ABSTRACT

The personalist project sets the person at the center of the moral universe. What is inimical to the person or destructive to the person is potentially evil. Ultimately what is destructive to the person is the refusal of the invitation of friendship with God or collaboration with God. When we fail to collaborate with God in our efforts to bring things out of the realm of possibility and into the realm of the actual, the things we bring into being are often monstrous or inimical to the well-being of persons. There is a distortion or privation of the process by which the individual agent intellect brings intelligible forms into being. When the effort involves interactions with other persons there is a failure to grasp the value inherent in the self or other person. The cause of the failure may be many things, perhaps the agent intellect prematurely terminates the transfer of what the medieval scholastics called intelligible forms out of the realm of the possible or potential existence and into the real and actual. Or it could be due to a failure to use the transcendentals to guide the actualization process. Or more frequently it could be due to a failure to grasp the unique value of the person you are interacting with. In this chapter I look at what an eschatological personalism can tell us about certain forms of evil. To forecast the key conclusions: some forms of evil, especially those related to group-inspired depersonalization of self and others, must be considered more than just privation of Being. All forms of evil act to delay the Parousia—the coming age.