Andrew Klavan on evil and beauty

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast interview. To listen to the interview, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, June 11th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Finding beauty in tragedy.

Author Andrew Klavan spent years as a screenwriter and crime novelist. But his latest work explores how to find the light in dark stories—both true and fictional.

MAST: His latest book: The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness looks at how seeing evil for what it is can help us think more clearly about God. WORLD’s Mary Reichard read the book and talked to Klavan about it. Here’s an excerpt from a longer interview.

MARY REICHARD: Andrew, welcome. It’s great to have you with us.

ANDREW KLAVAN: Thank you, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

REICHARD: In the book you generally describe some very heinous murders from real life and from the art world. One of those real life stories is the story of Cain and Abel. Why do you think that story still holds such weight in understanding evil?

KLAVAN: The murder of Abel by Cain is the first thing that happens after the fall of man. And it sets the tone of history in the same way if you're traumatized in your childhood, that trauma can repeat and repeat throughout your life. The brother battle is the whole story of the Old Testament. One generation after another is engaged in a brother trying to seize power from the other brother. And all the themes that go into that: envy, inner strife, the kind of idea that...murder in some way as a kind of suicide, kind of killing of your own soul. All of those themes are involved in the murder of Cain and Abel.

REICHARD: In the book, you describe atheist philosophy and your own conclusion that it just doesn’t adequately make sense of the moral order. How did you come to that conclusion?

KLAVAN: Because I had read a very, very dark novel called Crime and Punishment about an axe murder when I was 19, I was absolutely convinced that morality was not relative, that you had to make an argument that some things are just wrong. When you read the axe murder in Crime and Punishment, you just think to yourself, no, there's no planet on which this is right. So I was looking for an atheist who could make sense of the fact that there was a moral order. And finally I came upon the work of the Marquis de Sade, who is the psychopath from whom we get the word sadism. And his work is sadistic pornography interspersed with brilliant philosophy. Why is it okay to torture somebody for your own pleasure? And I read that and I thought that is the first atheist philosophy that actually holds together. Because what de Sade said is there's no God, therefore there is no morality. Therefore you should do whatever gives you pleasure. And in nature, the powerful overcome the weak. So why wouldn't you take pleasure in being the powerful and torment the weak? I thought, that makes sense, but it's hell. It's horrific. And so I made the only leap of faith I ever made in my journey to God, which is I thought, I believe that that's wrong.

MARY REICHARD: Hm. I know you’ve had some criticism about being a Christian and writing about these dark things. So help us to understand. We know scripture says hating one’s brother is as bad as murder. So how do you justify exploring depravity to show separation from God?

KLAVAN: Because I think that that's where the line is drawn. And one of the things about murder is it because it's so horrific, because we understand right away that it's bad, it makes you think, well, what's bad about it? Why is it bad? And what's bad about it is the fullness and sacredness of another person. I think murder is the absolute statement. It's the absolute dramatization of that sanctity and why, and once you deny that sanctity, you put yourself in a position of having done evil.

REICHARD: Continuing along that line, what do you think about the criticism that studying evil is like eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that it’s plain old sin dressed up as insight?

KLAVAN: I'm always having Philippians thrown at me, people saying, you know, should meditate on what's good and noble and true. if that verse, I mean, that's a complicated verse and an interesting one, but if all that means is it's like the song from Peter Pan, you know, think of the happiest things as the same as having wings. You have to remember that Peter Pan never grew up. And if you have a faith that cannot exist in the real world, you are going to lose that faith when the real world confronts you with the kind of suffering and evil that it does confront you with. When I look at plays that are about horrible things like Macbeth, is always my best example. It's one of the most beautiful plays ever written, but it's about nihilism, death, betrayal. Every evil that you can think of is in that play. And yet it is a beautiful thing because it actually shows you what evil is and what it does to you, how it separates you from the moral order and therefore separates you from all meaning and all love.

REICHARD: So I’m curious: is there a way to determine if art is Christian? If it contains violence or sorrow what should we make of those elements?

KLAVAN: Well, I believe that all truth is Christian. This is one of the things that I think is a shame about the modern world and religion in the modern world, is I think that we put Christianity aside. You go to church on Sunday, you say certain things, and those are Christian things, and other things are not Christian things. I don't actually believe that. I believe that if there is a God, which I think I not only think there is, I have complete faith that there is, that's the center of reality. That's the nature of reality. So I think that any true story is, will, you know, all things work together for those who love God. I think any true story will express God. Art that is honest will be Christian art. Someone once asked the great justice, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a devout Catholic, what does a Christian judge look like? And he said, he looks like a good judge. And I think that that's what Christian art looks like. It looks like good art.

REICHARD: You talk about good art and bad art and you write about Michelangelo’s Pieta–the sculpture showing Mary holding the body of Jesus. What do you think that depiction of suffering teaches us about beauty?

KLAVAN: It ends with the Pietà, which I believe is the most beautiful work of sculpture in the world. It's a picture of a woman with her dead son, Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus. And so it is a picture of the saddest possible thing that can happen to a human being in life, for a mother to lose her child. There is simply nothing sadder or more tragic than that. And then it goes beyond that since this is the world losing its God for a moment in that moment of death. It's a revelation of our estrangement from God that we would crucify him when we found him, when we saw him right in front of us. It is absolutely the worst moment in human history. And yet, and yet, Michelangelo made it beautiful. I think probably the central thing that keeps people from believing is the question, how can there be an all good, all knowing God when the world is so full of evil? And I don't think all of the usual Christian answers carry the day. The idea of, it's for free will and there has to be evil for there to be free will and the world is broken and Adam and Eve and all this stuff. None of that really helps you when you're in the midst of evil, when you're in the midst of suffering, when you're in the midst of darkness. But the idea that we might be a small part of a beauty that we can't see, we can't fully comprehend because now we see through a glass darkly, but we'll then see face to face. That to me is the answer. Without the fall, there couldn't be the redemption, and without the evil that we have in life, in this material life, we couldn't experience the actual beauty of the design that we will eventually see face to face.

REICHARD: What a wonderful thought. Andrew Klavan, thank you so much. Really enjoy talking to you.

KLAVAN: It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

MAST: That was an excerpt of a longer conversation. We’ll run the full version this weekend on The World and Everything in It feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.