Heart of Darkness
Manicheanism explains evil, but does not eliminate it.

By James V. Schall, S.J., professor of government, Georgetown
April 14-15, 2001

nlike old soldiers, old heresies do not just "fade away"; they "keep coming back like a song," to recall the words of an old tune. The fact that old heresies keep returning is not a bad thing, as it reminds us that the same basic problems remain in every generation of our kind. Moreover, each "heresy," a modern "cuss" word with usually a good point, is designed to answer a certain perplexity about the human condition. Manicheanism — a strange but useful word — seems to have originated in ancient Persia. However, Christians mostly associate it with the life of St. Augustine, who vividly describes his youthful attraction to it in his Confessions.

Basically, manicheanism is a response to the inquiry about the origin of evil. And it is an attractive answer, which is why it continues to come back in forms that we must constantly uncover and define even in our own day. What it proposed, and this seems to be the thesis against which the account of creation in Genesis was written, is that evil was caused by a god of evil who made matter. Good, on the other hand, now identified in this dualist metaphysic as spirit, was caused by a god of good. Thus, if we wanted to be "spiritual," as surely we do, the best thing to do would be to get away from matter as much as possible. The early Church had to confront this heresy because it implied, contrary to Christian teaching, that marriage, with its relation to matter, was therefore an evil.

Genesis, by its account, seems deliberately to have made a point, in each of the days of creation, that matter was good. In other words, while it still had to account for the origin of evil, it rejected the idea that matter was, as such, evil. In the account of the Fall, the origin of evil is to be found in something good, but something that was not, strictly speaking, "matter." The origin of evil was to be found in the free will of the rational creature, man or angel. That is to say, evil arose out of a good power in a good being, but not from God. The essential temptation of Adam and Eve was, following the name of the Forbidden Fruit Tree, to claim themselves, not God, as the origin of the distinction of good and evil. This claim was, in other words, a divine claim.

At first sight, we will wonder about the "practicalness" of knowing about manicheanism and the revelational response to it. Augustine himself tells us, in a surprising way, how such a seemingly odd theory might turn out to be rather useful. If I am sinning or otherwise doing wrong, but do not want to admit it or take responsibility for it, it is useful to have a "theory" that explains that when I do wrong, it is not "me" who does it. Rather it is some necessary material "god" or necessary evolution outside my own control. Thus, paradoxically, I can go in either direction. That is, I can become an ascetic and cease to involve myself in evil matter or I can go on my merry way and do whatever I want, holding that the god of evil or matter itself caused it all. Thus what I do is not my own act. Therefore I can live a sort of double life, morally pure on the spiritual side and, without contradiction, quite indulgent on the material side.

But, we might ask, what does this account, however quaint, have to do with us? Surely no one "believes" these things today. Whenever we hear the cant, "nobody believes this today," we can be pretty sure that the thing is all around us and that we do not recognize it. When do we see this Manicheanism, or Gnosticism, as it is sometimes called, around us? We find it whenever we come across an explanation of the evils of our time that is not primarily located in a free choice of human beings but in necessary historical, material, economic, or scientific causes.

What was peculiar about the twentieth century, I think, was its lethalness in terms of human life. In classical literature, it would be rare if we found a tyrant who killed more than ten or twenty people, most of whom he knew. But in the last century, we found many men responsible for the killing of thousands and even millions, none of whom they knew. What was peculiar about these "totalitarian" men is that they combined in themselves two offices, that of the philosopher and that of the politician. In this capacity, they sought to impose their "ideas" about good and evil on the world. All evil, even the worst, is pursued in the name of some good. Here the good was the effort to rid the world of its evils by some formula.

The philosophical part of the philosopher-politician (I think of the Lenins, the Maos, the justifiers of abortion) is invariably a thesis about the cause of evil. And that cause is outside the will of the one defined as evil. Evil has to do with being, not personal will. Just eliminate that being which is evil and all will be well. There will be a perfect world if we impose our theory. What is common to these systems then is that the locus of the evil is shifted away from personal will, including the will of the politician, to some cause outside, to some group or class or condition that is defined as the cause of the disorder in the world.

Once this thesis, and it is usually a complete system in the mind of the politician, is put into effect, the passion of the one with the thesis, normally called the "ideologue" in modern terminology, will be fired by the mission of eliminating evil or poverty (seen as the result of evil) from the world. The trouble with this thesis is that is dehumanizes everyone, not merely the victims of the thesis-action but also the one concocting the theory. The older classic and Christian thesis was that we will never find in this world an improvement of mankind that does not pass through the will and reasoning of individual persons. And no matter how good the circumstances we live in, it will always be possible and even likely that someone will chose himself over the objective good of others. Likewise, it will be possible in the worst regimes that good still appears in individual souls aware of the falseness of placing the cause of evil in things outside the control of human virtue and will. Manicheanism is still very much with us in diversity theory, in deconstruction, in postmodernism, in development theory. We even find it sometimes in religion. In short, this "heresy" still has much to teach us, especially if we do not see that the heart of evil also crosses our own souls.