Is suffering desirable? According to large swaths of the Christian tradition, the answer to this seemingly strange question is a qualified yes. In itself, suffering is wholly undesirable, but love can exploit it as a means of expression and give it an immense value. “By suffering out of love and obedience,” says St. Thomas Aquinas, “Christ gave more to God than was required to compensate for the offense of the whole human race.” The savior’s passion had atoning power, according to Aquinas, “because of the exceeding charity from which he suffered.”Footnote ¹

The value of love-suffused suffering is not limited to Christ’s passion, however, but is realized through the suffering of his disciples and followers as well, according to many Christian thinkers. “To love sufferings and afflictions for the love of God is the supreme point of most holy charity,” says St. Francis de Sales.Footnote ² For St. Teresa of Avila, “trials, sufferings, insults and persecutions” are “God’s gifts in this world.” God gives those gifts, moreover,

Although the sensibility displayed by Teresa and Francis may have flourished especially in the Counter Reformation period, it is clearly important throughout Christian history. Here are a handful of samples from other historical epochs, starting with our own time.

According to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, “love demands sacrifice. But if we love until it hurts, God will give us His peace and joy … Suffering in itself is nothing; but suffering shared with Christ’s Passion is a wonderful gift.”Footnote ⁴ She also proposes what she takes to be “the most beautiful definition of suffering”: “Sorrow, suffering … is but a kiss of Jesus – a sign that you have come so close to Jesus that he can kiss you.”Footnote ⁵ St. Pope John Paul II, who canonized Mother Teresa, seems to share her point of view. In his encyclical on the Christian meaning of suffering, he argues that “suffering is present in the world in order to release love, in order to give birth to works of love towards neighbour, in order to transform the whole of human civilization into a ‘civilization of love.’”Footnote ⁶

Unsurprisingly, the late Middle Ages are rife with testimonies about the intimate relationship between suffering and love. St. Catherine of Siena reports having received the following message from God:

Julian of Norwich provides another interesting example from the same time. When she was around thirty years old, she asked God to give her a vivid experience of Christ’s passion – “for I would that His pains were my pains … I desired to suffer with Him” – as well as an experience of being mortally sick.Footnote ⁸ “In this sickness, I desired to have all manner of pains bodily and ghostly that I should have if I should die (with all the dreads and tempests of the fiends) except the outpassing of the soul.”Footnote ⁹

God grants Julians requests, and when she falls ill, she receives a detailed vision of Christ’s passion. Christ then asks her if she is pleased that he suffered in this way for her, and when she answers yes, Christ responds: “If thou art pleased, I am pleased: it is a joy, a bliss, and endless satisfying to me that ever suffered I Passion for thee; and if I might suffer more, I would suffer more.”Footnote ¹⁰ As Julian meditates on these words, she realizes that

In other words, Julian realizes that Christ’s love is so great that he – if he could – would choose to die an unfathomable number of times. Moreover, he would do so even if it were not necessary, according to Julian. She points out that Christ “said … these words: If I might suffer more, I would suffer more. He said not, If it were needful to suffer more: for though it were not needful, if He might suffer more, He would.”Footnote ¹² This seems to imply that suffering, for Julian, is something positively desirable as love’s most powerful means of expression.

In the early church, a mentality not far removed from Julian’s can be found in a figure like St. Ignatius of Antioch, whose love for Christ expresses itself as a desire for martyrdom. “Allow me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ.”Footnote ¹³ The Epistle of Barnabas makes explicit the rationale behind this kind of desire: “Those who wish to behold Me [Christ], and lay hold of My kingdom, must through tribulation and suffering obtain Me.”Footnote ¹⁴

The idea that suffering is desirable when endured for the love of God ultimately goes back to the New Testament.Footnote ¹⁵ For St. Paul, suffering is a necessary consequence of the believer’s union with Christ through baptism.Footnote ¹⁶ Believers are “baptized into his death” (Rom 6:3) in order to rise with him, and this means that they must share in Christ’s suffering as an integral part of their baptismal dying (Phil 3:10; 2 Cor 1:5).Footnote ¹⁷ We are “joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom 8:17). This is why Paul can describe suffering as something to “boast” about (Rom 5:3), and a “privilege”: “For he has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well” (Phil 1:29).

The Letter to the Colossians portrays the sharing in Christ’s suffering as a reason for joy and a way of participating in Christ’s salvific mission: “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col 1:24).Footnote ¹⁸ The First Letter of Peter strikes a similar note, as its author encourages believers to “rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed” (1 Pet 4:13).Footnote ¹⁹ These attitudes to suffering and death must be understood against the background of a soteriological formula that is present in the earliest strata of the New Testament: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3); “Our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us” (1 Thess 5:10). As Christian Eberhart points out, “these ‘dying formulas’ … convey that Christ’s death is an ‘effective’ death by way of attributing positive meaning to it.”Footnote ²⁰ In the Gospel of John, Jesus relates this positive meaning to what seems to be a general principle about the nature of discipleship and self-giving love: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit” (John 12:24);Footnote ²¹ “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).Footnote ²²

There are of course other layers of meaning to – and alternative interpretations of – the biblical passages I have referred to, and many other texts would have been equally relevant to cite. Quotes from saints and mystics, moreover, could be multiplied indefinitely to make my case. The snippets I have given will suffice, however, for showing that a “qualified yes” to the question I initially asked – whether suffering is desirable – is a mainstream position in historic Christianity.Footnote ²³ It is another question what to make of this position and how to evaluate it. Is there a metaphysical logic behind the tradition’s valorization of suffering, or is it ultimately based on nothing but the brute fact that Christianity’s founder suffered horrendously, together with the New Testament’s interpretation of his suffering as being, in some sense, salvific?Footnote ²⁴

In mainstream contemporary theology, it is more or less an axiom that suffering should never be “glorified.”Footnote ²⁵ Modern thought in general is prone to look at testimonies such as those cited through a Nietzschean or Freudian lens and discover signs of some pathology – a masochistic preoccupation with pain, self-contempt, repression, ressentiment, or the like. Since it is hard to deny that excessive and distorted attitudes to suffering can be found in the Christian tradition, it is of course wholly legitimate to apply a “hermeneutic of suspicion” to Christian ideas and expressions of the sort I have cited.Footnote ²⁶ It is also legitimate and potentially fruitful, however, to temporarily bracket the hermeneutics of suspicion and approach the testimonies of saints and mystics with the purpose of mining them for genuine insights about the relationship between suffering and love.

In the present book, I have chosen to explore the latter route, with the aim of accomplishing two things. First, I will try to uncover the metaphysical principles behind the Christian tradition’s valorization of suffering (in the sense illustrated and explained above). Drawing mainly on the thought of St. John of the Cross and Thomas Aquinas, I will formulate my findings as a general hypothesis about the relation between human love and suffering.Footnote ²⁷ My claim is that this hypothesis can make the radical statements about suffering quoted earlier intelligible and clarify the assumptions on which they rest.

Next, I will put my hypothesis to work by using it as the foundation for a theodicy. Constructing a theodicy is one way of dealing with the so-called problem of evil, which can be understood both as an intra-theological aporia and as a philosophical argument against God’s existence.Footnote ²⁸ The theodicy I will suggest aims to be relevant for the problem in both these guises, and one of my goals is to show that the existence of suffering in the amount we find in our world does not constitute strong evidence against the truth of Christianity.Footnote ²⁹ I take this to be equivalent to showing that suffering and evil do not threaten the internal coherence of the Christian system of beliefs.Footnote ³⁰ Unfortunately, the very notion of theodicy has been the object of massive critique in the contemporary academy, not least in theological circles. Some ground-clearing will therefore be necessary. Before I take up this task, however, I must briefly say something about the general character of this book’s analysis of love.

What I will argue is that a correct understanding of the relationship between love and suffering must chart a path between two opposed pitfalls.Footnote ³¹ The first pitfall is the seemingly attractive idea that suffering only has a superficial or accidental relationship to human love. According to proponents of this view, there is nothing about the nature of suffering, or about human nature, that makes sacrificial suffering an especially powerful or great expression of love. True, in a sinful world, love must sometimes manifest itself through sacrificial acts, but this does not tell us anything essential about the nature of human love.Footnote ³² This view is a pitfall, I will argue, because it is false – it misrepresents the nature of human love – and because it makes God’s choice to manifest his love by suffering in Christ’s humanity unintelligible. In addition, the view makes the problem of evil intractable by separating the most important perfection that human nature can attain (love) from the phenomenon that provides arguments from evil with their most potent ammunition (suffering). Although partial explanations of God’s permission of evil can be had without positing a logical-metaphysical link between human love and suffering, the present book proceeds from the conviction that only a deep dive into the profound perichoresis of love and suffering as manifested in the cross of Christ can provide materials for a solution that approaches completeness.Footnote ³³ Exactly what this means will become clear as the book’s argument unfolds.

The second, opposed pitfall is the idea that the relationship between suffering and love is so deep and necessary that its roots stretch all the way back to the immanent Trinity. According to this view, not even God can love without being able to suffer, and since God is love, there must be suffering – or at least something analogous to suffering – in the divine nature itself. This view is a pitfall because it gives suffering a bedrock ontological status that it cannot have, according to a Christian metaphysics. Suffering is not something that arises in God but, as I will contend, in the “interval” between God and creation.

I will argue that the correct position is to be found in the space between these opposing pitfalls. It is a truism (but an often forgotten one) that the nature and essential characteristics of human love flow from and are determined by the nature of human beings. Since we are essentially material creatures and therefore naturally vulnerable, our love necessarily includes – if it is perfect – a readiness to sacrifice our own bodily convenience and well-being for others in case this is needed. Absent such a disposition, human love is imperfect, and this is due to the kind of creatures we are. God could shield humans from all suffering, but not even he could create rational, material creatures who can love perfectly without being disposed to accept suffering out of love under certain metaphysically possible conditions.

What is true of human love, however, is not necessarily true of divine love, in the sense of love as it exists in God himself from eternity.Footnote ³⁴ If God is invulnerable, and if the properties of the divine nature determine the essential characteristics of divine love, it follows that God’s love has no intrinsic reference to sacrifice and suffering.Footnote ³⁵ In this book, I am going to proceed on the basis of this classically theistic understanding of God, which – I contend – is fully compatible with the Christian claim that God expresses his own love by suffering in an assumed human nature.Footnote ³⁶ What I will argue, accordingly, is that human love, and human love alone, has an essential or intrinsic relationship to suffering. The nature of this relationship is complex, however, and needs to be spelled out through a modal analysis of love as a habitus or virtue. This is a main task of the present book, and the analysis I will suggest will leave untouched the possibility of perfect love in heaven (where there is no suffering), as well as the possibility of a primordial state without human suffering.Footnote ³⁷ As a result of certain metaphysical constraints on the realization of perfect human love, however, a world in which God permits innocent suffering for a limited time can be better, I will argue, than a world in which God does not permit any suffering at all. This claim, if true, provides the starting point for a theodicy.

1.1 Theodicy: Clearing the Ground

That God’s permission of evil is explicable in terms of a greater good is widely acknowledged among classical theologians,Footnote ³⁸ as well as among analytic philosophers of religion of a theistic stripe. In contemporary theology, however, the situation is different. Surprising as it might seem to outsiders, many theologians reject the idea that God permits evil in view of a greater good. As I will show here, what they reject is not merely the idea that we can know what the greater good that figures in God’s reason for permitting evil is. They make the much stronger claim that there simply is no greater good that justifies God’s permission of evil. As a consequence, they hold that the project of theodicy is misconceived by its very nature, if not outrightly immoral.Footnote ³⁹ This stance is common even among theologians who can be described as “classical” (or at least “neo-classical”Footnote ⁴⁰) theists, and who therefore are committed to a strong notion of divine omnipotence.

Ian McFarland is an example of such a theologian. He writes:

In this passage, McFarland does not merely make an epistemological claim about the futility of trying to find out the correct explanation of evil – why God permits it. He implies that there simply is no such explanation to be found. If God had a good reason for permitting evil, its existence would be justifiable by reference to this reason.Footnote ⁴² According to McFarland, however, “evil can have no place in creation … as an experience that is either inevitable or justifiable.” It follows that evil either exists without divine permission (which means that God is unable to prevent it), or that God permits evil for no good reason, which seems to be an evil thing to do.

Another theologian with similar views is John Milbank:

There are several problems in this passage. First, it is clearly untrue that “explanation can pertain only to existence.” A privation needs an explanation as much as something that positively exists. “Why does this hen lack a leg?” is a perfectly reasonable question, for example. Second, if it is true that evil is “not even explicable for God,” then we must ask how God can guarantee that heaven will be free from evil. What prevents privations from inexplicably rearing their ugly heads there?Footnote ⁴⁴

The biggest problem, however, is this. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that evil is “radically without cause,” as Milbank claims. The question remains why God does not eliminate all evils as soon as they randomly pop up and start to corrupt beings. If Milbank is right, God cannot have a good reason for permitting uncaused evils to persist, because the persistence of those evils would then be explicable in terms of this reason. Milbank’s claim that evil is “not even explicable in principle, not even explicable for God” hence entails that God either does not really permit evils to persist once they have come into existence (which means that he lacks the power to eliminate them), or that he permits evils to persist without a reason (or at least without knowing his own reason).Footnote ⁴⁵

Since it is absurd to hold that God permits evil without a reason, or without knowing his own reason, Milbank as well as McFarland are committed to the claim that God does not really permit evil at all. Evil simply occurs, and God is powerless to prevent it. This view, however, is in conflict with Christian theism. To be precise, it is incompatible with all forms of theism that claim that God could freely have abstained from creating anything at all. Given the latter claim, which is accepted by the vast majority of Christian thinkers,Footnote ⁴⁶ it follows by strict logic that God has the power to prevent all evils.Footnote ⁴⁷ He could have done so simply by abstaining from creating, thereby making sure that there would be no wars, no murders, no rapes, no torture, and no genocides. Since he nevertheless chose to create, it must be the case that he prioritizes the existence of the world (or some part or aspect of it) over the nonexistence of all these evils. This means that he permits evil in view of the greater good of the existence of the world (or some part or aspect of it).Footnote ⁴⁸

In the present context, it is important not to confuse the latter claim with the proposition that God uses evil as a means to a greater good. An agent can permit evil in view of a greater good without using the evil in question as a means. We can see this by the following example. Any contemporary national state could prevent a lot of horrendous traffic accidents by lowering the speed limits on all public roads to 30 km per hour. The reason why most states do not do this is that it would make the transportation system less efficient, which in turn would be bad for the economy, complicate many people’s lives, etc. This means that contemporary states typically permit horrendous evils for the sake of what they take to be a greater good, namely, an efficient transportation system and all the goods that flow from this.

Clearly, however, this does not count as a case of using evil as a means to a greater good. The means to the realization of an efficient transportation system in this scenario is the decision to allow high speeds on the roads. The horrendous traffic accidents that this results in are foreseen but nonintended by-products of this decision. As this illustrates, an agent can permit evil for the sake of a greater good without using the evil as a means. Saying that God permits evil for the sake of a greater good, therefore, does not necessarily commit one to holding that he uses evil as a means, something that seems incompatible with God’s goodness.Footnote ⁴⁹ A good deal of criticism directed at theodicy in general fails to make this crucial distinction,Footnote ⁵⁰ which I will come back to in Chapter 7.

My reasoning so far seems to have proceeded on the assumption that if God exists, he is a moral agent whose actions must – like any agent’s – be evaluated in relation to moral norms. The Thomist philosopher Brian Davies has argued, however, that this idea represents a kind of “category mistake.” Moral properties cannot be ascribed to God in any meaningful sense – he is simply the wrong kind of reality for that.Footnote ⁵¹ As a result, the project of theodicy must be seen as misconceived, according to Davies. God’s creation of a world that contains a good deal of evil is not an act that can or needs to be morally justified.

Although I believe that God can be regarded, in an analogical sense, as a moral agent, I do not think that the falsity of this claim would undermine the project of theodicy.Footnote ⁵² Contrary to what Davies assumes, doing theodicy does not commit one to believing that God is a moral agent, or that properties such as “moral goodness” are ascribable to God. Suppose that the statement “God is good” only means that he is the summit of metaphysical perfection and the source of all goodness in the world, as Davies claims. Would this entail that God’s goodness is compatible with any kind of behavior on his part? Davies himself assumes that this is not the case. Following Aquinas, he argues that God is not in any sense the cause of sin and merely accidentally the cause of “natural” evil.Footnote ⁵³ Davies writes: “I take it for granted … that God cannot be thought of as good if he deliberately causes evil as an end in itself.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Clearly, then, there are behaviors that are incompatible with God’s metaphysical goodness. Now, one behavior that classical theologians like St. Augustine and Aquinas regard as incompatible with God’s metaphysical goodness is to permit evils for no good reason. Quoting Augustine, Aquinas writes: “Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and power were such as to bring good even out of evil.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This claim entails that God would not be the highest good if he permitted evils for no good reason.Footnote ⁵⁶

If this is true, there is no escaping the “problem of evil.” Given Augustine’s and Aquinas’s view of what God’s metaphysical goodness entails, atheists can argue that God probably does not exist, because there are evils that God seems to have no good reason to permit. In response to such arguments, theists can suggest possible reasons that God might have for permitting the relevant evils, without thereby implying that God is a moral agent. Augustine’s and Aquinas’s view (which Davies claims to share) hence implies that theodicy is a meaningful, or at least a legitimate, activity. This means that we need not discuss, in the present context, whether God is a moral agent or not. In this book, I will assume that he is, but it should be kept in mind that this assumption is not essential for my argument.

Finally, another global critique of the enterprise of theodicy alleges that it is immoral by its very nature, and that engaging in this discourse practice therefore “creates evils,” as Terrence Tilley puts it.Footnote ⁵⁷ Although this kind of critique comes in many guises,Footnote ⁵⁸ much of it rests on something like the following claim: The very idea that God’s permission of evils (and especially of horrendous evils) might be justifiable by reference to a greater good embodies or represents a denial of the seriousness of the evils in question.Footnote ⁵⁹ If you hold, for example, that God’s permission of the Holocaust could possibly be justified in this way, you are simply displaying an “irremissible moral blindness” by refusing to acknowledge the gravity of this horrendous evil.Footnote ⁶⁰ Theodicies, in other words, “misdeclare” or “disguise” evils by implicitly portraying them as less evil than they really are.Footnote ⁶¹

As I will shortly argue, there is a true moral intuition behind this kind of critique, and it needs to be taken seriously if the enterprise of theodicy is to be credible. In order correctly to identify this intuition, however, we must first discern where the critique goes wrong on a theoretical level. As it stands, it cannot be endorsed by anyone who believes that God exists and could have abstained from creating the world.Footnote ⁶² If the latter claim is true and God has freely created the world, it follows that he permitted the Holocaust and other horrendous evils for the sake of a greater good, since he could have prevented them by simply abstaining from creating. Now, if God has in fact permitted all evils in view of a greater good, then clearly it cannot be intrinsically immoral for us to think or say that he has done so.Footnote ⁶³ Otherwise, God must be immensely more immoral than we are, since he has actually done what we (as theodicists) merely think or speak about. Since an immoral God is no God at all, the anti-theodical critique strongly suggests that no God exists.

Note that the claim I here reject as unsustainable for Christian theists is merely the categorical one that theodicy as such is an immoral enterprise, in the sense that it is always and everywhere wrong to propose or endorse a theodicy. Rejecting this claim does not commit one to denying that there are certain contexts in which it would be morally wrong to bring up theodicy for discussion, or that particular theodicies might be morally problematic. However, if it is true that believers in a freely creating God cannot reject as immoral the general claim that God permits evils in view of a greater good, it follows that no theodicy can be rejected a priori on moral grounds by those who believe in such a God (or even in the possibility of such a God). Religious anti-theodicists, therefore, must descend into the trenches and explain why the specific features of particular theodicies are morally objectionable. Since this applies to the theodicy of the present book as well, I take it that the theoretical ground has been cleared for a fair assessment of its virtues and vices.

Theory is one thing, however, and the concrete reality of evil quite another. The correct intuition behind the moral critique of theodicy is that certain forms of suffering are simply intolerable. Given a clear-eyed apprehension of – and sufficient closeness to – evils such as torture, sadistic rape, or cancer in children, most people will find that their strongest desire is for those evils to stop. The fact that this is how we react to extreme suffering – both our own and in many cases that of others – is closely connected to the very nature of suffering. An aversion of the will towards some evil seems to be an intrinsic and constitutive element of suffering as such, and many theorists portray this as the essential element. According to John Hick, for example, suffering can be characterized as a “state of mind in which we wish violently or obsessively that our situation were otherwise.”Footnote ⁶⁴

It is clear, however, that the will can be divided. It is not unusual to have a strong desire to avoid some evil, but an even stronger desire to obtain some good whose realization is incompatible with avoiding the evil. In such situations, we may voluntarily expose ourselves to the suffering that confronting the evil entails. This means that Hick’s definition needs to be amended. In order for suffering to be correctly ascribable to a person, she need not necessarily wish simpliciter – all things considered – that her “situation were otherwise.” It is sufficient if the evil is something that she – at some level – “minds.” Michael Brady accommodates this insight by defining suffering as “an unpleasant or negative affective experience that [the subject] minds, where to mind some state is to have an occurrent desire that it not be occurring.”Footnote ⁶⁵ This definition allows that we may simultaneously have other – and contradictory – desires besides the suffering-constitutive desire that things be otherwise.

Nevertheless, if the will’s aversion to some situation is strong and violent enough, it is likely to prevail over all other desires. Situations involving extreme physical pain are paradigmatic examples. When we merely contemplate, from a distance, what it would be like to have one’s leg amputated without anesthesia, it is possible to think that the resulting pain would be worthwhile if the procedure were the only way to save one’s life (e.g., in the context of a pre-modern war). However, when the pain is imminently at hand – or a fortiori when we are in the midst of it – most people will be wholly overtaken by the desire to avoid the pain, at any cost. This is why amputations without anesthesia usually require that the patient is tied down.

It is natural for us to react to extreme evils in this way, and our disposition to do so has an evolutionary explanation. Moreover, since we are social and rational animals capable of empathy and moral thought, we are also disposed to be overtaken by strong and sometimes all-overriding feelings of aversion towards the suffering of others, especially those who are close to us. It is good that we are thus disposed. The world would be a much worse place if people could easily override their natural reactions to extreme evils affecting themselves or others.

However, while critics of theodicy are certainly right that many evils are simply intolerable – “mind-stopping,” as Surin puts itFootnote ⁶⁶ – they are wrong to equate this predicate with “unjustifiable.” That this equation is wrong at least in some cases is shown by the example already given. The fact that an amputation patient finds the pain intolerable and wants to get away from it at any cost does not entail that her suffering cannot be justified in view of a greater good. When the pain has stopped and her life has been saved, the patient may agree that the procedure was justified. This example, of course, does not show that all cases of extreme suffering can possibly be justified – showing this is the end game of the project of theodicy. My point here is merely to note that mind-stopping suffering is not the same thing as unjustifiable suffering.

If this is right, it follows that theodicists who argue that God’s permission of horrendous suffering is justifiable can, without inconsistency, agree with anti-theodicists that torture, rape, and cancer in children are simply intolerable and mind-stopping evils. As human beings, we (or at any rate many of us) are incapable of closely apprehending such evils without finding that we cannot desire anything more than that they stop. The issue that divides theodicists and anti-theodicists is whether this perspective “from the inside” of suffering (so to speak) is the ultimate moral vantage point, beyond which no truth about human suffering could be found or should be sought.

With respect to this issue, anti-theodicists can at first glance seem to occupy the moral high ground. They claim to be the ones who take the suffering of victims most seriously, since they refuse to accept a relativization of the experiences of sufferers in favor of some purportedly “higher” or more ultimate perspective. The most compassionate stance, according to this view, is the one that refuses to look at the world except through the eyes of those who suffer here and now.Footnote ⁶⁷

On the other hand, it can be argued that a denial of the possibility to relativize suffering in view of a higher vantage point deprives the victims of suffering of all hope. If there is no more ultimate perspective than the one occupied by people who here and now experience intolerable suffering, it follows that there is no redemption from suffering. Even if all suffering at some point would stop and be followed by eternal bliss, the suffering must still be considered weightier and more ultimate than the bliss, because otherwise the perspective of the victims at the time when they suffered has been relativized and transcended in favor of a purportedly more fundamental perspective.Footnote ⁶⁸ If this kind of relativization is unacceptable, as anti-theodicists argue, it follows that nothing can ever be allowed to dethrone suffering from its position as the final determinant of human existence.

This conclusion is explicitly drawn by Brown and Parker:

Suffering is here taken so seriously that any suggestion about its redemption is seen as an insult to the victims. Is this a compassionate stance? I would argue that it is the opposite. What Brown and Parker do is lock victims into the prison of their own suffering for eternity, denying them all hope that something else will in the final analysis prove to be ultimate.

Many anti-theodicists would argue that Brown and Parker go too far. In order to take suffering seriously we need not deny the possibility of its redemption, we need only reject the possibility of its justification. This is an unstable position, however. It is only a God who has permitted suffering for a good reason – and hence justifiably – that can redeem us from it and redeem our suffering as such. A God who has not permitted suffering but was simply powerless to prevent it, is also powerless to redeem us. A God who has permitted suffering but without a good reason might equally well choose not to redeem us from suffering for no good reason. Only a God of whom some theodicy is possibly true can be relied upon to save.Footnote ⁷⁰

1.2 Suffering in God?

Earlier I mentioned a second pitfall to be avoided when thinking about the relation between suffering and love in the context of theodicy. This is the view that suffering can only be fitted into a Christian worldview if it is so tightly connected to love that suffering, or something analogous to it, must be present in the divine nature itself.Footnote ⁷¹ For many who do not believe that God permits evil on account of a greater good, appealing to divine suffering has become an attractive alternative to theodicy as a way of defending God’s goodness in the face of widespread suffering in the world. Theologians of this stripe attempt to make human suffering intelligible by reference to divine suffering, which they in turn explain as a necessary aspect of a God who is love. As Jürgen Moltmann contends,

Moltmann’s move can be taken to have relevance for the problem of evil in two ways. First, it can be argued that “a God of salvation would be justified in creating a world which contained so much pain and suffering only if he were prepared to share the burden of pain and suffering with his creatures.”Footnote ⁷³ Besides Moltmann, thinkers like Dorothee Sölle and Eberhard Jüngel are influential proponents of similar views,Footnote ⁷⁴ which are usually linked to a moral critique of theodicy. As Karen Kilby points out, there is

However, the idea that God’s co-suffering with his creation has any bearing on the problem of evil is misconceived. The decision of a father to let his children play with matches and gasoline does not become morally justified by the fact that he suffers with them when they set themselves on fire. It does not become justified even if he lets his children set him on fire so that he suffers in exactly the same way as they do. In the absence of a good reason for letting them play with matches and gasoline, no suffering on the part of the father will have any tendency to justify his permission. Neither can the putative fact that God suffers with us replace a divine reason for letting us suffer.

Perhaps it could be argued that although God’s fellow-suffering with us does not constitute a justification for his permission of our suffering, it is still the case that God would be morally defective if he failed to be emotionally affected by our suffering. So while divine suffering is not a sufficient condition for the justice of God’s permission of our suffering, it is a necessary condition for God’s moral goodness. In other words, what we need is both a divine reason for permitting suffering, and divine fellow-suffering.

However, the claim that God would be morally defective if he does not suffer with us is question-begging. It is true that a being who is constitutionally capable of having emotions and to suffer would be morally imperfect if he failed to suffer in sympathy when others suffer. However, it does not follow that a being who is not constitutionally capable of suffering would be morally reprehensible by not suffering in sympathy. What is moral or immoral to do or to feel depends on what kind of being one is. If God is very different from us, the absence of suffering in him might not be a defect, even though a corresponding absence would be a defect in us.Footnote ⁷⁶

The second way in which the purported suffering of God can be taken to be of relevance to the problem of evil is because this idea seems to provide some intelligibility to the omnipresence of suffering in the world. If not even God can love without suffering, suffering seems to be necessary in a deep sense, and we cannot expect human life to be suffering-free. Salvation, accordingly, cannot entail the total removal of suffering, but must instead mean that God becomes present in the midst of it, thereby defeating its power to alienate.Footnote ⁷⁷ As Moltmann puts it:

Although Moltmann’s approach to suffering has been influential, it is arguably Hans Urs von Balthasar who has gotten the most explanatory mileage out of the idea that suffering has a basis in God. Unlike Moltmann, Balthasar does not claim that God suffers in his divinity, but only that something analogous to suffering goes on there, in the bosom of the Trinity. Balthasar hence speaks about “that unnamed divine perfection, that eternal prototype in him, which in us is pain.”Footnote ⁷⁹ As Jacob Friesenhahn describes his view: “Balthasar provides a mediating position between a divine nature that somehow includes evil and an indifferent deity, who remains aloof from the world’s evil, while Christ suffers in his humanity alone.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Balthasar arrives at this mediating position by describing the eternal relations between the divine persons of the Trinity in terms that vaguely suggest some degree of negativity, vulnerability, and loss. He talks, for instance, about the “infinite distance” between the Father and the Son and describes the Father’s generation of the Son in terms of a divine self-emptying or “Urkenosis,” which entails as “super-death.”Footnote ⁸¹ The Father’s “surrendering” of himself to the Son, and the Son’s corresponding self-surrender to the Father imply, for Balthasar, a note of loss or sacrifice.Footnote ⁸² He can even speak in this context about an intra divine “godlessness.” The Father, writes Balthasar,

In another context, Balthasar makes a similar point in terms of death: “Both life and death are images of God … if death is understood to mean the sacrifice of life, then the original image of that sacrifice is in God as the gift of life flowing between the Father and the Son.”Footnote ⁸⁴

This portrayal of the eternal character of divine love provides the basis for an integrated vision of how the suffering of this world and God fit together.Footnote ⁸⁵ Since the roots of suffering are inextricably intertwined with love in God’s inner life, according to Balthasar, it can be argued that some light has been shed on the human condition. Moreover, through our own suffering and death, we can participate in the kenotic aspect of God’s inner life and thus be conformed to the Trinity. On Balthasar’s construal, then, suffering has a deep meaning and allows us to look into the abyss of divine love.Footnote ⁸⁶

I sympathize with Balthasar’s ambition to make suffering intelligible in a world created by God. There are problems with his account, however. First, it is unclear if his mediating position is stable. Does he really succeed in maintaining divine impassibility, as he wishes to do? This is a common criticism of Balthasar, and it can be developed in various ways.Footnote ⁸⁷ Instead of recounting this critique, however, I will focus on what I take to be another problem with Balthasar’s explanatory project.

This project proceeds from the intuition that there is an intrinsic connection between love and “negativity” in the sense of privation, suffering and death. As I argued at the beginning of this chapter, this intuition has a firm basis in the Christian tradition, and we see it expressed in well-known Gospel passages, one of which I have already quoted: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matt 10:39). The so-called “law of the grain of wheat” is both Christian and universal, paradoxical and deeply intuitive, and Balthasar takes the insight it expresses as revelatory of the very essence of love as such. As Kilby describes his view:

If this is what love is like, and if God is love, then there must be something analogous to negativity, loss, and suffering in God himself. What Balthasar does not attempt to do, is to explain why the basic intuition that provides the foundation for his explanatory project holds true. Why is love, both human and divine, inextricably bound up with negativity? Instead of looking for an answer, Balthasar takes the Christian intuition as something like a “basic belief” or a first principle in light of which the whole of reality is to be explained. If God is love, and if love – for unclear reasons – contains an intrinsic aspect of sacrifice and negativity, then the occurrence of evil and suffering in a world created by God can seem to become intelligible to some degree.

But is the feeling of explanatory progress warranted? If the relationship between love and negativity remains mysterious, does it really help to give this relationship the status of a first principle and locate its primary instance in God? The result could perhaps be described as an integrated vision of how sin, suffering and God fit together, but this integration is achieved by simply identifying the mystery of the relationship between love and negativity with the mystery of God.

A second, related criticism is this. The Christian intuition about the connection between love and suffering is based on Christian experience of the love and suffering of created and embodied beings (including, importantly, the embodied being Jesus of Nazareth). It is hence possible, for all we know, that the close relation between love and negativity is not a property of love as such but only of the love of created beings, as the Christian tradition has assumed. Love is a concept with analogical applications, and the love of humans might have essential properties that are unique to that kind of love, with no correlate in divine (or angelic) love. Compare: It is an essential property of human creativity that we can only make things from preexisting matter – we cannot create ex nihilo. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the same is true of divine creativity.

Balthasar’s interpretation of the whole of reality – including God – in terms of the relationship between love and negativity is hence risky. Unless we first get some understanding of why love and negativity seem to be inextricably linked in the human domain, we cannot know whether this relationship also carries over to God. Since the classical Christian tradition does not portray intra-Trinitarian love as characterized by an aspect of negativity, the presumption should be that the connection between love and suffering only holds for created beings.

In this book, I will address the question that Balthasar does not sufficiently ponder – why love and sacrificial suffering seem so tightly linked from our perspective. If the explanation I suggest is correct, Balthasar has been too quick to conclude that love as such is inextricably related to negativity. As I have already hinted, my metaphysical analysis will show that a link to negativity is essential for human love. This link, however, is explained by the nature of created being in general, and embodied being in particular, rather than by the “generic” nature of love as such.

1.3 An Overview of the Book

Although the reflections above have focused on theodicy and the issue of explaining God’s permission of suffering, the greater part of this book is devoted to an analysis of the Christian understanding of love and its relationship to what I have referred to as “negativity” (a concept that includes, besides suffering in a narrow sense, privations of various kinds as well as voluntary sacrifices). In order not to leave the reader in suspense about how these two elements of the book hang together – the analysis of love and the theodicy – I will, in what follows, give a bird’s-eye view of the book’s main argument and the topics of the different chapters. This will raise many questions and potential objections, which hopefully will receive satisfactory answers later in the book.

The point of departure for my argument is the claim that human love is a virtue, which means that love is partly constituted by dispositions to act in appropriate ways in different possible circumstances (“possible worlds”). Importantly, perfect love must dispose the lover to act self-sacrificially in circumstances where this is called for, and this means being prepared to accept suffering and loss of created goods for the sake of a beloved. Such a disposition is not external to love, but constitutive of it. This can be seen by reflecting on the following passage from the Book of Job, in which Satan challenges God to test Job’s fidelity and love:

One conceivable way in which God could have answered Satan is along the following lines: “What relevance does it have what my servant Job would do in the unlikely event that I were to stretch out my hand and deprive him of all his possessions? The only thing that matters is that Job loves and fears me now, in the actual world, where I shower him with every conceivable gift.”

But God does not answer Satan in this way. Instead, he acknowledges the relevance of Satan’s “thought experiment.”Footnote ⁸⁹ What Job would do in the scenario suggested by Satan has a direct bearing on the perfection or quality of Job’s love for God here and now, before the scenario in question is realized – in fact, independently of whether the scenario will ever be realized.Footnote ⁹⁰ If Job were disposed to love God only in good times, his love would be intrinsically deficient. This turns out not to be the case, however, and after having put Job to the test, God praises him before Satan: “He still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason” (Job 2:3).Footnote ⁹¹

The point here is that human love cannot be exhaustively described without reference to metaphysically possible scenarios that involve loss, suffering, and death and that call for certain responses on the part of lovers who by nature are susceptible to these evils. Not even God can create a human being who is naturally insusceptible to suffering and death, and the criteria for love’s perfection in humans are determined by the intrinsic properties and liabilities of human nature. The aim of the dispositional analysis of love that I will suggest is not to argue for a new and innovative understanding of Christian love, but rather to spell out what I take to be the logical preconditions and entailments of what Christians have always considered love to be.

This is why I start, in Chapter 2, with an analysis of the thought of John of the Cross and Thérèse of Lisieux, two Carmelites who thematize the relationship between love and negativity in a particularly profound way. John of the Cross views love of God as a coin with two sides: A self-emptying, sacrificial side, and a possession-oriented side that seeks happiness in union with the Beloved. These two sides are inseparable, since union with God can only be accomplished by the total gift of self to him, and John spells out the logic of this gift in terms of detachment from all things that are not God. In order to be wholly united with God, one cannot belong to anything created in the sense that one desires it equally much or more than doing God’s will.

After having presented the central elements of John’s thought, I analyze his concept of detachment (desasimiento) in dispositional terms. I conclude that the reason why love has an intrinsic reference to negativity is because it is always logically possible for a rational creature to choose to love itself (or some other aspect of creation) before God. This is why a total gift of self to God cannot occur in the absence of a disposition or readiness, on the part of the rational creature, to put God first and sacrifice the satisfaction of any need or desire for a created good (or for the absence of some evil) if this is what doing God’s will requires. This does not only hold true “after sin,” but in all possible worlds. In the second half of the chapter, I turn to John’s modern disciple, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whose thought and experiences I draw on to deepen the picture and discuss the relationship between detachment from creatures, grace, and suffering.

Chapter 3 contextualizes the ideas that I have extracted from John and Thérèse by showing that they are deeply anchored in biblical and traditional conceptions of sacrifice. The general phenomenon of sacrifice points to the fact that human love for God cannot be understood in separation from the bodily acts and signs whereby this love is outwardly expressed. Consequently, in the Old and the New Testament, as well as in theologians like Augustine, Aquinas, and Matthias Joseph Scheeben, sacrifice is not primarily about expiation for sin. It is fundamentally about the gift of self to God with the aim of attaining communion with him, something that is expressed through physical acts that involve renunciation. There is no contradiction between the communion-oriented intention behind sacrifice and its “negative” aspect, since a radical detachment from creatures is a necessary component of a rightly ordered love for God. This is illustrated by the story about the binding of Isaac (the Akedah), which provides a key for understanding the sacrificial cult of ancient Israel. As Matthew Levering writes: “Abraham grasps that true interpersonal communion, true feasting, laughter, and hospitality, must flow from profound sacrifice of everything to God.”Footnote ⁹² For Christians, the definitive sacrifice is Christ’s self-gift on the cross, which – like the Akedah – constitutes an expression of love through the voluntary embrace of suffering and loss.

In contemporary theology, however, the notion of sacrifice has been the target of various kinds of critique. The most radical critics, such as the early René Girard and some feminist and womanist authors, argue that sacrifice is an irredeemable concept that has no place in Christian theology. More moderate critics, such as Robert Daly, accept the legitimacy of sacrificial language but attempt to dissociate it from any connection with “negativity.” Sacrifice, according to this understanding, is merely about communion and conviviality, and any negative aspect is wholly incidental. In the second half of Chapter 3, I address both kinds of critique, with a focus on the second kind. I show that the idea of self-gift – which is the core of sacrifice – becomes incoherent if it is disconnected from the notions of potential suffering and loss.

In Chapter 4, we turn from the expression of love through sacrifice to the nature of love itself and the debate about this in contemporary theology. Perhaps the most controversial question in this context has been the relation between love as self-regarding and as other-regarding, often framed in terms of Ander’s Nygren’s distinction between eros and agape.Footnote ⁹³ This distinction roughly corresponds to the distinction I made above – in connection with John of the Cross – between the “self-emptying” and the “possession-oriented” sides of love. However, while Nygren pits these two sides against each other and denigrates the latter (eros), John of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux, and the mainstream Catholic tradition – as well as many Protestants – see eros and agape as inseparable. This inseparability-thesis is closely related to the main argument of the present book. In fact, my argument about the intrinsic relationship between love and negativity can be seen as an explication of the claim that eros and agape are inseparable.

Although the intimate relation between these two tendencies of love is widely acknowledged today, it is often simply asserted rather than explained, and the basic logic behind it needs further elucidation. In the second half of Chapter 4, I argue that Thomas Aquinas’s theory of love makes the co-existence of eros and agape within the one and unitary reality of love intelligible. The key to Aquinas’s solution to “the problem of love” is his analogical conception of unity, which allows him to see the common denominator in self-love and love of others, and to explain why it is natural to love God more than self.

But can Aquinas’s balanced theory of love integrate the radical embrace of suffering and self-sacrifice exemplified by John of the Cross and Thérèse of Lisieux? In Chapter 5, I argue that it can, and that Aquinas’s perspective in fact entails that perfect love is radically sacrificial in precisely the way envisaged by John and Thérèse. To love another human being means for Aquinas to regard her as an “other self” – to invest something of one’s own identity in her. Aquinas, accordingly, connects love with “ecstasy,” literally “standing outside” of oneself. “In the love of friendship,” he writes, “we draw ourselves to what is outside. For, to those whom we love in that love we are related as to ourselves, communicating ourselves to them in some way.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The result of such self-communication is that one wills the good of the other in the same way as one wills one’s own good.

Willing the good of the other is not a sufficient condition for a true gift of self, however. A person can will the good of another while simultaneously having a much stronger desire for his own private good, or even for superficial goods like pleasure. Clearly, such a person’s gift of self is seriously deficient. In order to love another perfectly, one must not only will her good but also take a comparative view of her good in relation to one’s own, in the sense that one must see the beloved’s well-being as equally (or almost equallyFootnote ⁹⁵) important to oneself as one’s own.Footnote ⁹⁶ This comparative or relational perspective has sacrificial implications. Any rational person is prepared to sacrifice an arm if this can save his own life. Hence, if a person truly regards his beloved’s good as being of comparable importance to him as his own, he must be prepared to sacrifice an arm to save her life (provided that this is compatible with his other responsibilities). Unless the lover is willing or disposed to do this, his love is imperfect, and the gift of self is incomplete.

On the basis of these (often overlooked) implications of Aquinas’s theory of love, I propose a metaphysical explanation of the commonsense intuition that a person’s love is greater or more perfect to the extent that he is ready to sacrifice for his beloved.Footnote ⁹⁷ The reason why this is so, I suggest, is that a person who is disposed to make great sacrifices when the circumstances require this will treat his beloved as an “other self” in more possible worlds than a person who lacks a self-sacrificial disposition, or who is only disposed to make smaller sacrifices. This follows from the fact that in some possible worlds, great sacrifices are needed in order to protect other people from harm and death. In such worlds, persons who are less self-sacrificially disposed will fail to do what perfect love requires. Some will only treat their beloved as love dictates in the narrow range of worlds where this is easy and entails no suffering. This means that their love will lack what I call “modal depth,” or “robustness across possible worlds,” which I argue is a great-making property of love.

In Chapter 6, I consider more carefully what a self-sacrificial disposition is. Dispositions are, by their very nature, directed or oriented toward a certain characteristic act or manifestation, by which they are perfected. In the case of a disposition for self-sacrifice, its proper manifestation is the acceptance (on the part of the subject or person) of some kind of loss or suffering for the sake of protecting, benefitting, or honoring another. It is not necessary, however, that actual loss or suffering follow the person’s sacrificial acceptance of these consequences, since unforeseen circumstances or factors may intervene and prevent them from materializing (Abraham’s aborted sacrifice of Isaac being a case in point). As long as the person reasonably believes – when he decides to make the sacrifice – that the projected negative consequences will ensue, a real sacrifice has been made, and the self-sacrificial disposition has issued in its proper act.

It would be impossible, however, for a self-sacrificial disposition to manifest itself perfectly in a world where God does not permit loss, suffering, and death. In such a world, nobody could reasonably believe that a beloved’s well-being or life needs to be protected by self-sacrificial acts, or that exposing oneself to loss, suffering, or death for the sake of another is even possible. In the biblical Eden, for example, heroic self-sacrifices could only occur given an elaborate scheme of divine deception, which would be morally impossible for God to carry out. This means that an essential dimension of human love must remain in an embryonic state there. The self-sacrificial disposition inherent in love would by necessity fail to attain its full perfection in an Edenic world, in the same way as the infused virtue of faith in a newly baptized infant must necessarily remain in an imperfect state until the child can make actual acts of faith.

This argument entails that the biblical, prelapsarian Adam should not be seen as a paradigm of perfection, but rather (following Irenaeus) as immature and naïve in crucial respects. What accounts for Adam’s inability to exemplify perfect love, however, is not any limitation in God’s power to infuse charity in him, but rather the principle that “whatever is received into something is received according to the mode of the recipient.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Given this principle – and its corollary that “grace perfects nature according to the manner of the nature”Footnote ⁹⁹ – we can argue that God’s suppression of the potentials for suffering and death in prelapsarian Adam must necessarily prevent the charity Adam receives from engaging all essential aspects of his human nature. Put in other, more general and hypothetical terms: If God had permanently shielded humans from their natural vulnerability and mortality, God would thereby inevitably have prevented an important dimension of human nature from being co-opted by charity.

In Chapter 7, I propose a theodicy on the basis of this reasoning and the preceding analysis of love. Since the theodicy contains too many moving parts to be conveniently summarized here, I will only point out that it can be seen as a development and expansion of a traditional Thomistic explanation of God’s permission of sin. This Thomistic explanation appeals to the fittingness of a providential order in which God governs things in accordance with their natures. Since humans by nature are such that they can fall away from moral rectitude, Thomists reason that it is fitting for God to permit that this sometimes happens.

The same reasoning can be applied to God’s permission of suffering and death, given the relation between human love and “negativity” canvassed above. If God were to prevent certain forms or degrees of suffering that humans by nature are susceptible to, he would thereby also prevent human love from attaining its ultimate perfection. This includes supernatural love, which – although infused – is necessarily “received according to the mode of the recipient.” Now, in light of the serious nature of the suffering that normally accompanies the manifestation of the greatest human love, it can be argued that God is morally obliged to prevent such suffering, even if this comes at the price of limiting the extent to which human love can be perfected. I argue, however, that it would be compatible with God’s goodness to permit all the suffering we find in our world, given the satisfaction of the following three conditions:

1. 1) That the perfection of love in human beings is or entails a good that, on the whole, outweighs the totality of human suffering (and that could not be obtained without God’s permission of the suffering in question).

2. 2) That every individual who suffers undeservedly gets the opportunity, at some point, to enjoy the mentioned good, unless he or she culpably forfeits it.

3. 3) That every individual who enjoys the mentioned good will find his or her sufferings worthwhile and will retrospectively consent to having undergone them.

For all we know, these three conditions could be satisfied. With respect to the first, I argue that the perfection of love in human beings is both an intrinsic good of great value and a necessary condition for deep intimacy with God.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Since such intimacy is of incommensurate value, its realization (to an ultimate degree) can outweigh any amount of suffering. As Paul puts it: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18).

With respect to conditions 2 and 3, I argue that they would be satisfied if God offers to every person who undeservedly and involuntarily has endured some serious suffering during their life the opportunity to present – perhaps from a post-mortem state – their suffering to God as a sacrifice that perfects their love and deepens their relationship with him. This means that the “form” of sacrifice is retrospectively supplied to the “matter” of some previous, nonsacrificial suffering. In this way, any suffering can be redeemed and joined to Christ’s through a retrospective intention.Footnote ¹⁰¹

After having discussed a number of potential objections, I will in Chapter 8 deepen the theodicy by making explicit its Christological and soteriological sources of inspiration, drawn primarily from two Pauline themes. Paul refers to Christ as “the last Adam,” a notion that makes explicit that Christ, in contrast to the first Adam, fully realizes the potentials of human nature, thereby perfecting humanity in his person. As Joseph Ratzinger puts it: “In him [Christ], ‘hominization’ has truly reached its goal.”Footnote ¹⁰² Now, the central claim of the proposed theodicy is that God permits evil with the perfection of human love in view. This perfection is realized by Christ in his capacity as the “last Adam,” in virtue of his willingness to lay down his life in obedience to the Father. As the Letter to the Hebrews states: “It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings” (Heb 2:10). Since God does not suppress the potential for suffering and death in Christ’s assumed human nature, there is nothing that prevents Christ’s charity from fully actualizing the sacrificial dimension that essentially belongs to human love as such. This is what happens on the Cross. In Christ, humanity loves God perfectly.

Moreover, in the same way as the “first Adam” in the Bible is not only an individual but also a “corporate personality,” so the “whole Christ” includes his mystical body, the Church. This means that believers who are united to Christ through grace participate in his perfect manifestation of love as members of his Body. Augustine can therefore speak of the “total suffering of Christ, who has suffered in our head and suffers [now] in his members, that is in ourselves.”Footnote ¹⁰³ According to Matthias Joseph Scheeben, Christ “continues the immolation and glorification of His own body in His mystical body [the Church].”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Connecting this to the present theodicy, we might say that Christ’s one and perfect sacrifice potentially includes all human acts of sacrificial love, and its power to mediate and enable deep intimacy with God justifies all nonpunitive suffering.

At the end of the book, I argue that the analysis of love and the theodicy I have proposed can shed light on some theological questions that are not directly related to the problem of evil, such as why Christ’s atonement needed to involve suffering. I also argue that the explanatory power of the theodicy with respect to intra-theological matters of this kind makes it more effective in restoring and creating coherence in the Christian system of beliefs than standard theodicies typically are. Finally, I address the question of why God created physical beings in the first place, considering that the love of such vulnerable and dependent creatures is inherently sacrificial.

1.4 Presuppositions

Before we get started, some brief methodological remarks are in order. The arguments in this study will proceed on the basis of broadly Thomistic metaphysical and theological assumptions, including a conception of God that corresponds to the Trinitarian theism of Thomas Aquinas, as presented in the First Part of the Summa theologiae. My aim is to argue in a way that respects this framework and does not violate general principles of Thomistic theology.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This does not mean that my argument depends for its cogency on the acceptance of those principles. Instead, the Thomistic framework can be said to play the dual (and perhaps paradoxical) role of being both a source of inspiration and a “straitjacket” that ensures that my proposal stays within the bounds of what most would recognize as a version of Christian orthodoxy. Hence, while the proposal in an important sense is Thomistic – and draws heavily on Aquinas’s theory of love – it is not addressed only to those who stand within this tradition.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The theodicy is compatible with a wide variety of views on issues such as the nature of God and the relationship between his causality and human freedom.

Besides Aquinas, the main resource I will use is John of the Cross. John was thoroughly schooled in Thomistic philosophy and theology at the University of Salamanca, and his thought often moves within the broad framework of Aquinas’s ideas. There are commentators, however, who see potential tensions between John and Thomas at certain points.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Although it would be worthwhile to address such tensions, for the present purposes, this is not necessary. What I am interested in with respect to John is the broad strokes of his spirituality – most importantly, his conception of detachment – and not the philosophical details of his way of understanding, for example, the ontology of mystical experiences or the nature–grace relationship. For this reason, the reader should presume that any perceived tension between John and Thomas is to be resolved (from my point of view) in favor of the Thomistic framework.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

“Free will” is often taken to be of great importance in the context of theodicy, and many theodicies depend on a conception of human freedom that is commonly referred to as “libertarian.” In his famous “free will defense,” for example, Alvin Plantinga assumes that a necessary condition for an action or a choice to be free is that “no causal laws and antecedent conditions determine that [the person] will perform the action, or that he will not.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Such a conception of freedom has usually been taken to entail that God cannot causally determine – as an “antecedent condition” – human acts without depriving them of their freedom.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Free will, on this view, is a “no fly zone” for God.Footnote ¹¹¹

In classical theology, on the other hand, it is usually assumed that God’s transcendence rules out any competition between divine causality and human freedom.Footnote ¹¹² Divine and human agency operate on different ontological levels, and therefore do not relate to each other in the manner of a “zero-sum game.” Aquinas, for example, claims that “God is the cause of action in every agent”Footnote ¹¹³ and seems to hold that human freedom is compatible with God’s transcendental determination of human acts. “Just as by moving natural causes [God] does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Although I lean towards Aquinas’s side in this debate, all arguments in the present book are neutral with respect to these different views on how human freedom relates to God’s causality.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In the present context, however, the most important thing to note is that the theodicy I propose does not, unlike many other contemporary theodicies or “defenses,” depend on a libertarian construal of human freedom. The theodicy, if cogent, works also given a strictly compatibilist view, for example, the “classical Thomism” of Domingo Báñez or Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Nothing in my argumentation depends, in other words, on the idea that God must somehow refrain from “interfering” (as it is often misleadingly put) with human choices. This I take to be one of the major strengths of the theodicy.

Finally, it should be noted that the theodicy is also uncommitted on the question of a historical Fall. Traditionally, the Fall of Adam and Eve has been regarded by Christians as the ultimate source and explanation of suffering and death. This is the view presented, for example, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which says that “the account of the Fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Due to this deed, “death makes its entrance into human history” and “the control of the soul’s spiritual faculties over the body is shattered.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

There are different opinions about whether a traditional view of this kind is compatible with the standard evolutionary account of the origins of humankind and all the scientific evidence that backs it up.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In my view, the traditional and the evolutionary stories are compatible, provided that the principal consequence of the Fall is taken to be privative: the loss of sanctifying grace and the supernatural protection (“preternatural gifts”) that God had bestowed on the first humans.Footnote ¹²⁰ While it is clear that animal death existed before humans came onto the scene – a fact that theologians like Augustine and Aquinas also acknowledgeFootnote ¹²¹ – there is no scientific evidence that rules out the possibility that God could have protected the first humans that emerged from evolution (whether a single couple or a larger group) from suffering and death until they fell.Footnote ¹²²

Although my sympathies lie with attempts to harmonize the doctrine of a historical Fall with our current knowledge of evolutionary history, nothing in the theodicy I will present requires the affirmation of a historical Fall. The theodicy is neutral on whether suffering and death entered human history through a Fall, or if those phenomena have always been with us. However, in what follows, I will sometimes use a traditional conception of “Eden” to exemplify a possibility that God could have actualized as a permanent state – a “possible world,” as it were, free from human suffering and death. Given a traditional conception of divine omnipotence, it is hard to deny that God could have created such a world and preserved it indefinitely.Footnote ¹²³ A theodicy, then, can be seen as an attempt to answer the question of why he did not do this.Footnote ¹²⁴