The Opposite of the Holy

In recent years, Matthew Fox has chosen to bring back the word evil. Not only has he proposed to rethink evil as a reality rather than an abstraction, but has defined it most recently as the opposite of the sacred or the holy. This is the deep conviction that animates his book Trump & the MAGA Movement as Antichrist: Recognizing the Archetype of Evil in Our Time, recently reissued with updates.

I have come to realize that the opposite of evil is not the good. Bad is the opposite of good. The opposite of evil is the sacred, the holy. A recovery of the sacred is key to working through evil. And what is the sacred? The sacred is that which is bigger than us and has brought us here. The sacred is that which makes us, rather than what we make. The sacred is beyond words and is one reason we call on art and artists, stories and storytellers, to invite us into the sacred. And to take on the forces of evil. Rabbi Jesus taught this way.*

I would like to unpack and comment on these lines. Augustine of Hippo, writing in the 4th/5th century CE, is generally recognized as the first Western thinker who treated evil as a philosophical matter. In his youth he joined the Manicheans precisely because they offered a solution to the problem of evil.

As it is the case with all cosmic dualisms, Manicheans ascribed all evil realities to an evil principle, eternally fighting against the good principle. This move effectively absolved God from all responsibility: bad things happen to people because Evil causes them. 

Later, moving toward a more satisfying monism — God as the only universal monarch — Augustine knew that evil needed to be explained, and he came up with a memorable definition: evil is the absence of good — a lack, rather than a reality in itself. Such a definition has merit, but it also created much dissatisfaction in the ensuing centuries. 

In Neoplatonism, the One — the origin of the universe — emanates light/good outward. The farthest regions are progressively less enlightened, until some locales are barely reached. In the Augustinian versions of neoplatonic philosophy, evil is where light does not enter sufficiently. This explains why evil is the absence of good, but it also implies that the dark regions are those of matter, understood as heavy and dull. Consequently, really spiritual people abandon as much as possible their material husks and soar toward the immaterial One.

This sophisticated version of the Platonic notion of the body as the tomb of the soul, is quite difficult to reconcile with the positive attitude toward body and matter expressed at the very beginning of the Bible (cf. Genesis 1).

The definition of evil as the absence of good also seems to misrepresent certain important characteristics of evil, namely its huge capacity for destruction, its cunningness and its deceit, even its apparent sadism. The biblical personification of the forces of evil as demons seems to grasp much better what evil is in people’s experience. The anodyne phrase absence of good does not. 

I hope that this briefly sketched history helps understanding the shift that Matthew is proposing by saying that evil is the opposite of the sacred/holy, rather than of good. He recognizes that where there is evil, good is absent. But that is not the same as saying that absence of good is a sufficient definition of evil.

It is, in the first place, a question of intensity. Evil tears people apart, while the Augustinian definition seems suited better for an afternoon tea chat.

Moving our talk from the moral plane of good vs. bad to the truly spiritual plane of sacred vs. evil surely plunges us into a deeper ontological level — without forcing us to talk literally about the devil.

* Matthew Fox.Trump and the MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: Recognizing the Archetype of Evil in Our Time. Lake Drive Books 2026, p. 6.

Banner Image: Confrontation of Good and Evil, Virtue and Vice. French tapestry, ca. 1505. Photo by Wuselig. Wikimedia Commons.

Queries for Contemplation

Do you find relevant any definition of evil? Are you helped by calling evil the opposite of the sacred?

Related Readings by Matthew Fox

The Beloved Will Guide You: St. John of the Cross and the Triple Dark Night of Our Times (Available for pre-order.)

Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society. 

The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’ s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved. 

Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality. 

Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth. 

A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice. 

Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet. 

Charles Burack, ed.,  Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality. 

Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation.