The Reification of Evil and The Failure of Theodicy: The Devil in ...

“And it was made clear to me that all things are good even if they are corrupted. They
could not be corrupted if they were supremely good; but unless they were good they
could not be corrupted. If they were supremely good, they would be incorruptible; if they
were not good at all, there would be nothing in them to be corrupted.… Therefore,
whatsoever is, is good. Evil, then, the origin of which I had been seeking, has no
substance at all…” (Confessions, Book 7, Chapter 12)
Perhaps no passage from Augustine has been more widely quoted – or more frequently
misunderstood. What Augustine emphatically was not saying is that the world is rosy and has no
problems. He also was not saying that evil is an illusion or only in our minds.
68 Here, Aquinas is citing Aristotle’s Metaphysics, cap. 7 (1017a22-35).
69 To Aquinas, it is no exaggeration to say that the verb “to be” is an active verb; esse means to
have existence or being, which is to be in actuo (in act, actual), and not only in potentio
(potential, having the possibility of being). He defined ens (entity) as that which is a thing and
has a substance, or essence; and essence is what the thing is, or (more literally) “what something
was [meant] to be”, “quod quid erat esse”, which is a literal translation of Aristotle’s
το τι ην ειναι.
To Aquinas, existence necessarily precedes essence: for a thing to be something, it must
first exist. This line of thought led Aquinas to one of his most startling conclusions, in his
treatise on God: “God is not only His own essence, … but also His own existence.” In other
words, “essence and existence are the same in God”. In S.T. I.I, Q12, Thomas argues that we
cannot know God directly, since we can know something of the essence of things, but not their
existence. Since God’s essence is also His existence, it follows (from this and other
considerations as well) that we cannot know God directly. We know about God by analogy,
from things in the world – and therefore, we also know about things negatively. (Analogy is one
of the two ways in which we can know God. The other is that the world is the trace of God, as
the footprints in the sand are the trace of someone who walked there: God leaves His trace as the
cause – efficient, formal and final – of the world.) Whereas God is simple and perfect, perfectly
good, infinite, immutable, we know of God from the things we can observe in the world using
our senses, and these things are complex and imperfect, imperfectly good, finite and mutable.
The idea of God’s simplicity is critical for Aquinas. The universal attributes of all being, called
transcendentals, include goodness, truth, beauty and unity. Whereas these attributes appear as
separate aspects of being for us, they are seamlessly united in God’s simplicity (see S.T. I.I, Q3)
70 See Summa Theologiae, Q48, a.2, Rep. Obj. 1, and Q48, a.3, in which Thomas Aquinas also
added, with enviable clarity, “…not every absence of good is evil. For absence of good can be
taken in a privative and in a negative sense. Absence of good, taken negatively, is not evil;
otherwise, it would follow that what does not exist is evil, and also that everything would be evil,
through not having the good belonging to something else; for instance, a man would be evil who
had not the swiftness of the roe, or the strength of a lion. But the absence of good, taken in a
privative sense, is an evil; as, for instance, the privation of sight is called blindness.”