The purpose of our mind is to fit things into a larger meaning -- that’s the mental feature distinguishing us from animals.

So since we are smarter -- though not always gentler -- than critters, we can all attempt to answer the question: What’s the larger meaning of the Virginia Tech shootings? Who or what is to blame?

One who stepped forward with an explanation was Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE.). On Thursday, The Associated Press reported, Biden ascribed the shootings to the "politics of polarization" as practiced by Republicans: "Since 1994 with the Gingrich revolution, just take a look at Iraq, Venezuela, Katrina, what’s gone down at Virginia Tech, Darfur, Imus. ... This didn’t happen accidentally, all these things."

And Biden’s words didn’t come by accident, either. After 35 years of holding forth in the Senate, Biden obviously feels that not enough people are listening to him, that he needs a larger national audience. So he is running for president, spewing blame for domestic bloodshed on half of his countrymen. That’s his idea of a larger meaning for Virginia Tech; it’s a great opportunity to advance his own personal political ambitions.

Others have dug deeper and found other factors. James Lewis, blogging for the American Thinker Web site, examined some of the course materials being taught at Seung-Hui Cho’s school. It’s been widely reported that students at Virginia Tech saw such movies as the slasher-horror pic Friday the 13th as part of their "curriculum." But Lewis took note of other works being taught, such as "Textual Androgyny, the Rhetoric of the Essay, and the Politics of Identity in Composition (or The Struggle to Be a Girly-Man in a World of Gladiator Pumpitude)." Deadpans Lewis: "Just the thing for a disoriented young male suffering from massive culture shock on the hypersexual American campus."

Lewis concludes: "English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated."

Lewis is on to something here. But in the end, this sociopathic act of mass killing can’t be blamed on the political left, just as it can’t blamed on the right.

Why? Because Cho was obviously disturbed in a way that transcends any ideological category. And so the search for meaning, for explanation, must travel past politics into the deepest recesses of a blackened human heart to a place where we confront an unfashionable but enduring reality -- the existence of evil.

But don’t take my word for it. Let’s consider the testimony of one who was there at Virginia Tech, Garrett Evans, a student shot in the leg on April 15. ABC News asked him, "Why were you spared?"

This was his answer: "Good Lord only knows. ... Maybe one reason is to tell you and the world what happened."

And what did Evans see? "I saw Satan at work and God at work at the same time. Evil, evil spirit was going through that boy, that shooter, I know, I felt it."

Now there’s an old-fashioned concept: Cho was overcome by evil, like a character out of the Bible. Like, how wild is that? I mean, what do we need psychiatrists and social workers for -- or for that matter, newspaper pundits -- if we start going back to basic ideas of good versus evil?

Skeptics, of course, will scoff at Evans’ witness. But his testimony, in a way, offers us hope -- hope that there is a deeper meaning to a tragedy such as the one at Virginia Tech, even if we here on Earth can’t quite figure it out.

The Christian writer C.S. Lewis offered a partial explanation in 1940: "Pain is God’s megaphone to a deaf world." That’s surely a hard concept to grapple with.

But maybe the alternative -- that there’s no meaning to Virginia Tech or to anything else, that we are just random particles in motion -- is the most horrible prospect of all.