"Put on the whole armor of God," wrote St. Paul to the Ephesians. "For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places."There are forces of evil at work in this world, ceaselessly and tirelessly spewing their vicious wickedness and hatred for the holy into hearts and minds throughout creation. These hellish creatures are beyond any redemption, beyond any hope for salvation, incurable of their moral maladies. They cannot be reasoned with or negotiated with; appeals to mercy, goodness, or truth will not soften their hearts or open their minds. They are wholly and utterly slaves to evil, good only in so far as God made them, traitors to the majesty for which they were wrought. Indifference to their existence or pitiful attempts to persuade them to embrace virtue are of no avail: None of them are human.
Evil is not the exclusive domain of demons. There are also evil human persons at work for villainy in this world: those who are slaves to hatred or to murderous anger, those who have only love for themselves, those who are willing to die in revelry of death and destruction, those who like Hamlet plot to cause the most injury in their aggressions. There are those who complacently ignore their own need for salvation, those who experience no empathy for others, those who enjoy violating the rights of their brothers, sisters, neighbors, and enemies. Yet no matter how dark the deeds of men and women, no matter how corrupt and disposed to sin they are, no matter how habitual has become their evil, they are not beyond salvation. Their souls remains in reach of the cross. Until the moment of death, when all is decided, there is yet hope, even where all we can see is hopelessness.
Christian tradition has often described evil as a lack of a good that ought to be there, an absence, a sickness, stain, or deformity. Postmodern criticisms of metaphysics have opened conceptions of evil as something more than an absence of good, but due to this we are no less aware of evil in our midst, though we are prone at times to reduce real evil to a psychological illness or something else terrible, but less grave than evil itself.
Since 9/11 , the language of good and evil has pervaded our political discourse. At first I welcomed it, for I saw it as a positive and progressive development away from the language of moral relativism that infected our popular moral thinking. Unfortunately, what politics touches tends to be corrupted, and so it has been with the terms of good and evil. Evil is commonly spoken of today by public servants and pundits as something distant, contained in easily recognizable shapes and sizes, something that must be fought over there lest we have to fight it over here.
I do not question that 9/11 was an act of abhorrent evil; indeed the spiritual tragedy of the event is that fifteen men gave their lives in an act of murder and probably died in a state of mortal sin. Who knows the state of souls of those who perished that day? The full tragedy cannot be known this side of eternity. Neither do I question that the ideology of terrorism or jihadism are evil to the core and must be confronted.
What I do question is the proposition that the evil that plagues the hearts and minds of these fallen human persons can be properly defeated with human instruments. These ideologies must be confronted with the whole armor of God. Certainly evildoers can be defeated, their lives vanquished, their deeds ended. From the standpoint of Christianity, however, the proper response to their evil is not their destruction, but rather their salvation. Destroying the evildoer compounds the tragedy of his villainy: he loses his soul, and the righteous lose a potential brother or sister in Christ.
This is not to say that we are never justified in taking the life of an evildoer, but such taking of life, even if warranted, even if we are forced into it for the protection of life, remains a defeat, a failure. Pope John Paul II called war a failure for humanity, for when we must destroy one consumed by evil, we have failed to guide him from darkness to light, and his failure to find the light of truth means his failure is forever.
The devil hates to be mocked, but I suspect he is amused at that hubris of our self-knighted defenders of the good and true, modern-day Diomedes challenging powers mightier than man, promising that their methods and instruments can ultimately conquer tyranny and terror or even bring an end to evil. Can Democracy defeat the devil? Can war save the sinner? The means of humanity have their power, but they are insufficient to healing the spiritual ailments that separate us from God and from each other. Only the power of God, the saving power of Christ, which we call grace, has the capacity to save souls and truly conquer evil and death.
Victory is not found in the death of the enemy, triumph is not found when hell-bent souls cross the river Styx, peace is not found after we slay our brothers and sisters on the battlefield. Victory, triumph, and peace are the fruits of grace and our participation in God's plan of salvation. The victory, triumph, and peace born of war and other instruments of man are poor imitations, consoling only for a time, and burdened by the weight of tragedy and human frailty.
The real defeatists are not those who see hope beyond war in the saving powers of grace, but those who deny the healing powers of God and hope only in the destructive powers of man.