On Evil

Written by Terry Eagleton Reviewed By William Edgar

Reflecting on the horrific events of September 11, 2001, Harvard President Larry Summers, only in the saddle for a few weeks, delivered a message in the memorial service the afternoon of the tragedy. He declared that unlike a tornado or earthquake, the events of “9/11” were acts of malignant agency that rightly called forth outrage against the perpetrators. He added that we needed to be intolerant of intolerance and that the best remedy would be to prevail by simply carrying on the university's everyday work. He was quite taken aback when he discovered that some of his Harvard constituents found his call to outrage against the perpetrators of 9/11 out of place and that his claim to “prevail” was imperialistic. For them the causes were to be sought in America's misguided foreign policy, the oppression of Muslims, and the like.

Terry Eagleton's book On Evil sets out to find sentiments such as Larry Summers'' entirely justified. Against the fashionable trend to deny the validity of such categories as good and evil, Eagleton mounts a considerable case for their appropriateness. Yet he does so by refusing to simply label something good or evil in order to have done with it. The effect of that is to shut off debate about social causes, upbringing, psychological conditions, etc. Yet he puts a special twist onto the word evil, one that we may want to question. The reader may be caught off guard by his approach. Evil is banal, nihilistic, meaningless, lacking in being. Thus, Shakespeare's three witches are truly evil, lacking in substance. Hitler is truly evil, inhuman. The Holocaust was an actegratuit, a spree of cruelty. Whereas, he argues, Mao and Stalin were ideologues, who carefully planned their rampages. While inexcusable, they were not strictly evildoers. Rather, they were wicked. It is not certain that Eagleton gets away with this distinction entirely. Did not Hitler make plans? Were not Mao and Stalin lusting for power? Let's follow his argument, though.

In many ways this book is stark, appropriately so. The title itself is uncomplicated, in your face, which is how we often meet evil. He opens by recounting the horrible story of two ten-year-old boys in England who tortured and then killed a toddler for no apparent reason. The policeman on the case reported that as soon as he looked at one of the perpetrators he just knew he was evil. Eagleton suggests that this policeman gives evil a bad name! He proceeds to explain that however convenient it might be simply to call a person, be it a child, evil, it rather excuses the deed. Similarly, to diagnose terrorists as evil psychotics gets them off the hook of their real responsibility. Calling terrorism evil is lazy. Wicked, no doubt, but there are in existence (or in literature) very few really evil beings.

If you have come to expect profound, witty, culturally informed, iconoclastic writing from Terry Eagleton, you will not be disappointed by On Evil . Neither a theodicy nor a systematic account of philosophical and theological explanations for the daunting problem of evil, its origins, its nature, its solution, nevertheless Eagleton's volume serves a useful purpose. What is it? The answer may sound rather modest, but it is not. The answer is to defend the concept of free will. He does this by supporting the rationality, though not the commendability, of evil deeds. While fully admitting the various influences (parental, cultural, religious, etc.) on every one of us, he does not thereby excuse our heinous actions. On the surface, Eagleton appears to reserve the term evil only for the rarest of cases. But deeper down, that is because he is so anxious not to excuse wicked acts and persons. Indeed, evil is meaningless, rather than transgressive. And as such it is relatively rare. Still, there is plenty of wickedness out there, and it is not altogether unrelated to evil.

The book has three sections of uneven length. The first examines the problem of evil through the lens of literature. One might recall, Eagleton is sometimes considered one of the greatest literary critics of our times. Many students survived university literature courses thanks to his Literary Theory (1983), one of the clearest accounts of the various schools of literary criticism ever written. Here he takes us through various novels where good and evil are articulated through the main characters. He discusses the dark novels of William Golding, Pincher Martin and Free Fall, where it is tempting to describe the protagonists as purely evil because of circumstance or psychology. Instead, they are described as stuck on themselves and incapable of love. These are qualities that are chosen, or learned, rather than simply predetermined. This is confirmed by a host of other stories he parades before us. Eagleton is fully aware that we come into the world with all kinds of influences and circumstances that incline us to evil. But, he argues, if we didn't, then how could it be called evil? Eagleton argues that the possibility of destructiveness is there in us because we are truly free.

The second major section of his book is titled “Obscene Enjoyment,” and it begins with the canon of Shakespeare, on which Eagleton is a considerable expert. He takes us from Shakespeare to Thomas Mann and de Laclos, and then to the Nazis. He argues that evil is based upon power and that such power loathes weakness. Valmont, in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, seduces his women out of spite rather than lust. His victims lack being or significance. The Nazis loathed the Jews because they are flawed, scheming, deficient in being. Evil in one sense has no reason for it. We are reminded of the guard at Auschwitz who was asked by one of the inmates why a particularly unjust measure was enacted, and who simply answered, “Here at Auschwitz, there is no why.” If there is a purpose to evil, it is to hasten the process of destruction that leads to death. Other than that, it is purposeless. Eagleton points out that true evil has no romance to it. In postmodern times we are told that transgression is fun. But since there is no authority against which to transgress, there is no real evil, only the nasty and the gross: vampires, demonic children, corpses, and the like. The truly demonic, as Kierkegaard and Hannah Arendt point out, is boring, banal.

The final chapter hastily goes through untenable answers to the problem of evil. Titled “Job's Comforters,” Eagleton rehearses the standard theodicies and dismantles each of them. Moral improvement (the “cold shower” view)? How is the Holocaust remotely useful? Looking at the big picture? Well, most of us live where the smaller bad things contribute to the big picture without any credible link to the good. Evil as mystery? Perhaps, but of what use is such a view to those who are really suffering? Evil as freedom gone wrong? But why were we given the capacity for evil in the first place? What kind of God would perpetrate such a thing? Theodicy, he affirms, is not only a failed enterprise but a very bad idea in the first place.

The great strength of this book is that it puts to rest the liberal idea that we are basically good, moving forward to a better place, only stymied by a few obstacles, or evildoers, along the way. Evil is real. It's not an alien force, making us do what we ordinarily would not. By the end we are made painfully aware that there is not only evil out there but in here. The book is strangely close to parts of traditional theology, while yet never stating that directly. The shadow of Thomas Aquinas hovers, especially when at times Eagleton describes evil as non-being. In the Bible, evil is all too real, yet it is irrational in one sense. There is no good reason for it. Eagleton does not accept a historical fall of a first couple, yet he fully agrees with the doctrine of original sin as he understands it: sin is pervasive and universal. And he asks many of the right questions. Insightfully, he states that the issue for believers is not how a good and powerful God could have allowed sin, but why he would make creatures in the first place who would endure such suffering and misery.

The singular weakness of the book is that it offers no hope. Perhaps Eagleton's strategy, a bit like the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, is to drive the reader to look elsewhere (upwards?) by confronting him with the bleakness of life under the sun. But could we not have at least a small ray of sun in the midst of his unrelenting analysis of evil? Sure, an honest, if brutal, diagnosis, contains more hope than a romantic cover-up. Still, it is surprising that the author who has given us very bright pages on Reason, Faith and Revolution (2010), and insightful, if defective descriptions of Jesus Christ: The Gospels (with Giles Fraser, 2007), ends with the stark sentence, “The result of defining terrorism as evil is to exacerbate the problem; and to make the problem worse is to be complicit, however unwittingly, in the very barbarism you condemn.” The book is even, most cynically, dedicated to Henry Kissinger! Is he evil, or merely wicked, we may wonder?

The gospel of Jesus Christ tells us that in one sense evil is a mystery. It does not remove the mystery of evil, but begins by pointing the finger at human beings, who are evil (and wicked-same thing). And then, with great caution and reverence, the Bible lets us think that if God truly is God, then there must be an explanation for the phenomenon of evil. That we do not have access to that answer is a challenge. But that there is someone who does should bring enormous relief, if not clarity. Finally, though, the real comfort is not that we can know what was in God's mind, but that from eternity he purposed to provide an extraordinary answer. By himself suffering and dying, “becoming sin for us,” he provides real hope. If Professor Eagleton ever knew that, he seems to have deliberately left it aside for the moment.


William Edgar

William Edgar is Department Coordinator and Professor of Apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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