Why would spiritual traditions recommend that one pray for a good death if loss of hope were not something worse than dying? Kant understood the weak, selfish, and wicked human heart to pose the greatest danger to human reasonableness. Kant denied that one could ever act diabolically—commit evil for the sake of evil; freedom could never destroy our respect for the moral law as such. Yet in our times we have witnessed faces of radical evil that are more dangerous than Kant imagined, indeed, even more harmful to the moral fragility of good will than mortality. We have witnessed the willed destruction of hope in oneself and others. Such deliberate acts of annihilation hollow hellholes out of our planet, whether by building extermination camps and torture chambers or through wanton acts of cruel neglect and genocide. Evil willed for its own sake lives!

How can hope be resurrected when we descend to depths of such hell? Do we know how to bring hope to a village in which neighbors raped each other’s daughters and wives or tortured and killed each other’s sons and husbands? How can people reclaim a space ravaged by years of civil, ethnic, and religious strife? Field workers readily tell us that there is no social or economic theory that can generate hope once it has become scarce. Yet progressive secular social theorists and activists of necessity presuppose hope in advancing any project of liberation, reparation, and reconstruction after atrocities took place. Such presuppositions intone inaudible secular prayers, which in turn invoke hope as possibility: We either stealthily assume that hope is given, or we await hope’s arrival through postsecular commissions of truth and reconciliation.

Secular progressives have for the most part vacated the language of evil to the conservatives or to the bully pulpits of, what Michael Lerner calls, the Right Hand of God. The language of evil that demonizes the enemy under such rubrics as the “Great Satan,” “Evil Empire,” “Axis of Evil,” or “War on Evil” attacks merely something external to human will. Demonization of the “evil other” happens when aesthetic religiosity hijacks spiritual categories. This aesthetic discourse is what Arendt in her report on Eichmann’s self-defense—that he was obeying the will of the great leader—identified as the “banality of evil.” Kant too worried about demonizing human beings and warned that we must not externalize evil. Good and evil are categories of the will, and so evil cannot be projected outwardly. Kant’s moral intuition preserved the human dignity of evildoers.

Secular progressives rightly fear that the aesthetic language of evil, parading itself in a religious costume, poses a problem. Secular critics of such religious discourses on evil must learn to sharpen their critique with help of religious progressives: If by externalizing evil one is not even minimally moral, how could one thereby be remotely spiritual? Postsecular redemptive critical theory and practice must unmask the confusion of the aesthetic with the authentic religious senses of evil and hope. Unless we grasp what propels willed destruction and generates aggravated scarcity of hope, we will not be able to receive from what Rabbi Lerner identifies as the “Left Hand of God” and the spiritual “new bottom line” the resources to generate hope and a renewed fabric for human solidarity. Field workers and social theorists tap yet do not have in their power these very resources whenever victims face their executioners or guilty bystanders in a public confession that trades criminals’ immunity or amnesty for the possibility of new common beginnings.

It is one thing to celebrate hope’s audacity, it is another to grasp both its radical loss and granting. First, we know from our contemporary experience that hope can become radically scarce. After the age of slavery, Auschwitz, Gulags, Rwanda, Darfur, and the many holy wars of religions, radical evil cannot but mean what Kant denied—that human beings might act freely in demonic ways to destroy the moral law itself. And yet, secondly, while the intentional annihilation of hope is what Schelling named an “inverted God” and what Kierkegaard revealed as a demonic will of despairing and defiant self; the persistent state of hopelessness necessarily is also what Judaism repels as the ultimate form of idolatry. On both counts, then, hope is at once scarce and uncanny: We must admit that hope is not in our power to get or give (this is the shared intuition of Yom Kippur and Kyrie eleison, as well as the first of the twelve steps to sobriety). Yet we hope—with Abraham, St. Paul, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse—against hope and for the sake of those without hope.

If the possibility of radical evil reveals a positively despairing and so negatively saturated will that destroys hope and hopes to destroy oneself or another, then its language is always more than aesthetic, moral or even paradoxical. The aggravated scarcity of hope must be grasped as a perversely religious phenomenon par excellence. This is what the post-Holocaust thinkers, like Hans Jonas or Emmanuel Lévinas, grasp equally as well as the Russian Orthodox writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky: In myth and literature devils are not atheists who suffer from the despair of a philosophy of religion that in vain tries to respond to the new atheists by finding solid proofs for God’s existence. The Devil appearing in a nightmare of Ivan Karamazov might quite well apprehend God and yet refuses faith. The Grand Inquisitor, all along adopting the mantel of God, effects a regime change of God’s creation and redemption. This religious-cum-political impostor who names evil by his name also blocks all paths to hope’s return. Worse than death, worse than ordinary loss of possibility, worse still than intellectual atheism is a willed inability to love and forgive, and this radical evil Dostoyevsky names hell.

When evil becomes radical in hope’s scarcity, at least four gates of hope’s uncanny possibility open to us. I name these as the unforgivable, the unforgettable, the unspeakable, and the unconditional. Should the human race at the point of global scarcity of hope begin entering through these gates, this new bottom line would signify a new global spiritual covenant.

The first gate calls for the turning, teshuvah, forgiving the unforgivable, one by one in all hellholes we have hollowed out on the planet.

The second would invoke a repair, tikkun olam, empowered and transformed by the tragic beauty in the midst of our unforgettable suffering.

The third would speak through silences, chashmal, letting unbridgeable traumas be healed.

The fourth would act against the forces of wanton annihilation of spirit, by blessing us, berakhah, with audacious hope without a why, in works or mitzvoth of unconditional love.