Paying Attention To The Sky

Mother Elvira Petrozzi

We left off in our last discussion of evil by considering Thomas Aquinas’ idea of evil as a privation or a negation of good. One of the great misstatements concerning Thomas’ writings on evil is that, as a privation or a negation of good, that evil, in fact, magically “doesn’t exist.” Recently this reappeared in the spirituality best seller The Shack: “Evil is a word we use to describe the absence of Good, just as we use the word darkness to describe the absence of Light or death to describe the absence of Life. Both evil and darkness can only be understood in relation to Light and Good; they do not have any actual existence.” I can recall a priest telling me of how one Christian had attempted to console another by lecturing him that the loss of his 6 year old son to leukemia wasn’t really an evil because evil “didn’t exist.”

But as you can tell by Aidan Walker’s interpretation of Aquinas I’ve been presenting 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.

Further, there are three considerations that flow from Thomas’ account of evil as “privation of the good” that are crucial for our understanding of how joy relates to evil and how God’s theodicy, His response to the question of evil is, in fact, a deed: the Paschal Mystery of the incarnate Son. More on that later.

(1) But first, the Thomistic account simultaneously explains why evil is scandalous and assures us that, however clamorous it is, this scandal can never obliterate the good. On the one hand, if evil is a privation of the good, we should expect it to be more obtrusive — to be more shockingly scandalous — than the good. Being normal, in fact, the good has “nothing to prove,” and so imposes its presence with a kind of quiet, solid reliability, whereas evil, a usurper with “everything to prove,” rebounds off the serene normality of the good with a loud, violent explosiveness. The evening news lives off of this obtrusiveness of evil: there is bad news to be told only because bad news can be easily pinpointed, and it can be easily pinpointed only because it stands out against a limitless background of normality. Good news is so woven into the fabric of everyday life that it can seem to be no news at all, and so can be taken for granted. Indeed, we have to presuppose the absolute primacy of the good precisely in order to see evil as evil, as something intrinsically and absolutely bad –  rather than as something merely unpleasant which one could, with time, get used to.

(2) Second, by refusing to give up either the ontological primacy of the good or the factitial (vocab: produced artificially or unintentionally) occurrence of evil, the Thomistic privatio boni doctrine enables us to move from the question of “what evil is” to the question of “why it is”, which arises precisely because the good has an absolute ontological primacy over evil –  and yet “allows” evil to occur alongside it. Or, more precisely, within it as “evil is a negation in a subject,” whose goodness is affected “all over” by this negation, but not entirely removed by it. The Thomistic account of evil helps us see that, if there is a why-question about the existence of evil –  if there is a problem of evil –  it is not because the existence of evil disconfirms the primacy of the good (if it did, the problem of evil would disappear), but rather because it raises a question about the good’s puzzling way of asserting its primacy by withdrawing into the background before the obtrusive display of evil. The privatio boni doctrine helps us see, in a word, that the problem of evil is fundamentally a question about the justice of God’s “permission” of evil in a world that he creates and providentially governs: if God is “in charge” of the world, is it not mysterious that he allows evil to occur in it?

(3) The Thomistic definition of evil as a privation of the good not only enables us to pose the problem of evil, but it also defines the parameters within which we have to answer it. It does this by requiring us to take seriously the ontological depth of evil — evil is wounded being, which affects everything co-posited in existence by that being. While conceiving evil as an ontological wound that touches the act of being, Thomas removes it from the world of nature. Thomas will “historicize” it, place it in the world of ideas and stories by relating it to the intra cosmic Fall of men and of angels. The Fall is simply another event within our history, which is already marked by evil. It is impossible to reconstruct what Paradise was like from the fragmentary hints left after the Fall. And yet, for all of the discontinuity, the Paradise and the Fall are linked together in a single history by God. History has a unity, not of man’s making, but of God’s. This is why we can paradoxically speak of a Providential plan for the world while vigorously rejecting any form of faith in “progress” or, indeed, any presumption that we can read God’s purposes immediately and simplistically from human history.

Thomas distinguishes two levels on which a “defection” from the good may happen: the level of “first act,” in which a thing’s nature is impaired, and the level of “second act,” in which a thing’s “due operation” is removed, either because it fails to occur, or because it does not occur in the right way.

“Evil…is a privation of the good, which consists principally and per se in act. But act is twofold: there is a first act and a second act. Now, the first act is the form and the integrity of a thing, whereas the second act is an operation. Evil can thus happen in two ways. In one way, by the subtraction of a form, or of some part, that is required for the integrity of a thing, in the way that being blind, or lacking a member, is an evil. In a second way, by the subtraction of a due operation, either because it does not happen at all, or because it does not have the due measure and order” (ST I, 48, 5). Contrast the joyful arrival of a child to a new family with “medical waste” flung into a metal disposal bin: the evil operates on both levels: there is the subtraction of a form and the lack of occurrence of a birth.

Both kinds of deficere a bono that Thomas mentions affect an entity’s very being, seen either from the point of view of its beginning — its initial natural patrimony — or from the point of view of its end — its naturally appointed flourishing. Taken together, then, the two kinds of deficere a bono correspond roughly to so-called “physical evil.”. In rational beings, however, the second kind of defection, defective operation, can also take the form of conscious failure to act as one should, in which case it becomes what Thomas calls culpa, or what we would call “moral evil.” Think of our collective culpability in living in a country that has aborted 45 million children since Roe Vs. Wade was enacted into law.  

In addition to committing moral evil, rational beings of course continue to suffer “physical evil,” both at the level of nature and of operation. At the same time, rational beings experience this double “physical evil” as what Aquinas calls poena, “punishment” — precisely for their culpa. In distinguishing poena and culpa, while making the latter follow on the former, Thomas implicitly “historicizes” evil in the sense stipulated previously. Physical evil, poena, is something that need not have been experienced — by rational beings.

In reserving poena (but not all “physical evil”) to rational creatures, Thomas seems to suggest that the “physical evil” afflicting sub-rational creatures, unlike the poena inflicted on rational creatures (insofar as it is poena), is in tune with the natural order, whose overall balance requires a certain mutual destruction: “Many good things would be removed if God did not permit any evils to occur. For fire would not be generated unless air were corrupted, nor would the life of the lion be conserved unless the donkey were killed, or, indeed, would a person who punishes justly or suffers patiently be praised if there were no iniquity” (ST I, 48, 2, ad 3). 

In focusing on the Paschal Mystery as the response to the question of evil, Walker tells us that he does not at all mean to replace the effort to make sense out of evil with a mere “story.” Although God’s response to the question of evil is a deed — the Paschal Mystery of the incarnate Son — this deed itself enacts what Hans Urs von Balthazar called a “dramatic logic” that responds in the only way possible to the request for meaning that comes to expression in the question of evil.

It may seem to be somewhat gratuitous to introduce the notion of drama here. But in reality, the switch to the “dramatic register” is appropriate for our argument. As we saw with Aquinas, the problem of evil — and its divine resolution — revolved around freedom, its fall, and its restoration by God. Evil, as we have seen, is introduced into the world through free, historical action, and it can be overcome only through a free, historical action that matches and exceeds it. As a privatio boni, in fact, evil is not only a contingency that first arises within history, it is one that has no sense in itself.

Consequently, it can be given a meaning, if at all, only after it has contingently occurred — in another contingent act that both compensates for it and, at the same time, exceeds it with a greater good than the one it has frustrated or ruined. It is therefore not sufficient for us to talk about evil as a privation of the due good. It is necessary that the ontological primacy of the good implied in such talk be vindicated through free, historical action. Hence the appropriateness of a dramatic framing of theodicy — for drama is the supreme artistic representation of freedom.

As I read that today I recalled these words I had encountered earlier, written by Mother Elvira Petrozzi, who is foundress of Comunità Cenàcolo, welcoming the lost and desperate through fifty-six religious orders in fourteen countries. This was her testimony of her day-to-day existence of working with those wounded by the evil of drug abuse, she called it How to Love Lepers:  “Priests are at the service of a wounded existence. I am not a priest, but I understand that I have to take care of this wounded existence, and for me the first wounded existence I must heal is my own. Today, if we are not specialists or competent, nobody will listen to us. Our competence to enter into this wounded nature is the mercy that we have received to be healed of our own wounded nature. Which one of us can say that we are not wounded in some way? Who among us still does not have open wounds? This wounded existence is us, every one of us; it is the first school for being able to be close to the wounds of others.

Today we are credible only if we have experience. We can say that we are experts. Personally I assure you that I feel that I can love only because I am continually filled up by God’s Divine Mercy. You know what mercy means? It means to become wounded by sin. This is my experience. The wound of my sin guarantees that the love that I give to my brothers is authentic. You know that I work with those who are addicted to drugs and that I live with them. I do not just live with them in a material and physical sense, but I live in their wounds. I get dirty in their mud, and I suffer their darkness.

The healing of these wounds cannot come from my natural compassion, from my human comprehension, or from the love of a consecrated woman. If it did, my experience is that my faith would decrease, my patience would end, and my interest to continue loving would be selfish. There is only one cure to heal the wounds of the heart, of the conscience, and of life: the love of God. If you do not have this love, do not go near these wounds. Otherwise, you just put the knife back in the wound, deceiving others that you can heal them with your love.”

I recall writing not too long ago about Penn (of Penn & Teller fame) on the occasion of his receiving a Book of Psalms from an Apologist. Was that not the same sort of love that was communicated to Penn, the concern for Penn’s immortal soul that the man demonstrated? Wasn’t that what impressed Penn so much?

“If you do not have this love, do not go near these wounds.”