"But evil on itself shall back recoil
And mix no more with goodness, when at last
Gather'd like scum, and settl'd to itself
It shall be in eternal restless change
Self-fed and self-consumed; if this fail
The pillar'd firmament is rottenness
And earth's base built on stubble."

-- John Milton, 1634

"Today our nation saw evil."

-- George W. Bush, September 11, 2001

The air fills with prayer this weekend as worshipers, or at least church-goers, attend the rites of Holy Week and Passover. These rituals call forth traditions and ideas born centuries ago, not least the idea that mankind is redeemable. It seems, however, that one other idea that for centuries had been a constant through these few days has declined and is out of favor. That is the idea of evil. There is something about evil today -- the word, its implications -- that discomfits up-to-date sensibilities. I think modern discomfort with evil explains, in part, the opposition to making war against Saddam Hussein.

Let me say at the outset that no attempt is being made here to diminish the sincerity of many who opposed the war, but merely, now that the battle is over, to understand the basis for their opposition and the remarkable divisions it engendered. Those who supported and opposed this war are obviously, in basic ways, not singing from the same hymnal.

I doubt that the role of evil in this event would have come up had not President Bush forced it into view. Starting on September 11 itself, Mr. Bush began to say in almost every public statement that the force confronting the United States, and the world, was "evil." I have no recollection of another recent public figure placing this concept so insistently at the center of his thought, not even the Pope. Mr. Bush quoted Psalm 23 that day: "I fear no evil for you are with me."

But the event that made it clear that talking in public about "evil" rubbed some the wrong way was Mr. Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech, in which the word appears five times ("evil is real"), most famously in the phrase, "axis of evil." That put off a great many people who inhabit the nation's political and intellectual life. They didn't like it, and said so.

This matter also has something to do with the personal animosity some express toward the president, or more accurately, their alienation from a person who unselfconsciously expresses spiritual belief in the existence of evil. Hollywood, oddly, makes us see the look of evil in a "Pianist" or "Schindler's List," then rails to prevent action against the Nazi-derived Baath Party's depravities.

Nonetheless, there might have been less squirming had the president instead called Iraq, North Korea and Iran an "axis of instability." But the tumult over the phrase at least made clear that to many modern ears that word, evil, really does sound archaic, a bit antique, so . . . religious.

John Milton, in the 1600s, lived in a place and time when everyone was a practicing Christian, no matter what they believed in private. Milton for 14 years labored on poetry that struggled with the most fundamental issues of good and evil; he gave all the best lines to the "Fiend," "Satan," for Milton never doubted the power, the appeal and the reality of evil's presence in the souls of some men. "Know ye not mee? . . . Not to know mee argues yourselves unknown."

Some 350 years later, no matter how much this particular weekend burns with ritual, it is evident that secular society, however real its benefits, doesn't dwell much on Satan or evil. It's not a subject. Even organized religion, both Catholicism and Protestantism here and in Europe, has recently dedicated its energies to more secular goals such as material justice rather than to purely spiritual goals, such as salvation or damnation, which once defined our common understanding of good and evil. Inside or outside the churches, it's not clear who believes what anymore, which wasn't true in Milton's time. What is now clear is that they don't believe in evil as John Milton believed in it, and as does, evidently, George Bush.

* * *

If this is true -- that years of declining belief have diluted evil to an abstraction -- it isn't surprising that for a great many people in the Iraq debate the idea that Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi regime were evil enough to require elimination from the civilized world simply did not compute; that's been deleted from their software. Despite the beheadings of women and the severing of dissenting tongues (Amnesty International report, 2000), the now-revealed prisons for children, the torture chambers with meat hooks, nine years of meticulous U.N. archiving of programs to produce weapons of mass destruction, the homicidal gassing of Shiites and Kurds, and a son, Uday, whose life reveals the Husseins to be, more than anything, Neronic voluptuaries, despite what this so obviously adds up to, it could never be "sufficient cause."

Milton thought that should evil win, then earth's base was "built on stubble." Not yet.

Updated April 18, 2003