Because one of the weapons that we have against the devil, perhaps the primary weapon (which is to say the weapon from which all our other weapons against him derive), is the knowledge that he exists, and that his activity and his influence can be observed, and named, and brought out from the shadows into the light, where it cannot hide.
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Such is the banality of evil, to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt. It would rather spread quietly and unnoticeably, like a vapor, without calling attention to itself, than to impress itself on our consciousness with displays that reinforce our awareness of its reality, though on occasion it does that too, when it can clothe itself in enough grandeur or eloquence or bravado or false modesty that it can convince us that it is something other than it is.
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Which does not mean, as I’m aware it might sound, that when we imitate being we actively involve ourselves in some ritualistic devilry, or anything so hackneyed as that (even if accounts of such goings-on are not entirely without substance), but only that it amounts to the same thing, albeit with varying degrees of intention and malice, insofar as, when one imitates being, one turns to the wiles of the devil, in order to evade the difficulty or the sacrifice that would belong to that person if they encountered the moment honestly, which is to say with the full humility of their person.
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Further, because we cannot manifest our ‘being’ without the use of our conscience, and because our conscience has no mechanism that opposes it (but is singular, the way an organ in our body is singular), any attempt, on our part, to imitate being, in the arena of sincere, human relations, arises from a nothingness that cannot be sustained without some reliance on, or intercourse with, the diabolic.
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One cannot overstate how vital it is that our conscience be the basis for these responses. For if it isn’t, and yet we find within ourselves the energy or motivation to engage our volition nonetheless, we become capable of a recklessness and selfishness that demeans us, and that dispirits others, and that amounts not so much to ‘being’ as to an imitation of it.
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Which isn’t the case, for in order to participate in being there must transpire, within us, an engagement of our will with the configurations and stimuli of our surroundings, none of which is necessary if we want to merely exist. More specifically, this engagement of our will must require of us some kind of effort, however small, that moves us (not necessarily in a physical sense, though possibly that too) from one orientation to reality to another. Never settling into the comfort or righteousness we might think we have found, in some sought-after arrangement of circumstances (for that is spiritually toxic for ourselves, and can have tragic consequences for others), but remaining alert, as long as we are able, to the demands or possibilities that each emerging moment presents to our conscience, and responding to these moments according to the promptings of that conscience.
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For what we are referring to, I think, when we refer to good and evil, is something like being and non-being, though we may have difficulty recognizing this insofar as we assume that a person can participate in being merely by existing, and that a person thus has being so long as they are breathing and comprehending and functioning and are not, technically, deceased.
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But, in the spiritual sense, we have then lost our reality, because there is no such reality except in God, and God does not know evil, which is to say he has no truck with it.
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Which isn’t to say that evil has no reality, but that the seduction and deception that are its powers, as a spirit, would have us distort the things of creation so that the reality of their purpose is brought to unreality (which is separation from God), and with it, us, though we might still appear to be as we always have been, and indeed still are, in the biological sense.
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And, anyway, art is rare, and difficult to achieve, and the best that a casual audience can hope for, much of the time, when that audience tunes in to a show, or streams something online (be it comedic, dramatic, romantic, or something else), is a tedious if well-meaning portrayal of some contest between ‘good and evil,’ which, in reality, is rarely as uncomplicated as the portrayal would suggest, and which perhaps has no reality at all, insofar as evil is not so much the opposite of good as it is the absence or the negation of good, and thus cannot involve itself in a contest as much as become evident in the landscape that resolves itself, or materializes, when we choose not the good. Which effectively means, I think, those occasions when we choose not to be.
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Usually the most egregious offense of which such films could be convicted is not the profligacy of their violence (which pales in comparison to that of the violence of history), but the suggestion that death is the worst thing that can happen to a person (and not a soul’s unreadiness for death).
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None of which is to say that every work that contextualizes evil, as evil, should be considered art, for many such works amount to nothing more than a thrill, an amusement, or a distraction. The majority of ‘slasher’ films, for example, belong to this category. And yet they need not be abhorred by Christianity, or, anyway, not sought out and lambasted, even when they are predictable, unoriginal, and clichéd. For in their most elemental movements, and their organizing principles, they tend to echo something of what Christianity teaches about the moral composition of the universe. In other words, they are more or less harmless, until one’s exposure to them, or interest in them, becomes excessive.
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In other words, I do not love The Blair Witch Project because I enjoy seeing people suffer (I don’t), but because it is an artwork that reveals a spiritual reality that draws the mind into contemplation of God.
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To the contrary, it is often by way of an articulation of the transgressive, to which category I would assign The Blair Witch Project (insofar as the suffering of its characters would seem excessive, arbitrary, and unrelieved), that the relevance of Christianity emerges, if only by implication, or through the audience’s awareness, however faint, that evil is real, creation is subject to its assaults, and that we are creatures who are dependent on supernatural grace.
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But it is inaccurate insofar as it would suggest that Christianity is threatened by the transgressive itself, as if there were anything in the realm of the possible, that could be conceived of and expressed, from which the faith would need to hide or protect itself.
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To an extent, this impression is accurate, and I would defend the rationale that has allowed such an impression to circulate, and prevail, insofar as it aims to protect the vulnerable, or those who are unable to make distinctions between art that contextualizes evil (and thus has a chance of obtaining to the level of art), and certain kinds of so-called art, which, intentionally or not, would invert evil, and glorify it, or would handle it with such carelessness that the work becomes morally vapid, a confusion or bewilderment of value, and, finally, an exercise in gratuitousness, or in the morbid pleasure of producing shock.
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In light of what I’ve said elsewhere in this diary, about Christianity, I want to say something further about how that subject might relate to artworks like The Blair Witch Project (and to horror as a genre), not because there is a particular connection between Christianity and that movie (I’d contend that the faith speaks to all things, equally), but because I only just now was discussing the film, and because I’m aware of the impression that religion in general, and Christianity specifically, cordons itself off from encounters with any of the works of humankind that are transgressive enough to risk seeming, from a Christian perspective, heretical, pornographic, or blasphemous. Or, more to the point, works that could seem to celebrate those qualities, rather than to disavow them, or to reveal them in the context of their depravity and alienation.
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Such a refusal isn’t prudence, it’s hubris.
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One does not cut oneself off from a source of wisdom merely because the bricks of the well from which one would draw its waters are old, crumbling, unfashionable, or even graffitied with ancient insults. Nor even if others who draw of it do not benefit from it, but spill it and waste it, or even pollute it with the rubbish of their own minds, once they have tasted it.
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Which is a truth we are in danger of forgetting, or losing sight of, I think, when we begin to regard tradition as irrelevant to us because of how far we’ve advanced in certain quarters, or as something antagonistic to our contemporary selves because of the ignorance or barbarism of which peoples of earlier eras (or even peoples now, who can be associated with those earlier eras) might have shown themselves to be capable, in other avenues of life.