Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

98 BRUNO HIDBERSt. Augustine’s definition seems to express that evil is both aprivation and a power that is at work in the world. Evil is thatwhich harms, breaks apart and destroys an order or a life. Evil isthat which impedes, diverts or slows the achievement of a goal.In this sense, evil is an attack against being, life or the good. Thedefinition of St. Augustine is verified by such contemporarysocial scientists as the anthropologist, Erich Fromm, the scholarof myth and religion, Karl Kerényi, and also by theologians suchas Emil Brunner or Hermann Häring. All agree in affirming thatevil is that which induces anguish and non-meaning, which leadsto disintegration, destruction and death. 8These problems of definition demonstrate that the distinctionsamong kinds of evil mentioned above must be taken withcaution. If it is true that the human being, in the same moment,can be the author and the victim of evil, then precisely where isthe boundary between moral evil, physical and metaphysicalevil, and social evil? Where does each kind of evil begin andwhere does it end? Why do we deny evil in the same moment aswe commit it? How is it that we feel ourselves as its authorsand its victims at one and the same time? 9 The social scienceshave highlighted how much freedom and conditioning areintertwined. This makes it hard to specify with empirical precision,so to speak, where my personal responsibility begins, andin what sense I am the author or the victim of evil. The difficulties,or rather, the impossibility of an exact and exhaustive definitionof evil indicate at the epistemological level that we willnever be able to know evil at its core and in its depths and thatwe will never be its master. Evil is and remains the “mysteriuminiquitatis.” 108Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York:Holt, 1973). Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology, trans.Olive Wyon (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1947). Karl Kerényi,„Das Problem des Bösen in der Mythologie,“ in Studien aus dem C.G.Jung-Institut Zürich XIII (Zürich: Rascher, 1961), 9-24. Hermann Häring, DasProblem des Bösen in der Theologie (Darmstadt: WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft, 1985), 1-3.9The traditional formula would say that each man in the samemoment is subject to original sin and is capable of personal sin.102 Thessalonians 2:7. See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans.Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).