Evil, The Problem of

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EVIL, THE PROBLEM OF

The problem of evil concerns the contradiction, or apparent contradiction, between the reality of evil on the one hand, and religious beliefs in the goodness and power of God or of the Ultimate on the other. In a very general classification, the religions of the world have offered three main types of solution: (1) There is the monism of the Vedanta teachings of Hinduism, according to which the phenomenal world, with all its evils, is maya, or illusion. A confused echo of this doctrine is heard in contemporary Western Christian Science, which affirms that "evil is but an illusion, and it has no real basis. Evil is a false belief" (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health, auth. ed., Boston, 1934, p. 480:23,24). Considered as a response to the problem of evil as stated above, this view is defective in that it redescribes the problem but does not attempt to solve it, for it leaves unexplained the evil of our suffering from the compulsive illusion of evil. (2) There is the dualism exemplified most dramatically in ancient Zoroastrianism, with its opposed good and evil deities, Ahura Mazdah and Angra Mainyu. A much less extreme dualism was propounded by Plato (Timaeus 30a and 48a) and is found in various forms in the finite deity doctrines of such modern Western philosophers as J. S. Mill (expounded in "Attributes," Three Essays in Religion, London, 1874) and Edgar Brightman (A Philosophy of Religion, New York, 1940, Chs. 810). (3) There is the distinctive combination of monism and dualism, or of an ethical dualism set within an ultimate metaphysical monism (in the form of monotheism) that has been developed within Christianity and that represents the main contribution of Western thought to the subject.

Since the terms of the problem of evil vary with the character of the religious beliefs which give rise to it, a separate study is required for each of the great religious systems. In the present article, however, the problem will be treated only in the context of the Christian tradition.

Christianity (like Judaism and Islam) is committed to a monotheistic doctrine of God as absolute in goodness and power and as the creator of the universe ex nihilo. The challenge of the fact of evil to this faith has accordingly been formulated as a dilemma: If God is all-powerful, he must be able to prevent evil. If he is all-good, he must want to prevent evil. But evil exists. Therefore, God is either not all-powerful or not all-good. A theodicy (from theos, god, and dikē, justice) is accordingly an attempt to reconcile the unlimited goodness of an all-powerful God with the reality of evil.

The kinds of evil distinguished in the literature of theodicy are (1) the evil originated by human beings (and angels), that is, moral evil or sin; (2) the physical sensation of pain and the mental anguish of suffering, which may be caused either by sin or by (3) natural evil, that is, disease, tornado, earthquake, and so forth; and (4) the finitude, contingency, and hence imperfection of all created things which some have called metaphysical evil. The last two topics will be treated in the course of discussing the others in response to the questions: "Why has an infinitely powerful and good God permitted moral evil in his universe?" and "Why has an infinitely powerful and good God permitted pain and suffering in his universe?"

The Problem of Moral Evil

the traditional augustinian theodicy

The problem of evil was a lifelong preoccupation of Augustine (354430), and the main lines of thought that he established have been followed by the majority of subsequent Christian thinkers. Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine was attracted by Manichaeism, a powerful contemporary religious movement with Eastern and Gnostic roots, which affirmed an ultimate dualism of good and evil in the forms of light, or spirit, and darkness, or matter. In turning from this doctrine to Christianity, Augustine rejected a final dualism in favor of belief in a good God as the sole ultimate reality, and rejected the Manichaean disparagement of matter in favor of an acceptance of the material world as reflecting the goodness of its creator.

But if the sole ultimate power is unambiguously good, what is evil and whence does it come? In answer to this question, Augustine develops two interlocking lines of thought, presenting the privative and the aesthetic conceptions of evil.

Evil as privation

Augustine counters the Manic-haean conception of evil as an independent reality and power coeternal with good by his analysis of evil (derived from Plotinus, Enneads, I, Eighth Tractate) as the privation, corruption, or perversion of something good. Evil, he taught, has no independent existence, but is always parasitic upon good, which alone has substantival being. "Nothing evil exists in itself, but only as an evil aspect of some actual entity" (Enchiridion, Ch. 4). Thus, everything that God has created is good, and the phenomenon of evil occurs only when beings which are intrinsically good (though mutable) become corrupted and spoiled.

Augustine expresses the same thought from another perspective when he equates being with goodness. God, as the highest, richest, and most intensely real being, is the supreme good, and everything that he has brought into existence is ipso facto good. For this reason the corruption that we call evil can never be complete; for if a thing becomes so vitiated in nature that it ceases to exist, the evil which is parasitic upon it must also cease to exist. Hence, there can be no wholly evil being.

How does this spoiling of God's initially good creation come about? Augustine's answer is that evil has entered into the universe through the culpable volitions of free creatures, angels and humans. Their sin consisted, not in choosing positive evil (for there is no positive evil to choose), but in turning away from the higher good, namely God, to a lower good. "For when the will abandons what is above itself, and turns to what is lower, it becomes evilnot because that is evil to which it turns, but because the turning itself is wicked" (City of God, XII, 6). Augustine holds that natural evils, such as disease, are divinely ordained consequences of the primeval fall of man, and thus traces all evils either directly or indirectly to a wicked misuse of creaturely freedom: "There are two kinds of evil, sin and the penalty for sin" (Against Fortunatus, 15).

When we ask what caused man to fall, Augustine's answer is his doctrine of deficient causation. There is no efficient, or positive, cause of evil willing. Rather, evil willing is itself a negation or deficiency, and to seek for its cause "is as if one sought to see darkness, or hear silence" (City of God, XII, 7). Perhaps the best way to interpret this obscure teaching is as an assertion of the inexplicability, in principle, of free volitions; for "what cause of willing can there be which is prior to willing?" (Free Will, III, xvii, 49). Augustine is saying that the origin of moral evil lies hidden within the mystery of human and angelic freedom. The freely acting will is an originating cause, and its operations are not explicable in terms of other prior causes.

Aesthetic conception of evil

The other main theme in Augustine is the aesthetic conception of evil, which is also derived from Plotinus (Enneads, III, 2, 17). According to this view, what appears to be evil, when seen in isolation or in a too limited context, is a necessary element in a universe that, viewed as a totality, is wholly good. From the viewpoint of God, who sees timelessly and as a whole the entire moving panorama of created history, the universe is good: "To thee there is no such thing as evil, and even in thy whole creation, taken as a whole, there is not" (Confessions, VII, 13).

The presupposition of this aesthetic view is the ancient conception, deriving from Plato (Timaeus, 41 BC), which Arthur Lovejoy has called the principle of plenitude (The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, MA, 1936). According to this principle, a universe in which all the varied potentialities of being are realized and which contains as many different kinds of entity as are possible (lower as well as higher, lesser as well as greater), is a better universeone which more adequately expresses the infinite creativity of Godthan would a universe which contains only the highest type of created beings. There is thus an immense hierarchy of forms of created existence, and each creature, in its own proper place in the scheme of nature, is good and glorifies its Maker. Those that are lower in the scale of being are not on that account evil; they are just different goods, contributing in their different ways to the perfection of the universe. Again, things that are transitory by nature, appearing and then perishing within the ever-changing pattern of nature's beauty, contribute, even by their death, to the perfection of the created order. As a very minor subtheme within this aesthetic conception, Augustine sometimes also uses the notion of evil as providing a contrast by which good shines the more brightly.

As an application of the principle of plenitude, Augustine holds that the universe must contain mutable and corruptible creatures, compounded of being and nonbeing. It is better that the universe should include free beings who may, and do, fall than that it should omit them. Thus, Augustine brings even moral evil within the scope of his aesthetic conception. In doing so, he employs the further principle (later invoked by Anselm, in his atonement theory) that as long as sin is exactly balanced by just punishment, it does not upset the moral harmony of the universe. "Since there is happiness for those who do not sin, the universe is perfect; and it is no less perfect because there is misery for sinners. So, whatever a soul may choose, ever beautiful and well-ordered in all its parts is the universe whose Maker and Governor is God" (Free Will, III, 9, 2627).

Influence of the Augustinian analyses

Both of these main Augustinian themes reappear in the thought of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century (Summa Theologiae, I, 4749).

Martin Luther and John Calvin, the Reformers of the sixteenth century, were not interested in developing a general theodicy, although they followed Augustine in his doctrine that all the evils of human life flow ultimately from the culpable fall of man.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in his Théodicée (1710), employed the two Augustinian themes, the privative and aesthetic conceptions, in the course of his argument that this is the best of all possible worlds (or, more strictly, the best of all possible universes, for he uses "world" in its most comprehensive sense)a notion pointedly satirized in Voltaire's Candide (1759). It is the best, not because it contains no evil, but because any other possible universe would contain more evil. The eternal possibilities of existence are individually present to the Divine Mind which, like an infallible calculating machine, surveys all possible combinations and selects the best, to which it then gives existence.

summary and criticism of the augustinian theodicy

The traditional Augustinian theodicy in respect to moral evil asserts that God created man with no sin in him and set him in a world devoid of evil. But man willfully misused his God-given freedom and fell into sin. Some men will be redeemed by God's grace, and others will be condemned to eternal punishment. In all this, God's goodness and justice alike are manifested.

This traditional theodicy has been criticized for its accounts of the origin and of the final disposition of moral evil.

The origin of moral evil

It is urged that the notion of finitely perfect beings willfully falling into sin is self-contradictory and unintelligible (cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube, 2nd ed., Berlin, 18301831, par. 72). A truly perfect being, though free to sin, would in fact never do so. To attribute the origin of evil to the willful crime of a perfect being is thus to assert the sheer contradiction that evil has created itself ex nihilo.

There appears, further, to be a disharmony between this theodicy and Augustine's doctrine of predestination, which in effect sets the origin of moral evil within the purpose and responsibility of God. Augustine's doctrine (City of God, XI, 11 and 13, and XII, 9) refers to the fall of the angels. Calvin (Institutes, III, 23, 7 and 8,) has a parallel doctrine referring to the fall of man.

The assumption of the traditional theodicy that it is logically impossible for God to have created humans such that they would always freely make right moral choices has recently been attacked under the name of "the free will defense." Defining a free action as one that flows from the nature of the agent, without external compulsion, recent writers have claimed that, without logical contradiction, God might initially have given men a nature that would always freely express itself in right actions. (See J. L. Mackie, "God and Omnipotence," Mind [April 1955], and Antony Flew, "Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom," New Essays in Philosophical Theology, 1955. For an important critical comment on these two articles, see Ninian Smart, "Omnipotence, Evil and Supermen," Philosophy [April 1961], and replies in the same journal by Flew [January 1962], and Mackie [April 1962].) Three of the questions involved in this debate are: (1) In denying that we do what we do because we are what we are, and that therefore we might have been made so that we would always freely act rightly, can we avoid equating free behavior with merely random behavior? (2) Is there any important difference between a good will that has been created ready-made as such, and one which has become steadfastly good as the outcome of a history of moral endeavor and struggle? (3) If God's primary purpose for humans is to evoke in them a free and uncompelled love and trust in relation to himself, would this purpose be frustrated by his creating people so that they cannot do other than make this response?

The final disposition of moral evil

The criticism of the eschatological aspect of the traditional Augustinian (and also, on this point, the Calvinist) theodicy has been expressed as a dilemma. If God desires to save all his human creatures, but is unable to do so, he is limited in power. If, on the other hand, he does not desire the salvation of all, but has created some for damnation, he is limited in goodness. In either case, the doctrine of eternal damnation stands as an obstacle in the way of Christian theodicy.

the irenaean type of theodicy

Prior to Augustine and the development of his theology by the Latin fathers of the Christian church, a significantly different conception of the fall of man was prevalent among many of the Greek-speaking fathers, chief among them Irenaeus (c. 120202). Whereas Augustine held that before his fall, Adam was in a state of original righteousness, and that his first sin was the inexplicable turning of a wholly good being toward evil, Irenaeus and others regarded the pre-Fall Adam as more like a child than a mature, responsible adult. According to this earlier conception, Adam stood at the beginning of a long process of development. He had been created as a personal being in the "image" of God, but had yet to be brought into the finite "likeness" of God. His fall is seen, not as disastrously transforming and totally ruining man's situation, but rather as delaying and complicating his advance from the "image" to the "likeness" of his Maker. Thus, man is viewed as neither having fallen from so great a height of original righteousness, nor to so profound a depth of total depravity, as in the Augustinian and Calvinist theologies; rather, he fell in the early stages of his spiritual development and now needs greater help than he otherwise would have required. (The contrast between the Latin and Greek doctrines of the Fall is most fully presented in N. P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin. London, 1927.)

In much of the British theology from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, which has been influenced by Friedrich Schleiermacher's discussion of evil, this earlier, less dramatic conception of the Fall has been carried further. The Fall is regarded as a virtually inevitable incident in man's development as a child of God. If man is to enter into a genuinely personal relationship with his Maker, he must first experience some degree of freedom and autonomy. For only a relatively independent being can enter into a relationship of love and trust with his Creator, and man's fall is seen as a fall into this independence. It is thus analogous to the phase of disobedience which signals a young child's assertion of his own individuality in relation to his parents.

This line of thought may be carried further on the basis of the awareness in much modern theology that the "Fall" does not refer to a historical or prehistorical, but rather a mythological event. That is to say, man has never actually existed in a state of pre-Fall perfection. The Fall story is an analysis of man's present condition of estrangement from God, but not an account of how he came to be in this condition. Using our knowledge of the early state of humankind, we may say that man, as he emerged from the lower forms of life, was endowed with only dim and rudimentary conceptions of his Maker. He existed at an epistemic distance from God, which allowed him to respond to modes of divine revelation that do not coerce the human mind but which preserve man's relative autonomy. Man's existence at this epistemic distance from God constitutes his fallen estate, and from this flows the moral and spiritual cleavage and estrangement which is traditionally called "original sin." In this type of theodicy, God bears the ultimate responsibility for (in other words, is the necessary and knowing cause of) man's existence as a fallen creature, although, on his own level, man remains individually responsible for his personal choices and actions. Further, though the significance of this cannot be pursued here, the God who has thus created man as imperfect but perfectible has also entered into human life, in Christ, to bring about man's redemption.

The Problem of Pain and Suffering

human pain and suffering

Some instances of sufferingfor example, those caused by war, injustice, and the many forms of "man's inhumanity to man"are traceable to human wrongdoing, and thus fall within the problem of moral evil. But other sources of pain, such as disease, earthquake, flood, drought, and storm, are built into the structure of the world itself. Surely, it is urged, they make it incredible that the world should have been designed by a Creator who is both perfectly good and infinitely powerful. The theist's reply is that this reasoning presupposes that God's purpose in making the world must have been to produce a hedonic paradise for man to inhabit. (This is the assumption, for example, of David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, XI.) It is assumed by the critic of Christian theodicy that the Creator's problem was analogous to that of a human being who is making a cage for a pet animal. He will naturally make it as safe and agreeable as he can, and any remaining sources of danger or discomfort are evidences of either his want of care or want of means. But the Christian conception of the divine purpose in creation differs from the one which is presumed in such a criticism. According to the Augustinian and Calvinist theologies, nature was created free from defect, and its present perils and hardships are punishments which man has brought upon himself. According to the Irenaean type of Christian theodicy, the purpose of the world is to be a place of "soul-making," an environment in which the higher potentialities of human personality may develop. To this end, it is claimed, nature is an autonomous system operating by its own laws, which men must learn to obey.

If God had created a world in which natural law were continuously adjusted for the avoidance of all pain, the more heroic human virtues would never be evoked. Indeed, a great part of our present moral language would be meaningless. There would be no such thing as "doing harm," for no one would be able to suffer any kind of injury; there would be no such thing as "doing good," for there would be no needs, deficiencies or occasions for improvement; there would be no such thing as a crime or a benefaction, an act of generosity or of meanness, of kindness or unkindness; and there would be no situations to which such qualities as courage, fortitude, loyalty, honesty, and the caring and protective aspects of love would be appropriate responses. There would thus be no occasions for moral choice. Such a world would be ill-designed to evoke many of the human traits which we value most highly. Indeed, it would seem that the "rough edges" of the worldits challenges, dangers, tasks, difficulties, and possibilities of real failure and lossconstitute a necessary element in an environment which is to call forth humanity's finer qualities.

But might not men have been created by God already possessed of these virtues? This is one of the points of contemporary debate. On the one side it is argued that, in principle, there are no limitations to an omnipotent God's capacity to create beings endowed with specific personal characteristics. On the other side it is argued that a virtue which has been formed as a result of making real decisions in real situations of moral choice is of greater value than the analogous virtue created by divine fiat, and that it is reasonable to suppose that the Creator is not content to build into men the merely ready-made and unearned qualities.

However, the discernible connection between the more heroic human virtues and the kind of world in which we live remains a very general one. It does not by any means amount to a one-to-one correspondence between each item of evil in human experience and some moral gain accruing to those who undergo it. Further, it appears that evil has crushed the human spirit as often as it has developed it, and that men have collapsed before life's challenges and opportunities as often as they have risen triumphantly to meet them. Accordingly, this type of theodicy demands completion in an eschatology. It points toward the eternal happiness of human beings in society with one another and in communion with God, which is symbolized by the "Kingdom of Heaven"; and its fuller claim is that the final fulfillment of God's purpose for his creatures in his heavenly kingdom constitutes a good so great and enduring that it justifies all the pains which have been experienced in order to reach it. (At this point, again, theodicy excludes the notion of eternal torment, for such torment could never serve any good end beyond itself, and would thus constitute precisely the kind of unredeemed evil which would make a theodicy impossible.)

A fundamental objection that is raised against this appeal to eschatology is that there is a contradiction between justifying a first-order evil, such as danger, as being required for the second-order good of courage, and then justifying the process by which courage is produced out of evil by reference to a future heavenly state in which, presumably, there will no longer be any dangers, and hence no need to have developed the virtue of courage in the first place. More generally, if heaven is free from "rough edges," how will virtues, so dearly bought in this world, survive within it?

Possibly the difficulty might be met in terms of heavenly analogues of earthly virtues, created by the development of the latter but no longer requiring the situations which evoked them; or in terms of the transmutation of a particular virtue (courage, for example) into an aspect of faith in God. However, Christian theology has not developed any definitive answer to this question.

animal pain

Thus far this article has been concerned with evil as it directly affects humankind in the forms of sin, pain, and suffering. There is also, however, the baffling problem of animal pain beneath the human level. Throughout the animal kingdom, one species devours another, and painful accidents and lingering diseases disable and then kill. How is this spectacle of "nature, red in tooth and claw" to be reconciled with the religious belief in an omnipotent and perfect Creator?

Certain solutions of the problem have been proposed. It is claimed that the lower animals live wholly in the present moment and lack the high-level capacities of memory, anticipation, and conscience that give rise to the human experience of suffering as distinct from the experience of physical pain; that the pain mechanism is a necessary warning device in bodily organisms that move about within a material environment; and that an animal's life, even though violently terminated, is predominantly active and pleasurable.

Solutions of a more speculative nature have been sought in two main directions. From the viewpoint of the Augustinian type of theodicy, it has been suggested that the premundane fall of Satan has had cosmic consequences, perverting the entire evolutionary process to a savage struggle for existence (see for example, C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, pp. 122124). The criticisms that have been made of the Augustinian account of the origin of evil apply also to this extension of it.

From another point of view, which adopts a theme of Eastern thought, it has been suggested that there may be a continuous reincarnation of souls through the levels of animal existence up to self-consciousness in human life. Thus, the pain of the animals is not wasted, but is part of a long constructive process (see Nels Ferré, Evil and the Christian Faith, pp. 6265). The aspect of this suggestion that is most readily open to criticism is its entirely speculative and unverifiable character.

See also Anselm, St.; Augustine, St.; Calvin, John; Evil; Indian Philosophy; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; Lovejoy, Arthur Oncken; Luther, Martin; Mani and Manichaeism; Mill, John Stuart; Monism and Pluralism; Moral Psychology; Moral Realism; Plato; Plotinus; Punishment; Thomas Aquinas, St.; Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de; Zoroastrianism.

Bibliography

statements and histories

The problem of evil is forcibly stated in J. S. Mill, "Nature," Three Essays on Religion (London: Longmans, 1874) and David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, edited by Norman Kemp Smith, 2nd ed., X and XI (London, 1947).

For historical treatments of the attempts to meet the problem, see Julius Müller, Die Christliche Lehre von der Sünde, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Breslau: Josef Max, 1849), translated by William Urwick as The Christian Doctrine of Sin (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1868); F. Billicsich, Das Problem des Übels in der Philosophic des Abendlandes, 3 vols. (Vienna, 19521959); Charles Werner, Le problème du mal dans la pensée humaine (Paris, 1944); R. A. Tsanoff, The Nature of Evil (New York, 1931); A. G. Sertillanges, Le problème du mal, Vol. I (Paris, 1948); and N. P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin (London: Longmans, 1927).

plotinus and augustine

Plotinus deals with the problem in the Enneads, First Ennead, Eighth Tractate, and Third Ennead, Second Tractate, which appear in The Enneads, translated from Greek by Stephen Mackenna (London, 19171921). See also B. A. G. Fuller, The Problem of Evil in Plotinus (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1912). Augustine's main discussions of evil are in De Libero Arbitrio, De Vera Religione, and De Natura Boni, among his anti-Manichaean works, translated by J. H. S. Burleigh in Augustine: Earlier Writings (London and Philadelphia, 1943); and in his Confessions, Bk. VII, Chs. 35 and 1216, and Enchiridion, Chs. 35 in Confessions and Enchiridion, translated and edited by A. C. Autler (London and Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955); and De Civitate Dei, Bk. XI, Chs. 1618 and Bk. XII, Chs. 19, translated and edited by Marcus Dods (Edinburgh, 1871). See also M. L. Burton, The Problem of Evil: A criticism of the Augustinian point of view (Chicago and London: Open Court, 1909); Régis Jolivet, Le problème du mal d'après saint Augustin (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1936).

thomas aquinas

Thomas Aquinas deals with the problem of evil in his Summa Theologiae, First Part, Questions 4749, and De Malo (second of the Quaestiones Disputatae); see A. C. Pegis, ed., The Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1945). See also Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas and the Problem of Evil (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1942).

leibniz

Leibniz's famous work is titled Essais de théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme, et l'origine du mal (Amsterdam, 1710), translated by E. M. Huggard as Theodicy; Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1951). For a contemporary theological critique of Leibniz, see Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik (Munich: Kaiser, 1932), Vol. 3, Part 1, par. 42,3; translated into English as Church Dogmatics, edited by T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh, 19591960).

hellenistic theodicy

For origins, see Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, edited by W. W. Harvey, 2 vols. (Cambridge, U.K., 1857), Bk. IV, Chs. 3738, also found in A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, eds., The Writings of the Ante-Nicene Fathers (Edinburgh, 1867; Grand Rapids, MI, 1885), Vol. I; and A. Harnack, ed., Epideixis (Leipzig, 1807), translated by J. P. Smith as Proof of the Apostolic Preaching (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1952).

jewish writings

Some major Jewish writings on the problem of evil are Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, translated by M. Friedländer, 3 vols. (London: Trubner, 18811885), Book III, and Martin Buber, Bilder von Gut und Böse (Cologne: J. Hegner, 1952), translated by Michael Bullock as Images of Good and Evil (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1952).

nineteenth-century studies

The Idealist treatment of the problem is found in Josiah Royce, Studies of Good and Evil (New York: D. Appleton, 1898). Arthur Schopenhauer's views are in his Parerga und Paralipomena (Berlin: A. W. Hahn, 1851), from which T. B. Saunders has assembled and translated passages under the title "On the Sufferings of the World," in Studies in Pessimism (London: Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, 1890).

twentieth-century discussions

The following are some modern Augustinian discussions: A. G. Sertillanges, Le problème du mal (Paris: Aubier, 1951), Vol. 2; Paul Siwek, The Philosophy of Evil (New York: Ronald, 1951); François Petit, Le problème du mal (Paris, 1958), translated by C. Williams as The Problem of Evil (New York: Hawthorne, 1959); Charles Journet, Le mal (Paris, 1961), translated by Michael Barry as The Meaning of Evil (London: G. Chapman, 1963); Mark Pontifex, "The Question of Evil" in Prospect for Metaphysics, edited by Ian Ramsey (London and New York: Allen & Unwin, 1961); and among Protestant writers, C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Bles, 1940); Austin Farrer, Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited (New York: Doubleday, 1961).

The Irenaean type of theodicy finds classic expression in Friedrich Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 1st ed. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1821), Part I, 3, and Part II, translated and edited by H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart as The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928). More recent writers who tend in this direction include F. R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology, Vol. 2, Ch. VII (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1930); William Temple, Nature, Man and God, Ch. XIV (London: Macmillan, 1934); and Nels Ferré, Evil and the Christian Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1947); J. S. Whale, The Christian Answer to the Problem of Evil (London, 1939). John Hick, God and Evil (London: Macmillan, 1966) traces the two types of theodicy, Augustinian and Irenaean, and presents an Irenaean theodicy for today.

Some philosophical discussions are: A. C. Ewing, Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, pp. 247250 (London, 1951); J. E. MacTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion (London: E. Arnold, 1906), Chs. 6 and 7; C. H. Whiteley, An Introduction to Metaphysics (London: Metheun, 1950), Ch. 11. In addition to the articles referred to in the body of this article, see John Wisdom, "God and Evil," in Mind 44 (173) (1935): 120, and H. D. Aiken "God and Evil," in Ethics 68, (2) (1958): 7797, (1949), reprinted in Aiken's Reason and Conduct (New York: Knopf, 1962).

More purely theological discussions occur in P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God (London: Duckworth, 1916) and Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik (Munich: Kaiser, 1932), Vol. 3, Pt. 3, par. 50, translated as Church Dogmatics, edited by T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 19591960). A book discussing Karl Barth's views on the problem of evil is Kurt Lüthi, Gott und das Böse (Zürich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1961).

See also C. G. Jung, Antwort auf Hiob (Zürich: Rascher, 1952), translated by R. F. C. Hull as Answer to Job (London: Kegan Paul, 1954). On the problem of animal pain, see the relevant chapters in the works cited by Ferré, Farrer, and Lewis.

John Hick (1967)

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