For it is true that evil belongs to the order of created things, though when we speak of it as such we must remember that God did not introduce it into creation this way, but that it resulted from a choice made by a portion of those spirits we know as angels (themselves created beings) who, in primeval time, envied God, and in so doing turned their faces away from the seat of divine sovereignty, and in that instant transformed their beauty into that which we know as supreme ugliness. Tradition has given the highest of these angels the name of Lucifer, who, in his fall from heaven, at the hands of the archangel Michael, became the great deceiver, otherwise known as Satan.
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In other words, though we are free to do otherwise, it appears as though we are able to increase the presence of divine love that is diffused through reality. In the same way that, if we remain beholden to our own will, and follow our impulses blindly, we diminish ourselves, and increase the presence of evil. Which isn’t to equate the power of the two spirits, or to imply that they have proportionate authority in opposite directions (and that it could be either of them, finally, whose dominion is established), but that, for a duration, or an age, or however we might refer to that term in which humankind flourishes in this temporal and spatial realm, divine love allows evil to abide, and to remain as a potentiality throughout creation. For while the former is uncreated, and is in fact an aspect of the Godhead itself, the latter is created, and thus is subject to the authority of God.
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And that is no minor thing, for it is through our participation in that trajectory, and specifically through those choices in which the virtues are manifested by us, that we, mere creatures, do as God would have us do, and consecrate reality by way of a dignity that is at once beyond us and always available to us. The magnificence of which should not be lost on us, for what it means, effectively, is that his very creation, which in some ways is left unattended (the way a work of art, at a certain point, is left by the artist who produced it) can extend the work that he wills us (but does not compel us) to do.
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Which is not, I don’t think, a frightening thing, or an unnerving thing, but is most certainly an awesome thing. Insofar as it can remind us of both our smallness and of the fatherly way in which that smallness has been instituted and arranged by divine providence, so that room is left for us, as a special kind of creature, to participate in the moral trajectory of the universe.
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For our own volition is not destroyed by the reality of predestination, but is preserved, if only insofar as we experience that volition as something actual, and something that can never be taken from us, even under dire circumstances. Which in some way owes itself to the fact that we experience time as chronological, as something that must elapse, and be gotten through, and that can be divided into moments that become shaded or colored, in our memory, by the choices we make in their particular durations. While, to God, time in its entirety is already known, and has been written.
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So that it is possible to understand one’s life, and the very breadth of history, through the prism of divine omniscience, knowing that what is going to occur is bound to occur, and yet also knowing, simultaneously, that our participation in those occurrences is a necessity whose very character is always something of a surprise to us until it is enacted, at which point it becomes part of the past.
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This doesn’t mean, I don’t think, that predestination is less prevalent the further away from the drama of the incarnation that one reaches, in history or locale, but only, perhaps, that its revelatory power in these instances is less overt, insofar as certain moments and certain lives can seem ordinary or inconsequential when their spiritual echo appears minimal, or confined to the area immediately around them (like when you brush your teeth alone in the morning, or when some raindrops fall across the pane of a window no one is looking out of) though really these occasions are neither of those things (ordinary and inconsequential), and everything in creation, which includes both space and time, participates in the unfolding of what we might describe as a divinely wrought narrative.
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Which is why, I suppose, there is an aura of predestination surrounding Judas where he is mentioned in the gospels. Which isn’t to say that this aura is put in there, or contrived, as a sort of literary device, in order to resolve the conundrum of him, but rather that, because predestination is a facet of reality that the scriptures reveal, it is of course going to be revealed most profoundly in those moments when the drama of the incarnation reaches its highest pitch.
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For, with Judas, you have a situation where an innocent is given over to executioners, to be killed (which is what happens in Gethsemane, when Jesus is betrayed by him), and without him you have a situation where the redemption of humankind, or the ‘divine plan,’ cannot be brought to fruition, insofar as the death of Christ is necessary for the expiation of the guilt we inherit by way of Adam. How then is one to feel about Judas, as a person who existed? To wish that his sin be committed seems impossible, but to wish that his sin not be committed seems equally impossible.
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But, to return to the subject of Judas, who was not a psychopath, I don’t think, but a man whose sinful nature was perhaps more straightforward, or ordinary, and who in fact was able to feel remorse, as his suicide seems to indicate…the conundrum that is him can seem insoluble.
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Which isn’t to say that wealth, or privilege, or certain behavioral traits (namely reserved or retiring ones) are abhorrent in themselves, but only that the momentum of modern society, at least in America, with the cultural values that are particular to it, has produced the conditions in which the individual is encouraged not to see, in those around him, the image of himself and of his maker (so that he might treat others with disinterested love, and a charity that is active and energized, and not afraid to exhaust itself on a world that needs it), but to view them instead, in the best case scenario, as persons who can be categorized by interests, or persuasions, and who thus can be separated into groups that the individual mentally or subconsciously keeps track of, in order to measure his margin of victory or loss against (so that these groups will forever, at least for that individual, remain ‘otherized’), and, in the worst case scenario, to view them as competitors for some ephemeral or ever-shifting prize that is defined materially, or in terms of reputation, or political clout, so that the individual finds himself always dissatisfied, and unable to relate to anyone except as they are ahead of him or behind him in a race that is spiritually vacuous, and that disguises itself with words like ‘progress’ or ‘freedom.’
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And, anyway, it is possible that the view of ‘psychopathy’ to which we have become accustomed, where physical and sexual violence (of a depraved or sadistic nature) is the defining element, or the symptom by which the disorder reveals itself, is a distortion of what is more fundamental to it, and that can best be described as a refusal, on the part of the individual, to relate to the objects and persons of this world except insofar as those things can be made to serve the interests of that individual. Which really is not so uncommon a disposition among human beings in this country today, and which perhaps is unique to the psychopath only in the totality with which it has informed his personality. For if Dante was writing now, instead of in the thirteenth century, I would not be surprised if the characters he indicted for the sort of conduct I have just described were not so much outwardly violent (which would meet the popular criteria of ‘psychopathic,’ as we have been conditioned to understand it), but belonged to that class of individuals who, while mild and polite, and paragons of discretion, are able, through wealth or social position (or some other means that they’ve inherited, stolen, or earned) to arrange their life in such a way that they need not interact with anyone with whom they would prefer not interact (for whatever unpleasantness or discomfort it would cause them). And who have learned to conceive of life as a series of moments whose only importance is the degree to which those moments can be approached as transactions. By way of which attitude, or orientation, they lose sight of the spiritual dimension of both themselves and humankind. And neither realize, nor care, that their daily existence amounts to an abuse of their fellow man, and an affront against God.
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Although it is possible, I’ve sometimes thought, that the ‘psychopath’ is such a product of modernity (which isn’t to say exclusively a product of modernity, but mainly so) as well as such an amalgam of types of sin, that Dante might not have found, among his contemporaries or the ancients, an individual that would fit such a description, had the terminology even been in use, as part of his lexicon. And so the very notion of a ‘psychopath’ might never have occurred to him. And so he did not include one of them in his infernal landscape.
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I have mentioned the ‘psychopath’ as an example of the gravest sort of sinner, and I suppose I would stand by that, although it was the traitorous, and those who would betray, that Dante, in Inferno, relegated to the ninth circle of Hell, suggesting that, in his view (which in some ways was aggrieved, but which also had an Aristotelian aspect, so as not to be lacking in reason, or logic) it was this type of sin, and this kind of sinner, that was the worst, or most detestable. Judas Iscariot being the foremost example.
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In this sense, the saint has no opposite, but exists somewhere along a spectrum on which can be found only positive integers, the beginning of which is inhabited by man at his most abject, and the end of which does not in fact end, but continues on into holy infinitude.
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Sin, in fact, might best be understood as an absence, or for what it is not; as a failure of the individual to inhabit a moment honestly, which is to say as a person who has integrated themself with reality as they know it to be, and who can participate in it with the proportionality that is befitting of a being who is made in the image of God.
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And, anyway, perhaps the ‘psychopath’ as I am conceiving of him is not so much the opposite of a saint as he is a person in whom saintliness is entirely absent. In the same way that zero is not the opposite of the integer 1, but is merely the absence of that integer. For the difference between virtue and sin is not the difference between something and its contrary, but the difference between something and nothing, or being and nothingness. For while virtue is what makes us real, sin is real only insofar as it has real effects. In itself it is a falseness, or a negation.
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I do not mean this as a slight against psychology or psychiatry, for, as fields of study and clinical work, they do much for the plight of those who suffer from mental illness. And, from what I understand, ‘psychopathy’ has never been an easy diagnosis to make, nor necessarily a helpful one, nor one that cannot include so many traits or symptoms, depending on the patient, that it would seem too broad or slippery a category to be applied liberally, or with much confidence, for it often collapses many conditions or disorders into a single category that by now is susceptible, at least among the general populace, when they hear mention of it, to the deleterious effects that our culture’s mythologizing of it (in movies and novels and so forth) has produced. Which isn’t to say that the category itself has no validity as a diagnostic tool, among professionals, for I’m sure that it does, but only that it has been romanticized so thoroughly, through fictionalized treatments of the subject to which it pertains, that perhaps it has been degraded.
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And so what we might have, in the case of the so-called ‘psychopath,’ is an individual who is sane, rather than insane, but who channels the spirit of evil, rather than the spirit of charity, to such a degree that he would appear to be the opposite of a saint.
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It isn’t for no reason that psychopaths are often described as ‘evil,’ by people who would not attempt to understand them psychologically, for they do not exhibit the same disorganization of thought, and inability to adapt socially, that those who suffer from more visible signs of mental illness do exhibit (and which mitigates the culpability of those people, for actions whose consequences they might otherwise be responsible for). And so the deeds of the psychopath that earn him the designation by which we know him tend to assume a malevolence that we associate with scheming and duplicity. And rightly so, I think, for his crimes are premeditated, and are designed to exact for him an amount of satisfaction that is proportionate to, and arises out of, his victim’s pain. Though to describe such an individual as ‘evil’ is not quite correct, for evil is a spirit, and can only be channeled, or manifested, just as a person cannot really be ‘good’, but can only channel or manifest ‘goodness.’