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Evil Is Not the Opposite of Good, It Is the Opposite of Truth, By D.P. Curtin – Brown Pelican Society of Lousiana

Evil Is Not the Opposite of Good, It Is the Opposite of Truth, By D.P. Curtin

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Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_The_Fall_of_the_Rebel_Angels. Image from Wikimedia Commons

By D.P. Curtin, Catholic Exchange, Oct. 10, 2025

Dr. D.P. Curtin is a psychologist and translator of early and medieval church texts. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Scriptorium Project.

 

Dermot DP Curtin_HeadshotOur common-sense moral imagination often assumes that there are two opposite forces in the world: good and evil, locked in perpetual conflict, like twin powers of equal strength vying for dominance. This dualistic picture is misleading. It risks granting to evil a kind of dignity and weightiness it does not truly possess. I would like to posit an alternative moral theory, one that is subtler, more insidious, and indeed more perverse: that evil has no true essence of its own. Rather, it is purely parasitic, existing only as the distortion of truth.

St. Augustine, wrestling with the Manichean heresy that saw good and evil as two coeternal principles, made a decisive break by asserting that evil is privatio boni (the absence of good). Just as darkness is not a positive reality but the absence of light, so too evil is not something in itself, but the negation of what is. By this reasoning, we might extend St. Augustine’s hypothesis further. Evil is not exclusively the absence of good. It is a distortion, corruption, and falsification. Evil functions not simply as a void but as a perverse mimicry: it counterfeits the good, while at the same time denying the truth of what is. ….

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