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Among the multiple manifestations of evil, one can discern three symptomatic aspects--parasitism, imposture and parody. The evil one lives as a parasite on the being created by God, forming a monstrous excrescence, a demoniacal swelling. An imposter, he covets the divine attributes, and substitutes equality for resemblance. “You will be as God”, as his equals. Finally, as a jealous counterfeiter, he imitates the creator and constructs his own kingdom without God, an imitation with an inverse sign.
The philosophers have never succeeded in elucidating the problem of evil; they have rather complicated and entangled it. Evil, on the contrary, was never a problem for the Fathers of the Church. For them it was not a question of speculating on evil, but rather of fighting the evil one. The prayer of a saint would be: “Preserve us from all vain speculation on evil and deliver us from the evil one.” Likewise, the Bible does not speak of ethical principles concerning good and evil but it reveals God and mentions the adversary; it denounces also “the man of iniquity of the last days”, “the son of perdition who gives himself out as if he were God”.9.1
From the very heart of his being the devil “from the beginning” has been a murderer, according to the words of Christ.9.2 A spirit of negation, he is above all a murderer of his own truth, that of being Lucifer, a receptacle of divine light. Thus, he consummates his own metaphysical suicide, and sets himself up in universal denial of the imprint of God. He thus attains at the same time homicide and deicide.
If for Plato the contrary of truth is error, at the deeper level of the Gospel, it is the lie. “Liar and father of lies” by essence, the evil one has taken upon himself a frightful vocation, that of knowingly altering truth. The initial perversion of his will has made it possible for him to usurp whatever he can in order to fabricate an existence with spurious materials. Isaiah clearly designates this enterprise: “We have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have found a hiding place.”9.3
To lie in the face of heaven is to oppose God's truth and to impose one's own version on the world. The devil sets himself up as a counterpart in order to dislodge God from his creation, which he tries to make insensible to the divine presence, and thus to effect a gigantic substitution. Disdainfully proud, he says: “I, and no one else”, “A god am I.”9.4
“When he tells a lie, he speaks from his very nature.”9.5 This judgment of the Lord contains a whole philosophy of evil. Every lie by its nature originates in what is false, that is to say, the non-existing. The “very nature” of the evil one, from where he draws his lies, is then nothingness. Thus St. Gregory of Nyssa could define evil as having a phantom-like substance. God, by his fiat--his yes--creates similarities and completely fills all beings. The evil one, by his no--his anti-fiat--expels and completely empties all, and he constitutes “a place of dissimilarity”.9.6 On the other hand, “the saints are those who do not speak from their own nature, but it is God”9.7 who speaks in them, and they thus form “the place of similarity”. The dreadful secret of Satan conceals the absence of any metaphysical foundation, and this emptiness obliges him to borrow, to usurp, the being founded and rooted in the creative act of God. Evil, as a parasite, sticks to being, vampirizes and devours it.
The Scriptures do not teach philosophy. The Bible does not see in evil a simple lack of good or of perfection, a non-plenitude, but a liberty that has failed and has turned into an evil will. In adding the non-existent to the existent, it has perverted this into a malevolent being. However, this perversion, or evil, is not materialized and personalized in the evil one except under certain conditions; men must furnish him with ontological “board and lodging” which means that, thanks to their freedom, men can be conscious or unconscious accomplices in serving a lie. In this real ministry of those “possessed” by evil, beings are diminished so that the Liar may swell and grow. His tragedy is that the nourishment of the gods, “the bread of the mighty (angels)... eaten by men”,9.8 is lacking to the devil, for the heavenly wheat is the accomplishment of the Father's will. This will is the substance of all things, St. Irenaeus teaches. Thus in the world of God, the phantom-like evil one, famished for the real, is a metaphysical “sponger”. He feasts on the seizure of men, and his horrible carousals, by increasing the emptiness caused by the absence of God, are for them the beginning of hell here below.
Where there is no God there is no man either. The loss of the image of God entails the disappearance of man's image, dehumanizes the world, and multiplies “the possessed”. The absence of God is replaced by the burdensome presence of one obsessed by himself, a self-idol;9.9 in the long run his sad utopias risk modifying our anthropological type. Man loses his dimension of depth, the dimension of the Holy Spirit. According to the bold words of St. Gregory of Nyssa, one who is not moved by the Holy Spirit is not a human being.
Every passion bears within it the seed of death since it dulls the spirit of discernment. Likewise every bad means is never justified by a good end for it is already its negation. One can say just the contrary; the good means to a bad end runs the risk of changing [it] into good. It is entirely a question of foundation and of source. Temptations never come up to the expectations they arouse, for evil possesses no source of life within it; it satiates without ever satisfying or quenching thirst. It is not in its power to repeat the words of the Lord: “Who drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst.”9.10 The one who seeks other springs imposes on himself unquenchable thirsts.
At the bottom of every state of passion, whether it be ambition, eroticism, gambling or narcotics, there is a simple mechanism of possession which, once broken, strikes us by the dullness of its meager content conducive to boredom. As the oyster secretes its shell, every ideology which makes atheism its passion ends sooner or later by secreting boredom. Shrewd observers remark this symptomatic state of soul. It is especially true of the ponderous gravity of the doctrinaires, busy in making “the new man”. He must be “machine-made” in the factories of social discipline. In order to survive, the power ruling the masses, which are now satiated with graphs and statistics,9.11 galvanizes them and excites them by presenting them with imaginary prospects, a very ambiguous peace, and five-year plans for a terrestrial paradise. However, here in the place of “the new man” is the man of all times who is bored; here and elsewhere, almost everywhere, man is yawning. Dostoievski and Baudelaire said that the world would perish, not by wars but by a gigantic and unbearable boredom when, from a yawn wide as the world, the devil will come forth.
Dostoievski attentively studied this phenomenon which is rapidly becoming universal. He found that the most efficacious method against every evil enterprise is to identify its purest essence, which is immediately shown to be ridiculous; now everything that is manifestly and evidently ridiculous unfailingly kills. Is not the devil himself always somewhat ridiculous?
The writer [Dostoievski] has drawn largely from the humor of the “fools in Christ”, so greatly loved by the people. Protected by their apparent folly, hiding an extreme humility and great fraternal love, during the day they set themselves against guilty silence and denounce without fear every hypocritical profanation with stinging irony and irresistible humor, and during the night they pray for every one. They throw stones at the houses of “the good”, and kiss the thresholds of the houses of sinners.
During recent times of bloody persecutions, it was these “poor in spirit” who at the crossroads of cities preached the Gospel and the kingdom of God.
Humor, like laughter, possesses a liberating power; it frees us from the weight of social functions, from every temptation to take ourselves too seriously. It also frees us from excessive suffering in the spiritual life. Frank and childlike gaiety is a typical trait of great saints; they enjoy themselves as children of God, and divine wisdom takes delight in their play.9.12