Thomas Aquinas · Theology
Aquinas’s answer to the hardest question in theology: how a good and all-powerful God can permit the evil and suffering that fill the world.
It is the oldest and sharpest argument against God, posed by Epicurus and sharpened ever since. If God is all-good, he would want to abolish evil. If God is all-powerful, he would be able to abolish evil. Yet evil - suffering, cruelty, disease, death - fills the world. So either God is not all-good, or not all-powerful, or does not exist. Aquinas felt the full force of this; in fact, he lists the problem of evil as the very first objection to God’s existence in his Five Ways. A serious theology cannot dodge it, and Aquinas does not.
Why does this matter? Because it addresses the question of evil’s source. Everything God creates is good - being itself is good, and God is the author of all being. But if evil is not a positive thing, not a being at all, then God did not create evil; there is no ‘evil’ among the things he made. Evil enters as a defect, a falling-short, in good things - when a created will turns from the greater good, or a body fails in its functioning. God causes the good that is wounded; he does not author the wound as a thing. Evil has, Aquinas says, no efficient cause (no positive maker) but only a deficient cause - a failure, an absence of right action.
Aquinas, following Augustine, holds that God permits evils only because his providence is powerful enough to bring good out of them - indeed, it belongs to God’s infinite goodness that he can allow evil and produce good from it, rather than allowing no evil at all. He points to the beauty and completeness of a universe that contains many grades of being, some corruptible; to the goods of free will, which require the possibility of its misuse; and to the virtues that only exist in response to hardship. The picture is not of a world without evil, but of a world in which evil is permitted, bounded, and ultimately defeated within a larger good order that God governs.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Aquinas treats evil as a privation of good and argues God permits it for greater goods. Reconstruct his answer, and the strongest objection to it, in your own words.
Leads to Gottfried Leibniz.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.