Even though the news reports on the tragedy at Virginia Tech have virtually disappeared from the mass media, the image of the murderer is still on my mind. We now know that he made meticulous plans over a fair period of time before he actually began to act. That period of planning made him similar in organization to the two young men at Columbine high school. Their planning made me think of an observation once made by G. K. Chesterton who insisted that a madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason. Now that is a paradox worthy of Chesterton and, allowing for obvious counter instances, holds a profound truth. There is something wildly horrible about someone acting out of absolute rationality when that person is, at the same time, bereft of a sense of compassion, imagination, and all the other characteristics of the authentically human. Many years ago my former colleague, Richard Rubenstein, argued that the Nazis soon realized that anti-Jewish rage would soon dissipate itself if it were allowed to follow the trajectory of the pogroms. Thus, the "Final Solution" had to be rationalized and it was in that rationalization, carried out by mediocre but efficient clerks like Eichmann, that the full evil of the Shoah showed itself. These thoughts first came to me while watching the Cable News shows as they trotted out consultants and various Talking Heads to pontificate and harrumph. What seemed to me absent from those exchanges was anything remotely close to a consideration of the capacity of the not fully human to do EVIL things and, it further seems to me, to talk about the nature of human evil is not easily reduced to a sound bite; it is, however, a topic that needs attention in this therapeutic culture in which we find ourselves.

Lawrence Cunningham is John O'Brien professor of Theology (Emeritus) at the University of Notre Dame.

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