Evil feeds upon the good

By Kurt Armstrong and ChristianWeek | June 29, 2010

If you enjoyed last year's Reason, Faith and Revolution by the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, you'll be pleased to know that he's still got theology on his mind. While his last book was a witty, biting, sermon-like contribution to the "God debate," his new book, On Evil, is a work of literary criticism. But his interest in theological issues is still evident.

"Postmodern cultures…have had little to say of evil," writes Eagleton, but with this book he wants to reintroduce the term to help make sense of individual and social behaviour. Because of his political bent, Eagleton argues that evil can be structural and institutional, but it is also personal. Evil is bent towards chaos and meaninglessness. It despises reality. Evil, he says, has a sort of "diabolical delight" in the pure notion of absolute destruction. It is anti-material and therefore parasitic upon the good, which is "one reason why Satan is in such a permanent sulk," says Eagleton. Evil has nothing to truly call its own.

According to Eagleton, evil is a complete lack of being, fundamentally meaningless. Evil recoils from the impurity of real existence; it seeks to destroy. "In the end," he writes, "evil is indeed all about death."

One way to review this book would be to list all the phrases Eagleton uses to talk about evil: chaos, void, undifferentiated mass, despair, the desire for non-being, pointless destruction, non-existence, nihilism. He spends a lot of time talking about evil in literature, discussing fictional characters in Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, William Golding, Jean-Paul Sartre and Graham Greene. He finds true individuals, characters that fundamentally alone and cut off from others. In his discussions of fiction, he's looking for wisdom, drawing lines between novels and the evening news. "Pure autonomy is a dream of evil," he says. "It is also the myth of middle-class society."

Evil is as heavy a topic as you could find. But this book isn't a morbid obsession over terrible, evil things. Having asserted that evil is parasitic, this book is an affirmation of goodness, of life and love and the world that God loves. This is an excellent book. I'm sure it will fire up lively debate among Christians, atheists and those in between.