It’s not part of us
22 October 2016It’s entirely obvious that wickedness and evil are the result of our disposition. Evil isn’t a component part of our nature, but the result of our free will. The devil is called the preeminent evil one, because of his excessive wickedness and because, despite the fact that we’ve done nothing to harm him, he wages an implacable war against us. This is why the Lord didn’t say: ‘Deliver us from evil ones’, but ‘from the evil one’. He thus teaches and instructs us not to reject our fellow human beings at all, over whatever harm they do us, but to direct our enmity away from them and towards him, since he’s the root cause of all evils.