The Christian idea of evil is that evil is gratuitous pain, which means subject to a mortal calculus, while te post-Christian view, as is documented in the history of literature, is that evil is inexplicable motivation, which means it can be explained away.
In his “Confessions”, St. Augustine exemplifies evil as his youthful stealing of pears he didn’t even want to eat. That meant eil was gratuitous and ubiquitous. And therefore attributable to original sin. I would generalize the insight to mean that evil was the infliction of unnecessary pain, such as happened when the Allies bombed Dresden. Evil often occurs for revenge, an unacceptable motive. Not quite so famously is Hannah Arendt’s rejoinder to St. Augustine, where she says in “Eichmann in Jerusalem” that evil is banal, just a way to make the trains run on time, rather than malicious or terrible in the perpetrator’s nature while terribly evil in its consequences. Arendt was comparing her reading of evil to that of the prosecutor of the case, Gideon Hauser, who portrayed Eichmann as satanic, echoing Milton’s view that Satan was a fallen angel and so still retained his luster to be particularly hideous in his nature. Let us inquire into the nature of evil without offering a theological explanation or even a philosophical one, whereby following Kant we find what concepts mean by consulting how inevitable terms, such as free will and ought are used because they cannot be avoided and so therefore must exist. Let us consult instead the career of world literature where “career” is meant to mean a story that could have developed differently but did not and so the history of consciousness is evidence of realities both discovered and invented,
Stories are as old as before when dogs contemplated getting a bone, the irony of something not being accomplished as getting done. But the career of literature is the invention of forms and contents to stories even if they are so long standing that they seem inevitable. Two of these stories have provided the ways people of the western imagination have expressed and gripped stories and there is no end of elaborating and analyzing these resources, the ones offered from the Greek tradition and, for contrast, the one developed in the Hebraic tradition.
The Homeric epics develop stories that are ordinary people elevated into heroes because of their remarkable feats and because of being known as heroes rather than ordinary people even though they are ordinary in that they have the same sets of emotions and ideas that are familiar with all people. Odysseus is sly and Priam wants his son to be properly buried and Telemecaus wants to know what happened to his father. So epics are reflections of life rather than the transmogrified pagan figures that Ovid transforms into psychological processes of transformation, those a staple or eternal availability.
But something changes by the time of the great Greek tragedies. The heroes have fatal flaws or maybe existential ones to which people will lapse into a condition that is transgressive. He or she is no longer just trying to get by, to manage life, as when Circe, like all women, can accurately enough turn men into swine. It is that heroes rebel against social or intrinsic nature and are recognized for doing what is generally recognized as evil, that thought, that figure, having come into the world and remaining with us to any present day procedural police drama. Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter; Oedipus marries his mother and Medea kills her children. Note that these are family damas where people overreach, while warfare and politics reside as just normal life while family life is problematic, as if the solidity of family was being discovered just as Gilgamesh a thousand years before discovered to be put in words that dead people were very different from the living, not just another state of being alive. As people absorbed the meaning of death, the Greek tragedians discovered or invented the idea and fact of evil, the villain and not just the hero.
The same evolution takes place in the Hebraic tradition. Its historical rather than mythic roots begin with Abraham who is an ordinary person. He is not a god or has special powers. He minds his sheep, tries to arrange peace with his clan members, tries to manage his shrewish wife, and also has the ability to communicate with God by negotiating with Him on the basis of morality, which assumes that morality is independent of both Abraham and God. Other great Hrebraic figures are also ordinary people. Moses stutters and has a temper. King David, whose political and personal biography is told warts and all in Samuel 1 and Samuel 2, unites his kingdom despite doing a number of bad things. In fact, the idea of a transgressor as a person who is deep down opposed to morality, and so is properly called evil, does not emerge until the Gospels, where Judas is evil and so are the money lenders, who are perfidious rather than just businessmen, and so there arises the idea that evil lurks in the hearts of all people and St. Paul specifies that as tied to those passages in the story of Adam and Eve which have been given a fresh and creative interpretation concerning passages that are put at the beginning of Genesis but may have been written much later than the Abraham stories. Evil is also both an invention and a discovery.
Shakespeare expands the experience and structure of tragedy by adding malice to the people who engaged in transgressions. W, H. Auden was correct in thinking that Shakespearean tragedy was Christian while ancient tragedy was not but it wasn’t because as Auden thought because classical tragedy was about fate and circumstances while Shakespeare was about fatal flaws, but because ancient tragedies only sometimes added malice, which is ultimately unexplainable as a motive into the mix. Oedipus had no malice until Freud discovered that as one side of an inevitable yearning, But all ofShakespeare’s great tragedies reveal a malice that predates the events of the play or evolves within it. Hamlet is angry with his mother, his uncle, his girlfriend, to whom he speaks cruelly and needlessly, as well as to Denmark itself, while avoiding his own anger through subterfuges, such as the play within a play and his constant procrastination, him the locus whereby the temple is destroyed. Macbeth goes deeper and deeper into bloodshed trying to act as if that were fated rather than chosen. Othello becomes malicious, trained into it despite his obvious advantages and the plaudits accorded to him, his unnecessary rage left to the very end. So the Shakesperian tragic heroes have that spark of commanding the stage that makes them what would later be considered Miltonian evil but already known as Pauline: they choose to sin even as they are fated to do so.
Fast forward to the nineteenth century, the golden age of the novel, where fictional figures represent all the ordinary people, meaning that they are not in history, their lives unchronicled except in fiction, as if they were important too, which means the novel is not an epic, but something else. The arrival of this species of literature was telegraphed in the eighteenth century when “Tom Jones” lampooned their ordinary people by calling them examples of heroic stereotypical figures. The thing about the novels is that their motivations have to be extrapolated from their behaviors, but the satisfaction of reading the novels is to figure out their motives. In “Great Expectations”, Mrs. Haversham does bizarre things because of a jilted love; Magwitch is an escaped convict desperate to remain free, and Pip and are just trying to manage their own lives. Full of adventure without any magic or particular evil.
What the nineteenth century novel also does is rehabilitate people who are regarded as poor or otherwise disreputable as ordinary rather than evil people by taking their point of view just as Shakespeare had done by making Shylock more human than the stereotype of a Jew would have made him. That is clear in the case of Jane Eyre, the nanny, and most notably by Oliver Twist, who is a guttersnipe made human and so not evil however readers at the time were distrustful of the poor and remain so. Even more striking and forward looking is Wilkie Collins presentation of women themselves as no longer strange or subservient and in their place. One heroine is manlike, and another takes charge of her husband despite the idea that how men and women do together in private is never discussed. So the novel purges itself of evil even of disagreeable characters and low birth, even to the extent that Edmund Dantes in “The Count of Monte Cristo” is a character filled with revenge for his imprisonment but not dismissed as merely evil. He had his reasons.
This view of the novel is different from that of the idea that nineteenth century science was progressive in that it invented evolution, the railroads and electricity. Which certainly eased the material world and rid the social world of blame, while the literary world was conservative because it redefined Christianity in a palatable way, “A Christmas Carol” and inscribed morality as just natural, but it was radical in rehabilitating all manner of groups as human, merely human, even to the extent, flashing ahead again, to render even gays as plausable protagonists as in the novels of the Fifties and Sixties such as Vidal’s “Myra Breckinridge”, Cheever’s “Falconer” and Baldwin’s “Giovani’s Room”. There is no limit to rehabilitation.
Then what is left with evil? It is a residual force when people are made ordinary and yet a powerful one in that immorality becomes ever more strange. Evil can be redefined as bitterness which is inexplicable, Freud having plunged into the depths by making neurotic and hysterical patients and so understandable and forgivable. A Freudian might think that even Hitler could be redeemed for humanity by noticing the traumas of World War I that made him obsessed with mlitarism.
Replacing evil as gratuitous with evil as inexplicable makes a big difference. Gratuitous is a fact about a situation and the evil is inferred. Inexplicable is a characteristic of the observer and is a;so inferred as is clear when so many people are rendered ordinary rather than evil. The responsibility rests on observers to rehabilitate people rather than make a moral judgment on whether the level of gratuitousness is enough of a crime to consider it evil, while inexplicable is a challenge to the imagination. But that test can also be made and so evil can remain part of the vocabulary. Fifties Existentialists recognized people so unsympathetic to the rest of humanity that they were uncomfortable enough to be considered evil even if Camus preferred to think such alienation of self as part of the human condition rather than a sign of malice. And more generally Durkheim and his followers have adopted to use the term deviance to describe people sufficiently different even just in being unusual so as to gain a stigma which removes them from compassion, and that situation remains current and readily available to be attributed to Mexicans or East and West coasters who for some reason prefer to live in moral chaos and urban disorder or, on the other side, anyone who voted for Trump. Just inexplicable. The concept digs deep and will remain with us even if some people might want to erase the idea of evil.
The history of the concept of evil has progressed in that it has become more exact. Christians think that all people have original sin and so are all evil even if they lead spotless lives. Post Christians think that there are fewer and maybe only a few people who deserve to be called evil even while thinking that most people can be found upon inspection not to be evil. Hitler was evil in the Christian sense that he did not have to start untold misery though he thought war and genocide were necessity. Hitler is evil in the post-Christian sense in that his rage to dominate was beyond reason, some inner kernel of evil. Evil people are few and far between. They include serial killers and mass murderers but do not include those who dropped the A-Bomb. Col. Tibbets was engaged in military necessity and without personal malice. Be wary of applying the brush too easily. Reserve it only to the really bad guys.