Letter to the Editor: On Evil, Physical and Moral
(To remind readers, letters to the editor are very welcome, and those judged pertinent can be posted, with permission, and with some commentary in the spirit of charitable dialogue and critique in search of the fullness and splendour of truth).
So, in that spirit, Richard Yates from England writes:
I don’t think Carl Sundell is expressing a view that does justice to the Catholic tradition on the subject of evil. If memory serves aright, Aquinas teaches that evil is a lack of something that belongs to an entity according to its nature. There are both natural and moral evils. Natural evils include suffering and death (brought upon us by the Fall). Lacking a limb is an evil (not an attributable moral evil) because it belongs to the nature of living things to have a complete set of limbs, and they can’t function well without them.
I don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘problem of evil’ in the sense of a challenge to the goodness of God.
Why does God permit evil?
On the one hand, we could just say “we don’t know”. What we do know rationally is that God is perfectly good because God is the perfect being (this follows from the convertibility of good and being).
According to Aquinas, God permits evil so that an even greater good may come of it.
Perhaps one could say: the worst evil was the torturing to death of the man who was God, Jesus, but from it came the redemption of the world, raising us to a state higher than that before the Fall.
Reply from the editor:
True enough. Saint Thomas does distinguish ‘natural’ or ‘physical’ evils from moral evil. The former are privations in any given nature or being – missing something that should be there. While the latter – moral evil – is true evil, a disorder in the will. We wrote of this distinction in these pages. Both may be ‘mysteries’, in the sense that we don’t understand their full purpose in God’s providence, but moral evil, with its eternal consequences, is far more grave – in fact, it is ‘incommensurate’ with physical evil, as the Catechism says.
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