“The mouth of the just man shall meditate wisdom; the law of his God is in his heart, his steps do not falter. (Ps. 37: 30-31)

Within the space of a week or so Americans have witnessed three despicable acts of public violence: one taking the lives of two innocent children in Minneapolis, then a young Ukrainian woman fatally stabbed on a Charlotte bus (both acts indiscriminate and random), and culminating in the deliberate and heinous murder of popular pod-caster Charlie Kirk in Orem, Utah. Kirk was outspoken about his Christianity and fearlessly proclaimed the Kingship of Jesus Christ. Fewer than two months before his death he was urging fellow Evangelical Christians to engage in a deeper understanding of and reverence for Mary, the Mother of God. He is reported to have been attending Mass with his Catholic wife and children at least twice a month. He had become both mentor and role model to millions of millennials and generation Z kids deeply searching for something more than what this superficial hedonistic culture was offering.

Kirk was known for cheerfully engaging his left leaning opponents in honest debate on campuses around the country while convincing many that social conservatism, not the prevailing DEI and transgender madness, represented the real hope for the future of his generation. Just shy of 32 years old, Charlie was ruthlessly slain simply for defending truth as he understood it. What those who continue to despise Charlie Kirk, even after his death, seem unable to grasp is that Kirk genuinely loved the sinner even as he hated the sin. He was the proverbial good shepherd seeking to bring back any lost sheep. In this Kirk was the antithesis of Satan, the ‘accuser,’ who loves the sin yet hates the sinner. Even if one did not agree with everything Charlie expressed, you had to admire the man for his vitality, integrity, and raw courage. Another good shepherd, Bishop Joseph Strickland, has rightly pointed out we must not forget to pray for the repose of Charlie’s soul because he was human just like the rest of us. Likewise we need to pray for a repentant heart and timely conversion of Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, a young man grossly deceived by the demoniacal culture which incessantly radicalizes and alienates the young from truth and common sense.

Of course the predictable and tedious commentary about why a good God did not prevent such a tragedy will be spewing forth from social media ad nauseam. Why does God regularly allow evil to afflict good people? That question continues to mystify modern man, I believe, because our culture has adopted such a shallow understanding of the very meanings of good and evil; truth and falsehood. What is good anyway, and who are the “good people?” In the Gospel our Lord makes a seemingly odd reply to this question, “Why do you call me good? There is only One who is good.” (Mt. 19:17) Did Christ mean that only his Father is good and therefore everything else must be evil? Of course not! It was his way of teaching that goodness emanates not from ourselves but from God alone. So in order to make any sense of evil, one must first understand “the good” in its proper context.

The first thing to realize is that evil is not a ‘thing.’ Neither is it ‘nothing.’ Evil is an ontological question mark, a term that pertains to the distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘real existence.’ Evil can only exist in relationship to something good which already exists. It is a counterpoint to ‘the good,’ but one cannot logically conceive of a counterpoint unless it is preceded by some ‘point’ which it means to counter. Try playing handball without a wall on which to bounce your ball. Evil must have some pre-existing ‘good’ to oppose, otherwise the term has no rational meaning. The example of blindness is often used as an image to explain evil. Blindness is the deprivation of that ‘good’ which we know as sight. But on some dark, distant planet devoid of light the concept of blindness would have no meaning.

This means that evil is always dependent upon the existence of some prior good. Evil can be defined as either the privation or distortion (disordering) of a particular good. God first created a universe filled with good things. “God looked at everything He had made, and found it very good.” (Gen. 1:31) But God also established a hierarchy among those good things, an established natural order which ranks certain goods higher than others. At the top of this order is God himself, the greatest ‘good’ who is also the fullness of goodness, and from whom every lesser good derives. Next in the order of good things are those rational creatures whom God endowed with intellect and will ~ beginning with the angels themselves but then including mankind, albeit on a lower level. Further down the flow chart we find various animals, then sedentary life forms such as plants and finally the physical world. All these things are proclaimed by God to be “good” but in a ordered way so that we can truly say for instance that human life has more value than animal life, plants, or the earth itself.

So if God made all things in the created order to be good, where did evil originate, because God, whose entire nature is one of goodness, could never countenance evil? But as noted above, evil is not a ‘thing in itself,’ rather it is the privation or disordering of some good thing. Murder is evil because it deprives another of his life which is a good. Adultery is evil because it reorders some lesser good, pleasure, over the greater good which is that permanent marital bond which secures the family. A lie is evil for distorting or perverting the truth. Likewise, God who is all good cannot be considered the cause of evil since that would be to contradict his own nature. Therefore the root of evil must necessarily be found elsewhere, that is among the rational creatures who were first endowed with both understanding and independent wills, namely those angels who, though created in the light of divine goodness, chose by their own free wills to resist rather than to reverence their divine Creator.

Evil is the bitter fruit of that incomprehensible rebellion against the infinitely good God. The angels who joined in that revolution became a legion of demons, cast into hell according to Revelation chapter 12, under the sway of their leader and chief demon, Lucifer or Satan. Remember that evil cannot exist in a void, it must be somehow attached to a person or persons (yes, demons are persons, i.e., spiritual beings the same as those good angels, and even the most high God consisting of three divine persons). Evil and its doppelganger, sin, can only operate through the agency of persons, primarily demons but also humans who are embodied persons. (Evil may also lurk in certain ‘things’ like bad music or an ouija board when closely attached to persons.)

Of course we humans do not possess the superior intellect of the demons and so we often fall into evil through weakness or lack of understanding. And since human nature is ordered to pursue the good, evil generally conceals itself under the appearance of something good. “And the woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom.” (Gen. 3:6) Demonic evil, however, is driven by pure hatred and malice, sometimes including events that may appear to be purely natural or accidental such as a freak storm or an automobile accident. God may allow the storm to occur but it is the demons who do their best to put humans into harms way.

Although God does not actively will that some evil befall us, at times He does permit it whether to test or strengthen our faith or perhaps to bring about some greater good which we may be unable to see. “Chastised a little, they shall be greatly blessed, because God tried them and found them worthy of Himself. (Wis. 3:5) Nor did God spare his own begotten Son from evil tribulations, all for our sake. Consider Christ on the cross, the greatest evil ever perpetrated in human history, which He willingly endured solely to free humanity from the curse of evil and slavery to sin.

Knowing that the ultimate source of evil is Satan and his demonic legions, and that evil attaches to some creature whether demonic or human, it should be obvious that God could not create evil as it is something totally opposed to his nature. But in granting free will He permitted it to subsist in creatures, particularly those demons who have the power to influence and manipulate lower ordered creatures and even physical objects (at least within divinely set boundaries). This understanding prepares us to critique the Church’s most ancient and perennial heresy, Gnosticism, which today prospers openly under various guises such as New Age occultism, Freemasonry, and even Modernism. The two main principles which govern Gnosticism are 1) the search for secretive, esoteric knowledge and methods intended to liberate the person from the “original sin” of ignorance, and 2) a dualism originating in ancient Persia which posits ‘evil’ as an existential reality co-equal with ‘good.’ In this system evil is generally associated with material things whereas good is associated with the spiritual dimension. Spirit is good while anything carnal is evil implying that the human person, as a composite of soul and body, represents a “house divided.” Therefore we are living contradictions existing on two opposing plains according to the Gnostics.

I have already shown why this pernicious doctrine is gravely erroneous because it represents a false dichotomy. Evil can never be ontologically equated with the good. Evil rather is a kind of parasite which plays and feeds off of what is good. Our soul-body duality was designed by God to be complementary, the conjoining of two ‘goods’ for the benefit of the whole person. Likewise our male-female duality was divinely intended for the procreation of new life and preservation of the family, but the evil one distorts those mutual differences to play the one against the other (through feminism, divorce, etc.). Thus Gnostic dualism distorts these God given and mutually supportive complementarities as somehow working in opposition to one another, according its flawed good vs. evil paradigm.

The Gnostic implication is that evil might be just as valid a choice as the good depending on one’s particular taste or circumstance, as if simply choosing which team to support in a football contest. But if evil is afforded the ontological status of being a ‘thing in itself’ it means that God, who first created all ‘things,’ must have created evil while He was at it. This is a dangerous theological as well as philosophical error which can easily lead persons down some very wrong pathways in life. Consequently many young people get sucked into various death obsessed versions of ‘Goth’ culture via video games, tattoo parlors, Wicca fascination, and heavy metal rock. Such pernicious Gnostic dualism also encourages the young to question their God-given sexual identity by feeding and justifying any transgender fantasies the demons may offer. Likewise it rationalizes the entire LGBTQ ideology as a valid alternative to male-female sexual norms. For if anything carnal is already evil by nature, then what difference does one’s preference really make? Lust is lust, don’t you love it?

There is a philosophical maxim that a small error in principle invariably leads to large errors in conclusion. The tragic and devastating polarization that recent generations have been subjected to has yielded countless mass shootings, the pointless stabbing of a young immigrant woman on a Charlotte bus, and now the senseless assassination of Charlie Kirk for daring to hold a different point of view. Such social and moral disorientation is easily traced back to the Gnostic notion that sin and evil are merely ‘Option B’ to the more traditional ‘Option A’ representing truth and goodness. Be a Christian (privately but never publicly) or become a Satanist because, after all, “religion is all relative” and either will get you to the same (unspecified) end. With such a depressing and nihilistic frame of reference being offered them by our modern day education and cultural establishment, it is not surprising that millions of young people have flocked to Charlie Kirk’s counter-cultural message which is simply the age old message of Christianity. Either Christ must reign in your hearts or else chaos will rule the streets.

Like its Gnostic predecessor, modern ideology is failing the test of logic (which may explain why logic is no longer taught in today’s education mills). If truth is relative then there is no real truth. If evil is just another life-style choice then there is no point in striving to pursue what is good. This is the essence of the Gnostic spirit (which has been described as the heart and soul of Freemasonry). We are seeing more clearly every day where that Gnostic spirit leads society which is to complete moral and social anarchy. Charlie is just the latest victim of the vile hatred that the demonic Gnostic spirit has engendered since the days of Robespierre’s revolutionary reign of terror. Rest in Peace Charlie Kirk and may perpetual light shine upon you. He truly fought the good fight; may the rest of us have the courage to carry his light forward.

Francis J. Pierson +a.m.d.g.