A brief study of evil.
Once upon a time there was a young woman who bore a son. She died during childbirth and was buried according to her wishes beneath the Juniper tree in the garden. After some time the boy’s father married again and had a daughter by this new wife, a harsh and moody woman who always found a reason outside herself to explain her ill temper. It seemed to her that her new son always stood in her way, both to her husband’s affections and to her daughter’s legacy. The ‘evil one’ filled her mind with this until she hated the boy, the poor child having to live in continual terror and unable to find any peace.
One day her daughter asked her if she might have an apple from the chest of drawers. As she was helping herself she asked if her older brother might also have one when he returned from school. The woman stiffened, and, as if the devil had entered into her, she snatched back the apple and told her daughter sharply that she had to wait for the boy’s return. When the boy got back from school the same devil made his step mother ask him with unusual sweetness if he would like an apple. Then it seemed as if she was forced to say, ‘come with me..’ and when he began to help himself from the chest of drawers the devil prompted her once more and she slammed the lid shut with such force his head rolled off.
Then she was overwhelmed with terror, ‘if I could but make them think it was not done by me,..’ She propped him up at the table and put the poor head back on its slender shoulders with a handkerchief wrapped around his neck to conceal the awful wound. She then put the apple in his open hand and went fussing about her business. When the daughter came in asking for her apple now her brother had returned from school she said, ‘of course, you may have his apple and if he does not give it to you, box his ears.’ When the young girl asked her brother for his apple and he failed to respond she boxed his ears and of course the head rolled off to the hysterical screaming of the terrified girl.
‘What have you done?’ scolded the mother, ‘come we must hide your crime and make him into black pudding.’ So they chopped him up and made him into black pudding, the girl crying terribly all the while. When the father came home they served him the black pudding and he ate up the whole lot. Beneath the table, the traumatised girl gathered up her brother’s bones, wrapped them in a handkerchief and went and lay under the Juniper tree weeping tears of blood.
Then she fell asleep and when she woke the handkerchief of bones had gone. At the top of the tree she saw a beautiful bird which sang the most incredible song,
‘My mother killed me, my father ate me, my sister gathered my bones, tied them in a handkerchief, laid them beneath the Juniper tree, kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I’
The bird flew off to the nearby mill and sang his song once more…
‘My mother killed me, my father ate me, my sister gathered my bones, tied them in a handkerchief, laid them beneath the Juniper tree, kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I’.
The millers were amazed and asked him to sing once more to which he agreed but only at the price of the millstone which he then carried through the air with ease back to his parents house where he sang once more..
‘My mother killed me, my father ate me, my sister gathered my bones, tied them in a handkerchief, laid them beneath the Juniper tree, kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I’.
The wicked mother rushed out with a broom to shoo him away but when she appeared he dropped the millstone upon her head and killed her outright. When father and daughter went out to discover the source of the commotion the young boy stood before them whole once more.
What is evil? Is there a line to be drawn between bad and mad? How can you tell the difference? And how do you work with it?
Such questions are made more difficult by the further consideration of whether evil is about acts or whether it is about intentions. Not to mention that evil often masquerades as good, ‘I’m just being honest….’ St Augustine was once asked how to be sure of what you are dealing with given the propensity of evil to camouflage itself in virtuous clothing, ‘by the taste in the back of your mouth.’ he replied. Your body will tell you.
That being said, what is evil? The church has a variety of responses, none of which seem entirely satisfactory anymore. Augustine, despite his visceral response, seems to shy away from the problem by calling evil the ‘absence of the good’, a concept central to his doctrine of the ‘Privatio Boni’, a theological feint which prefers not to give the problem of evil too much attention, nor the devil too much adversarial power. The Protestants don’t do much better in so far as evil is defined as defiance of god’s will, as if anyone could know what that might be and not withstanding the inflation presupposing it were even possible.
The Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers don’t bring much in addition to the table. Socrates and Plotinus both echo notions of ignorance and privation of good whilst Plato and Aristotle prefer the argument of failures of character or reason, elaborate forms of lack.
Even Nietzsche, whom you might think would have something meaty to say demures, reducing evil to a mere envious value judgement of the have-nots. He argues that the weak, resentful, or oppressed redefine the natural expressions of strength, power, and vitality as evil in order to morally condemn their superiors and elevate their own traits (like humility and obedience) as ‘good.’
For Schopenhauer, evil is a real feature of existence but only in so far as it is rooted in the blind, insatiable “will-to-live” that drives all beings. He argues that because every individual expression of the will strives at the expense of others, life is inherently marked by conflict, suffering, and cruelty. The only palliative is the emergence of compassion (Mitleid), which restrains the will’s harmful tendencies.
One way or another evil is treated as though it were ‘nothing but’. It seems to fall to Jung to break ranks with this dangerous mitigation, which you cannot help but think has actually given rise to the contemporary evils we are faced with, after all, ‘The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.'(Baudelaire)
An exception to this rule is the writing of 13th C. poet Dante Alighieri, whose Divine Comedy might have had him burned at the stake if he had not already been exiled. His contrasting descriptions of Hell and Purgatory are telling instruction as to the nature of evil because the two realms are remarkably similar with one crucial difference, those trapped in Hell are determined in their self-righteousness. Their evil is depicted as a definite ‘something’, perhaps not so much a set of actions or behaviours as the set of unquestionable values which gave rise to them. In fact, the passage from one realm to the other is called the Adamant Gate, a threshold upon which intransigent conviction has to be renounced.
Jung’s approach to evil made him equally unpopular in certain quarters because he, like Dante, is unequivocal in his assertion that evil is a definite something. It behaves like a real, active force in the psyche. Treating it as “nothing but” leads to denial and projection. Historically, this matters because if a culture insists it is aligned with pure good it becomes blind to its own shadow. Such blindness allows destructive tendencies to grow unchecked and to appear ‘out there’ as enemies, heretics, presidents etc.
Jung’s thinking here is that what once supported life can, when it becomes outdated, turn into an obstacle and become harmful or destructive. ‘I saw which vices the virtues of this time changed into, how your mildness became hard, how your goodness became brutality; your love became hate… (The Red Book)
The idea that everything out-dated becomes evil is a compression of three Jungian ideas:
- Psychological forms have a lifespan
- When they outlive their usefulness, they become rigid
- Rigidity turns life-supporting structures into destructive ones
In other words what once served life, when it becomes fixed and outdated, tends to turn into its opposite. Something can be genuinely good in one stage but when it outlives its role, it blocks further development and becomes potentially destructive. When we are little we have definite ideas about who we are, all of which are largely commensurate with one another. As we grow and identity becomes more complex we are faced with the developmental task of containing contradictions and anomalies. I am both good and bad, loving and hating.
If such complexities cannot be entered into they are either repressed and find expression without the benefit of conscious mediation or they are projected onto others where they are no longer able to be sublimated or transmuted. The good then turns into its opposite because it refuses its opposite. So, development requires a kind of betrayal of the old good in order to inhabit a more compendious sense of self.
The opposite of evil is not good, it is growth. What this means is that even the good can become evil if good, as an identity, cannot be renounced. This is why Christianity is in such a pickle and why the halls of both political and religious institutions are replete with crucifix bearing zealots protecting paedophiles.
The mother in our story cannot grow into the realisation that she is not simply ‘good’. She cannot entertain the fantasy that she also harbours ill intent towards her step son. It seems that some external force makes her do bad things for which she has no responsibility or remorse. She understands intellectually what she has done but is limited to the self interest of ‘what if I am caught?’ Her need to preserve her ‘good’ name, her sense of self as a ‘good’ person then means she must sacrifice the very daughter whose station she hoped to elevate by killing the boy.
It is the very prejudice of goodness, ‘I could not say or do such a wicked thing because I’m not that kind of person’, which constitutes a kind of cancer of the soul and unleashes the disaster. Whatever we choose as our definition of evil has this as its precondition, denial, the now autonomous impulse being cast down into the underworld where it is free to grow horns and a tail.
The fact that the boy is reconstituted and returns to hound his step mother to death feels like an afterthought and is missing from earlier versions of the story whose primary message seems to be that without growing out of naive conceptions of oneself, destruction is bound to follow. The best defence against evil is to keep it close to you, to recognise your own capacity for hate and envy, to have the humility to recognise primitive stirrings and vengeful impulses such that they can then be contained, so as not to be let loose upon the world, or upon your loved ones.
I like M Scott Peck’s definition of evil from his chilling masterpiece, ‘People of the Lie’, “Evil is the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion in order to avoid spiritual growth.” In other words, evil is the means by which efforts are made to maintain the status quo and, ironically, to keep oneself small. The alternative is indeed difficult, involving any number of inner deaths, and having to hold the tension between opposites such that contradiction can be re-forged as paradox. An alchemical saying, devoted to growth and transformation, captures this best, ‘a warring peace, a sweet wound, a mild evil’.
