The Traditional Understanding of Evil

hello everyone I hope you all are having a good week uh this week we're going to talk a little bit about the problem of evil from a personalist standpoint so you can see how the philosophy of personalism um affects these kind of traditional philosophical problems that we've seen throughout uh throughout history and uh just to start off uh so that we have the same Baseline here uh by the problem of evil we're thinking uh mainly of the formulation of why does God allow evil things to happen and even beyond that really is how does evil

make sense within a divinely ordered world and what is the the meaning of this why is it that uh especially the the problem of uh The Book of Job right why is it that bad things happen to good people so this is the fundamental formulation of the problem of evil that we'll consider from a personalist standpoint and uh Marian's piece on this is very interesting I think uh he does two things he gives your kind of traditional premodern answer to the problem of evil from uh a metaphysical perspective and then he's going to transition into

uh a more personalist understanding um as far as formulating the problem and trying to give a philosophical account from that perspective so it'll be interesting to weigh both and see how we can bring both of these things together so starting with let's say the traditional metaphysical answer so we know from uh I would say going back to St Augustine uh thinking about the problem of evil and especially tying it back to platonic philosophy it's understood there that goodness really is uh coextensive with being itself so God is goodness itself and all goodness comes from God

such that evil is something that uh isn't tied to him in any way now if that's the case and this is the original impetus for the the problem from a metaphysical standpoint if evil doesn't come from God then uh where does it come from and uh so for Augustine you'll remember that first as a manakee their formulation was this kind of materialist understanding where you had these two Gods so to speak one that was source of all good and the other that was the source of all evil and so some of these attempts to answer

that question would Place something else as the source of evil but uh it becomes tricky when you think well there's something that exists somehow outside of God that is also Eternal or uncaused in its own right like this Prime Evil thing so how does this make sense and how do we differentiate the two so uh Augustine's answer in the end inspired by neoplatonism and moving away from manism and uh as a step toward the Catholic faith understood that evil is only a privation that it's a taking away it's not another thing it's not something that

exists parallel to the good but it is something that exists Like A Parasite so it's a privation or absence of the good it's taking it's the taking away of a good that's supposed to be there so it's kind of really more synonymous with uh something like blindness so blindness is not some alternative power but blindness is simply the absence of sight right the same way in the same way uh evil is related to the good uh just as that that it's a taking away or absence of a good that's supposed to be there so evil

then if that's all true right which from a metaphysical standpoint it's uh by necessity this is the the only explanation that ends up making sense out of all the different pieces um if this is the case then evil from metaphysical standpoint doesn't actually exist it's it's a privation of being itself it's an absence of being itself so it's a kind of emptiness now uh it's of course the case though and here's where the problem lies it's easy to say from a purely metaphysical phical standpoint that evil doesn't exist now with that said though there is

still the experience of evil there is still the experience of of this lack or this emptiness this we know when when it you know when when something is missing we know when we encounter evil so the experience of evil even if evil itself is not really a thing it's not really real in the sense that it's it's a an absence um the experience of that absence nonetheless is very real and that much is undeniable so you can have the metaphysical answer but is that enough to give you the consolation uh with the very real experience

of evil and that that's where you get into the personalist side of things but I think again before going there I think it's important to emphasize the strictly metaphysical understanding of it to keep that clear because it's not really something that we're going to contradict even analyzing the problem from a re uh a personalist standpoint we're not going to deny the metaphysical basis for understanding good and evil uh the personalist instead will try to sort out or fill out the experience of evil itself which is real so again the experience of this lack is a

real thing but evil in and of itself is not real in so far as it's not a thing of its own right it's a privation or taking away of a thing so so it's important that we get that clear now uh that gets into again one side of the equation the speculative side uh another thing that you could say on the speculative side as far as why evil would exist would be quite simply that it is only in God that you have this Perfection or totality of being itself so with every creature of God then

by the mere fact that the creature is not God there will always be something that is lacking in the creature and because of these imperfections especially as we go down the chain let's say we we come to us and we come to um material being which by the very nature of matter itself is subject to change you can see how there's more of an opening in so far as being is lacked that uh you will have um the experi erience of evil that is a taking away of something so let's say from a metaphysical standpoint

uh the explanation for at least the possibility of evil is already there in so far as just understanding how the the lack of perfection so to speak with all other beings apart from God as evil corresponds to a lack and uh all other beings lack in something uh in comparison to God so at least that explains why just in creating things uh there's already some opening at least for again the possibility of evil especially when we're talking about um other persons like lesser persons right in comparison to God who is perfection in every sense um

if we have persons that is people with free will with reason right then in so far as they're imperfect because they're not God it's at least possible it's potential it's a potential for them for this freedom to be misused to go astray and so it's not a necessary reality that this will happen it's not as though it were predestined so to speak for evil um without our choosing but understanding just the nature of free will the nature of our imperfections and rationality that the potential will always be there and let's say given an infinite series

uh thinking about this um I guess along to mytic lines really that of all possibilities taken into account uh you can at least conceive of of you know one at one point that that uh sin will occur right in in that sense it seems necessary just in so far as we're imperfect so there's a bit of give and take there right because of course God knows this and yet creates us anyway and so that's really where the traditional problem of evil uh will come about and uh Gus's answer to this in the um this is

one of the objections in his article on the five ways uh proving the existence of God one of the objections is effectively well if evil exists how can how can God exist because uh let's say either God is um not in control because evil exists or um he's not all good because evil exists uh so the these are the original kind of uh problems that come about now aquinus is answer and I think Augustin says the same thing really uh both of them will say that on the contrary uh it's not a threat to God

because God is so powerful and so good that he can um just as he creates from nothing right he can bring goodness out of evil so uh he can allow evil and this allowance I think again if we understand the metaphysics of being uh with Creation in comparison to God so Perfection and imperfection you can see why again that already opens the door to the possibility of evil uh God would do this because on the one hand it's not a threat it doesn't take anything away from him it's not a threat to his order either

because he can still bring good uh even when you know we mess up right even out of evil and then on the other hand that you would think well um and this this is uh how Augustine deals with this as well yes although creating these lesser persons right with angels and and humans allows for or at least comes with that possibility that some will fail that that there will be sin uh that same possibility for sin also introduces this other possibility for true love um that people will come to love God freely rather than being

made to love God being created that way uh and this is the greater good and so you think well the the very same thing that is subject to misuse to evil that very same feature of persons is also open to a greater good and uh one that would not exist if you didn't have that kind of power if you didn't have freedom and rationality and so on uh so this is the balance from the metaphysical side so again these are kind of the the traditional uh approaches to the question um and going now into uh

a contemporary analysis thinking about this as a personalist again we're not going to do away with that uh it's not that those are um you know obsolete or or whatever you'd want to say right I I don't think you know we're not going to we're not going to go there nevertheless it's still recognized though that everything that we just talked about on the metaphysical or speculative side of the fence again all of these things while true while reasonable um may not be all that consoling in the moment and perhaps the the closest that we came

to uh thinking about this dynamic in let's say that more modern uh subjective or or taking into account subjectivity would probably be boethius's consolation of philosophy since in that work rather than you know just give giving you like aquinus uh just giving you the the kind of barebones argument I guess another one would be Augustine's confessions right these to peer into the psychology of the existence of evil or and the the experience of evil I should say uh and that kind of back and forth that tension that we have um but in both of those

cases I think both Augustine and boethus were in the end nevertheless consoled by the philosophical answer uh but of course that's not true for for most people so um it remains to this day something that Contin continues to be brought up right you'll continue to hear people say that about the problem of evil that they don't believe in God for that reason uh seeing the suffering of the world and so on and uh I think what the personalists will try to do thinking about this is taking into account let's say especially the ttic personalist will

take into account the traditional speculative answers that we've gone over in brief uh we have that on the one hand but we recognize that there there must be something about the experience of evil you know there there's some truth that's there in uh let's say the the cries of the person the innocent suffering that make the matter a little bit more complex Lex or at least that there's some mystery that's there uh even understanding again the speculative side that does explain what evil is where it comes from uh why it doesn't contradict god um how

it fits in in the abstract sense but now we have to figure out well but what about in the particular sense uh with each person person so it's one thing to understand the reality of evil in the abstract um and understanding why evil exists again in the abstract in the collective uh let's say more like hypothetically right but um how do we make sense of it with this person's experience uh now looking at the particular person that evil is affecting you know why did this person that's innocent have to go through these things and uh

that's what the personalist will try to speak a little bit more to and again it's the interesting thing is that especially if you're thinking about this in the traditional mindset it's not that the speculative account that we've gone over the metaphysical account it's not that that doesn't explain those things but uh because it's at the abstra level you can see um where that tension will lie for people so uh so again I don't want to minimize that I don't want to Discount that but uh these are the two things that we have to try to

hold in balance