Paying Attention To The Sky

Thomas Aquinas

When last I left off with the topic of Joy, I was discussing the obstructions I’ve had in my life to experiencing Joy and how the sin of acedia has blocked my ability to truly understand it. I continue to plod along however. Continuing now with a monograph I found by Adrian J. Walker who is an assistant professor of philosophy at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. I found it totally fascinating and will be borrowing extensively from it. It ties together the Christian primacy of Joy and the subject of evil, something you would probably never associate.

Evil is a curiously Janus-like phenomenon. On the one hand, it pervasively colors historical existence, from which it can be no more removed by human effort than death (the two phenomena are, in fact, intimately connected). Because of this ubiquity, evil insinuates itself even into the fabric of the everyday and so becomes “banal,” to use Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase. On the other hand, no matter how common evil is in fact, no matter how widely diffused in “structures of sin” that shape whole cultures and in which we are all more or less complicit, evil never quite manages to complete its colonization of the normal, and its “banality” always betrays a conscience that has either never awakened or has lulled itself to sleep. No matter how seemingly inevitable evil is, then, it never altogether loses its power to shock, but always remains a scandal.

It is a good thing that evil scandalizes us. Our sense of outrage testifies that we have not yet lost the ability to recognize it for what it is. If evil is evil, in fact, it is because it is not normal, but abnormal, monstrous, and prodigious, no matter how prevalent it may be de facto. What is normal is not evil, but the good. In saying this, we formulate the experiential root of the classical Christian doctrine that evil is not equi-primordial with the good, but rides parasitically on it — is a “privation of a due good,” in the scholastic  language of Thomas Aquinas. At stake in Thomas’ admittedly dry definition of evil is nothing less than the affirmation that reality is basically good, and that it is good to exist in this world, despite the presence of evil in it.

“Rejoice Always”
The Apostle Paul tells the Thessalonians to “rejoice always” [pantote chairete] (1 Thessalonians 5:16), thereby declaring joy the fundamental trait of the Christian ethos. If we follow Paul’s injunction,  then, our last word as Christians can never be scandal over evil, however intensely we may and should feel that scandal, but, as Nietzsche liked to say, “Yes and Amen”: joy. John Henry Newman  (who felt as keenly as anyone the scandal of evil) admirably expresses  this Christian primacy of joy in the following passage: 

Gloom is no Christian temper; that repentance is not real which has not love in it; that self-chastisement is not acceptable which  is not sweetened by faith and cheerfulness. We must live in sunshine, even when we sorrow; we must live in God’s presence,  we must not shut ourselves up in our own hearts, even when we  are reckoning up our past sins. We must look abroad into this fair world, which God made “very good,” while we mourn over the evil which Adam brought into it. We must hold communion with what we see there while we seek Him who is  invisible; we must admire it while we abstain from it; acknowledge God’s love while we deprecate his wrath; confess that,  many as are our sins, His grace is greater. Our sins are more in number than the hairs of our head; yet even the hairs of our head are all numbered by Him. He counts our sins, and, as He counts, so can He forgive; for that reckoning, great though it be, comes to an end; but His mercies fail not, and His Son’s merits are infinite.
[Erich Przywara, The Heart of Newman. A Synthesis Arranged by Erich Przywara, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 317]

Newman’s eloquent insistence on the primacy of joy in the Christian outlook brings us directly to the question: does the Christian who always and first rejoices thereby evade the seriousness of the problem of evil? Should we apologize for joy? Joy, like the ontological goodness of which it is the celebratory affirmation, really needs no justification other than itself. It would therefore be perverse to rebut the charge that joy is an evasion of the problem of evil by lading it with a merely human seriousness.

Not to say that evil is a frivolous matter, but rather just the opposite: the problem of evil is too serious for us human beings to handle alone, partly because we ourselves are too involved in evil to be truly objective about it, lacking divine help and illumination. Without a joy born of the confidence that God’s mercy infinitely outweighs evil, we inevitably replace an objective concern for divine justice with the partisanship of human self-righteousness, God’s wrath with man’s rage, the loving ferocity of the saint with the humorless ranting of the self-professed  “radical.” Without joy, protest becomes an end in itself and turns to violence, becoming a mirror image of the evil, real or imagined, that called it forth — as Islamist terror reminds us in our own day. The joyful trust in God’s victory over evil is not a self-centered quietism, but precisely a way of participating in that victory, which God has always already won in Christ, even as he leaves us “room” to  “complete what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ” (Colossians 1:24).  Christian joy is not just a state of mind, but a deed, a deed that is first God’s and only then ours by participation. 

In Evil and the Justice of God, N. T. Wright begins by noting how the Enlightenment project for the perfection of man and the elimination of evil has received some severe checks, from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to the indiscriminate slaughter of the last century. Even so, the modern attempt to abolish original sin was never abandoned, although substitutes had to be found in Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Postmodernism is not helpful on the subject, often branding as evil what it deems politically incorrect. We might add here that when Wright gets around to discussing the evils of the modern age, his list drips with the sort of ecclesial leftism one expects from the Anglican establishment: Third World debt, American military adventurism, capitalism, and industrial pollution. The author thinks the United States’ response to 9/11 “immature,” that we thought we could somehow “eliminate evil” by bombing the Taliban, but he proposes no alternative.

Despite these political hiccups, Wright’s discussion of evil is provocative. He begins by warning against the temptation to “solve” the problem of evil in any obvious way. Even the most sophisticated theodicies (attempts to justify God in the light of evil) run the risk of trivializing the problem. Evil is not a puzzle to be solved, but rather a question to be lived. A person who suffers the loss of a loved one does not want to hear what philosophers have to say on the subject; in fact, if that person suffers in the right way, he or she may be far closer to “solving” the problem of evil than any philosopher.

“What the Gospels offer,” according to Wright, “is not a philosophical explanation of evil, what it is or why it is there, not a set of suggestions for how we might adjust our lifestyles so that evil will mysteriously disappear from the world, but the story of an event in which the living God deals with it.” Which means that the ultimate “solution” to evil is the sufferings of Christ. God is not going to remove evil from His creation; He is not going to push the “restart” button. Rather, starting at Calvary, He is going to allow evil to be part of the solution. He is going to use it to help bring into existence the “new heaven and new earth” we read about in Revelation.

Wright points out that the blessed state on the other side of the Parousia, where evil will have no purchase whatsoever, is to be achieved only “through suffering love.” Until then, evil will remain present in our personal lives and in the world at large. Its role in our redemption will never be entirely comprehensible, and we have to take on faith the words of St. Thérèse of Lisieux that “God does not permit unnecessary suffering.” Being an Anglican, it is understandable that Wright’s discussion of evil mostly sticks to Scripture; but it may be that, until the beatific vision, the final word on the subject is to be found, not in any texts, but in the lives of the saints.

The Scandal Of Evil
At the heart of the problem of evil is the question “why is there evil?” This question is not a wounded animal’s inarticulate cry, but a rational being’s request for understanding. Before tackling the question as to why there is evil, however, we need to be able to say something about what it is. If we consult our experience, we find two elements that, taken together, give us an intuitive picture of the “nature” of evil. On the one hand, experience testifies that the phenomenon of evil is not an illusion, but a reality that no human effort or technique can eradicate.

As Catholics, we need to reject both a general faith in progress and the specifically scientific form of that faith, whose ideal is an (asymptotic) elimination of suffering and death through technology. Technology, it should be noted, is not just an application of science, but is its guiding ideal: science was born in the modern West, not only from the desire to understand things for the sake of understanding, but also, and perhaps dominantly, from the desire to better the human condition through the control of natural forces.

One of the costs of the pursuit of this scientific-technological dream has been a reduction of the mystery of evil. In order to lay open to human control in the way classical modern science imagines, the world has to be a machine. But, if it is a machine, then evil is either a cog set in place by the Designer (Leibniz) or the inevitable by-product of the friction of its blindly interacting parts (Darwin). But, in either case, evil is no longer truly evil — no longer a “mystery of iniquity” that originates in demonic refusal of God and then disrupts (without completely abolishing) the original harmony of the cosmos.

Indeed, as C.S. Lewis suggests in That Hideous Strength, the scientific-technological approach to evil, to the extent that it attempts to eradicate suffering without taking account of the mysterium iniquitatis (mystery of iniquity – a term John Paul II referred to when speaking of child molestation by priests), actually feeds into the demonic “No” to God that is the problem in the first place.

None of this should be taken as an argument against the attempt to alleviate suffering, but is meant only to underscore that the conventional distinction between technique (which is supposedly neutral) and use (which is putatively good or bad depending only on the user’s intentions) not only does not stand up to analysis, but is itself the expression of a worldview that sees man as the unique source of moral value in an essentially amoral, machine-like universe (even though early proponents of this worldview such as Leibniz tried to restrain its radical implications by retaining God as a Benevolent Designer of the universal mechanism).

Despite the intentions of the individuals who (often unconsciously) hold it, this worldview objectively plays into the demonic refusal of God’s Lordship over the cosmos that is the source of evil and suffering in the first place.

Experience shows that evil happens, not when something goes right, but when something goes wrong. There is a way things should be, and that, in the normal case, they are that way. It is against this often unthematized teleological horizon that evil stands out, jarringly, as a regrettable, and even perverse, failure to fulfill an appointed telos. Think of a working plough horse on a small farm in Pennsylvania farm country and contrast that image with a pig farm where the animals are force fed, not allowed to root naturally, and are “harvested” when reaching an appropriate weight goal.

If there is an appropriate per-fection that something should have, experience suggests, evil is a de-fection that signifies precisely the non-realization of that very perfection. Thus, if the first intuition grasps evil as a reality ineliminable by unaided human effort, the second qualifies the first by distinguishing evil from every other reality with which we are familiar: evil is not an achievement that enriches the patrimony of being, but an inexplicable, even perverse, withdrawal of that very achievement.

Thomas Aquinas gives a technical formulation to this double experiential intuition about evil in his definition of evil as a “privation of a due good.” Although Thomas is often unjustly faulted for dismissing evil as a harmless nothing, the truth is that he does not deny that there are evil people, things, and events, but rather attempts to capture, as precisely as possible, the intrinsic, formal principle of their being evil. Thomas’ dry Aristotelian vocabulary conceals, not a denial of evil, but an effort to understand exactly why it is evil in the first place. To be sure, Thomas is interested in the formal principle of evil, and, to the extent that form bespeaks perfection, evil, as the contrary of perfection, cannot be a form, but must be a certain “absence” of form: “[W]e must say that the being [esse] and the perfection of every nature whatever has the character of goodness. Therefore, it cannot be the case that evil signifies some being or some form or nature. It follows, then, that the term evil signifies a certain absence of the good” (ST I, 48, 1).

This absence, however, is not a mere nothing, but a “privation,” a “negation in” an underlying “subject.” “Evil is distant from both being absolutely and non-being absolutely, because it has being [est], neither as a habit nor as a pure negation, but as a privation” (ST I, 48, 2, ad 1)], a quasi-active “defecting from the good,” a defective actuality, a failure to be. If we keep in mind that evil has to occur in a “subject,” then we must say that this “defecting” is a quasi-act of that subject, indeed, affects the subject’s act of being, which now realizes the subject defectively on account of the “privation of the due good” it suffers. Far from trivializing evil as a harmless nothing, then, the privatio boni account identifies precisely its terrible reality: because evil is a privation having no reality of its own, the reality it does have can only be that of the actuality of the underlying “subject” itself — seen, not in its per-fection, but in a (quasi-active) de-fection that is nothing less than a “malflourishing” of its whole self.

This is not to say that evil totally corrupts in the sense of removing all the being and goodness in a thing. Thomas explicitly denies that it does (ST I, 48, 4). The point is simply that evil is the privation of a “crucial piece” that makes for the thing’s integrity or fulfillment. Absent that “piece,” the whole fails to live up to its idea, and so becomes bad as a whole, or, at least, significantly impaired. Another way of putting this is to say that a thing’s act of existence (esse), which posits in being all that is in the thing, also “posits” the privation of the due good as a privation — which thus affects everything else in the thing “indirectly” via the actus essendi. On the — or a broadly — Thomistic view, then, evil affects every aspect of a thing in concreto, even if it does not make every aspect of a thing bad in abstracto. Such a view allows us to do justice to the insight contained in the Reformed doctrine of “total depravity,” which insists that there is no part of the fallen creature untouched by sin, while simultaneously retaining the “Catholic” affirmation that, buried under every evil is a good waiting to be redeemed — so that the Redemption is not simply a second creation out of nothing, but also a restoration of the first creation as creation..

One of the great misstatements concerning Thomas’ writings on evil is that, as a privation or a negation of good that evil “doesn’t exist.” As you can tell by Aidan Walker’s interpretation here, evil is a profound alteration of good. Evil, Thomas is telling us, is not a nothing, but a voracious ontological parasite that feeds off of the real in order to clothe its empty center with a shadowy, counterfeit substance with no originality of its own.