The Problem of Evil in Antiquity
There was no shortage of solutions to the problem of evil in antiquity. Consider, for example, the wealth of insight afforded by Greek tragedy. The tragic poets locate evils variously in the will of the gods, in the ignorance of humans and their tendency to be carried away by passions, and, more frequently, in the mysterious workings of fate (tychē, moira, atē) and necessity (anankē). Even if the specific cause of one’s misfortunes is obscure, it is a divine law, first announced by the father of Greek tragedy, Aeschylus, “that man must learn by suffering [pathei mathos].”1 According to Aristotle, the pretended pathos of the tragic actors was intended to evoke an empathic catharsis in the spectators.2
The Stoics agreed with the tragic poets that bearable suffering could become a learning experience. They argued that it was pointless to regard unavoidable misfortunes as evil. They proposed that the best solution was to see all seemingly unfortunate events in the larger context of one’s life. They located evil in intentions that were not in accordance with reason: it was evil to inflict pain, but not to endure it.3 The Stoic moral theory taught one how to endure ills with dignity by taking into account the bigger picture.
Plato was the first Greek philosopher to insist that evil, unless it served the purpose of remedial punishment for sin, could not be attributed to the gods. In the Republic he formulates the problem in the following way: “For the good things we must assume no other cause than God, but the cause of evil we must look for in other things and not in God.”4 However, Plato’s answer to the question of evil’s origin was far from consistent. In Timaeus he attributed imperfections of embodied beings to the creative agency of the lesser gods and to the intransigence of the receptacle (hypodochē), the world’s chaotic substratum, which would come to acquire the more technical designation of matter (hylē).5 In Theaetetus 176a, Plato hinted at the necessity of ontological dualism; he observed that it is impossible for evil to cease to exist, “for there must always be something opposed to the good.”6 He did not develop this idea but rather emphasized that the material world was beautiful, good, and ordered to the degree to which it reflected the realm of the eternal forms. For Plato, the forms imprint structure, beauty, and order into the world’s matter.
Building upon Plato’s vision, Plotinus placed matter at the very bottom of the hierarchy of forms, as that which was completely unbounded, measureless, and formless (apeiron, ametron, aneideon). It followed that matter was a “privation of the good” (sterēsis tou agathou) and therefore “evil in itself” (to kakon to auto) or “the primary evil” (prōton kakon).7 However, against the gnostics, Plotinus argued that the material world was a beautiful, good, yet imperfect reflection of the intellectual universe of the forms.8 Some critics observe that Plotinus was not able to fully account for the tension in his system between the evil of matter and the beauty of the material cosmos.9
Early Christian Theodicies
In early Christianity, no one theodicy was ever adopted as binding upon the church as a whole. In the history of Christian doctrine, more generally, theodicy has never reached the level of dogmatic precision attained by the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation. Nevertheless, a tangible degree of unity has been achieved, in part by holding to theistic ontology, and in part by excluding the rival proposals of Marcion, the gnostic teachers, Mani, and most philosophers. For example, the shared commitment to monotheism ruled out all forms of strong ontological dualism. The benevolent and almighty Creator tolerated no eternal opposite, be it another divine agent, or matter, or the realm of darkness and chaos. God’s goodness and power were not limited by matter but rather worked through it. The cosmological speculations of the gnostics received no less vigorous criticism, conveyed by declarations that the world was not an afterthought of an incompetent committee of gods or a result of Sophia’s fall from the divine realm. Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen, among others, concurred with Neoplatonists such as Plotinus that God was not the author of evil.10 However, unlike the Neoplatonists, the church fathers refused to locate the origin of evil in matter.11
Nourished by the biblical account of creation, the orthodox Christians rejected ontological dualism and held that the omnipotent and benevolent God created everything good. It followed that evil could not be among the things originally created; in this sense, it was nonbeing. Following the Neoplatonists, Christian theologians explained that evil was a privation (sterēsis) of the good in a way similar to how darkness was the absence of light.12 Evil was not a substance since it was parasitic upon the good and thus depended upon the good for its existence.13 Pseudo-Dionysius, following the Neoplatonist Proclus, proposed that evil was beyond nonbeing, since evil was more than mere lack of the good, mere absence of being, in that evil was destructive of that which is good.14 Yet without introducing this technical and potentially misleading distinction between nonbeing and “beyond nonbeing,” most patristic theologians taught that evil was nonbeing in the sense of being the corruption, perversion, and destruction of the good.15
Within the framework of Christian theism, the belief that evil was nonbeing did not lead to the conclusion that evil was a grand illusion. On the contrary, from its very beginning Christianity was characterized by a keen sense that evil was real, powerful, and all-pervasive. Hence, the insight that evil was nonbeing was bound to provide only a partial answer. If God is not the author of evil, then who or what is? What feature of creation could be causally connected to evil without at the same time implicating God? Relatively early among patristic theologians, a broad agreement emerged that the free will of some rational creatures accounted for the actualization of evil. The Creator could not be held responsible for the free evil choices that rational creatures made, since God did not causally determine these choices.16 However, when God chooses to permit evil, he always draws greater good out of that evil.17 Thus God could be said to cause “external evil” in the form of physical suffering, when it serves the divine purpose of admonishing, converting, chastising, punishing, teaching, and curing those who are turned away from God.18
In addition to these philosophical considerations, the biblical narrative framework was indispensable for addressing the problem of evil. Salvation history, from creation to eschaton, offered the most comprehensive theodicy. Christians relied upon the creation account to support their claim that God was not the author of evil. For example, the fathers drew in part upon Genesis 3 and the story of the watchers in Genesis 6 to construct their theories of the human and angelic falls, respectively.19 All patristic authors agreed that evil was causally connected to the misuse of free will, although their accounts of the fall differed considerably.20 Evil resides in the inclination of the free rational agent who prefers the finite good of creatures to the infinite good of the Creator.21
It may be objected that while free choice could account for the existence of moral evil, the cause of natural evil was left unexplained. This challenge was met in different ways. Some fathers replied that the human choice of evil had tragic and far-reaching consequences for the rest of creation. Others argued that “natural evil” was a misnomer: strictly speaking, all evils were unnatural. Augustine proposed that such disasters as fires and hurricanes represent the working of natural forces that are inherently good but can be misdirected so as to harm humans.22 Others speculated, drawing upon Stoic views, that natural disasters are not evil at all, because no evil intention is involved.23 Still others deferred to the universal religious insight that natural disasters are a form of divine punishment for human disobedience. God sent natural disasters to admonish, correct, or restrain, and to mete out retribution for sin.24 Origen more imaginatively hinted that natural disasters were a part of the demonic revolt against God.25 On this analysis, natural evil is reducible to moral evil in its demonic form. Despite their considerable differences, these accounts of natural evil share one general point in common: the ethical categories of moral corruption and sinfulness blend with the ontological categories of physical corruptibility, disorder, and death.
The narrative framework of salvation history offered the fathers more than just an explanation of evil’s origin. Human history was presented as a series of God’s redemptive acts, the climax of which was the divine incarnation. Incarnation was seen as a new creation, as God’s restoration of his image and likeness in human beings, as the God-Man’s victory over the powers of sin, corruption, death, and the sphere of the demonic. The fruits of this victory, abundantly available in the sacramental life of the church, would be most fully manifest in the eschaton. The hope for the resurrection of the dead and the orientation of life toward the final judgment expanded the horizon for a bigger-picture theodicy. Many ancient Christians endured persecution, torture, and martyrdom with the hope of attesting by their death to the power of Christ’s resurrection. Apocalypse, despite its sobering features, also functioned as a theodicy: in the end God’s justice will triumph by destroying all evil and rewarding all those who are obedient to God.
Conclusion
The common core of patristic theodicy may be somewhat schematically reduced to the following five points:
The task of contemporary theology is to combine the penetrating patristic analysis of the dynamics of moral evil with modern sensitivity to cases of horrendous evil and undeserved suffering. Such a synthesis has the potential of being deeper and more existentially compelling than any version of protest atheism. Still, even if all objections to the traditional theistic account of evil were tested and found inadequate, there is much about this problem that is bound to remain shrouded in mystery, at least on this side of the eschaton.
1. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 177, trans. Peter Meineck, in Oresteia (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 9. See William Chase Greene, Moira: Fate, Good, and Evil in Greek Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1944), 99–100.
2. Aristotle, Poetics 6 (1449b27).
3. Anthony A. Long, “The Stoic Concept of Evil,” Philosophical Quarterly 18 (1968): 329.
4. Plato, Republic 379C, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 626; Greene, Moira, 298. Cf. Plato, Timaeus 30A.
5. Plato, Timaeus 40–42, 50–51. For patristic critique of the Platonic idea that some things were created by lesser gods, see Augustine, City of God 12.25, who also denies that angels had any part in creation. According to Philo, De confusione linguarum 35.179, some imperfections in creation are precisely attributable to angelic participation in the original creation. See Harry A. Wolfson, Philo, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 1:273. For an illuminating discussion of Platonic theodicy, see Peter Harrison, “Laws of Nature, Moral Order, and the Intelligibility of the Cosmos,” in The Astronomy Revolution: 400 Years of Exploring the Cosmos, edited by Donald G. York, Owen Gingerich, and Shuang-Nan Zhang (Boca Raton, FL: CRC, 2011), 375–386. For a review of different competing theories of Plato’s theodicy, see Harold Cherniss, “The Sources of Evil according to Plato,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 98 (1954): 23–30.
6. Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 195. This passage is discussed in Plotinus, Enneads 1.8.6. On matter’s preexistence, see Enneads 2.4.5.
7. Plotinus, Enneads 1.8.4; cf. a similar point attributed to the Platonizing Celsus in Origen, Against Celsus 4.66.
8. Plotinus, Enneads 1.8.3–5. See Denis O’Brien, Théodicée plotinienne, théodicée gnostique (Leiden: Brill, 1993).
9. See Edward B. Costello, “Is Plotinus Inconsistent on the Nature of Evil?,” International Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1967): 483–97; John M. Rist, “Plotinus on Matter and Evil,” Phronesis 6 (1961): 154–66.
10. Origen, Against Celsus 6.53–55; Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.9; Augustine, Free Will 1.2; 4.10. Only a fragment of Irenaeus’s letter to Florinus, titled On the Sole Sovereignty or That God Is Not the Author of Evil, survives in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.20.
11. Tertullian, Against Hermogenes 9–11; Athanasius, Against the Pagans 6; The Incarnation 2; Augustine, Confessions 7.5.7, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 116.
12. Plotinus, Enneads 2.4.5, 10; cf. Athanasius, Against the Pagans 7.4–5.
13. Augustine writes in Enchiridion 8.27: “He judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist,” trans. J. F. Shaw, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1996), 33; cf. ibid., 24.96; Confessions 7.12.18; Athanasius, Against the Pagans 4.4; 7.3; The Incarnation 4.5; this point is emphasized by Gillian R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
14. Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names 4; Proclus, On the Subsistence of Evils 38.7–11, discussed in Carlos Steel, “Proclus on the Existence of Evil,” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), 95.
15. Augustine, The Nature of the Good 4.
16. Augustine problematized this claim in Free Will 1.2.4: “We believe that everything which exists is created by one God, and yet that God is not the cause of sin. The difficulty is: if sin goes back to souls created by God, and souls go back to God, how can we avoid before long tracing sin back to God?”; trans. Dom Mark Pontifex, St. Augustine: The Problem of Free Choice, ACW 22 (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1955), 38.
17. Origen, Against Celsus 7.68, points out that God permits evil but does not order evil by his will. Cf. Lactantius, On the Anger of God 13; Augustine, City of God 1.8–29; 11.18.
18. Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.13–15; Origen, Against Celsus 6.56. See Hans Schwartz, Evil: A Historical and Theological Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 103.
19. Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
20. Tertullian, Exhortation to Chastity 2.4–5; Augustine, Free Will 3.17, 48; On True Religion 12.23; cf. City of God 13.14: “Hence from the misuse of free will there started a chain of disasters: mankind is led from that original perversion, a kind of corruption at the root, right up to the disaster of the second death, which has no end,” trans. Henry Bettenson, Augustine: Concerning the City of God (London: Penguin Books, 1984). See David Ray Griffin, “Augustine and the Denial of Genuine Evil,” in The Problem of Evil: Select Readings, ed. Michael L. Peterson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 197.
21. Athanasius, Against the Pagans 7.3–5; The Incarnation 15; Augustine, Confessions 7.18.
22. Augustine, City of God 11.22.
23. Plotinus, Enneads 1.4.4–13; 1.8; 4.4–44.
24. Lactantius, On the Anger of God 17.
25. Origen, Against Celsus 4.65. See John M. Rist, “Beyond Stoic and Platonist: A Sample of Origen’s Treatment of Philosophy (Contra Celsum 4.62–70),” in Platonismus und Christentum (Münster: Aschendorff, 1983), 233–34.