Dissenting from Reality: The Denials of Evil

I

How is it possible to perform an action that rebels against the very order by which anything exists at all, including actions? Admittedly, no action can rebel against the whole of such an order at once because this would remove the possibility of its existing at all, as Aquinas and Augustine point out.¹ It remains a mystery however, that it can rebel against any of it. Puzzling though it is, this view of the morally evil action—that it is a kind of rebellion against reality itself—dominated the old Western tradition. Paradoxically, it made evil into a bigger affair than if the concept filled a more normal ontological category. This starkly contrasts with the view articulated in a work of the Japanese novelist Endo that compares pantheist Japan to the "swamp" that absorbs everything,² meaning that good and evil are seen as growing up alongside one another, each having its place within a larger context. Life produces evil as well as good, and we must learn to live with the one as with the other. One of Endo's characters says (concerning an act of adultery), "There was some regret, some uneasiness, some self-contempt; but as soon as I was sure that no one had ferreted out my secret, all this soon went away."³ Evil is no large mystery here. The Western tradition, by contrast, thought it was mysterious indeed, requiring nothing short of divine intervention, if we were to get over it.

One of the main problems of the Western notion of evil is the question of how evil is possible at all. Reality is convertible with good, as the scholastics said,⁴ so that evil actions subscribe in their own way to the same order that good actions do, moved by a hope of advantage and acknowledging the created natures of things if they are to be real and effective. When Aquinas asks whether good is ultimately responsible for evil actions, he answers in the affirmative, at least in as much as such actions are actions, and part of the natural economy on which all actions rely if they are to exist at all.⁵ In this article, I will try to examine what the Western notion of evil implies for the desire and knowledge of the agent who does evil. I will conclude that the negative quality of evil finds its way into the action itself, so that an evil action is not only aimed at a deficiency, but is itself deficient as an action—a bizarre combination of willing and not-willing and of knowing and not-knowing.

The Greeks, famously, thought that this was more or less explained once an evil action was seen as a mistake. The deed falls short of its intent, so that we finish with an outcome we did not really want or know about. Augustine realized that there is more to it than this. The incident of the pear orchard described in the Confessions suggests the evil of the action is precisely part of its attraction, known and willed in a shadowy kind of way—something that is not true of a mistake. The theological tradition related this to the notion of creation, with its sense of a necessary order that is nonetheless contingent and that therefore opens up a possibility of fundamental rebellion. The tradition view was that the first sin—that of the angels—was fundamentally a rebellion against created status. Augustine says something like this about his part in the theft in the pear orchid, seeing himself as seeking to rise above the status of a creature and take on "a dim resemblance to omnipotence" in doing what was not allowed.⁶

The notion of a rebellion against the very order that makes it possible to achieve anything at all (even rebellion), points to strategies of some complexity. Evildoers need to outwit original healthy instincts that take them toward the good and the true and that are a condition of any human action. As we will see, an evil action is no...