The Idea of Evil

In chapter 83 of Kentaro Miura’s masterwork manga, Berserk, the series’ primary antagonist Griffith comes into contact with the god of that world in the moments preceding his own ascension to a lesser divine status. The being refers to itself as the Idea of Evil, and more importantly stylizes itself as the desired god. The Idea of Evil says to Griffith that it was born of humanity’s desire for a reason behind their suffering. War, famine, pestilence. The collective anguish proved too great, and even greater than this anguish was the seeming senselessness behind it all. And thus, from this desire for reason the Idea of Evil was born. Fate and causality and the struggle against it are two of the most important ideas in Berserk, if not the most important, and the Idea of Evil is the architect of causality itself. It explains to Griffith that it engineered human desire and manipulated history to create the context and lived experience that would bring Griffith before it, and it ultimately tells Griffith to do as he will, and that his actions will either bring pain or salvation to humanity. Griffith chooses to bring pain.

The capacity to be moral agents gives people a unique position in the world (that we have thus far discovered). Animals of course largely lack the capacity for moral judgements and, the things one would place above us in an exercise of hierarchy such as planets, heavenly bodies, the forces of nature themselves etc. lack this capacity even more so. Were we to assume these things followed a moral ideology however, the obvious conclusion as to their doctrine appears to be might makes right. Larger, more powerful animals generally take preeminence over smaller ones; smaller heavenly bodies orbit or are attracted to larger ones; weaker forces are overpowered by stronger ones. That most of us have adopted a differing perspective speaks to our moral tendencies being at odds with nature itself. Even so, it is impossible to look at human history without noticing this same principle playing out in practice despite it being loathed in principle. In Blood Meridian, the correctness of this view is espoused by the Judge, who states “This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.” That power has such an intense selection bias for the most cruel and ruthless of us is indicative of the ‘correctness’ of might makes right in the absence of moral judgement. The tension between this apparent truth and our moral ideals is one of the defining aspects of our condition.

Of all the characters in the novel it is the Kid who most embodies this tension.   One of the earliest descriptions of him reads “He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence.” Everything preceding this line is either physical description or elucidation of his origins; this is the first we hear of his character. If we take the Kid to represent humanity, then this becomes a statement of how fundamental violence and by extension evil is to us as a species. Reading the Kid (or any character in this novel) as a stand in for humanity paints an obscenely bleak picture, though nevertheless one that is corroborated by history; the story the Kid finds himself in itself bears a painful amount of historical accuracy. However, the Kid is especially apt to serve this role in interpretation as he throughout the novel shows surprising amounts of empathy, at least relative to the others around him. His sparing of Shelby and the Judge when he had both the opportunity and incentive to kill both demonstrates this. Furthermore, he is more merciful than the rest of the gang toward their victims (low bar though that may be), and most of the worst atrocities occur without direct mention to his participation. Of course, this does not imply his lack of participation or absolve him of guilt, even by association, but it does make it easier to separate him from the worst of the worst, represented by the rest of the Glanton Gang, Glanton especially. The Kid thus perfectly represents the vast majority of people, equally capable of good and evil, with the path taken most often determined by the moral predilections of other around them, especially those with a particular tendency towards either end of the moral spectrum.

I find arguments of human nature being essentially evil to be rather asinine for their parochial focus on the evil we are capable of, as if acts of goodness for some reason do not qualify as human nature. Of course, these arguments often have a theological bent to them, the most influential of these of the idea of original sin. Original sin as a doctrine pairs well with the assertion of the Kid’s innate taste for violence. If humanity is evil by nature then such a disposition should be concomitant. But one does not need a theological underpinning to arrive at such a conclusion. If we were to participate in the admittedly flawed exercise of judging animals as moral agents then all of them would fail. Of course, they lack the mental capacity to be judged in this manner. Let us revisit the quote from earlier: “He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence.” What is fascinating about this is the attribution of malice immediately succeeding the attribution of ignorance. If again the Kid is taken to represent humanity, then what this line does is essentially restore us to our basest form, an unenlightened one. Evil, or what we consider to be evil thus accompanies ignorance. Take the phrase mindless violence. Typically, this expression signifies a wantonness, a glibness that makes whatever atrocity committed all the more reprehensible. However, the killing of a prey animal by a predator could equally be considered mindless, as it was not any rational thought that lead to the act, just pure instinct. Consider again the original sin. It should be noted that when Adam and Eve were cursed and cast out of the garden, nothing changed about them intrinsically other than their newfound knowledge. The curse was focused entirely on their circumstances. It could be said that the act of disobedience is what corrupted them, but even then, the only explicitly stated differences pre and post fall is how they were perceived by God and by themselves. The sorts of actions they were capable of, their intrinsic nature, remained the same. The fact that they were able to commit evil in the first place is proof of this. In another statement on war the Judge espouses a similar perspective, stating “It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”

What we consider to be evil can be understood as an agglomeration of key tensions and factors: the tension between our base nature, incapable of moral judgement and our aversion to death and suffering; an intellect capable of understanding this tension as well as envisioning ways of action and of being that resolve that tension, and a profound despair that arises when we fail to realize those other, more auspicious possibilities. The only thing that separates humans from other creatures is moral judgement; even advanced intellect fails to do so. Thus, by failing to be moral we fail to be fully human. With awakening came a new form of suffering; animals suffer in many of the way we do – pain, grief, anxiety – but only we suffer from knowing that there is a better way than what our instincts compel us to do.

The Judge is without a doubt one of the vilest characters ever put to print, an incarnation of evil who is almost without rival in his malice despite his every narrative contemporary being a wretch of the highest order. And yet his deplorability is equaled in degree by his eruditeness. The depths of his knowledge are shocking. Take for example when he speaks to a Mexican sergeant, the novel reads “He adduced for their consideration references to the children of Ham, the lost tribes of Israelites, Greek poets, anthropological speculations as to the propagation of the races in their dispersion and isolation through the agency of geological cataclysm and an assessment of racial traits to climatic and geological influences.” Another example later in the novel reads “In the afternoon he sat in the compound breaking ore samples with a hammer, the feldspar rich in red oxide of copper and native nuggets in whose organic lobations he purported to read news of the earth’s origins, holding an extemporary lecture in geology to a small gathering who nodded and spat.” Indeed, his monologues and lectures recur often throughout the novel, with hardly anyone there to receive them capable of keeping up with the sheer depth and density of his knowledge. He far surpasses any individual in both malice and knowledge. The novel even describes him in divine terms, with statements such as “The judge sat upwind from the fire naked to the waist, himself like some great pale deity” and “The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.” The Judge thus exists not only as an incarnation of evil but also an incarnation of knowledge, a fascinating juxtaposition that reinforces the idea that our knowledge is what allows for evil. The Judge greatly resembles the Serpent in this dual role, especially given the protreptic nature of his speeches. Murderous as any member of the Glanton Gang, if not more so, yet always seeking to instruct. The serpent has been identified as Satan and yet his temptation was ultimately an act of instruction, freeing Adam and Eve from their ignorance.

Identifying the Serpent as Satan is a defining feature of Christian orthodoxy, but it is far from the only interpretation of scripture that exists. The idea of orthodoxy in itself is misunderstood; instead of there being one original orthodoxy that had to withstand various heresies, the early history of Christianity is better understood as a time where different ideals competed for validity, with one interpretation finally winning out (before of course fracturing several times down the line). Whether this victory was for spiritual, theological, or political reasons can be debated ad nauseum. One of the more well-known of these early competing sects, the Sethians, offers a radically different interpretation of the Bible. In it the material world was not created by God but by a lesser deity afflicted with ignorance named Yaldabaoth. The God of the Old Testament is understood to be Yaldabaoth, and the God of the New Testament to be the true eternal God, reconciling the vast differences between the two of them. Under this new lens the fall of man goes from a story of corruption to one of awakening, the first step in escaping the prison of the soul that is the material world and once more reuniting with God. Thus, the Serpent is no longer an enemy of humanity but rather a Prometheus like character who plays a central role in achieving salvation. Such a status is difficult to attribute to the Judge, given his affinity for malice, however the strong dualism present in Sethian thought allows for such a comparison to work. The Serpent, a vessel for liberation it may be is still a creation of Yaldabaoth, and thus inherently corrupted as it belongs to the material world. The Judge may have achieved some level of divinity via his awakening but is still bound to the material world; salvation can only be achieved when one ascends to a level even beyond him.

Both the Kid and the Judge share an important relation to Glanton. Where the Kid represents humanity in all its potential for both good and evil, Glanton stands for only the latter. Where the Judge stands for our potential liberation and the impulses we must fight against to achieve it, Glanton represents those impulses in their purest, most brazen form. Glanton utterly lacks any of the humanity of the Kid or the enlightenment of the Judge. A passage early in the novel reads “not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.” Glanton is one whose heart is of clay, and he himself has become a part of the barbarous terrain that shapes other, the Kid being a prime example. He is a creation of Yaldabaoth through and through.

The Idea of Evil is such an interesting character because via its construction it essentially avers two of our most central fears: the fear of a meaningless and absurd world and our fear of moral responsibility. Regarding the latter, most would admit that we all have Glanton within us to some degree, however where we differ is in the level of agency we give ourselves in our salvation from such attributes. Pinning the cause of evil on a deity that is to be ultimately vanquished or some manner of ontological corruption reduces our level of responsibility and makes our failures more acceptable, inevitable even. Claiming that salvation comes from a deity reduces that responsibility even further. Perhaps this is why the Sethian way of understanding failed to become orthodoxy. The Sethian notion of salvation via gnosis is one that turns the salvific project inwards. It becomes something you achieve rather than something granted to you via grace. Imagine yourself as Griffith, standing before God and being told to choose salvation or pain for the entire human race. A simple decision it may seem, but the weight of such a responsibility breaks an astounding number of us, even when making the decision only for themselves. There is much more comfort to be found in believing it is the decision of someone else.