Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

by Miroslav Volf

Once the war started and the right conditions were maintained, an uncontrollable chain reaction was under way.9 These were mostly decent people, as decent as most of us tend to be. Many did not, strictly speaking, choose to plunder and burn, rape and torture, or secretly enjoy these. A dormant beast in them was awakened from its uneasy slumber. And not only in them. The motives of those who set to fight against the brutal aggressors were self-defense and justice. The beast in others, however, enraged the beast in them. The moral barriers holding it in check broke down and it went after revenge. In resisting evil, they were trapped by evil. In “After the Catastrophe,” written right after World War Two, Carl Gustav Jung wrote, “It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts” (Jung 1964a, 198). Evil engenders evil, and like pyroclastic debris from the mouth of a volcano, it erupts out of aggressor and victim alike.