To help answer the question 'what motivates malevolence?' we have to first of consider what evil actually is.
The nature (or lack of nature) of Evil
By definition Evil is a thing lacking, a lack of explicit goodness. If God is Truth, Goodness and Beauty then Evil is the absence of those things. It is distortion, deceit and decay. Evil is non-being and non-existence.
Thomas Aquinas described it as a ‘privation of being’ the absence of something that's meant to be there. If I come across a wingless squirrel in the woods nothing seems to be amiss since squirrels aren’t meant to have wings, but if I find a bird with only one wing, I'm disturbed and suspect that something's happened since the bird is lacking something that, by design, it's meant to have. Something has gone wrong for that bird. Evil is somewhere nearby perhaps. Another example of privation is a hole in a sock. It is emptiness where once there was fabric, I see the face of Evil in my sock and that's even before I try to find its pair!
Evil is nonbeing and emptiness, a lack of substance. For this reason we say and we feel that death is 'evil' since death is the privation and absence of life. Where life is meant to be death dominates.
What Wickedness Wants
If evil were personal, if it had a name and a will, I wonder what it would want? I'd suggest that it would want embodiment and strength, the ability to affect things in the real world perhaps.
Given it's (lack of) substance however, how could it ever hope to achieve something like that? When emptiness becomes full or for dark to become light it would find itself destroyed in the process. For Death to desire life is as misguided as Disney's Olaf desiring warm hugs and loving summer.
In Olaf’s case Elsa made for him a personal snow cloud that could follow him around in the warmth of summer (yes, reader, I'm expecting that you've seen Disney’s Frozen!). That way he maintained his icy coldness even whilst fulfilling his dream of experiencing summer.
In the same way Evil would need a living host through which it could act in the world. It could keep its emptiness whilst also touching fullness, live even though remaining dead. This is what we enact and play with on Halloween. Lifeless entities are given physical form and image through our fancy dress in order that, for one night only, they may indeed walk upon the earth!
For most of us Halloween is about making ourselves braver by getting as close as we dare to the things that scare us. From Evil's point of view however it offers it a chance to live.
Tolkien’s image of evil in The Lord of the Rings is a being without form but who lusts after embodiment. Having been defeated and stripped of his power in a previous age, Sauron now craves the object whose spirit will enable him to take form in the world.
Satan craves a measure of the embodiment that we humans as God’s image-bearing creatures possess. As a result of the happy union between our bodies and souls we have agency in the world. We're able to think up a thing we want to do and carry it out. We’re capable of cultivating gardens, embracing loved ones and taming wildernesses. What can Satan do in the world? Nothing, at least not without human participants.
How Evil aims to get what it wants
In Christian tradition Evil is taken seriously. It teaches that malevolent entities attach themselves to things in the world that human beings offer devotion to. They play on our desires and offer us what we seek.
That's what idolatry is. When we channel (or manifest) our hopes and dreams onto a thing in nature we give it power over us. It isn't always that an idol worshipper thinks that this block of wood or statue has power, but that the spirit and energy attached to it does.
In this way evil forces take the precious commodities of our attention and our life and hope that they might harvest them until they have enough to achieve embodiment. They try to manipulate our actions and control our minds to gain for themselves influence in the material world.
Existence requires co-operation
Everything we can see with our eyes is the result of a union between billions of atoms holding together to form substances large enough that they become visible. The Bible teaches us that the physical world, matter, is good. Perhaps part of what makes it good is that it is a display of relationships between things, something that nonbeing lacks. Whereas death and decay breaks the partnership between atoms, life animates matter through co-operation. Since Evil is emptiness it is therefore immaterial and, by extension, not good.
One way that the Enemy is at work then is in his attempts to undermine the goodness of physical things. Through philosophy and focus he is working to convince the human race that the physical world (the thing God pronounced ‘good’) is bad, or if not bad then certainly 'less good' than the non-physical world.
Rene Descartes expressed this most famously when he located the inner, non-material reality as the thing that matters most of all. The mind, thought and spirit is pure whereas the body and the external world of my senses is suspect since it could all be an illusion: “I think therefore I am”. On top of this William of Ockham (of Ockham's razor) taught that physical things only possess meaning when we give it to them. Their meaning is therefore malleable and plastic, a thing to be made up by us.
In all this we in the West have become convinced about the superiority of spirit and mind over being. We're therefore happier to relate to our physicality as a less necessary part of life. My body isn't of much importance since the real 'me' isn't my body. I come to have a body not to be one.
A cause for alarm?
Given these reflections on the nature of evil should we be alarmed about the dreams of our inventors and scientists who are working to create a world where bodies can be done away with and the limitations of our bodies can be overcome? To be fair that has always been how technology serves us. They seek to overcome and extend the limits of our hands and feet. Books extend the influence and overcome the limitations of our minds, cars do the same for our feet and spades our arms.
The internet is a technology that works to make our nervous system external. We can think, feel, love and decide online in a way that exists outside of our skin and in doing so perhaps we are coming to render our bodies less necessary. When our brains become algorithms do we invite others to take possession of them?
When we rely less and less on our bodies to do things or when we think of them as inconsequential shells, when we treat maleness and femaleness as arbitrary we’re more than half way down the road is disembodiment already.
We are moving at a pace toward the dystopian vision C.S. Lewis foresaw in the Abolition of Man. When we finally manage to conquer and subdue nature, he said, we will turn round only to realise that we have subdued and conquered ourselves as well. We are part of nature and we forget this to our destruction.
Greater and more effective AI technology is the natural next step for humanity. Perhaps the real reason to fear the AI of the future isn’t because mahcines might achieve consciousness but that the ‘presences’ and principalities in the spiritual world might come to take form between the microchips and capacitors.
Our world is much more mysterious and spiritual than we realise.
I know that many will scoff at such a statement and idea since it all seems too unscientific. However pre-eminent British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has demonstrated recently that left brained attention (the kind of world categorised by science) is incapable of thinking it has any need of the insights offered by the right hemisphere - at its own detriment. Reality is at least double layered, right brain (personal, present, implicit) and left brain (objective, explicit). A left brain insight on the world lacks half of what it needs.
Ancient gods summoned by modern scientists
Consider the case of Blake Lemoine, a Google whistleblower fired for going public with his belief that LaMDA, its AI program, had achieved consciousness. His revelations included the fact that those involved with LaMDA took part in a ritual committing it to the ancient Egyptian god Thoth. An AI machine being united (or at least trying to be united) with an ancient god. The stuff of science fiction, of myth, or of reality?
Perhaps this is where Evil is hoping to lead humanity after all. If we understand what evil is we can begin to surmise what it wants. Perhaps Evil is using us to enable it to get what it wants, and perhaps what it wants is to walk on the earth?
Since Christ took on human form, and since Christ now lives and acts on earth through his people perhaps the Enemy believes it could do likewise?
Having said all that, Evil really ought to take note from what took place on Easter Sunday.
When the Son of God entered the realm of the dead, when his body gave up its spirit and he breathed his last and when he became lack and emptiness it was death that got swallowed up by life.
The grave couldn’t contain him then and it won’t contain his people in the future.
Evil, for all its pretensions has no hope, not even a fool's hope.