I have met pure evil. Sat and talked with it. I worked in a prison. Now most people in prison are criminal, bad people, do things wrong, commit crimes, etc. But occassionally you come across evil and once in a great while pure evil. Pure EVIL was 5 foot 8 inches 165 pounds and looked like Howdy Doody!(Look it up kiddies). At my now 64 years of age I have never met or come across anything in life scarier, more dangrous,or more evil.
But the “formal” response is that this person could talk, digest, enjoy simple pleasures, think, and generally show many of the simple skills and “goods” of being a human person.
He may have had a deeply corrupted will and utterly foul notions of what others owed him and he owed them. It may have been unlikely to the point of unimaginable that he could or ever would understand the evil he had done and embraced — much less turn from it. But, as you might say, he did that evil with “goods,” goods like intelligence, focus, physical strength, and the faculty of choice.
All of these goods were horribly distorted, tainted, fouled by his misuse of them. But that they were there to be misused was, in itself, good.
However despicable and contemptible a sinner may become, there is, I think, an inescapable tragic aspect to sin because to the destruction of wonderful capacities.
“At my now 64 years of age I have never met or come across anything in life scarier, more dangerous,or more evil.”
If that fear generated by evil caused you to turn to God to be rescued by His Love, it served a good purpose. If you just held on to the fear, then it did not.
I’ve seen people such as you describe meeting in the prison fall to the ground and snarl, hiss and growl in the presence of God’s Love. They are afraid of it. If you fill yourself with God’s Love, then they are afraid of that Love overflowing from you.