FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - PURE EVIL

A SCHOOLBOY MURDERS HIS TEACHER IN COLD BLOOD: THE THREAT OF RADICAL EVIL
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Rant Number 607       6 November 2014


‘I wasn’t in shock. I was happy. I had a sense of pride’ 15-year-old Will Cornick averred, after savagely stabbing to death his female schoolteacher during a lesson. A crime deemed ‘inexplicable’ by the prosecutor.

‘She deserves more than death, more than pain, torture and more than anything than we can understand’, he raved on Facebook before doing the bloody deed. Yet apparently the victim had not punished or picked on him in any special way.

Teenage schoolboys are passionate beings – growing up, sexual awakening, the storms of adolescence, all that. That includes violent, aggressive drives. Most youths don’t go on to implement their aggressions so wickedly, however. Why this?

A totally irrational hatred? That doesn’t help much. David Hume, a placid and urbane Enlightenment thinker, argued that reason is impotent in human affairs. Sentiment and feelings are what motivates people to action, not theorems, algebra or logic. It follows that hating a person does not require reasons. Hume of course postulated universal benevolence but malevolence can motivate, too.
‘I do not love thee, Dr Fell. The reason why I cannot tell…but this I know, and know full well, I do not love thee, Dr Fell’, the nursery rhyme goes. Luckily, the student never implemented his dislike with a thrust of the dagger.

Not nurture. No obvious mental illness. No broken family. No history of violence or abuse – those currently fashionable, stupid pseudo-explain-all categories. ‘Decent, loving and responsible’ his parents are described. So, a good-looking boy, from a good family and getting good marks at his good Roman Catholic school.
Why the evil deed then?

Psychopathology? Does that mean madness? The easy way out society favours when confronted with extreme breakers of social and ethical norms. Still, psychiatrists have not certified Will Cornick insane and the judge has sentenced him to a minimum of 20 years accordingly. That implies the Court considers him morally responsible, i.e. not demented.

Is Will by nature evil? But again, what does that mean? Whenever the official spokesmen of our Zeigeist blather of evil they invoke material, social or genetic influences. They don’t get a purchase in this case. So…what?

You went out to work or to shop this morning. You locked your front door. And the door of your car after you parked it. At the Bank you shielded your PIN number as you keyed it in. Why did you do it? For security, naturally. Burglars, car thieves, credit card fraudsters – they exist. Some driven by need, maybe. Lucre, material gains motivate them but…what if someone vandalises your house or your car just for the hell of it? There is a propensity to evil in human nature that cannot be neatly explained away by reference to straight material causes.

In the movie Dirty Harry Clint Eastwood plays a detective chasing a villain called Scorpio. Scorpio kidnaps a girl and buries her alive, despite getting the ransom money. Why does he do it, someone asks? ‘Because he enjoys it’, Harry responds. Yes, for fun.

Liberal-democratic, Christianophobic Britain does not countenance passe’ theological explanations, appeals to metaphysics, the supernatural, demonic influences and the like. Leaving Old Nick aside, the priest believes that where secular, humanist and scientist ideologies fall short, Christian doctrine helps.

There is probably no religious teaching more abhorred, more hooted at, more mocked by our present culture than that of original sin. Indeed, positions as wide apart as liberal Protestantism, Islamism and secularism are united in its rejection. Yet original sin is the golden key that unlocks the code, the insight that solves the puzzle, the ‘Open Sesame’ formula that causes the light to dawn upon the whole.

It is a sacred truth however that man is both fallen and redeemed. As the first Adam caused humanity’s ruination, Christ, the second Adam, brings about man’s restoration, his salvation. So the outworking of sin manifests itself in the person of Will Cornick but that simultaneously ushers in the promise of redemption. A legal system that has no place for forgiveness, for the offender’s healing and redeeming shows itself implicated in man’s fallen state. The defendant was under 16 when he murdered yet the judge ordered his name and details to be made public. Does this betray an attitude of vengefulness?

The boy’s prison life will be rendered much harder by the disclosure. The Court might as well have commanded to have him brutalised, beaten and tortured. ‘Serves him right!’ the tough-minded will cheer. That is worse than inhuman – it is anti-Christian. God the Father does not desire the death of a sinner but that he may repent and live. And God the Son was crucified to make that redemption possible.

All decent and good people are dismayed and revolted by the clean-faced lad’s ferocity. Likewise, the right-thinking authorities, the media brigade, the puffed-up ‘Establishment’ folks, MPs, the chatterati and the like must feel especially threatened. This is pure evil! In the midst of a happy, democratic, egalitarian and hedonistic society. And you cannot fathom this darkness! It refuses to be accounted for in the usual ways. Why didn’t this lad smoke pot, get a girl friend, get laid, get drunk and the like? All normal, reassuring and acceptable ways of being a teenager. Why such radical shattering of the pattern? A danger lurks…could this frightening darkness engulf other youths? Worse, could the darkness be even inside all?

Right occasion to meditate on St John’s words: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.(1:5)

Revd Frank Julian Gelli


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