“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil, and they have recognized the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so, none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1, Hayes Translation
The Weight of the Word
The word evil carries some weight. It’s heavier than other words. You don’t just use it, you wield it. It lands like a verdict. Decisive. Non-negotiable.
Why?
Let’s approach the word from different angles—see how it holds up under different pressure in different lighting. I want to examine the word itself. Not only the meaning, but the framing.
How did it get the power to become a final judgment?
When we put the word evil to work, what is its job description?
The Job Description
I’ve identified three functions.
- It can remove responsibility. As if the person was possessed, or the event wasn’t normal.
- It separates. It draws a line between us and the thing we’re calling evil.
- It closes inquiry. It ends the conversation. We stop asking questions.
It wasn’t always like this.
How “Evil” Got Heavy
Historically, “evil” wasn’t a cartoon villain lurking in a lab plotting with ACME anvils. It wasn’t a demon in the shadows. It meant bad, harmful, sick. It was a concrete term—the kind of mundane thing you could point your finger at.
Over time, the word narrows. “Bad” remained the general, concrete term, and “evil” started to become more of a specialist term.
My theory, without handing you an etymological tomb that only Heidegger could love, is that this change comes from an institution. And that institution looks a lot like a church.
Religious texts contain a ton of theological weight. You need a word that can haul that weight around in different contexts, and it needs to describe more than just outcomes. It needs to describe the people or events that brought them about.
Once that weight gets attached, the word becomes functional. It becomes a separator. A line in the sand. The redeemed on this side, the contaminated on the other. The saved up here, the rest down there. If we’re going to keep God’s hands clean, somebody somewhere must have dirty hands.
The church used Latin terms like malus and malum, the source of modern words like malfunction and malpractice. Something stopped working correctly or didn’t act how it was supposed to. The concrete backbone of the metaphysical term.
The authority we feel in the word was assigned to it, and in the grand scheme of things, not that long ago.
The Translation Problem
If it didn’t exist in the same way before, then why did Marcus say evil in the epigraph?
Let’s try a different book with the same title:
“At the start of the day, tell yourself: I shall meet people who are officious, ungrateful, abusive, treacherous, malicious, and selfish. In every case, they’ve got like this because of their ignorance of good and bad. But I have seen goodness and badness for what they are, and I know that what is good is what is morally right, and what is bad is what is morally wrong; and I’ve seen the true nature of the wrongdoer himself and know that he’s related to me – not in the sense that we share blood and seed, but by virtue of the fact that we both partake of the same intelligence, and so of a portion of the divine. None of them can harm me, anyway, because none of them can infect me with immorality. Nor can I become angry with someone who’s related to me, or hate him, because we were born to work together, like feet or hands or eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against each other is therefore unnatural – and anger and rejection count as “working against.””
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1. Waterfield Translation.
Both contain the same underlying Stoic idea. Swap out a few words, sprinkle in different modifiers, tweak punctuation, and the reading simply feels different.
Greek and Latin were widely spoken in the Roman Empire, so there’s a fluency between them that doesn’t translate cleanly to English.
Greek and Latin words can be more like terms. A container that holds a concept that could carry different meanings in different contexts. English was built around concision and brevity. When you make that choice, you can slightly alter the overall context or meaning. You set a mood.
We get from words like malum and kakos to evil because of something we all know rather well, whether you know it or not. It’s tucked neatly into the Lord’s Prayer as if it had always been there. As if it belongs. “But deliver us from evil.”
Hebrew ra was translated into Latin malum and, by Anglo-Saxon monks, into “ac alys us of yfele” around 990 AD. That’s evil’s big break. After that, its foot was firmly in the door of our modern understanding.
So when we see evil from a source that’s more than 1100 years old… Not only should we question the author’s intention and voice, but also the motives of the translator.
Honesty?
Education?
Persuasion?
Washing the hands of a higher power?
The Cost
When we can’t comprehend.
When we disapprove.
When we’re out of words.
We reach for something to describe it.
A label that communicates that urgency and establishes boundaries feels right.
But it comes at a cost: it kills curiosity. It shuts down understanding. It keeps us ignorant.
Socrates showed us that knowledge is a virtue, and we don’t intentionally move away from virtue.
The word evil is a tool. Used by ignorance to lure us away from the virtue of knowledge.
Plain truth. Rough edges.
The Question I’m Carrying Forward
When you call something evil, what are you trying to accomplish—distance, certainty, or closure?
Discover more from Plain Truth, Rough Edges
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