I have a friend, Marius, who almost committed suicide about 8 years ago. As we spoke over lunch yesterday, I could not help but note his strength of character. To see him today, you would never know that there had been such a dark and dreary moment in his life. He did not just make a come back. Au contraire, Marius is so far ahead of where he once was that those who know him all along stand in awe of him. He explains himself as follows: “I was in the very clutches of evil; spat in its eyes; and then removed myself from of its grip”.
I would never wish evil upon anyone. But one thing is now clear to me. There is a moral power, a depth of knowledge, and majesty of character that only those who have vanquished evil ever come to have. There is a fashioning that comes about only if the self has successfully passed through the very crucible of evil without overcome by evil. Marius, himself, has noted that he would not know the remarkable strength that he possesses today were it not for the horrible pain of yesteryear.
For one thing, anyone who has vanquished evil has a most profound sense of some of his limits and strengths. It is natural for all morally decent people to insist that there are some lines they will not cross. But, alas, for most of us, this is no more than a hope. It is not self-knowledge. Hopes are wonderful things; and life without them would not have the richness it has. Unfortunately, though, there is no end to the list of hopes that have floundered in the face of reality, where in order to achieve a goal people have done what they vowed they would never do. Integrity isn’t worth the paper on which it is written if all too often a person lacks the wherewithal to say “no” in the face of great loss.
And as I reflect upon the life of my friend Marius, it seems rather clear to me that much of the cacophony that I hear in society today is occasioned by people trying to convince themselves that they have integrity; hence, they could pass through the crucible of evil without being overcome by evil. I have seen many of my Jewish students get angry over the Holocaust as if they had been through this evil portal itself. The same holds for many of my black students with respect to American Slavery. Both seem willing to excuse hate on account of the wrong of evil. Somehow this is supposed to underwrite their identity as Jews or blacks. Yet, it was Elie Wiesel who remarked in his Syracuse University Milton Lecture address in 2000 that hate is never justified. Rather strong words for someone who was in fact in a concentration camp during the Holocaust.
And this, interestingly, brings me back to my point about Marius. When a person with Wiesel’s experiences remarks that hate is never justified those words have a power that they cannot possibly have coming from you and me. His words come from a grasp of what evil is like that it is perhaps not even possible for us to imagine. The same holds true for a person like Marius who nearly took his life, having chosen both the bridge in Paris off of which to jump and the pills that would numb him to the experience. Marius, you see, had been raped by two men.
Both Marius and Wiesel know from first-hand experience what the self is like when it is most frail. What is more, if any two people have an excuse to be full of bitterness, resentment, and anger, it is certainly the case that these two do. Most importantly, both know what it is like to be triumphant over moral pain that invades every aspect of a human’s physical being and psyche. Accordingly, by their very lives they bear witness to the wherewithal of human beings to stare evil in the face and then loosen its grip. Needless to say, this is a moral power than only comes through experience.
To vanquish evil is to be blessed with a 6th sense. One has a way of seeing and hearing the lives of those around one. Part of the explanation for this is that one has no need of symbolic indications of righteousness and strength. Why? Because one’s very life is an indication of righteousness and strength. Another part of the explanation is the perspective that one has. On the one hand, of course, no one’s suffering is the measure of all things. On the other, to have stared evil in the face and then to have walked away is to have an experience from which to extrapolate that is like none other.
Although nothing renders us entirely invincible, to vanquish evil is to no longer be in search of a citadel in which one can take refuge; for one’s life has been transformed into precisely that.
It goes without saying that none of this justifies or excuses evil. Nothing renders us entirely invincible. Clearly, a world without evil is preferable to one with it. Just so, the lives of those who pass through the crucible of evil without being overcome by it are testimony to the truth that evil need not ever have the last word. And now more than ever we must attend to the lives of those who can offer that very testimony.
