I was drawn to thought on evil as a seminarian trying to make sense of the intractable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that framed my formation for the priesthood. I remembered when President George W. Bush described Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address. Even now, the phrase evokes an instinctual sense of supernatural dread, which was precisely its purpose. As the presidential speechwriters David Frum and Michael Gerson were preparing the address, they tweaked the line from the slightly more benign “axis of hatred” to make it sound more “theological.”
For most of Western intellectual history, the study of evil was reserved for theology. From Augustine and Aquinas to Luther and Calvin, Christian thinkers were preoccupied with the “problem of evil,” or the question of how a good God could allow bad to exist in our world. When Immanuel Kant introduced the concept of a radical evil that exists outside the limits of reason and will, the eternal problem of evil was released from the church’s exclusive grasp.
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