The Reflected Face Of Evil

Note: this post is a rewrite of a speech I gave this week for the young men's group I'm a part of. The slideshow below is the powerpoint I prepared for the presentation.

At the heart of the world there lies a profound conflict, normally referred to as the conflict between good and evil. This is accurate and suitable enough for most purposes, but I believe there is a deeper and more fundamental way of thinking about the problem. Instead of good vs. evil, we should understand this conflict as love vs. self.

How it Begins: The Fall

To understand the destructive nature of self, we have first to understand The Fall. And to understand The Fall, we have to understand Satan's original rebellion that resulted in his exile from heaven and his subsequent deception of man. This rebellion is described in dramatic detail by Isaiah:

"How you are fallen from heaven,
O Day Star, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
you who laid the nations low!
You said in your heart,
'I will ascend to heaven;
above the stars of God
I will set my throne on high;
I will sit on the mount of assembly
in the far reaches of the north;
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.'"¹

What little word do you notice recurring repeatedly in that quote? The tiny and terrible pronoun I. Satan's downfall was not a delight in evil - it was his desire to exalt himself. After he was cast out of heaven and began his program of sabotage, he appealed to the same desire within man.

The Creation

God created Adam and Eve free and fulfilled. He made them autonomous beings and placed within them the desire for relationship with Himself. The self was created by God and for God, and as such it is good, as long as it is properly related to God.

(As a point of semantics, I should make it clear that I do not believe the self to be inherently bad; it is self-will and self-interest are the problem. In this article I am using the term "self" in reference to these destructive qualities.)

The Temptation

The temptation of the Fall, specifically, was to "be like God." As we saw in Isaiah's description of Satan's fall, the root of sin is a desire to exalt the self - not a delight in evil as such. The Serpent took Adam and Eve's innocent, God-given desire to know God, and perverted it into a desire to be God - effectively substituting self for love.

The Devastation

The self, morally corrupted and removed from fellowship with God, becomes enslaved in sin. It doesn't take long for the rebellious desire for exaltation, knowledge, and power to deteriorate into boldfaced wickedness. The self continues to demand more and more, the conscience is dulled, and the noose of sin begins to tighten.

How it Happens: The Slavery of Self

J. R. R. Tolkien offers us some profound commentary on the destructive nature of self in the Silmarillion, describing the spider Ungoliant:

She had disowned her Master, desiring to be mistress of her own lust, taking all things to herself to feed her emptiness; and she fled to the south, escaping the assaults of the Valar and the hunters of Oromë, for their vigilance had ever been to the north, and the south was long unheeded. Thence she had crept towards the light of the Blessed Realm; for she hungered for light and hated it... In a ravine she lived, and took shape as a spider of monstrous form, weaving her black webs in a cleft in the mountains. There she sucked up all light that she could find, and spun it forth again in dark nets of strangling gloom, until no light more could come to her abode; and she was famished.²

The self is like a black hole: it violently turns everything - including itself - into nothingness.

Self is selfishness, Love is otherness. Self cannot love because it cannot ascribe priority to someone else. Love, on the other hand, is so abandoned that it is not even self-conscious. We love most and best when we're thinking about the object of our love, not the love itself.

Self is what we hold and cling to, Love is what we give and release. "I remember what Susan Said / How love is found in the things we've given up / More than in the things that we've kept..." (Rich Mullins)

Self implodes our natures, Love expands them. This is why C. S. Lewis (in Letters to Malcolm) suggests that Heaven will display much more variety than Hell. Heaven is full of people whose natures have been expanded and developed into the fullness God intended for them, while Hell is full of people who have chosen themselves over and over again, until their once-beautiful nature collapses in upon itself in a cloud of dust.

Self is a mirror, Love is a window. The self is "the reflected face of evil," drawing us ever inward until there's nowhere else to go. Love is outward, drawing us ever "further up and further in," as impossible vistas open up on every side and we are quite literally beside ourselves with wonder and delight.

Satan is Self, God is Love. The devil prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking prey to devour, the very incarnation of death. God offers himself as a sacrifice, for the express purpose of creating a way for us to share in his death-defying, self-transcending life.

How it Ends: Hell

Hell is the inevitable destination of unchecked self-dom. Sheldon Vanauken, in his book A Severe Mercy, says "We saw self as the ultimate danger to love, which it is; we didn’t see it as the ultimate evil of hell, which it also is."³ Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, makes a similar point with this chilling statement: "I ask myself: 'What is hell?' And I answer thus: 'The suffering of being no longer able to love.'"⁴

C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain provides what is quite possibly the clearest explanation of how this tragic end is reached:

They wanted, as we say, to 'call their souls their own.' But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, 'This is our business, not yours.' But there is no such corner... The damned are, in a sense, successful, rebels to the end; [..] the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man 'wishes' to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.⁵

God does not coerce or compel his creatures, and so when man insists on having his corner, God allows him it. The doors of hell are locked from the inside.

Love: The Redemption of the Self

Living in a fallen world, we are all subject to the slavery of self. We have nothing left to do but cry out in desperation with the Philippian jailer: "What must we do to be saved?" How do we get out? What can we do to escape this self-destructive force that has shackled the world?

We find the answer in the first and greatest commandment.

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”⁶

Love God with everything you are, and love your neighbor as yourself. This is the only way to overcome the destructive nature of the self. Still, in and of ourselves we are powerless to do this, like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. This realization should lead us to the Cross.

We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.⁷

We love because he first loved us - that's the why and the how. It is only in accepting God's love that we are enabled to love our brother, and it is only in loving our brother that we truly love God - it cannot be abstracted.

Our one need is to simply be people who are loved for free, who are filled with love for free, and who therefore love all other people for free.⁸

When we lay down our lives and love others, the process of self-destruction is arrested and reversed. "Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."

Love is the redemption of the self. The Cross, the greatest symbol of love ever, is a crossed-out I.

(1) Isaiah 14:12-14, ESV
(2) J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, (Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 73
(3) Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, (Harper & Row, 1977), 37
(4) Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 322
(5) C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 75, 130
(6) Luke 10:25-28, ESV
(7) 1 John 4:19-20, ESV
(8) Greg Boyd, Repenting of Religion, (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 105