John- Paul Heil
Evil Explained
Pope Leo XIV has evil on his mind. Following in his predecessor’s footsteps, the first American pontiff remains deeply concerned with the problems facing modernity. While his initial comments about AI, couched within the context of his choice of papal name, have received significant and insightful attention, the Pope seems to view artificial intelligence as emblematic of a larger second Industrial Revolution, which risks degrading the inherent dignity of the human person. His comments remind us of Leo XIII’s critique of communism and unchecked consumptive labor practices during the first Industrial Revolution. Dehumanizing cultural forces can only exist within a world that has more broadly rejected an adequate anthropology of the human being as rational and free, male and female, created for and only fulfilled by a complete and total gift of self to another.
When this vision of the human person is lost, and societies embrace a reductive view of what it means to be human, atrocities will undoubtedly follow. Something like a second Industrial Revolution, and the threat it poses to the dignity of humanity and the value of human labor, can only arise in “a world that suffers a great deal of pain due to wars, violence and poverty.” The pope echoed this in his recent calls to fellow religious leaders to reject “ideological and political conditioning” and to “be effective in saying ‘no’ to war and ‘yes’ to peace, ‘no’ to the arms race and ‘yes’ to disarmament, ‘no’ to an economy that impoverishes peoples and the Earth and ‘yes’ to integral development.” But this still does not address the origins of evil, and how war, violence, and an impoverished world can emerge in the first place.
Fortunately, we can uncover further insight in a recently rediscovered philosophical treatment of where evil comes from, stemming from the same traditions that formed Pope Leo. Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977) was a Catholic philosopher steeped in the critiques of modernity articulated by Leo XIII, which prepared him to be an early and staunch activist against the rise of Nazism in Germany. Hildebrand was, like John Paul II and Edith Stein, a phenomenologist greatly occupied with what it means for human beings to be persons, and with how our being persons distinguishes us from the rest of creation and reality. Personhood reveals our particular dignity, inspired deeply by the thought of St. Augustine.
These two strands of Hildebrand’s thought, phenomenology and personalism, led him to compose Ethics, an account of how human action comes about and what constitutes a good or evil act. Though an extremely influential text, Hildebrand’s Ethics only treated the origins of moral evil—and especially evil’s emergence from pride and concupiscence—in passing. Recently, however, Czech scholar Martin Cajthaml located an enormous treatise on this subject in Hildebrand’s Nachlass (his unedited notes and documents left behind as part of his literary estate) now collected and revised for the first time as The Roots of Moral Evil.
The release of this text corresponds providentially with the election of Pope Leo XIV, as Hildebrand’s arguments reveal greater insight into the philosophical and theological groundwork of this pontificate. As the early comments of his papacy show, and recent studies of his dissertation as a young Augustinian confirm, Leo’s vision of the Church is rooted in Vatican II’s Christian personalism and the phenomenological concerns that occupied Hildebrand as much as John Paul II, especially how the human heart turns away from the love of the one, beautiful, true, and good to the love of lesser things. To understand how Pope Leo is addressing the evils of our world, we should consult Hildebrand.
As a student of Edmund Husserl, Hildebrand became an early and central thinker in the new philosophy of phenomenology, focused on what scholar Michael Waldstein calls “an account of what is itself present or given in our conscious awareness or experience,” or, more simply, that sees the path to objective truth as rooted in our real and subjective (though not relativistic) encounter with things as they are. Phenomenology begins not with the postulation of hypotheticals but with our being in reality. Through our real encounter with the being of things, we begin to see (at least in the phenomenology of Christian philosophers like Hildebrand and John Paul II) Being itself as something real which is not itself a thing, even a very powerful or supreme thing. Rather, Being underpins and goes beyond material phenomena.
With this attention to subjectivity, the dignity of the human person becomes clear. We recognize in our encounter with real Being its total infinitude and absolute glory beyond reality itself, yet we can only begin to understand Being through analogy with reality, something strongly emphasized by Augustine. Augustine also highlights how Being is not some ultimate monad, disinterested unmoved mover, nor transcendent Platonic form pouring out existence because it cannot help it. Rather, Being is personal, inviting us through the Logos into a transcendent life which is an interpersonal and eternal pure act of love. Inscribed into each human being is the call to be with divine Being, which is mysteriously and simultaneously beyond us and for us, completely perfect and needing nothing, and yet desiring a perfect union of love with each human being. We see imaged in our natures, in the desire to make a complete and total gift of ourselves to another through love, a perfect analogy for the interpersonal love that is the life of Being and a universal call to happiness and perfection with the Truth, a being-with-Being, that is only possible if we love others as we have been loved into being: through a gratuitous and sacrificial gift.
If this is our call, why do we reject it? Explaining this is Hildebrand’s herculean task. As Cajthaml notes in his introductory study, Hildebrand rejects the Platonic and Aristotelian notions of evil as ignorance or hamartia, missing the mark. Rather, like Augustine, Hildebrand “locates moral evil in evil will” rather than a malformed intellect: “pride and concupiscence,” Hildebrand writes, both of which are failures of the will, “are always at the basis of all moral evil.”
Hildebrand sees concupiscence as being “characterized by the turning to the merely subjectively satisfying as the one exclusive measure of our life—implying an outspoken indifference toward the reign of morally relevant values and any value or importance-in-itself.” Straightforwardly, this means that we tend to choose, to will, to pursue something we find pleasurable in the moment rather than seek after that which we know to be right. We often prefer the action that gives us subjective pleasure over something that’s intrinsically better. We will take the lesser pleasure for ourselves rather than the higher good because we want the lesser pleasure, darn it!
Though concupiscence and pride share a common denominator—egocentrism—they differ insofar as the concupiscent man “plunges into subjectively satisfying goods and throws himself away on them,” while the prideful man “is characterized by a reflexive gazing at himself.” The concupiscent man, Hildebrand suggests, “exclusively seeks to taste the various pleasures and views the world under the category of the agreeable,” whereas the proud man “is centered on his self-glory, the consciousness of his own importance, and excellence, and his masterly sovereignty.” Drawing explicitly on Augustine, Hildebrand distinguishes concupiscence and pride by concluding that “concupiscence refers to a having; pride to a being. Concupiscence is a perversion in the sphere of the possession of a good; pride is a perversion in the attitude toward one’s own perfection.” The worst type of pride is satanic, a “reversal of St. Catherine’s prayer … ‘That Thou be all and I, nothing.’ Its innermost gesture repeats to God: ‘That I may be, and Thou shalt not be.’”
The egocentrism that underlies all evil, from the least serious form of concupiscence to this lowest and most extreme form of metaphysical pride, always requires those who will it to undertake a self-blinding. If the heart of phenomenology and the realization of our human dignity requires an encounter with being, with created reality, then the roots of moral evil stem from the choice to turn our backs on what we see. We will ourselves to pay attention to something we know is less important, or something that gives us a certain kind of self-satisfying pleasure at the expense of a better good. It is particularly common for us to want to pay too much attention to ourselves.
This self-blinding results from what Hildebrand identifies as an absorption in an immanent logic, by which he means the logic of a particular activity. Though this absorption does not always result in evil and indeed is a prerequisite for human craft—an attentive mechanic, for instance, should be absorbed in the immanent logic of a car he is repairing—“as soon as this immanent logic absorbs us to such an extent that we no longer situate the end of our activity within the hierarchy of values, that we are no longer concerned with the place that our ends holds in this hierarchy, we have fallen prey to the immanent logic of our activity.” We will, consciously or otherwise, to hold something of lesser value as more important than something of greater value: Hildebrand uses the example of a leader of a charitable organization who, though initially well-intentioned, becomes so wrapped up in the practical and monetary affairs of getting the organization off the ground that he is led to sin.
Hildebrand’s arguments show that the roots of moral evil and the temptation to self-blind, to dis-order the hierarchy of values which has at its summit the love of God and neighbor, are relentless. Though we may be inclined to believe that our disordered subjective pleasures remain only with us, Hildebrand warns that sinful absorption into immanent logic can not only be taken up by whole societies but also brought to bear against their most vulnerable.
Hildebrand encountered this firsthand. As papal biographer George Weigel noted, Hildebrand resigned in 1933 from Germany’s leading Catholic academic society to protest the “‘ignominious affair’” of one of their lecturers declaring that “the Third Reich [was] the realization of the Body of Christ in the secular world”—a fascistic disordering that revealed the Reich as sacrilegious in its theology as it was anthropologically and morally bankrupt. Hildebrand immediately wrote to friends to argue that “‘it is completely immaterial if [this] Antichrist refrains from attacking the Church for political reasons, or if he concludes a Concordat with the Vatican. What is decisive is the spirit that animates him, the heresy he represents, the crimes committed at his behest. God is offended regardless of whether the victim of murder is a Jew, a Socialist, or a bishop. Blood that has been innocently spilled cries out to heaven.”
In the Third Reich’s supremely prideful immanent logic, ideology is ordered above innocence, above the human person, and above God. Pope Leo identifies this same sort of immanent logic, the logic of a new industrialization that seeks to void all aspects of the imago Dei inscribed into our natures, as threatening the human person on all sides. What, then, can practically break us out of a pleasure-focused concupiscence, a self-centered pride, or a totalizing immanent logic? What helps us to see reality well?
Leo seems to be following Hildebrand’s path. Hildebrand’s personalism developed into an account of the sexual difference, nuptial gift, and family that was foundational for John Paul II’s famous theology of the body. Leo echoes this turn in his recent declarations that “it is the responsibility of government leaders to work to build harmonious and peaceful civil societies [which] can be achieved above all by investing in the family, founded upon the stable union between a man and a woman.” Our families force us to reexamine our priorities, remind us that we are not living for ourselves and our pleasures alone, shake us out of believing that we are perfect, and break us out of immanent logics that demand too much from us: they force us to encounter reality. Hildebrand and Leo both point us to how concupiscence, pride, and immanent logic are toxic to the life of the family, the very life that reflects, better than anything else in reality, the life of the Being that moves the universe through love.
*John-Paul Heil is a Core Fellow at Mount St. Mary’s University. His writing has appeared in TIME, The Week, and Smithsonian.
