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

71 From Saint Thomas and the Problem of Evil by Jacques Maritain (The Aquinas Lecture,
1942). The exact quote from Jeremiah 31:15 is “…Rachel plorantis filios suos, et nolentis
consolari super eis,…”.
72 This statement may be truer of suffering that results from natural disasters and diseases, than
of suffering that results from moral evil.
73 In Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome (Picador Press, 1987), it is given to the mad priest,
Father Simon Rinaldo Smith, to elaborate this point; Percy thereby implies that this madman is
saner than the sane. Percy, who was trained as a physician, has the priest say to the protagonist,
the troubled psychiatrist, Dr. Thomas More:
“You are a member of the first generation of doctors in the history of medicine to
turn their backs on the oath of Hippocrates and kill millions of useless people, unborn
children, born malformed children for the good of mankind – and to do so without a
single murmur from one of you…. Do you know what is going to happen to you?”…
“What is going to happen to me to me, Father?” …
“Oh,” he says absently, appearing to be thinking of something else, “you’re going
to end up killing Jews.”
Slightly later, the conversation continues:
“Do you know where tenderness always leads?”
“No, where?” I ask,…
“To the gas chamber.”
“I see.”
“Tenderness is the first disguise of the murderer.”
Like the well-intentioned radicals of Dostoevsky’s novels, the physicians who bypass the
seemingly antiquated dicta of the Hippocratic oath (for Percy, this certainly included the
prohibition against abortions, as well as “pedeuthanasia” and “gereuthanasia”, which are allowed
in the not-distant future in which the novel takes place), do so “for the good of mankind” – as
part of a utopian dream. Percy thus warns against devaluing human life under the guise of
tenderness and altruism.
Later in the novel, Father Smith tells of the time during his teen years that he spent in
Weimar Germany, a time in which Hitler and the Nazis were coming to power. The priest
recounts discussions he heard there about a book entitled “The Release of the Destruction of Life
Devoid of Value”. This book, of which the title is alternatively translated as “Life Unworthy of
Life”, is an actual book by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, doctors of jurisprudence and
medicine, respectively, that was published in Germany in 1922. I mention this point because if
one is reading about it for the first time in Percy’s novel, it sounds fictitious. About this awful
book with a pseudointellectual title, Father Smith comments: