Abstract

Professional philosophers tend to think of the problem of evil as a question to be tackled within the philosophy of religion as a distinct domain of reflection and not primarily in moral or political philosophy. It is not absent from the latter domains, but standardly philosophers in the Western tradition have defined the problem of evil in connection with the belief in God’s absolute goodness and power, and their compatibility with the given fact of evil. Standardly also, a variety of so-called theodicies have tried to articulate and defend that compatibility. The difficulty is raised to a height of importance in the measure that the highest God is said to be absolutely good. Moreover what that God has brought to be, the finite creation, is essentially good, by virtue of its being created by such an absolute origin. In response to the difficulty, a variety of theodicies have been proposed and the following four most notably. First, there is the famous definition of evil as privatio boni. It is a view easy to caricature. We then think of privation as a powerless possibility merely, and do not see the reversed energy of nihilation involved in privation. Augustine ascribes to evil a deficient cause, but we might see this as a deeffecting cause, a defecting cause — the willed betrayal of the good intends the undoing of the given good, its de-creation. Important in this view is the asymmetrical priority of the good. In the face of this, the parasitical power of evil, battening on good as its presupposed host, calls for our deep thought. Second, there is what is sometimes called the free-will theodicy. In this case, our power to affirm good or negate it, indeed revolt against given good, is central. The enigma of the mysterious letting of freedom, by the endowing God, is central. Our free allowance to refuse good is not itself refused by the goodness of the endowing God. There are philosophies of history, Hegel’s for instance, that see the true beginning of world history not in divine allowance, but in human transgression. Third, there is what has been called the virtue theodicy: the world is not just a vale of tears but a ‘‘vale of soul-making,’’ as the poet Keats put it. Evil does not destroy the promise of the good, and the promise is given again, though we must ourselves contribute to the redemption of the promise. If we refuse the given good, we become good in transcending the broken condition of the first good refused. Fourth, there is what has been termed the aesthetic theodicy. Vision of the whole exceeds us, and the whole, like a work of art, contains the blending of light and dark, in whose complex composition we stand, but we do not now fully see the beauty of the whole, for we lack the ‘‘God’s eye’’ view. The art of the endowing God raises the question not entirely unlike that posed by Blake’s poem Tyger: ‘‘Tiger, tiger political theology, Vol. 16 No. 2, March, 2015, 93–100

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