On the Full Scope of Evil

and Good:

...The vast panoply of scary creatures the human imagination has concocted to express our fears reflects this awareness that there is some deeper and more ancient evil behind mere human evil.  Always at the shadowy edge of human evil is the awareness that it trails off into a darkness where something is breathing: something that hates us and wills our destruction.  We call such things “monsters” in our art, and the interesting thing is that “monster” is a word related to both “monstrance” and “demonstrate”.  That is, a “monster” is a thing that shows forth in visible form something Horrible for all to behold, just as the Monstrance shows forth in visible form something Beautiful for all to behold.

We make monsters because it is our nature as sub-creators in the image and likeness of God to do so.  We create, as He does, in our image and likeness and dredge up out of ourselves different faces to show us who we are.  When God made us, he made us innocent and without sin, pure as He is.  But when we fell and chose to trust the word of the Ancient Dragon, who is called the Devil and Satan, we allowed into our souls things that are the stuff of nightmares.  In our art, we give these things body in order to face our fears, not only of what we are, but of what lies behind our fall.  Through those stories we discover again our capacity for evil—and the possibility of resisting it by grace.

The Faith presents this to us in stark form in the form of what the Didache calls the Two Ways: the Way of Light and the Way of Darkness.  It’s what Jesus calls the broad and the narrow way and it boils down to this: the Monster or the Monstrance.