Evil Exists. But.

I was raised Catholic. In many ways, I still am Catholic. It's something that will never leave me. Over the years I've gravitated towards the mystic traditions of Christianity, towards the Teresa of Avila's and the Thomas Merton's. I've found myself drawn to the notion of personal, ecstatic experience of the divine and the exhortation to "Love thy neighbor as thyself." These are the tenets of my faith. These are the central pieces.

I spend more time than most of the people I know engaged in meditation, which often makes people think I'm all Zen and stuff. I'm into balance, calm, acceptance. But I'm still Catholic.

And the thing about Catholics: We believe in evil.

We believe absolutely that evil exists. It roams the earth. The Devil is merely an anthropomorphized personification of this evil. He's a boogeyman. The evil actually exists within us, within each of us, and it is the responsibility of each of us to find that evil within ourselves and accept it, absorb it, so that we don't commit evil.

Theologically, God is our help in this endeavor. Baptism, communion, prayer, regular Mass attendance and confession are all ways in which God (through his representatives on Earth) aid us in our quest to accomplish this. We will fuck up a lot. That's why forgiveness is God's greatest gift, and such a central piece of the Catholic cosmology.

I believe in evil. I believe absolutely that evil exists in the world. I believe absolutely that it is my duty, as an aspiring moral being, to combat this evil. Because of my propensity towards mysticism, I believe that I must start with the evil within me. It's not a matter of casting it out, since such a task is impossible, but rather of absorbing it. When you are aware of the negative impulses, you can control them, and thus refrain (knowingly and purposefully) from committing evil.

To me, the "knowingly and purposefully" caveat is quite important. We can accidentally stumble into good works all the time; it doesn't take much. It is akin to what philosopers refer to as "narcissistic altruism" in which we do good things for others because we are addicted to the rush of righteousness that comes along with it. We're really doing good things for ourselves, for our own selfish reasons.

I believe in evil. I believe in true good.

But the world is not a perfect dichotomy, and there exists a whole spectrum in between evil and good.

Narcissistic altruism, for example. It's not true good. You are not being selfless; your primary concern is your self and your own feelings. But it's also not evil. It's dangerous because once you get into a pattern of doing things for the way they make you feel rather than the way they make others feel, it's hard to get out, and this prevents you from growing as a person. This prevents you from reaching stages of awareness in which you could fully embrace and therefore neutralize the evil within you.

But it's not itself evil to do good things for the wrong reasons.

Evil is far, far worse than that.

I was recently chit-chatting idly with a friend when the conversation took a turn for the serious, and this friend honestly began to put forth evidence of their own evilness. I was slightly aghast. Evil is not a joking matter, for one. I am Catholic. But also I was deeply saddened that anyone could have lived and come to the conclusion that they were evil simply because they'd made mistakes. What kind of culture do we live in that anything as human as making mistakes, even mistakes that cause pain, make one categorically evil? Evil is something I take far too seriously to classify it on par with human weakness. If human weakness were evil, there would be no salvation or comfort for any of us, and we would all be incapable of doing good as soon as we were born.

Evil is not temptation succumbed. Evil provides the temptation, and we will and do succumb. But to be an evil person, you have to look at whatever the fallout from that mistake was and not be hurt yourself by it. Evil is the inability to feel in yourself the effects of what you do.

As long as you can still feel, as long as you retain empathy, you are not an evil person, and you can grow.