What Evil Is

But human recklessness, looking not to what is helpful and fitting but to what it was able to do, began to do the opposite. Moving the hands the wrong way, it made people commit murder. It led their hearing away into disobedience, and their other members into adultery instead of the lawful begetting of children. It turned the tongue from right speech to slander, insult and perjury; the hands again to stealing and to striking their fellow human beings; the sense of smell to many kinds of scents that stir up lust; the feet to be swift to shed blood; and the belly to drunkenness and gluttony that is never satisfied. All these things are a vice and sin of the soul, and there is no cause of them at all except the rejection of better things. [a]

It is just as if a charioteer had mounted his chariot on the racecourse, and then paid no attention to the goal he ought to be driving toward, but ignored it and simply drove the horse as he could, or in other words as he liked. Often he runs into those he meets, and often down steep places, rushing wherever the speed of his team carries him, and he thinks that by running like this he has not missed the goal. For he looks only at the running, and does not see that he has gone wide of the goal. In the same way the soul too, turning from the way that leads to God and driving the members of the body beyond what is proper, or rather, being driven along with them by her own doing, sins and brings harm on herself. She does not see that she has strayed from the way and swerved from the goal of truth. That goal is what the Christ-bearing man, the blessed Paul, was looking to when he said, “I press on toward the goal, for the prize of the high calling of Christ Jesus.” So the holy man, making the good his mark, never did what was evil.