The Ghost Who E'er Denies

Contradictions inhere in evil. We picture it as powerful, often as superior in intellect, but when we look at evil closely, analytically, comprehensively, it turns out to be pathetic, limited, deficient, and contemptible. The philosophers’ definition of evil as the absence of good turns out to be narrowly correct. Let’s take a moment to examine that contradiction—power and absence—before turning to other aspects of this subject.

Genuinely powerful phenomena have a neutral character: tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides. We know them to be innocent of the least intention. They represent release of energy. Droughts that come when the rains fail and devastate the land represent the opposite, denial of energy. Droughts also lack intentions; they are conditions, not real denials of anything.

But the power we associate with evil is also simply energy. But those who release or deny it are people who have what nature lacks: intention. What we mean by that word, strictly speaking, is a fusion of will and consciousness. When consciousness is missing we’re dealing with instinct. The tiger may “intend” to eat, but it has no awareness whatsoever that its victim is just another “tiger” in a different form.

People are capable of evil because they innately know—and the more sophisticated they are the more certain we can be that they do—that what they intend will cause harm to others; but they do not care. Innate knowledge and choice of action contrary to it is of the very essence of evil. If we deny this innate knowledge, we cannot really hold people responsible. Conscience must be an absolute, must be really present—or to put it more sharply must have been present at some point and then been consciously overstepped—before evil is possible. And the knowledge that I talk about is the real sort of thing, not a conceptual structure but something fused with a feeling best rendered as empathy. To harm others knowingly shows an absence of empathy, and in the philosophical “absence of good,” the real absence is that of empathy. It is a hardening of the heart. This hardening, however, does not deprive the evil-doer of power; it redirects this power to an evil expression.

It intrigues me that the personification of evil—as Mephistopheles—achieves an ambiguous but yet heroic status in Goethe’s Faust as the nineteenth century dawns (1808). It is from Faust that my post’s title comes, rendered in the same beat Goethe used, I am the ghost who e’er denies (Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint). The Enlightenment is then already in the past, and the devil is now promoted to the status of God’s agent provocateur. Mephistopheles becomes a more interesting figure than Faust; Faust wins in the end; we like this sort of story; it means the cake and eating it too.

The Faust figure appears to have been a real person who styled himself Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior. In his own time, the early sixteenth century, he was uniformly denounced as a charlatan, alchemist, moving about with a performing horse, a dog, familiar and evil spirits, and in league with the devil who eventually carried him off. In all of the earlier literary works based on Faust, the magician reaches a bargain with the devil, benefits for a set number of years with all kinds of rewards, but in the end is carried off to hell. Thus Encyclopedia Britannica informs me—and thus also end of story. In Goethe’s Faust we encounter the blessed transformation to modernity—at least if we view the story from a distance. Faust enjoys the powers that he bargains for but at the end is—saved! saved in part by the pleadings of the virtuous Gretchen, whom he seduces, gets pregnant, and who, in turn, drowns her illegitimate child—but she is saved and enters heaven anyway. There, in a role that evokes Dante’s Beatrice in Heaven, she intercedes for Faust. And all ends well.

But does it? In the earlier tales, the high sophistication, towering intellect, and all those other things Goethe lavishes on Faust do not produce the transformation. The absence of empathy corrupts. In the long run things always end badly. It might be time, again, to write another Faust, in modern dress. Ah, if only I had the energy, the poetry—and the years left for the labor—I might attempt it myself. That being beyond me, I invite a kindred spirit to do this necessary task.

Oh, yes. Perhaps I’d better define what “kindred spirit” means. It means a spirit of the new times, now in process of gestation. In those times it is Gretchen that matters, and who gives a fig for Faust. A kindred spirit will not give a dime for Faust’s ever so exalted soul if his will is bent the wrong way round. The poet will see him enter hell and wait for the doors to slam shut. And leave judgment to the Almighty.