Concerning evil, nothing occurs to me. Evil is simply the privation of good. This was the profound insight of the Church Father St Augustine which in its wisdom would advise feeble spirits to look no further. There is no comfort in the hardships of moral psychology for shallow minds. Evil is beyond the grasp of our superficial contemporaries as they go about the streets careering against each other like random dodgems, lost in the trivia of their iPhones into which they peer mesmerised.
To whom do I speak of evil? Who thinks seriously of evil any more? I cannot converse with the fanatic trustees of evil. I am equally repelled by the lukewarm liberals and sanctimonious agnostics discomfited by evil. Who then?
My mother of peasant stock used to warn, ‘Don’t stare too long in the mirror, figlio mio. You will see the Devil …’ Did she mean the Evil Angel of Catholic theologians, Hellish and real? Or perhaps mean the devil in me? Or an eyeful of my own vanity? The mirror has since cracked. Any question of discourse on evil has turned in self-portrait against me.
I ask myself the thorny question. Is evil understandable intellectually?
I am tempted to give up at once my dismal reconnoitre of evil. Let those who know better proceed with silence. I sympathise with the seventeenth century mathematician Blaise Pascal whose cold shiver of fear I share as he gazed up at the night sky that should normally fill one with the awe of its splendour. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.
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