Evil

악 · 惡 · ak · Ak · Wrong, Wickedness, Malum, the Fallen

What Is Evil?

Evil is any person, act, or state of affairs that deviates from God's purpose of creation and severs the principled relationships by which every being is connected to God, to its conjugal other, and to the whole.

In Unification theology, evil is not an eternal substance competing with God; it is a derivative condition produced by the Fall and transmitted as a lineage of false love, false life, and false blood. Because goodness is the condition of returning to principle, evil is precisely the condition of standing outside of it — a real and devastating state, but one that presupposes the created order it deforms.

Goodness is returning to principle. Goodness is grounded in principle. Adam's first path was to become one with God. Next, he had to become one with Eve. Then, once Adam and Eve were one with God, that family had to become one. That is the law. The Three Object Purpose that appears in our Principle is God's law. That is the principle. Whatever does not fit this principle is evil.

— Sun Myung Moon (073-085, 08/04/1974) Cham Bumo Gyeong

This passage establishes the most exact Unification definition of evil. Evil is not named as a list of forbidden behaviors; it is named structurally as whatever falls outside the four-position foundation of God, subject, object, and offspring. A deed that appears virtuous but destroys that structure is evil in the technical sense; a deed that appears burdensome but preserves it is good.

Evil, therefore, always refers back to the standard it has deviated from, which is why the doctrine of evil cannot be stated without first stating the Principle of Creation.

The grounding passage is continuous with the Exposition of the Divine Principle's chapter on The Human Fall, which traces evil to a specific historical origin rather than to an eternal metaphysical principle.

Etymological Analysis

The Korean term 악 (ak) writes with the Hanja 惡, a character composed of 亞 — “second-rate,” “deformed,” originally depicting a crooked or hunched shape — placed above 心 — “heart.”

The literal etymology is therefore “deformed heart” or “heart bent out of its proper shape.”

This etymological clue maps precisely onto the Unification theological teaching that evil is not a created substance but a distortion of an originally good heart.

In everyday Korean, 악 names what is morally wrong: evil acts (악행 / akhaeng), evil people (악인 / akin), evil demons (악마 / akma). Compounds such as 선악 (seon-ak, 善惡) — “good and evil” — preserve the ancient East Asian pairing of the two concepts and the conviction that they are defined against each other.

In technical Unification usage, 악 retains the everyday moral sense but is refined into a structural and relational category: evil names the broken relationship before it names the specific act.

The Hanja 魔 (ma) — “demon, specter” — joins 惡 to form 악마 (akma), the term used for “devil” or “demon” in Unification theology. The compound 사탄주의 (sat'anjuui) — “Satanism” — and 악마주의 (akmajuui) — “devil-ism” — appear in Rev. Sun Myung Moon's speeches as technical names for the entire order of fallen existence, distinguished from 하나님주의 (God-ism) as its structural opposite.

Theological Definition

Within the Exposition of the Divine Principle, evil has a precise location in the system of creation and fall that cannot be paraphrased without distortion. Evil is defined as the state that opposes God's purpose of creation. Because the purpose of creation is the realization of love through give-and-take centered on God, evil is the refusal or failure of that give-and-take — a turning of a being inward toward itself rather than outward toward God and the whole.

The Unification teaching thereby avoids two classical errors. It rejects ontological dualism — the view that evil is an eternal principle equal and opposite to God — because evil has a historical origin and no independent existence. It also rejects mere subjectivism — the view that evil is only a matter of opinion or cultural convention — because evil is anchored to an objective structure, the Three Object Purpose, that holds regardless of whether any particular person or community recognizes it.

What is Godism? Centered on true love — because false love could not unite the family, that is devil-ism. Because of false love, there was no unity. Mind and body were divided, husband and wife were divided, and sons and daughters became enemies. So God Himself became an enemy. Because such a false principle of devil-ism started, Godism must come. This is division-ism and hell-ism. Unifying the divided individuals, families, tribes, peoples, nations, and world centered on true love and True Parents, this is opposed to the devil, and so it is Godism.

— Sun Myung Moon (241-022, 12/19/1992) Cham Bumo Gyeong

This passage gives the operational anatomy of evil. Evil is false love — love that turns inward to grasp rather than outward to give.

False love produces division at every level of the created order: within the individual, between spouses, between parents and children, and ultimately between humanity and God.

The teaching names this entire complex “devil-ism,” “division-ism,” and “hell-ism,” three names for the single phenomenon of a creation that has been pulled apart from its original purpose.

The Origin of Evil — The Fall

Unification theology is distinctive among world religions for giving evil a precise historical origin that is at once specific and comprehensive. Evil did not exist in God's original creation.

It entered the world through the Fall of the first human ancestors, Adam and Eve, whose disobedience consisted of an illicit love relationship that inverted the created order.

The Exposition of the Divine Principle teaches that the Fall occurred in two stages.

The spiritual fall took place when Eve, in an immature spiritual state, entered into an unprincipled love relationship with Lucifer, the archangel who had been placed to serve humanity but became jealous of God's love for Adam and Eve.

The physical fall took place when Eve, corrupted by her unprincipled relationship with Lucifer, joined with Adam before the God-given time of their marriage, extending the contamination into the human lineage.

The ideal world of the original creation is the world realized by perfecting the four great realms of heart — true child, true sibling, true spouse, and true parent — centered on God's true love, true life, and true lineage. Because the first human ancestors disbelieved God's will and formed an illicit blood relationship with the archangel, human beings came to inherit the seed of evil. Through such a love relationship, humanity came to have the root of evil life and evil lineage through evil parents and evil children.

— Sun Myung Moon (271-148, 08/27/1995) Cham Bumo Gyeong

This passage states the doctrine of evil's origin in its starkest form. Evil did not arise from a neutral choice or an intellectual error; it arose from a misdirected love relationship that corrupted the root of the human lineage. Because the corruption was transmitted through bloodline rather than mere example or teaching, evil cannot be removed by education alone but only by a restoration of the lineage itself, which is the work Unification theology assigns to the Blessing.

The Cosmic Scope of Evil

Although the Fall was committed by individual persons, its consequences extended far beyond the individuals involved.

The structure of creation had been designed to transmit goodness through lineage; once corrupted at the root, it transmitted evil through the same channels.

What fell was the individuals Adam and Eve, but the realm of the Fall is cosmic. The individuals Adam and Eve fell, but the consequences extend not only to this world but are connected on a cosmic scale — from earth up through the spirit world. Unless this realm is reclaimed, liberation is impossible. That is why many religions went through so much indemnity to cross over this peak.

— Sun Myung Moon (251-019, 10/15/1993) Cham Bumo Gyeong

This passage establishes the distinctive eight-stage expansion of evil that structures the entire Unification doctrine of restoration. Evil began with an individual act but propagated through family, tribe, people, nation, world, cosmos, and even God's own condition of unresolved sorrow. Because evil is cosmic in scope, restoration must also be cosmic — it must reverse the Fall at every level at which the Fall was transmitted.

This teaching has a specific consequence for how evil is confronted. It cannot be defeated at the individual level alone, because it is larger than the individual; it must be confronted at every level up to and including the cosmic.

The mission of True Parents and of Blessed Families is precisely to carry out this multi-level restoration.

The Lineage of False Love

The most operational teaching in Unification theology about evil concerns how it is transmitted. Evil is not only committed; it is inherited.

The corrupted blood relationship at the root of human history produced a lineage whose every member inherits the distortion, not as punishment but as real continuity.

This is why Unification theology speaks of false parents as the active principle of evil in history, in parallel to True Parents as the active principle of restoration.

All the things defiled by false parents cannot but disappear. When the last day arrives and they are judged, the opposite side of God, centered on True Parents, establishes a new view of the individual, family, tribe, people, nation, world, and cosmos. Therefore, everything in heaven and on earth cannot but seek the world where all things become one. For that purpose, True Parents had to come and begin true love, true life, and true lineage.

— Sun Myung Moon (362-158, 12/12/2001) Cham Bumo Gyeong

The passage articulates the eschatological horizon of the doctrine of evil. What false parents introduced, True Parents reverse.

The “last day” in this passage is not an apocalyptic annihilation but the historical moment when the lineage of false love is cut off at the root, and a new lineage of true love is planted in its place.

Evil, precisely because it was introduced through a specific historical event, can in principle be ended through another specific historical event — the substantial work of True Parents and the Blessing.

Evil as Self-Centered Love

A practical complement to the doctrine of evil's origin is the Unification teaching about what evil looks like in daily life. Evil is not principally dramatic crime; it is principally self-centered love.

The seed of the original Fall was the archangel's self-directed desire, and every subsequent expression of evil partakes of the same structure: an inward turn of love that should have flowed outward.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon's speeches repeatedly contrast 이기주의 (igijuui) — egoism, self-centeredness — with 이타주의 (itajuui) — altruism, living for the sake of others. Egoism is named as the essence of Satanism; altruism is named as the essence of Godism.

This is why the Unification ethical formula holds that the public-private test — acting for the whole versus acting for the self — is the operational measurement of evil in ordinary conduct.

Providential Context

Across the three providential ages, the confrontation with evil develops in three corresponding stages.

In the Old Testament Age, evil was fought by external separation — the chosen people separated from the surrounding fallen cultures through covenant, circumcision, and dietary law, and evil was identified with what lay outside the covenant.

In the New Testament Age, evil was fought by internal transformation — the heart was the battleground, and the law of love aimed at changing the inward disposition that produces evil acts.

In the Completed Testament Age, evil is fought by lineage change — the Blessing grafts the inheritor of a fallen bloodline into the lineage of True Parents, addressing evil at the root where it was originally transmitted.

The movement is cumulative. The external separation of the Old Testament remains useful; the interior transformation of the New Testament remains essential; what is added at the Completed Testament stage is the structural restoration of the family line, without which the other two levels can restrain evil but cannot finally end it.

Practical Dimension for Blessed Families

Three concrete consequences follow for the life of a Blessed Family.

First, the inheritance of evil is reversed through the Blessing, but its consequences in habit and disposition remain to be worked out.

A Blessed Family is not instantly perfect; it is a family grafted to the right root, from which the work of growth toward perfection continues daily.

Second, Hoon Dok Hae, prayer, and public service are the daily means by which residual self-centered patterns are identified and overcome.

Evil in the post-Blessing life rarely presents itself as dramatic temptation; far more often, it presents itself as the slow gravitational pull of egoism in time management, financial decisions, family relationships, and community obligations.

Regular exposure to the Word and regular investment in public work are the practical antidotes.

Third, tribal messianic work and interreligious peacebuilding are the outward-facing extension of the same principle. A family that has been grafted to the lineage of true love cannot keep the grafting to itself; it must extend the same grafting to its own lineage, to its tribe, and to the nations. To do otherwise is to revert, on a small scale, to the very self-centeredness that constitutes evil.

Academic Note

New Religious Movements scholarship has taken particular interest in the Unification doctrine of evil because of its distinctive account of the origin of the Fall.

George Chryssides, in The Advent of Sun Myung Moon (1991), notes that the identification of the Fall with an illicit sexual relationship has antecedents in some strands of Second Temple Judaism and early Christian apocrypha, but is developed in a systematic and unprecedented form in Unification theology.

Massimo Introvigne, across his CESNUR writings, observes that the Unification teaching on evil is thoroughly relational rather than ontological — evil is always a distortion of a relationship, never a standalone substance — and that this places the tradition closer to Eastern Orthodox thought than to Western forensic paradigms.

Eileen Barker's sociological work, especially The Making of a Moonie (1984), documents that the coherent account of evil's origin was a major intellectual draw for converts who had found other theodicies unsatisfying.

Young Oon Kim, in Unification Theology (1980), provides the most thorough insider articulation and is the standard academic reference.

Frederick Sontag's Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church (1977) gave the earliest sympathetic scholarly treatment and located the Unification account within the broader tradition of Christian hamartiology.

Ninian Smart's comparative-religion work provides tools for placing the Unification doctrine alongside its Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, and Confucian neighbors.

Comparative Religion

Christianity — Augustine, in City of God and the Confessions, developed the doctrine of privatio boni — evil as a privation rather than a positive substance — and located its origin in the misdirected will of creaturely freedom.

Thomas Aquinas refined this view, arguing that evil has no proper cause but is a defect in action; its apparent power comes from the goodness it parasitizes.

The Reformed tradition, especially through Augustine's influence on Calvin, emphasized the total corruption of human nature since the Fall.

The Unification doctrine shares the Augustinian conviction that evil is derivative rather than original, but differs decisively in locating the origin of the Fall in a concrete illicit love relationship and in teaching that the restoration of evil therefore requires the restoration of lineage, not only of will.

Judaism — Rabbinic Judaism teaches the doctrine of yetzer ha-ra — the evil inclination — present in every human being alongside the yetzer ha-tov — the good inclination. Mainstream Jewish thought refuses to attribute independent power to evil and regards it as a test of human responsibility under Torah.

Kabbalistic tradition, especially in the Zohar, develops the concept of sitra achra — “the other side” — the shadow of divine emanation in which evil clusters.

The Unification doctrine shares the Jewish refusal of cosmic dualism and the emphasis on human responsibility, while adding a specific account of the historical origin of evil and its transmission through bloodline.

Islam — The Qur'an names Iblis — the jinn who refused to bow to Adam — and Shaytan — the tempter — as the specific figures through whom evil entered human life.

Al-Ghazali's Revival of the Religious Sciences develops an extensive analysis of the diseases of the heart (amradh al-qulub) by which evil takes hold in the soul.

Islamic theology holds that every human being is born in a state of fitra — original purity — and that evil is acquired through subsequent misuse of freedom.

The Unification doctrine shares the Islamic identification of a specific angelic or jinn-like figure in the origin of evil, but locates the crucial act in a sexual rather than merely volitional disobedience.

Buddhism — Buddhism personifies the obstacle to liberation as Mara, the tempter who opposes the Buddha's enlightenment, and analyzes evil structurally as the three poisons — greed (lobha), hatred (dosa), and delusion (moha) — that arise from ignorance of the true nature of reality.

Evil in Buddhist thought is not metaphysically real in the strong sense; it is a function of mistaken cognition and craving.

The Unification doctrine shares the view that evil is derivative and curable, and shares especially the emphasis on greed and self-centered desire as the root of suffering, while differing in holding that the cure requires a relational act — the Blessing by True Parents — rather than only a cognitive insight.

Confucianism — The Confucian tradition is divided on the origin of evil. Mencius held that human nature is originally good and that evil arises from the corruption of this original nature through a bad environment and bad habits.

Xunzi held the opposing view that human nature is originally rough and must be polished into goodness through ritual and education.

Neo-Confucianism, especially Zhu Xi, incorporated both views by distinguishing the principle-nature (always good) from the material-nature (capable of obscuration).

The Unification doctrine aligns more closely with Mencius — original human nature is good, and evil is a corruption — but adds the specific historical event of the Fall as the point at which the corruption entered the line.

What distinguishes the Unification doctrine of evil from each of these traditions is its combination of three features: a specific historical account of the Fall as an illicit love relationship that inverted the created order; a lineage-based account of the transmission of evil through the bloodline; and a lineage-based account of its reversal through the Blessing. No neighboring tradition holds all three together in this way.

The strongest parallels are with Augustinian Christianity for the privation theme, Mencian Confucianism for the original goodness theme, and Kabbalistic Judaism for the relational-distortion theme, but the Unification synthesis is distinct from each.

Key Takeaway

Evil is any person, act, or state of affairs that deviates from God's purpose of creation, centered on the refusal of the four-position foundation of God, subject, object, and offspring.
Evil is derivative, not original; it entered creation through the Fall and has no independent metaphysical standing apart from the good order it distorts.
The Fall, understood as an illicit love relationship between Eve and Lucifer and then between Eve and Adam before the God-given time, is the specific historical origin of evil and the reason it transmits through lineage.
Evil is cosmic in scope — extending from individual through family, tribe, people, nation, world, and cosmos — and its restoration must therefore occur at every level at which the Fall was transmitted.
Evil is reversed through the work of True Parents and through the Blessing, which grafts the fallen lineage into a restored lineage of true love, true life, and true blood.

What is the difference between evil and sin in Unification teaching?

Evil names the state or structure of deviation from God's purpose of creation, while sin names the specific acts that deviate from it; original sin is the inherited condition of being born into the lineage of evil, and actual sin is the choice within that condition to act against the Principle.

How does Unification theology explain the origin of evil?

Evil originated in the Fall, specifically through an illicit love relationship between Eve and the archangel Lucifer, followed by a premature relationship between Eve and Adam, which inverted the created order and transmitted corruption through the human bloodline.

If evil is derivative, why is it so powerful in history?

Because evil propagates through lineage and is reinforced at every level of human organization from individual to cosmos, its accumulated momentum across six thousand years of history far exceeds anything any single individual can resist, which is why Unification theology teaches that restoration requires True Parents rather than human effort alone.

Key Texts on tplegacy.net

Exposition of the Divine Principle — Primary source for the doctrine of evil, especially the Principle of Creation and the chapter on The Human Fall.
Cheon Seong Gyeong — Rev. Sun Myung Moon's teachings on evil, Satan, and the subjugation of Satan through love.
Cham Bumo Gyeong — Extensive treatment of false parents, the lineage of evil, and the cosmic scope of restoration.
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong — Rev. Moon's peace messages addressing the political and cultural manifestations of evil in the modern world.
World Scripture and the Teachings of Sun Myung Moon — Comparative placement of the Unification doctrine of evil alongside the hamartiologies of the world's religions.