The Problem of Evil

Book VII of The Confessions of Saint Augustine is absolutely fascinating!

Augustine's considerations of the problem of evil have immense ramifications for man.

Questions students are considering and discussing:
1.    Did God create evil?
2.    Is Satan/Lucifer evil?  Was he created as evil?
3.    Is evil a substance?
4.    Is God material or pure spirit?  Why?
5.    Are created things evil or good or a combination?  Why/how?
6.    Can human persons choose to do or love evil things?  Why/why not/how?
7.    From what does evil come or originate (according to Augustine)?
       a.    What do you think of Augustine’s answer?
8.    How does human freedom and God's providence fit into Augustine's consideration of evil?

Rommen and Ratzinger on Metaphysics: Its Importance for the Law and Society

In Fr. Robert J. Araujo, S.J.'s remarks on the natural law, he referenced a brilliant German lawyer and thinker, Heinrich Rommen. (If you haven't read Rommen, shame on you!) He was imprisoned by and later fled the Nazis for his defense of law as an "ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated" (Summa Theologiae I-II, 90, art. 4). The Nazi regime--as well as any totalitarian regime--in its embracing of the Modernist position (which is nothing other than the embrace of the Enlightenment project, specifically that of Descartes), perverted law from an "ordinance of reason" to be rather an "ordinance of will."

In our example in class the other day, we saw how an arbitrary exercise of the will can result in an unjust law. In the example given, we looked at the "reasonableness" aspect of the definition of law. But what is the foundation for a law's reasonableness? The answer lies in the Chesterton quote below. There we saw that one cannot escape the essential question of being or existence; and even more, the Ultimate Being or Existence Himself, God. In philosophy, this area of inquiry is called metaphysics. Rommen expands upon this in his magisterial tome The Natural Law. He looks historically at the times when natural law was esteemed:

The idea of natural law obtains general acceptance only in the periods when metaphysics, queen of the sciences, is dominant. It recedes or suffers an eclipse, on the other hand, when being and oughtness, morality and law, are separated, when the essences of things and their ontological order are viewed as unknowable. The natural law, consequently, depends on the science of being, on metaphysics (The Natural Law, 141).

I cannot emphasize enough, dear students, the importance of considering this fundamental question. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger in an article entitled, "Faith, Philosophy, and Theology," [11 Communio 351, 357 (1984)] stated: "The true philosopher, if he wishes to reach the ultimate questions, cannot free himself from the question of God, the foundation and end of being itself." The implications of this for the society are profound. It is the difference between the gulag and freedom.

GKC, Aquinas, Children, Grass: The Primacy of Existence

As we read McInerny's distinction between the Modernist View vs. the Classical View, I thought this quote by the great G.K. Chesterton to be well worth our consideration:

Without pretending to span within such limits the essential Thomist idea, I may be allowed to throw out a sort of rough version of the fundamental question, which I think I have known myself, consciously or unconsciously since my childhood. When a child looks out a nursery window and sees anything, say the green lawn of the garden, what does he actually know; or does he know anything? There are all sorts of nursery games of negative philosophy played round this question. A brilliant Victorian scientist delighted in declaring that the child does not see any grass at all; but only a sort of green mist reflected in a tiny mirror of the human eye. This piece of rationalism has always struck me as almost insanely irrational. If he is not sure of the existence of the grass, which he sees through the glass of a window, how on earth can he be sure of the existence of the retina, which he sees through the glass of a microscope? If sight deceives, why can it not go on deceiving? Men of another school answer that grass is a mere green impression on the mind; and that he can be sure of nothing except the mind. They declare that he can only be conscious of his own consciousness; which happens to be the one thing that we know that the child is not conscious of at all. In that sense, it would be far truer to say that there is grass and no child, than to say that there is a conscious child but no grass. St. Thomas Aquinas, suddenly intervening in this nursery quarrel, says emphatically that the child is aware of Ens. Long before he knows that grass is grass, or self is self, he knows that something is something. Perhaps it would be best to say very emphatically (with a blow on the table), "There is an Is". This is as much monkish credulity as St. Thomas asks of us at the start. Very few unbelievers start by asking us to believe so little. And yet, upon this sharp pin-point of reality, he rears by long logical processes that have never really been successfullly overthrown, the whole cosmic system of Christendom.

Ens is the present participle of the Latin verb esse. It means "being" or "existing." Existence is glorious! It is the hallmark and the sublime mystery of God Himself, Who named Himself "I Am Who Am." It is upon this foundation of ultimate reality, Existence Himself, that every thing else hangs.