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“No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.”–G.K. Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown

I hold two literary opinions that I rarely discuss with friends, because they are the sorts of opinions that make one unpopular. The first is that CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series is better than JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The second is that GK Chesterton’s Father Brown is a better detective than Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. In both cases, my reasoning is the same: there are far more serious and profound ideas at stake in Lewis and Chesterton’s work than there are in Tolkien’s and Doyle’s. The latter works are entertaining. The former are important.

I am not going to talk more about Lewis and Tolkien here, but I do want to talk about why Father Brown is my favorite fictional detective. Sherlock Holmes solves crimes through precise logic and a vast storehouse of knowledge, which is way cool and spectacular to watch. Others solve crimes by intrepid detective work, procedural maneuvers, or hard-boiled moxie. Father Brown solves them by understanding human nature.

Chesterton’s fourth collection of Father Brown mysteries, The Secret of Father Brown, is set in a frame narrative in which a wealthy American asks Father Brown how he has managed to solve mysteries that nobody else can solve. He wants to know the secret, and Father Brown obliges: “You see,” he says, “it was I who killed all those people.”

What he means by is that, in order to solve a murder, he must first recognize the he is capable of committing the same crime. He taps into the evil that he is capable of and, in a very real sense, becomes the murderer. When he completely understand the point of the view of the murderer, he has no trouble solving the murder. To do this, he must empty himself of “the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls.” He must acknowledge the fact that he is capable of every imaginable deed. And he can never argue that any type of evil is foreign to his human nature.

I reread The Wisdom of Father Brown this week precisely because I needed this reminder. When I heard the news last Sunday that nearly 60 people were killed, and nearly 500 more wounded by a Las Vegas gunman, all of my inclinations were to label the shooter as something fundamentally not like me: an inhuman action, an unfathomable act, pure evil, something foreign and alien to my nature. And from my reading of the news this week, I observe that I was not alone.

It is comforting to cast evil as something completely outside of human nature. It’s how we reassure ourselves that we are good, and that most people we know are good, and that somebody firing a thousand rounds of ammunition into a crowd does not share any part of our nature. We know that we would never, under any circumstances, do such a thing, and that allows us to expel pure evil from our species and take comfort in our common humanity.

But this is a lie. If we can learn anything from the 20th century’s tortured history of atrocity and genocide it is that acts of supreme evil are generally committed by people a lot like us. Sometimes they are following orders, or trying to get a promotion, or just acting in service of their country or cause. The idea that there are a small number of purely evil people in the world who somehow lack the ability to empathize with others is itself a colossal failure to emphasize with others.

And the consequences of believing the lie are severe: until we recognize our own capacity for evil, we can never understand it. If we never understand it, we cannot prevent it. But if we face it head on and learn how to control the evil that we are capable of, we become capable of influencing others. Because the same humans who are capable of great evil are also capable of truth and beauty and goodness and love. All of that is part of human nature too.

Chesterton was a religious writer in an irreligious environment, and he believed that the claims of religion should be taken seriously. One of those claims is that our primary responsibility as human beings is to recognize and act on our fundamental spiritual kinship with other human beings. Talking about “pure evil” or “inhuman evil” is a cop out. The real problem is human evil, which, like human goodness, is never pure, always complicated, and very much a part of our natures too.