In the ‘Screwtape Letters’, Lewis writes through the eyes of demons who are tempting their victims and trying to pull man from Christ. Yet the demons constantly note they are unable to create anything, including evil. Screwtape, the senior tempter, directly states, “All we [demons] can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy [God] has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He [God] has forbidden.” 

Many of our social, political, or personal issues we name “evil” are not truly evil at all but perversions of the good.

Though I wish to present some new, brilliant opinion, it may very well sound old. I hope it does sound slightly old precisely because the ideas are old. They were developed and given to us by prominent Christian intellectuals of the 20th Century. We have simply not listened or chosen to forget.

Though man, myself included, is prone to apocalyptic thinking and constantly lamenting the evils of the day, G.K. Chesterton, one of the prominent Christian authors and social critics of the 20th Century, viewed the problem in the exact opposite way. In Orthodoxy, where Chesterton details how he came to believe Christianity, he writes, “The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues.”

The world is not evil or full of things created with evil. Instead, the world is full of good things that have been twisted and corrupted. Rather than merely racked by vices, “The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.” Of course, Chesterton’s “modern world” was the late 1800s and first decade of the 1900s. The detachment of Christian virtues from Christ and the rise of the completely autonomous will has now creeped slowly for over a century.

Chesterton’s twisted virtue looks like a scientist who pursues truth, but his truth is pitiless. Likewise, some prioritize pity, and yet their pity is untruthful.

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