Peter Kreeft on God and Man, Good and Evil

What the great novels tell us about the great truths:

If the number of books I have by an author tells you what I think of the writer, then Peter Kreeft must be greatly liked by me. And he is. I happen to have 26 books by the Catholic philosopher who has taught at Boston College for so many years now.

He is 88 years old and is still writing. And given that he has penned over 80 books, I still have a long way to go in reading all his material. Yesterday I wrote an article on his newest book: The Two Greatest Novels Ever Written: The Wisdom of The Lord of the Rings and The Brothers Karamazov (Word On Fire, 2025): https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/03/11/the-worlds-greatest-novels/

Here I want to look a bit further at this short but important book, offering some key quotes along the way. After a lengthy Introduction he has two main sections: Part 1 is on Evil and Part 2 is on Good. In the introductory remarks to Part 1 he says this:

All stories are about some kind of evil. There were no stories in the Garden of Eden until evil snaked in.

 

Some literary critic once reduced all plots to twelve. Another reduced them to seven. I reduced them to one. All stories have a single plot: the tension, or war, or struggle, between some kind of good and evil.

 

Without evil, there are no stories, no “news,” either “bad news” or “good news” (“gospel,” “God spell”). The two always go together, for the “good news” is always the war against, and the conquest of, the bad news. The Good News is not that “everything is okay.” First of all, that is a Big Lie (and thus a very popular one), and second, it’s not even fake news because it’s not news. It’s not a story….

 

The “Good News” of the Bible is that “God whupped the devil.” The Good News is not a philosophy, an eternal truth, a state of being. It is a contingent, fragile, dramatic, and perilous event. That’s what makes it interesting. Even if the Gospel is a lie, it is the world’s most interesting line. It’s not a platitude; it’s a headline. It’s about war. In fact, it’s about the war, the war behind and under all wars, private and public. (p. 37)

Kreeft begins Chapter 3, “Evil and the Ring in LOTR,” by looking at technology:

We, too, have put our power into our rings: our technology. We have disappeared into our screens like the girl in the movie Poltergeist. We do not see Sauron because he is too close; he is ourselves. And paradoxically, that is why no one identifies with him. It is no accident that we cannot see our own face as we can see the faces of others.

 

Of course, technology as such is not evil; in fact, it is proper to human nature. But its power is addictive….

 

We have put our most fundamental identity, and our faith and hope and love, into the things we have made, our idols, our Rings of Power: our technology and its apparent control. We are controlled by our control. This (power, control) is our new answer to the question of what is the summum bonum or “greatest good,” the meaning of human life on earth…. (pp.57-58)

He goes on to say this:

Controversial issues today are not theological, but anthropological, psychological, and moral. Most disastrously, we have lost the innate, intuitive, inner, instinctive sense of objective, real, authoritative, non-negotiable moral good (and evil as its lack), especially the previously universal consensus of a “natural moral law” known by conscience, God’s universal prophet in the soul. That loss is what C.S. Lewis called “the abolition of man” and what Pope Benedict XVI called the “dictatorship of moral relativism.” The world of LOTR is a premodern world before this “death of God”; the world of BK is a Nietzschean modern world where God is beginning to die; both fictions tell us more about the difference God makes than most religious instruction does. (pp.59-60)

In the Conclusion, “The Issue of the nature of Man” Kreeft ties these themes together:

The fundamental philosophical issue of our time, and of these two books that are so relevant to our time, is not the nature of God, but the nature of man.

 

What are the consequences of the biblical definition of man as being made in the image of God? What does the denial of that definition entail in practical life? (p. 160)

He teases this out, in part by appealing to The Abolition of Man by Lewis, which he calls the “most prophetic book of the twentieth century”. He then says this:

As man is dependent on God, anthropology is dependent on ontology, or metaphysics. What we are depends on what is. If matter does not exist, the body is an illusion. If spirit does not exist, the soul is an illusion. If both do not exist, both are illusions.

 

And the two divisions of philosophy that study the two distinctively human powers of knowing and choosing, or reason and conscience – namely, epistemology and ethics – also depend on metaphysics, which is the philosophical science of the real, of being, of what is; for what we can know depends on what is, and what we should choose depends on both what is and on what we can know. If truth and goodness are subjective illusions or feelings, and not objective realities, all our questioning and questing, all our inquiry and desire, and all our curiosity and longing are as meaningless as sexual desire in a sexless species or hunger for meat on the part of a robot.

 

The fact that man is the image of God in his mind and will is the reason why truth and love are the two supreme values, why love is the absolute truth (it is, after all, the essential nature of God) and why truth must be loved, and loved absolutely. Man’s primary need is reality, being. His deepest thirst is ontological. Even a thinking that is a thinking of everything else but not of reality is worthless. And even a love that is a love of everything else but not of reality is worthless. (pp. 160-161)

He closes the book with these remarks:

In LOTR, man is only one of the species, but Tolkien’s anthropology is also evident in hobbits, elves, orcs, dwarves, wizards, and even ents, because these are personifications, or species-ifications, of our own inner hobbit, elf, orc, dwarf, wizard, and ent….

 

All species are corruptible, and “corruptio optimi pessima” (corruption of the best is the worst). The corruption of the best and greatest species (Maiar) is the worst (Sauron, who is like a snake who has grown wings and become a great, proud dragon), while the corruption of the least and humblest species (hobbits) is the most miserable and pitiable (Gollum, who is like a dragon who has lost his wings and become a little, low, sneaky snake). Yet the highest species is defeated by the lowest: Sauron, one of the Maiar or angelic gods, is defeated by the lowest of all hobbits, Gollum, aided by Frodo and Sam – or by Frodo and Sam, aided by Gollum.

 

In the bleakest of times there is hope, and usually from the most unlikely sources. The light of the single star that Sam saw gleaming through the murk and mists of Mordor, in the passage of LOTR that has struck the heart of many a reader “like a shaft,” has not been extinguished and never can be. No matter how dark the days ahead, there is “light and I beauty for ever beyond its reach.” Even if we fall, even if our civilization falls (as all civilizations, like all individuals, do), God never falls. He is beyond the reach of evil, but evil is not beyond his reach.

 

The issue is, ultimately, one of metaphysics. Being cannot be defeated by nonbeing, but nonbeing can be defeated by Being. As C.S. Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, discovering the primacy of the ontological thirst, “It is more important that Heaven should exist than that any of us should reach it.” This discovery made him surprised by its joy. Like Sam seeing the star in Mordor. Like Alyosha seen the “threads” of sobornost after Father’s Zossima’s death. Like you, reading these two books. It’s not fiction or fantasy; it’s reality. (pp. 163-164)

Those are comforting words to end on indeed.

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