. They hurt millions. But up close they were pathetic. Harry Truman noticed this when he first met Stalin and remarked, I never realized, till I got up close, what a little man he is. And the president was not talking about Stalin’s height.
Now let’s ask the larger question: what is the Christian view of evil? Many outside and inside the Church think that we see reality as a titanic struggle between equal and opposite good and evil, where, in the end, Good just barely manages to come out, gasping, on top.
That’s not our story. It’s a good story, good plot. But once again, here we have a good story and wretched teaching. Between Good and Evil, according to Christianity, there is simply no contest. Evil, in the end, does not have a prayer. In Christianity, God is good, and what God creates is good. Read the foundation story: this world is good good good good good and finally (with us in it) very good. And in the end as Lady Juliana say all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.
Hannah Arendt had the right attitude. And so did our own John Donne, poet and priest. Donne wrote the most truly Christian poem about Death, one of the weapons of evil. And in that poem he showed not fear, not respect, not fascination and not anger. He shows contempt:
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
Those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
. . .
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
That’s the spirit. That’s the Spirit of the one who once said to the enemy, Satan, get thee behind me.
