Good, Evil and Humility Chris Selmys Originally published in Issue IV of Vulgata,  January, 2002.

We must navigate a most narrow and precarious path on our march towards the holiness to which we are all called. What I wish to bring to your attention is the obvious fact that one can stray from this route on either of two sides. It seems to me that the more we fear falling to our doom as a result of wandering too far to one side the more likely we are two lose our footing on the other with disastrous result. The enemy is a clever tactician and will make use of any weakness, including over-zealousness in one particular respect. Now, the devil's standard bag of tricks is probably fairly well known to most of our readers, however it is markedly less effective in the case of people who are actively striving to do God's will. Nevertheless the devil does not then resign and consider the battle to be lost. Indeed, he perceives that he is dealing with a big fish and concludes that any additional effort required to ensnare it will be well worth it. Now, I did say that our opponent is clever but I will emphasize that he is not original. Every temptation really boils down to the same thing and they all follow the basic formula laid down in the Garden of Eden. The serpent will always attempt to make evil seem to us to be good. It is helpful to remember that although he can attempt to disguise the nature of a thing (good or evil) he cannot disguise it's degree quite as effectively (small good or great good, minor evil or terrible evil). This does not mean that he does not try to trivialize a sin when he is tempting us with it or inflate it to the point of absurdity when we have already committed it, he most certainly does. But this does mean that very great evils usually need to be disguised as very great goods. When the serpent tempted Adam and Eve with the sin that caused the fall of Man, he told them that it would make them as gods. Abortion, probably the greatest evil of our time, 400 Holy Innocents are butchered every minute worldwide, and yet it has a great many supporters who will claim that it must be widely available in order for women to be "free", that it is better to tear a child into pieces than to give it up for adoption. They will even impose abortion on poor countries as a pre-requisite to food and medical aid.

To further illustrate my point, consider the following: we are able to think of something like eating one more chocolate than is good for us as either a very minor pleasure or as a very small mistake, it is very difficult to consider it as anything else. By the same token, a very great evil must be made to seem to be a very great good if a man will consent to it. Nobody will commit a pre-meditated murder unless they mistakenly though genuinely believe that they will benefit enormously from it in some way. The woman who pays a hired killer called a doctor to eviscerate her unborn child truly hopes that this will solve all of her problems. When Martin Luther struck the blow whose continued effects over the years have now split the mystical body of Christ, which is the Church, into fully 30,000 pieces he was acting out of the best of all possible intentions.  Because we have been given free will, a gargantuan potential for good necessarily means an equal and opposite capacity for evil. Lucifer was the brightest of the angels before he fell, but boy, did he ever fall. Our Father in Heaven gives each of us a certain amount of potential but our free will determines which way it will go. Now, each of us are also given very particular unique gifts and we must use these as much as possible for the greater glory of God. Regrettably, this does not always happen. In fact, this is one of the ways particularly favoured by the devil for attacking devout Christians who are better protected against his more standard deceptions, actually, the only one I have room to treat at this time. A common view among devout Christians who are trying to practice the virtue of humility seems to be that the various special graces that each individual has been blessed with are nothing more than yet another temptation to pride. They will go to great pains to deny their very real and actual talents, often pretending that they do not exist at all. Instead they tend to favour acting out  a stereotype of holiness which is almost always fairly transparent and unconvincing. God could easily have made  a flock of holy automatons if that was what He wanted but He is much greater than that. What results from this false humility is a very serious sin of omission because we then do not allow God to work through us in the way that He intended. Indeed, the closer someone is to God, the more they are distinguishable form everyone else who is close to God. That is why every saint is so distinctive. Being holy therefore consists in conforming ourselves as closely as possible to what God intends us to be like, not to an artificial standard of what we think a holy person should be like.