Re: (no subject)


Subject: Re: (no subject)
From: Cade Bois (cadere@HOTMAIL.COM)
Date: Sun Oct 17 1999 - 21:35:23 EDT


> > Dear Group:
> >
> > Just re-reading Lancelot. Any ideas about the concept of absolute evil?
> As
> > Flannery O'Connor said, it walks about this world on two legs.
>
> That'd leave a lot to lance.
>
> Ken Armstrong
> --
>
Another (Catholic) author, Francois Mauriac, has said "Evil is Someone,
Someone who is multiple and whose name is legion....It is one thing to be in
the realm of the demons, as we all are when we have lost the state of grace,
and quite another to be held and surrounded, literally possessed by him." I
raise question with the phrase "absolute evil" personally, because (allow me
to draw from Aquinas here) evil is parasitic upon the good, therefore always
in relation to the good. The idea of "absolute" cannot be reconciled with
this kind of contingency in my own mind. I could be wrong--surely I'm being
too philosophical. But in a phil-theo-literary sense, perhaps it is simply
the perverted, and not merely fallen, state that humanity finds itself in
all too often where, as Mauriac suggests, the person ceases to be free at
all (since to the Catholic mind, as with Mauriac, Percy or Flannery,
authentic freedom belongs solely to the realm of God, and separation from
God is a potential reality for any creature with free will) and therefore is
possessed by the One who is Evil. Those are my thoughts, for what it's
worth.

______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Thu Jan 11 2001 - 12:52:21 EST