What Does it Mean to Be Evil: A Medieval Perspective

One of the great problems of philosophy and theology is the question of why does God permit evil in the world if He is so great? Many philosophers have tackled this problem by going at it from the perspective of man's free will. Many philosophers take the view that evil as a thing doesn't actually exist, it is instead the merely the absence of good. Evil therefore is not a naturally existing something, but can only exist in the perspective one takes of that something which we call evil for lack of a better word.

Medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas says of Augustine that he believes that "evil cannot exist except in the good." Aquinas goes on to state that "evil cannot have an essential cause." In other words, a person doesn't go about committing evil unless he sees in the action some good. A person does not consciously choose to perform an evil act, it is only evil when viewed from the correct perspective. Therefore evil should be considered an accidental circumstance of the desire to do a good. The good gets perverted and instead an evil is perpetrated, even though the person committing the act may not see it that way.Then there is the question of man's free will. If a man has the right to choose between good and evil, what will prevent him from choosing evil? What if there were some way to create a world in which everybody choose good over evil every time. According to the theory of evil being a lack of good, this would be impossible because every good could be viewed as evil if seen from the right perspective. If someone gets a job that someone else wanted, would that decision be seen as evil in the case of the one who didn't get the job?

So maybe evil is a necessary thing to have in the world. Maybe it's through the acts of evil that we learn exactly what good actually is. Perhaps the view of evil as a learning resource is the only correct way to go about this kind of thinking. If evil is absolutely necessary for the growth of the human race, then what does that say about the perpetration of great acts of evil? Can anyone carve out a lesson from the Holocaust?