(The Nationalist, 20 April 2007)
Do devils exist? Forget the black creature with bloodshot eyes and pointy ears, a tail with a spike on the end, and a pitchfork for prodding people into hell. (But before wiping out that image, think for a moment how Africans feel that angels are always white and devils always black; images matter.)
Are devils a personification of evil, a counterpoint to angels, an artistic creation, a cop-out device enabling us to evade accountability for our own evil; are they a projection, a figment of imagination, a pun where do plus evil equals devil? Or are there personal spirits of evil, mysterious and malignant realities?
I once saw a documentary on World War II which showed a group of German officers standing together engaged in conversation. They were well dressed, looked fit and healthy, even handsome. To all appearances they were normal men on a quiet, routine day. Occasionally a wisp of smoke blew across in front of them, a minor distraction to the TV viewer. Then the camera swung a little to one side and down, revealing a pit full of burning babies. The officers seemed unaffected by this. Most likely, they were responsible for it.
Or think of the Cambodian communist dictator, Pol Pot, explaining patiently, as if to someone especially stupid, to an Australian journalist in the Seventies why it was necessary to kill children: You have to do it in order to create a new society; don’t you understand? (A little later he killed the journalist, too.)
Or Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa of Central Africa, also in the Seventies, his fridge stocked with the livers of his perceived opponents, and his empress machine-gunning to death 100 children who refused to buy over-priced school uniforms from a factory she owned.
Or the woman in Rwanda in 1994, who was accused of killing her neighbours’ children. She admitted it without remorse. When asked how many she had killed, she said she couldn’t remember as she had lost count.
Human beings are great messers. There is nothing we couldn’t make a botch of. But we may be more than just messers.
Evil is more in the ordinary than in the spectacular such as the above. What about the evil of opting out, as in ‘I didn’t know,’ ‘I didn’t see,’ ‘If only someone had told me…,’ ‘I didn’t want to get involved’ – when evil was there plainly in front of us to be seen and heard, and we did nothing? ‘Nothing is necessary for the triumph of evil, save that the good do nothing,’ said the eighteenth-century Irish parliamentarian, Edmund Burke. What about the refusal to accept responsibility for one’s actions, the wilful blaming of parents, school, society, the government, the boss, the neighbours, drink, or drugs – anyone but oneself – for one’s own wrong-doing? Isn’t there something evil, too, about determined habits of negativity, habitual fault-finding, the cynicism that constantly belittles, that – seemingly as a matter of course – attributes good to evil: if a person does something good, then it was done in the wrong way or for the wrong reason, or why didn’t they do better long ago? Those are closer to home.
And yet evil seems more persistent and intelligent than may be explained solely in human terms. It is mysterious, and has a strangely seductive power; it attracts. Saint Paul wrote, ‘I do the evil know I shouldn’t do; and the good I know I should do, I don’t do.’ There would seem to be more than human forces alone at work. Our Father…. deliver us from evil.