Letter #242: Better Villains Through Religion

No Darth Without Jesus

Delighted to let you know that “Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness,” has made it onto the New York Times Bestseller List. Thank you to everyone who picked up a copy. I hope you come to love it as much as I do. And thank you to the incredible team at Zondervan and for the generous help of the Daily Wire.

Spengali,

Your Anakin Skywalker theory of good and evil — the idea that only the best can become the worst — reminds me of a thought I’ve often had when reading classic works.

I’m not enough of a scholar to say this with confidence, but it sometimes seems to me that there really are no villains before the advent of Christianity. I don’t mean there is no one who does wrong or who is universally condemned. I mean there is no one — at least in literature — who is absolutely evil because he stands in defiance of an absolute good. No Richard III who is “determined to prove a villain.”

Medea murders her own children, and yet she’s portrayed by Euripides as a tragic figure rather than an evil one. Even a traitor like Catiline is despised because he violated a man’s natural love of country, not an immutable law of heaven.

My old pal Socrates used to wander around the agora wondering if piety was pious because the Gods approved of it, or if the Gods approved of it because it was pious. If I remember rightly, he never found an answer to that question. But would such a question even have occurred to King David? To him, what God valued was good because God was good. Goodness was his nature. Which meant that those who defied him — Jezebel, say, or Haman — were essentially wicked.

Even so, the God of the Old Testament does not feel the need to explain his goodness in human terms. He will have mercy on whom he will have mercy. Where were you, after all, when he made the world? (I was in Philadelphia, if memory serves.)

There’s no denying that the New Testament has a different tone. The God made incarnate in the person of Jesus not only centers God’s law in love — other rabbis had done the same — but he elevates love above the law and sometimes even changes and nullifies the law by holding it responsible to love.

So the point of view you quote from Augustine — that evil can only exist as a corruption of what was once good — seems to me a Christian innovation.

I mention the same Augustinian idea in The Kingdom of Cain (Did I mention I have a new book out?).

“I believe that the Great Speculation — the equal reality of myself and others and the dearness of those realities to God — is, in fact, the logos, the moral order, incarnate in Jesus Christ. The logical conclusion of that logos is the primary reality not of desire and death but of love and life. To do evil, then, is to act in opposition to the logos embedded in your truest nature… Evil is the absence of love.”

If this were not so, evil would not point to good. In some sense, it would not even be evil. It would just be nature. Which is what the Marquis de Sade argued right before he tortured someone to death.

Love, Dad