Bringing Ontological Terms to an Existential Fight:

In Search of a Metaphysically Grounded Pastoral

Answer to the Problem of Evil

Stephen Hager

PH1010 Problem of Evil

12/15/2020
 Introduction

In spite of the fact that the problem of evil is undeniably one of the central issues dealt with

in any modern philosophy of religion textbook, one will not find any section directly addressing

it in the Summa Theologiae, perhaps the greatest (and quite probably one of the longest)

medieval textbooks on theology and philosophy of religion. In fact, for Aquinas and those who

would follow in his footsteps, it could even be said that no such problem existed. Even though

Augustine, a key predecessor of Aquinas, wrote fairly extensively and directly on what is now

called “the problem of evil,” he never seemed convinced that it was a real problem. Evil was

simply not as big of a problem for medieval thinkers as it is for modern ones, and much of the

reason for this is due to their metaphysical grounding of the terms employed in the debate. When

these are rightly understood, neither the logical nor even the evidential problem of evil can arise.

The existential problem of evil may be more resilient. William Hasker defined it as “the

form in which theism is questioned and/or rejected on the basis of moral protest, indignation, and

outrage at the evils of this world.”1 One could be forgiven for simply understanding it as the

“felt” problem of evil. It is indeed tempting to say that its resilience is due in large part to its

being more divorced from metaphysics by its very nature. But it’s resilience also clearly has

something to do with its universality. The felt problem of evil is one everyone will have to deal

with at some point in their life, and therefore one that everyone will have to develop an answer

to. For that reason, it is also much more naturally related to the pastoral care is often required to

deal with experiences of evil.

1 William Hasker, “On Regretting the Evils of This World,” in The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings, ed.
Michael L. Peterson, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 193-194.
 2

This paper will not aim to create a new theodicy or even a defense, but will instead

highlight and tie together some of the most successful aspects of those attempted by some

classical thinkers and their modern interpreters. If successful, then when the terms of the debate

are properly defined and grounded, it should be clear why the logical and evidential problems of

evil should not even arise. With these metaphysical definitions, these terms will then be tied to

the existential problem by considering why they may not be intuitive for some people, where a

healthy sense of mystery should be maintained, and where more understanding can be sought.

This will lead into consideration of some of the purposes that evil does serve in God’s plan for

the universe, both as implied in the metaphysics employed, and as highlighted in Scripture. This

will finally lead to a groundwork for pastoral recommendations for those suffering some

particular evil. Just as everyone is bound to come into contact with evil in some manner,

everyone is bound to realize the power of such experiences to bring one face to face with one’s

most fundamental beliefs about oneself, the world, and God. As an earthquake shakes and

destroys any structure of weak integrity and any edifice built on uneven foundations, so too can

an experience of evil collapse a weak worldview, and bring well-intended beliefs into chaos.

Augustine’s Good News

It should not be taken for granted that in any serious philosophical discussion the terms

being dealt with will be defined before they are employed. Surprisingly, a survey of the

contemporary literature on the problem of evil reveals that objective grounding for the terms

seen as central to the discussion is rarely sought, and strong metaphysical foundations, even for

“good” and “evil,” are often neglected. Not being one to have fallen into simple methodological
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errors, Thomas Aquinas was careful to establish ontologically grounded definitions for good,

evil, being, privation, etc in the first part of the Summa Theologiae. In doing so, he affirmed that

the good is in fact convertible with being, meaning it transcended the Aristotelian categories of

substance.2 With this affirmation, he found himself squarely in the good company of

philosophical titans like Albert the Great, Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato.3

Indeed for Augustine, things have natures, and all natures are good in so far as they are.4

Aquinas embraced this line of thinking wholeheartedly, and buttressed it according to his own

influences. Partly from the Aristotelian axiom that the good is that which all things seek,5

Aquinas concluded that all things seek their own perfection, a notion which added direction to

the fluctuations between actualization and privation in beings.6 All things seek to be, and to be as

fully as they can be. In all composite beings, this directionality speaks to their telos, the end

toward which they tend. For Aristotle as for Aquinas, the appetite is a power whose purpose is

none other than to achieve the perfection of the agent, whereby in the case of the human, the

rational appetite seeks that which the intellect apprehends as having the aspect of the good.7 That

which is desirable is therefore so desired because it contains something that the intellect

understands to be perfective of the agent, and therefore good. In this way, the good is that which

allows a substance to be more fully, and therefore the good as such must be convertible with

2 Thomas Aquinas, ST.I.5.1.

3 Scott Charles MacDonald, Being and Goodness The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and
Philosophical Theology (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991), 1-2.
4 Augustine, Confessions, 7.12.
5 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.1094a.
6 Aquinas, ST.I.6.1.
7 Ibid., ST.I-II.1.2.
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being, though with the added relation to the appetite as something perfective of the agent, and

thus desirable.8

With an ontologically positive understanding of the good, it was not hard to explain evil as

an ontological negative. For Augustine, all beings other than God have natures that are

corruptible, which means a good nature can admit of privation. Yet in so far as the nature is, and

does not lack what should be, the nature is good.9 Once again following Augustine, Aquinas

affirms that evil is privation or the lack of being due a thing.10 Yet Augustine drew from the

platonic doctrine of the Forms to develop his own theory of the Divine Ideas, which in turn

served to ground his theory of natures. With these, he had an ontological standard for what and

how things should be, but ontological limits imply deontological ones. If things must be in a

certain way, then they must act in a certain way too. To do otherwise would be to welcome

privation or corruption into oneself. Free will was therefore seen by Augustine as the gate

through which evil enters the universe: “From a human nature, which is good in itself, there can

spring forth either a good or an evil will. There was no other place from whence evil could have

arisen in the first place except from the nature—good in itself—of an angel or a man.”11

Being well grounded in Aristotelian metaphysics, Aquinas found a similar standard in the

forms of substantial unions. To see evil as a privation was therefore to see it as having no

positive ontological status of its own, but instead as a specific kind lack that always presupposes

8 Aquinas, ST.I.5.1.
9 Augustine, Confessions, 7.12.
10 Aquinas, ST.I.48.1.
11 Augustine, Enchiridion, 4.15.
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the antecedent fact of being.12 Evil is not a substantial thing in its own right, but simply a defect

in the good, parasitic of it, and thereby wholly contingent upon the good for its own purely

nominal existence.13 For both Augustine and Aquinas therefore, the good news of ontology is

that the fact of evil always presupposes the real existence of the good.

The Problem of Good

Guanilo’s criticism of the Anselmian ontological argument for God’s existence was that no

one can define God into existence. In like manner, ontological input of the sort thus far described

has also occasionally been criticized in discussions on the problem of evil as an attempt to define

evil out of existence, in effect brushing off any need for the theist to respond to the problem head

on.14 Yet reading Aquinas or Augustine as handwaving the problem away with metaphysics

would be to misunderstand their positions at best, and misunderstand what is even required to

answer the central issues in the debate at worst. To approach the discussion on their own terms,

questions orbiting the modern versions of the debate will need to be set aside, so as to avoid the

pitfalls of their presuppositions.

For Aquinas, it is almost more appropriate to speak more of the problem of good than the

problem of evil. Strictly speaking, if evil is a privation of some good due a thing, then it is

accidental to the good, making good in some way the cause of evil. Indeed, Aquinas affirms this,

explaining,

12 Aquinas, ST.I.48.1.
13 Ibid, ST.I.48.1.; Augustine, Confessions, 7.12.
14 J. L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” in Oxford Readings in Philosophy: The Problem of Evil, ed.
Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 29-32.
 6

It must be said that every evil in some way has a cause. For evil is the absence of the
good, which is natural and due to a thing. But that anything fail from its natural and due
disposition can come only from some cause drawing it out of its proper disposition. . .
But only good can be a cause; because nothing can be a cause except inasmuch as it is a
being, and every being, as such, is good.15

In his own day, Augustine had argued against the Manicheans who defended a dualistic

conception of the universe whereby evil is substantial and characteristic of matter, and good is

characteristic of nous, mind, or spirit. Augustine deftly and ingeniously parried attacks from this

invasive heresy in the Church by propounding the more biblically defensible notion that, strictly

speaking, only good is, but not everything is good because not everything is what it can and

should be.16 With ontological priority and supremacy being given to the good, the problem of

good thus arises: how can that which is not so heinously affect that which is? To put it another

way, if that which is has its grounding in He who is fully and without defect, then how could a

world so painfully lacking in due perfections come about?

Reconciling Free Will and Agent Causality

It has already been noted that for Augustine the answer was free will. Augustine saw free

will as a part of human nature which is in itself a good thing. Yet to the degree that the will does

not seek the good of the person according their nature qua human, it acts wrongly and prevents

the attainment of a fulfilling good. So by virtue of its autonomy, which is a power good in itself,

evil can be chosen over good.17

15 Aquinas, ST.I.49.1.
16 Augustine, Confessions, 7.12.
17 Augustine, Enchiridion, 4.12.
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Aquinas would agree with Augustine that evil has no substantial cause, but the way he

would go on to explain the accidental cause of evil in the good was perhaps a bit more complex.

Part of the reason for this has to do with his understanding of agent causality, which Brian

Davies has successfully highlighted in recent years that as a key element lacking in modern

discussions on the problem of evil. As Davies explains, for Aquinas there is decidedly no causal

independence from God.18 Whatever an agent does, he can do only as a secondary cause whereby

God is the first cause. Yet this would entail that any action by an agent qua secondary cause is

even more so ascribed to God qua first cause. As the first cause, God causes the being of every

agent, not in a passive or one-off deistic way, but actively, each moment that they exist.

At least two problems are commonly raise in response to this view of causality that should

quickly dealt with. One is that, if God is causing the being of everything that exists each moment

that it exists, nothing but a strictly deterministic universe would be logically tenable. A related

issue is that, without free will being actually free in some meaningful sense, free will cannot be a

door through which sin enters as Augustine thought, leaving God to be most responsible for the

evil actions of his creation. Davies finds neither of these objections convincing, and concludes

that if the classical view of God and agent casualty are both understood, the first objection is

demonstrably wrong and the second one to be plainly ridiculous.

He deals with the issue of free will by presenting Aquinas’ position on primary efficient

causality. He understands Aquinas to be saying that God actively sustaining a person’s being

(according to their nature, of which free will is a power) is the necessary precondition for a

person to exist in the way that they do. Moreover, a necessary precondition for a thing’s

18 Brian Davies, Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 76-78.
 8

existence cannot be an impediment to it.19 Moreover, because the nature of the will is, in itself,

indifferent toward good and evil, it is able to choose freely when the goods presented to it are not

presented as necessary by the intellect. Therefore, the will is not actually determined by God, as

Aquinas himself explains:

And God indeed inevitably moves the will because of the efficacy of his causal power,
which cannot fail. But because the nature of the will so moved is indifferently disposed to
different things, no necessity results, and freedom abides. Just so, God’s providence
works infallibly in every kind of thing, although effects result contingently from
contingent causes, insofar as God moves every kind of thing proportionally, each in his
own way.20

Neither can our sin be ascribed to God who is the first cause. One way of understanding

this is according to the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of agent causality in which action

(change made) and passion (change incurred) really refers to one and the same change. So,

action and passion really differ only in respect as one and the same act is expressed by the agent

or received by the patient.21 This amounts to the axiom that an effect resembles its cause.

Therefore, God who is Pure Act will only create that which is likewise in act, or actualized. A

corrupted being with an evil will could therefore could not be created by God. Rather, only a

good being with all the perfections due his form could be directly created by God—though

having been created, this being could then become corrupted.

To offer an illustration, when a room is cleaned, the intention and effort put into the act of

cleaning the room by an agent is imprinted in the result of the room having been cleaned exactly

according to the degree of effort and type of actions causally exerted by the agent. That is, a

19 Davies, Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil, 76.

20 Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, 24.1.ad 3.
21 Aquinas, ST.I.44.4.
 9

cleaned room does not have to physically look like the agent who cleaned it to resemble the

agent as an effect resembles its cause. A cleaned room is instead a map of where and how an

agent causally imprinted change on things passively receiving those changes. With a sharp

enough eye, and a knack for causal reasoning, one could work backward from studying the room

to create a mental picture of what the agent who cleaned it must have been like. This is, in

principle, the job description of forensic detectives (and philosophical theologians for that

matter, though for them perhaps toward more hopeful ends).

A second reason God could not be the cause of sin or evil is because He is the cause of all

goodness and perfections in the universe, meaning He Himself is perfect. Being the first cause of

all perfections, all perfections exist preeminently in Him, so God is rightly called perfect.22 This

can also be understood by recognizing that, as Pure Act, He is both wholly simple. He cannot

have any potentiality in Him, for His is nature is its own act of existence. Therefore, because He

is fully, there cannot be in Him any deficiency or potentiality. So if effects resemble their causes,

then creation as actual must reflect the actuality of its Creator. The first cause of all being must

himself Be preeminently. Moreover, because that which does not exist is not explained in its non-

existence by any act, it is neither possible nor necessary to ascribe to God the creation of

privation in things, for privation cannot be created, which is to reiterate, it has no substantial

cause.

22 Aquinas, ST.I.4.2.
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Recovering Analogical Predication

Yet this only partially addresses the question, leaving the problem roughly as Augustine

saw it: to explain how the good things that have been created became corrupted with privation.

In fact, this is the problem of evil, traditionally understood. Even with the generous assumption

that one has a clear understanding agent causality as it relates to God and creatures, one may still

be drawn to wonder how the sheer magnitude of privation evident in the world today could

characterize a good creation. One may still ask: if the “good” being predicated of God is in fact

truly predicted of Him in spite of the evils in the world, then how can it retain any meaningful

content given the fact of horrendous evils in the world? This question, much discussed in the

modern literature, is essentially asking how goodness can be anything but equivocally predicated

of God and man, if man would not call any creation this full of horrendous evils a “good”

creation. For if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent, and if as the first cause of

creation He “imposes [His] character” (i.e. that of existence) on creation, how is it that evil

thrives?23 What meaningful relation to the vulgar sense of “good” can be retained with this

theory of ontological “goodness” as the urstoff?

To answer that, an analogical understanding of how being and goodness are predicated of

both God and creation needs to be recovered, and in the modern literature, Brian Davies has done

a remarkable job of just that. He has argued that much of the problem with the God-talk in the

debate on the problem of evil stems from an improper view of God, or at least a non-classical

one. He and others have argued for the necessity of recovering the doctrine of divine simplicity

before Gods’s being and goodness can be discussed at all. James Dolezal explains the doctrine of

23 Davies, Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil, 78.

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divine simplicity with two points: “(1) God is identical with his existence and his essence and (2)

that each of his attributes is ontologically identical with his existence and with every other one of

his attributes. There is nothing in God that is not God.”24 In other words, God is in no way

composed, neither of substance and accident, nor of essence and existence, nor of act and

potency, etc. This immediately makes him distinct from any other conceivable being, because all

that is which is not God is a creature, and all creatures are composed. Humans, for example, are

composed of essence and esse (an act of existence), form and matter, and act and potency. But

God, on the other hand, has no potency, meaning He is Pure Act. Not being composed of form

and matter means He is not limited by any ontological constraints. Similarly, not being composed

of act essence and esse means His essence (if He can be said to have one) is his very act of

existence.

It would almost be appropriate therefore to say God is in a different category of being

altogether, but even this way of speaking fails to live up to the reality of the difference at hand.

Because of the fact of their metaphysical composition, all other beings can be placed into

categories, namely categories according to genus and difference. Humans, for example, would be

in the genus of “animal” with the specific difference of “rational.” But in the case of God, the

only genus which he could be in would be “being” or “existence,” as His essence (analogically

speaking) is His own self-subsistent act of existence. Hence, scholastics had the tendency of

referring to God as the Ipsum Esse Subsistens. Aquinas, following Aristotle, observes that

24 James Dolezal, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness
(Eugene Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 2.
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“being” cannot admit of any difference, because anything that is not a being is simply nothing,

and therefore being itself cannot be a genus.25

Accordingly, God’s goodness must be understood analogically as well. In the case of

human beings, goodness is often interpreted in terms of Aristotelian virtue ethics, whereby a

virtuous thing has the habit of being what it should be, and thereby acting rightly. But these ways

of understanding goodness cannot apply to God, because the actualizing of potentials cannot

apply Him for the reasons already explained. The doctrine of divine simplicity affirms God’s

identity with His act of existence and His goodness, thereby also implying His immutability,

impassability, and eternality, among other things. While it is therefore true that God is, and that

He is good, He neither is, nor is good, in the same ways that people are and are good.

What all this amounts to for Davies is the importance of firmly holding to an analogical

view of being when thinking and speaking about God. God is not a “thing,” like humans are

things. God does not have being. He is His own act of existence—in Him and Him alone are His

“essence” (analogically speaking of course) and His act of existence one. This means that He is

not simply quantitatively, but qualitatively different from everything of which we have direct

experience, and it means that He stand outside the created order, sustaining it such that it only

has its existence in and through Him.

God cannot therefore be spoken of as if He were an actor in the universe. Accordingly one

cannot make sense of assumptions that there are contexts in which God can have obligations,

expect by reasoning that they come for a univocal view of goodness as predicated of God and

men. If anything, obligations themselves are a part of the creation God freely chose to make.

25 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. Anton C. Pegis (Toronto: Image Books: 1955), I.25.6.
 13

Moreover, as has been explained, because God could not be subject to moral obligations on

account of His being devoid of all potency. To be moral necessarily implies that one be able to

actualizing a potency to be in a certain way. In other words, to succeed in doing the right thing

means there must have been a wrong thing that could have been done. Because God is Pure Act,

He has no potential to be anything other than what He is. He therefore cannot be “good” or “bad”

in any moral or deontological sense.

Yet any descriptive term need not only be univocally or equivocally predicated of its

referent; it can also be analogically predicated, whereby there is an element of similarity and an

element of difference in the prediction. The differences in the case of “being” and “goodness” are

the qualitative differences thus far explained, and the similarities are rooted in the the

convertibility of goodness and being: all that is, is good in so far as it is. For God, who Is

completely and necessarily in Himself, it is proper to speak of Him as wholly, infinitely, and

even necessarily good. For humans however, they are good only in so far as they fulfill their

potential to be what they are according to their nature. they are good only in so far as they

succeed in achieving their end.

Good and the Mystery of Being

One of the immediate consequences of maintaining this view of God for the modern

literature on the problem of evil is that there can be no complete or absolute evil, because an

absolute evil, if there were one, would be an absolute privation, which is nothing. On this view,

even Hitler and the devil himself would have some kind of metaphysical goodness in them as

real beings. Perhaps one could say that the ontological limits of the essences of actual things
 14

have the character of the good. Augustine seems to have said as much: “For good to be

diminished is evil; still, however much it is diminished, something must remain of its original

nature as long as it exists at all. For no matter what kind or however insignificant a thing may be,

the good which is its ‘nature’ cannot be destroyed without the thing itself being destroyed.”26

However bad a horrendous evil is, there must be some good presupposed in it for the

experience of the evil to even be possible. But this immediately sets up an important distinction

in man’s experience of good and evil, one that seems to have escaped much discussion in the

modern literature, either because it is so well hidden in plain sight as to have escaped general

notice, or because it contains the seed of a truth capable of defusing the felt-problem of evil,

which perhaps people are loathe to admit on account of the ensuing responsibility. The

distinction to be made is this: because good and evil are not antipodes standing in perfect

opposition to one another on a bipolar ontological spectrum, there is an epistemological

disequilibrium embedded in our experience of them.

Good Is Presupposed in Evil Particulars

If all that is is good, then those things which we have experience of in some way have the

character of good (be it “naturally,” as it was for Augustine, or “ontologically” as it was for

Aquinas). Good is thus presupposed in some aspect of every experience. The same can be said of

the true, for it is likewise convertible with being, yet with the added relation of being

apprehended by the intellect. Whatever is understood therefore has being in some sense, be it

actually, potentially, or merely conceptually. Evil, however, is not likewise understood. If evil is

26 Augustine, Enchiridion, 4.12.

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only in so far as what is good does not succeed in achieving its end, what is said to be understood

is but the good upon which the evil is parasitic. Augustine informs his readers on what he sees as

the two ways good is presupposed even by evil things:

Vice cannot be in the highest good, and cannot be but in some good. Things solely good,
therefore, can in some circumstances exist; things solely evil, never; for even those
natures which are vitiated by an evil will, so far indeed as they are vitiated, are evil, but
in so far as they are natures, they are good. And when a vitiated nature is punished,
besides the good it has in being a nature, it has this also, that it is not unpunished.27

For man’s experience, this means that the greatest good can in principle be known, though

by virtue of the qualitative difference between its infinitude and the finitude of the knower, there

will always be more to be known by the knower. That is not so with the greatest evil. The

greatest evil, like any evil, can only be understood in so far as the ontological good of an

actualized form persists, and a finite good can be fully known. The infinite good is completely

foreign to man’s direct experience (save for what can be known of God through the work of the

Holy Spirit in the life of the believer). The greatest evil however would presumably be the devil

and his work, depending very much on how “great” is predicated of evil. Yet in both cases, man

can have direct experience, and to the degree he does not, he only lacks experience of the

greatest evil quantitatively, not qualitatively. Again, all evil is of itself per necessity finite, and to

some degree everyone will encounter evil in this world. But the good man experiences in this life

are not quantitatively comparable to the Good which will be seen in the next life. As seen in

Davies work on analogical predication, the perfect goodness of God is qualitatively different

from the goodness man encounters in the life, though not so different as to be equivocal.

27 Augustine, “On a Good Creation’s Capacity for Evil,” in The Problem of Evil: Selected
Readings, ed. Michael L. Peterson. 2nd edition (Notre Dame Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 240.
 16

Because man does not have any direct experience of the absolute good, there is an element

of mystery inherent to it, even as it is essentially intelligible. From this, one may perhaps

speculate that there could be no real mystery at all except in that which is inherently intelligible,

for mystery implies something being potentially known, and nothingness cannot be potentially

known, nor it is even actually unknown—it simply is not.

Disequilibrium in Predication

At its heart, the disequilibrium between good and evil is this: there is absolute goodness,

but there is no absolute evil. An absolute good would have the character of a true infinite—

infinite being. But again, absolute evil would simply be nothing. The greatest evil there could be

would simply be the greatest non-absolute privation possible of the greatest particular finite

good. Moreover, the absolute goodness is essentially intelligible, but evil, parasitic on a

particular good for even its form, is essentially unintelligible.

Man’s understanding of good is said to be analogical in that the ultimate good is God who

is simple, and therefore qualitatively different in His goodness from the particular goods man

experiences in this life. But man’s understanding of evil is not likewise analogically predicated

of the greatest evil and men, because evil in beings is the result of a privation in some actuality

due a form. Evil of necessity requires metaphysical complexity—it always entails some

composition of act and potency at least.

If correct, the foregoing considerations imply that the evil and good are neither equally

intelligible, nor equally comprehensible to people. Instead it seems instead that there is an

inverse relationship between the intelligibility and comprehensibility, both of good and evil. This
 17

is so first because good is more intelligible than evil. In fact, only good is intelligible. Evil is of

its nature irrational and unintelligible.

Secondly, goodness is less comprehensible than evil. If to comprehend is to fully

understand something, then absolute goodness will forever by mysterious to men, both in this life

and in the next. Humans have no living experience of a pure and subsistent good. And as has

been said, such a good would be an infinite being of pure intelligibility, so one could in theory

forever learn about it. This is why Davies found analogical predication of the goodness to God to

be so necessary when discussing God. And because there can be no pure and subsistent, infinite

evil, all evil must exist in finite and metaphysically complex beings, thereby making it in this

sense less mysterious, and more comprehensible. Evil can be predicated of creatures only, and

thus it can be predicated univocally among the kinds of beings in which it can be found.

An objection may be presented here: some angels are said to be evil, but their manner of

being is not the same as man. Therefore, evil is analogically predicated of the evil angels and

men. Here, the first two propositions are true, but the conclusion does not follow. It is true that

some angels are said to be evil, and it is true that their manner of being is not the same as man’s.

Yet whereas being is analogically predicated of men and angels because men are more

metaphysically complex, and angels less so, the same analogical relations do not hold for

privation. As Aquinas affirms, that which has being more simply is more absolutely, and so the

angels do indeed have their being in higher and more excellent way than men, but from this it

does not follow that by failing to achieve a good proper to one’s nature (be it angelic or human),

the ensuing privation itself changes in nature. Indeed, privation itself has no nature but is only

known through that good upon which it is a corruption. To speak of privation as being analogical
 18

between men and angels would be to speak of varieties of nothingness. Therefore, though being

can be predicated analogically, it does not necessarily follow that privation can. It is for this

reason that even though angels have different modes of being and knowing, when they fail to

achieve some good proper to their nature, Scripture likewise speaks of them as “sinning.”28

Aquinas notes that Lucifer was not led to his first sin by habit or passion, for these inhibit

the reason, but higher angels know the universal directly through the intellect, not discursively

through reason as men do. Lucifer instead fell into his first sin “by desiring, as his last end of

beatitude, something which he could attain by the virtue of his own nature, turning

his appetite away from supernatural beatitude, which is attained by God's grace.”29 So he sought

to attain a good for himself apart from God’s will for him according to the type of thing that he

was. Moreover, he sought to do this while clearly perceiving it was contrary to God’s order and

will for him. This is precisely what is meant when it is said that “man sins.” However, in

accordance with the greater complexity of man’s nature in relation to the angelic beings, there

are ways in which man can sin though angels cannot. If man sins on account of ignorance, or

because his reason is clouded by habit or passion, in those cases sin may be spoken of

analogically, though it would still follow that the ensuing privation was itself somehow

analogical. Accordingly Paul reveals believers will judge angels,30 a fact that would be more

difficult to interpret if both the act of sinning and the result (inordinateness or privation

perverting God’s design) were to be analogically understood.

28 2 Peter 2:4. All biblical references will be in the NASB unless otherwise indicated.
29 Aquinas, ST.I.63.3.
30 1 Corinthians 6:3
 19

Proper Suffering as Analogous to the Creative Act:

Bringing the Intelligibility of Good Out of the Unintelligibility of Evil

A Teleological Compass Points to Healing as a Purpose of Suffering

This lack of equilibrium in the intelligibility and comprehensibility of good and evil may

very well be at the root of the felt and existential problem of evil, even as it is indicative of its

solution. Evil is understood univocally, but good as such can only be analogically grasped.

Whatever evil is, or more precisely, that it is not, is apparent in full. Not so with the good, which

of its nature belongs to the absolute, transcendent, and finite. The good will in this age only be

partially understood, and even though the beatific vision will allow for clear perception of the

Good in the age to come, comprehension of the Him will grow forever.

Accordingly, there is something amiss when finite beings in this age expect to be able to

resolve all the mysteries of a universe made and upheld by the ase God. That kind of desire has

often been tied not only to Tower of Babel, man’s great endeavor to build his way up into

heaven, but to the fall of the devil himself.31 When Job stood before God demanding an answer

for the evils and sufferings that had befallen him, He was met with the voice of God

reprimanding him and his friends for their vain speculations while God highlighted that Job and

his friends were in no position question God on anything. Therefore, a considerable amount of

circumspection is certainly in order as man considers the plans of the infinite God these topics,

and the tool of analogical predication goes a long way in helping to secure the kind of

intellectual humility necessary for the discussion.

31 Genesis 11:1-9; Aquinas, ST.I.63.3.

 20

Yet while man should not expect to be able to plumb the depths of all mysteries through the

power of his intellect alone, God has not left people entirely ignorant of the purpose of evil in the

universe either. Through both general revelation and special revelation man can come to know

something God and His plans. Both Scripture and natural theology therefore reveal that God

orders creation back to Himself as its final end. It follows that He intends to bring good out of

evil and that He allows it for this purpose. This is also hinted at in the fact that because a

complete evil does not exist of its own accord, but only has a borrowed, quasi-being via the

corruption of some good, in all evil experiences there is therefore an opportunity to recognize the

good underneath the evil, or the good toward which the evil is ordered. Aquinas affirms that God,

as the first cause, imprints something of himself on creation in bestowing those perfections to a

thing which accord with the kind of thing he has made it to be. But because all perfections come

from God, they exist in Him preeminently. And because all things seek their own perfection, all

things are naturally and ultimately ordered back to God.32 One may imagine therefore even

though many things in this world have not attained the perfections due its nature, God has not

simply left them to corruption, but instead has implanted in their very being a teleological

compass pointing them back toward himself as the source of the perfections which they lack.

Aquinas contends that this is even true of all manner of things:

All things, by desiring their own perfection, desire God Himself, inasmuch as the
perfections of all things are so many similitudes of the divine being. . .And so of those
things which desire God, some know Him as He is Himself, and this is proper to the
rational creature; others know some participation of His goodness, and this belongs also
to sensible knowledge; others have a natural desire without knowledge, as being directed
to their ends by a higher intelligence.33

32 Aquinas, ST.I.44.4.
33 Ibid., ST.I.6.1.
 21

To the degree that corruption deprives a thing of some perfection due its nature, it has all the

more reason to find the fulfillment of that perfection at its source, which its very being naturally

seeks. This process of creation tending toward its fulfillment in the first cause could therefore be

conceived as a process of healing—the rectification of privation and corruption in things. The

Bible itself speaks to this idea in passages such as Psalm 90:15-16 which seems to imply a

proportionate connection between the evil one experiences in this life and healing rewards in

seeing the majesty and works of God: “make us glad according to the days Thou has afflicted us,

and the years we have seen evil. Let Thy work appear to Thy servants, and Thy majesty to their

children.”

A Two-Fold Purpose for Evil: Revealing Value

Similarly, in response to a question concerning the reason for the natural evil of blindness

afflicting a man, Jesus answered in John 9:3, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents;

but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” While there is of course debate

over how generalizable this example was intended to be, in at least this case, an example is seen

in which there was a good purpose intended to be drawn out through the evil, namely that the

power of God would be made manifest in the man by his healing.

In examples like these, one imagines evil serves the good in at least a twofold way. First of

all, evil is an opportunity for the power, love, mercy and character of God to be revealed in such

a way that is all the more valued because of the dark circumstances into which it was bestowed.

Augustine is probably the earliest and most well-known supporter of this idea. As he explained,
 22

things are more beautiful when arranged with contrast, just as a poet intentionally uses antitheses

to accentuate the beauty of his art. In color theory, this idea is known as “simultaneous contrast”:

Colors appear more saturated if they are seen against the background of their
complements. Thus, red appears more reddish when we set it against green. This
phenomenon of simultaneous contrast is not restricted to colors of hues. This effect also
appear in black and white contrast. That is why a white diamond shines most against the
background of black velvet.34

It is not that a black background changes the value of the diamond, as if the perfection of its

substance were dependent in any way on its background (which has only an accidental relation to

the diamond). Yet this accidental relation can enable the true value of the diamond to be more

clearly seen, and therefore more accurately valued and more appropriately appreciated. In both

the men who were born with sight, and the man who was healed from blindness, the perfection

of sight came from God. But in which group was the perfection of sight more highly valued?

That this reasoning was intended to extend beyond purely physical perfections is seen in

passages such as Luke 7:47: “For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been

forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” So to have been forgiven

much, will in turn produce more love in oneself than would otherwise have been the case. More

difficult passages expand the scope of this contrast-value theodicy to explain the effect of

regeneration not just on the level of individuals, but on the whole group of people being saved.

Romans 8:28 says: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those

who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose,” indicating that both good and

evil serves the purpose of those that love and follow God. In Romans 9:22-23 Paul asks, “What

if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with

34 Jafar Mahmud, Physiological Psychology (New Dehli: A.P.H. Publishing Corp., 2005), 97.
 23

much patience the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction. . . in order that he might make

known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory?”

Here again, evil factors into the greater order and harmony of the universe, benefitting the good,

and harming only the evil, as Augustine likewise taught. These verses seem to indicate that evil

is permitted for a time to reveal how great the mercy of God is on those who chose to accept His

pardon for their own acts of evil.

A second, way in which evil may serve the purpose of the good follows from the first. The

French novelist Leon Bloy wrote, “Man has places in his poor heart which do not yet exist, and

into them enters suffering, that they may have existence.”35 His idea seems to be something akin

to Christian ideas of sanctification and regeneration through trial, an idea expressed in numerous

places in Scripture, but characteristically in James 1:2-4 where the author writes, “Consider it all

joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith

produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and

complete, lacking in nothing.” What is called “trials” here are understood to be the instances of

adversity one faces in life, such as temptation and even suffering which, when endured properly,

have a valuable, perfective effect on the person.36 The key to accessing this perfective benefit of

these seems to be maintaining a posture of faith in the midst of difficult experiences, meaning

that a person continues to trust in God and does not doubt what He has revealed of Himself (e.g.

that He is good, loving, and sovereign). What the passages above Scriptures imply, Paul clearly

35 Charles Journet, The Meaning of Evil (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2020), book jacket.
36 The Greek for “trials” as it appears in James 1:2 is peirasmos, G3985. The Strong’s definition reads: “a
putting to proof by experiment (of good), experience (of evil), solicitation, discipline or provocation; by implication,
adversity—temptation.” This would seem to include any instances of adversity in life, be it internal temptation or
external affliction, which could entice one to have an improper response to the trial. Experiences of evil, especially
horrendous evil, should therefore qualify as peirasmos.
 24

states in 2 Cor. 5:17-20, namely that as people are conformed to the image of Christ, they begin

to participate with Him in His work of reconciling the world to God. In other words, as people

come to faith in Christ, they are sanctified by adopting and maintaining a posture of humble faith

in the midst of various trials, and in so doing are equipped to facilitate a similar process of faith-

leading-to-sanctification in people around them.

There is thus a strong Scriptural precedent for considering the work of the Holy Spirit in

the life of believer to be a spiritually creative in act, in that He calls the order of righteousness

out of the disorder of the lawlessness in which a person was previously living. Moreover, as the

believer willfully submits to this process of regeneration, they will be participating in this

creative act by helping to initiate similar processes in the lives of those around them. At the very

least, to adopt an attitude of humble acceptance of suffering, as James encourages his readers,

and to not doubt the goodness of God in the midst of suffering, will naturally be to bring order

into the life of a person in some way affected by the chaos of some particular evil. This bringing

of order out of chaos is analogous to the creative act of God seen in Genesis 1 and elsewhere.

This can also be seen in the work of Christ on the cross when, by suffering voluntarily, humbly,

and with faith, he was able to bring the greatest good from the greatest evil, the greatest life from

the greatest chaos.

This is therefore the calling of every believer. When Christ admonishes his followers to

take up their crosses and follow Him, He is admonishing them to suffer well, to voluntarily

accepting responsibility for the evil, chaos, disorder, and privation rampant in the circumstance

they will individually encounter in life, and by doing so while retaining humility, faith, and
 25

righteous living, they will redeem those situations, thereby bringing order out of chaos,

intelligibility out of the unintelligible.

This regenerative act of voluntary suffering is essentially an act of love. Aquinas describes

love as “first movement of the will and of every appetitive faculty,”37 and it is therefore

conceived as the movement of the will toward the good, which is the proper object of the will.

Love is therefore a dynamic going out of oneself, to seek another as a good. When in attainment,

the good is experienced as joy, as the will rests in quiescence of possessing its end. This is a

static relation of possession, static because it seeks no further end. When the will fails to attain

some good end, a kind of anti-joy results in the experience of pain. Pain would here be a

dynamic, non-static orientation toward a privation in the self. But Love is a seeking of the good,

meaning an intellectual judgment that a thing is, and is perfective, is presupposed in the act of

love. With pain, only privation and disorder is presupposed. To love another is therefore to will

their good, and to seek their attainment of some feature perfective and fulfilling them. This is in a

very important sense analogous to the creative act. It seeks being over non-being, order over

chaos, joyous quiescence over painful privation.

The call of Scripture is to voluntarily accept the suffering of the world and to go outside of

oneself seeking the good of others in spite of the pain of life. This is an act of love, and it is

regenerative of both the believer and the person being loved by them. In The Psychology of Love

According to St. Bonaventure, Robert Prentice observed that “Metaphysically man is perfect in

himself, in his species, yet psychologically there is in him a potency which must be actuated by

37 Aquinas, ST.I.20.1.
 26

union with another person.”38 To love another is therefore to actualize a potency in them, and

bring to quiescence ergo joy the movement of their will toward being loved.

There may be a fundamental similarity, or perhaps parallel, between the act of creation and

its regeneration. The walk of the believer as presented in the New Testament seems to present the

idea of love having a regenerative, restorative, or corrective effect on one’s environment. This

also seems analogous to God’s act of brining order out of chaos at the beginning of time in

creation. Perhaps this is even part of what it means to be made in the image of God: to be

capable of bringing forth order and intelligibility out of chaos and disorder. God calling order out

of chaos when creating ex nihilo would then be not just a one-off event at the beginning of

history, it is also something that is constantly happening as creation is being renewed, even on

the level of individual interactions through the members of the body of Christ. If to be redeemed

and renewed is to be brought from a state of chaos and corruption and unintelligibility into a

state of goodness and order and being more fully (which is how Paul seems to have understood

righteousness), then the believer can participate in that process of renewal by having faith in the

goodness of God, which is to affirm that ultimate being is good in spite of the privation seen in

the existence of things in the world around them.

Concluding Remarks: Engaging the Pastoral Problem of Evil

An evil world is one in which there is rampant unintelligibility, chaos, privation. But even

such a world must be governed by an inherently intelligible (ergo good) being. Through natural

theology and the revealed truths of Scripture, man can know that God’s plans are good. But

38 Robert P. Prentice, The Psychology of Love According to St. Bonaventure, 2nd ed. (New York: Franciscan
Institute Publications, 1957), 53.
 27

because goodness per se is beyond the experience of a finite creature, they should not expect to

be able to fully comprehend a wholly good being’s plans.

Augustine says the mystery of natures that are apparently evil is to level pride and produce

humility and faith, both of which are good things. In this way, he saw the plan of God as being

one of order and harmony in which good is brought out of evil, which itself came forth as a

corruption in human nature via the good of free will. It would almost seem as if God had

embedded an imperative in the fabric of nature for all those who would come to Him to do so on

faith, and not purely on the basis of their own understanding. For to rely on one’s own

understanding is to declare that God cannot exist in the way He claims to under the present

conditions of the world. Moreover, it is to say that unless a good great enough to justify the fact

of evil according the standards of the creature is proffered, the creature succeeds in disproving

His creator. Evil thus lowers and narrows the door leading to the path upon which one may find

God. No one who walks tall, confident in their ability to find truth through their own power

alone will be able to find this door. It is perhaps even the primary test of this life to affirm the

goodness of being in spite of one’s undeniable experiences of evil. And it is for those who pass

the test to receive the good to which even evil is ordered.

Is it possible for someone to be so miserable in this life that it would be better if they had

never existed? It is certainly possible to be so miserable in this life that one may wish they had

never existed. Indeed the amount of suffering one can experience in this life seems constrained

only by the limits of experience, and perhaps the only a priori conditions bounding experience

are man’s ontological and temporal finitude. Within those bounds one can certainly find enough

potential suffering that it indeed defies facile comprehension. No one cannot read in detail the
 28

about the atrocities of the 20th century and come to any other conclusion. In response, many

have found the answer to the question of the value of being in the face of extreme suffering to be

self-evident. As Hume said:

I believe that no man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping. . . If it be no
crime, both prudence and courage should engage us to rid ourselves at once of existence
when it becomes a burden. It is the only way that we can then be useful to society, by
setting an example which, if imitated, would preserve to everyone his chance for
happiness in life, and would effectually free him from all danger of misery.39

For Hume then, life is not intrinsically valuable, but worth keeping only in so far as it produces

happiness. Most decidedly then, in the face of great suffering, life is not worth keeping, and non-

being is preferable to being.

If Hume is right in any aspect of this position it is in his latent understanding that there

really are only two paths in life: the one which affirms being as essentially good and that which

does not. For Hume being is not essentially good, it is contingently good, contingent upon the

presence of happiness, and as soon as happiness becomes unavailable it would logically behoove

oneself to rid oneself of one’s life, for it has “becomes a burden” and thereby lost all meaning.

Although most are loathe to admit such dramatic conclusions, it is not for lack of logical

consistency. It is rather more likely due to an intuitive sense that they are wrong, though an

awareness of this intuition is itself impeded by an unwillingness to face the reasons for it.

Every person experience of evil and horrendous evil is therefore both a test and an

opportunity. It is a test to prove whether one is willing to continue to affirm the goodness of

being and of life in spite of what has every appearance of being evidence to the contrary. To

affirm the goodness of being in the face of evil is truly to walk by faith and not by sight, but it is

39 Charles Hume, “Evil Makes Belief in God Unreasonable,” ed. Michael L. Peterson, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017) 59.
 29

not only that. So doing is actually an act of love whereby one wills the good of the other, even

the perpetrator of evil, by forgiving them. This action is restorative, and instead of “cursing God

and dying” as Job’s wife suggested to him, it will remove rather than add to the evil in the world.

In so doing a person can truly be conformed to the image of Christ who is not only the righteous

servant, but the creator. And by allowing his creation to participate in bring order out of chaos,

He allows them to bear His image, even analogously in this grand sense.
 30

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