In order to engage in theodicy, humility is required, especially considering the particularly horrible and traumatizing forms of evil that leave us abashed. Evil can be fought against, but it cannot be explained away. The main problem of theodicy is rather how to balance the belief in (a benevolent and beneficent) God with (1) a sincere and honest acknowledgement of the reality of evil and (2) the ethical duty to overcome evil in all its forms as much as we can and ought to.
Andrew Shanks's Theodicy Beyond the Death of ‘God’ follows the tradition of Jakob Böhme, Schelling and Hegel. Augustine is also an important point of reference for Shanks, whereas the positions of Aquinas and Kant on theodicy do not figure in the discussion. According to Shanks, the key inspiration for Schelling and Hegel to engage in theodicy comes from reading Böhme, which is why Shanks dubs the two thinkers ‘the Böhmeans’. Böhme is certainly one of the most original, idiosyncratic thinkers in the whole Christian tradition, who combined a rare profundity of thought with a deep lyrical pathos (136–43). Schelling transforms Böhme's theodicy into a systematic philosophical theory (143–60), while Hegel provides a historical background for Schelling's argument (1–3), especially in his Phenomenology of Spirit (15).
The book focuses on these thinkers, but it also examines the Biblical book of Job (172–86), the post-Holocaust poetry of Nelly Sachs (186–202) and the lyrical philosophy of Simone Weil (202–13). In this manner, Shanks wants to bring theodicy back to our contemporary world. He tries to bridge the gap between academic philosophy, religious thought and poetry by bringing them into dialogue. He stresses that Schelling and Hegel are not religiously neutral philosophers, but also religious thinkers deeply interested in the intrinsic concerns of faith (6). Shanks credits Hegel for the insight that philosophy, poetry and true religion share the same content while differing in their respective forms of articulation. Hegel and Schelling understand that the different forms of articulation of this identical content are lyrical expression, religious prose and philosophical theory. Neither of them can do without the other two (7).
According to Shanks, it is Schelling's genius to have converted Böhme's deep but barbaric and unsystematic doctrine into a systematically structured philosophy (145). At the same time, Schelling's philosophy comes as an attempt to reconcile and transcend the two opposing forms of philosophical one-sidedness represented by Fichte and Spinoza, with their equally de-personalized and non-poetic concepts of God: Spinoza finds God in nature whereas Fichte seeks God in self-assertive morality. Schelling is inspired by both ways to do theology, and manages to unite them in an overarching systematic whole (145–46).
Schelling represents God as Will, and represents human beings as individual wills participating in God's Will. According to Shanks, Schelling's argument in the Philosophical Investigations is a ‘systematic theodicy’ that can be summarized as proceeding in five stages: (1) the distinction between being as existence and being as the ground of existence [Grund]; (2) the relationship between ground and existence, which entails the possibility of evil; (3) how such a possibility becomes actual; (4) divine personhood as redemptive; and (5) the hope in an ultimate future state of being as an end of evil (147–61).
As humans, we have to become more and more sensitive to our own capacity for evil (152). This capacity for evil is not our predestination in the Calvinistic sense: for Schelling, our moral character is a result of our own intelligible choice. For him, willing is first and fundamental; ‘acting follows being’ (operari sequitur esse) but ultimately ‘being follows willing’ (esse sequitur velle). Willing determines both being and acting (152–54). Becoming aware of this is part of our moral responsibility which Schelling links with authentic religion, in contrast to mysticism or to ‘what a sickly era calls idle brooding, rapturous divination, or a willing-to-feel [Fühlen-wollen] of the divine marking the tribe of philosophers of feeling [Empfindungsphilosophen]’ (154–55). For Schelling, taking moral responsibility seriously is part of a full-fledged authentic theodicy.
Shanks contrasts ‘Leibnizian Verstand’ with ‘Böhmean Geist’. He clearly prefers the Böhmean tradition, which he equates with Geist (Spirit), truth-as-openness, and wisdom. God is understood as living-in-history, personal and relational (the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’, the God of Christian ‘folk religion’). He prefers it to the Leibnizian tradition that he equates with Verstand (understanding), truth-as-correctness, and God as the abstract God of the philosophers (7–9). Overall, Shanks seems to interpret Leibniz as a conventional deist who simplifies theology by proposing an essentially abstract, rationalistic notion of God. In spite of his anti-Leibnizian stance, however, Shanks returns to the necessity of a complementarity between Leibnizian understanding and Böhmean spirit. In affirming the two styles of thinking without negating their radical difference, Shanks intends to be faithful to Hegel (9–12).
Shanks's book discusses theodicy ‘beyond the death of God’, not ‘after the death of God’. According to him, it is only the deist concept of God that is dead while God still inspires human lives and history. For Shanks, ‘a certain God has died’, i.e., the God of truth-as-correctness (14–15). In this context, he also examines the relation between the Böhmeans and twentieth-century process theology (Whitehead, Hartshorne, Cobb), a theological programme that has much in common with the Böhmean tradition.
In Shanks's view, all the attempts at theodicy throughout history come down to the opposition of spirit and understanding, or—in other words—the conflict between Hegelianism and Leibnizian theory (218). Leibniz prioritizes Verstand and strives for a theoretical solution to the problem of theodicy. Hegel, by contrast, prioritizes spirit over understanding, and his resolution is a holistic one. Shanks sides with Hegel (218). Authentic theodicy requires thinking ‘the death of God’, i.e., the idea that all the false gods of idolatry have to die. The true God, the God of truth-as-openness, has to rise from the dead (14 and 219). This also entails that theodicy has to be authentic rather than manipulative. For Shanks, Hegel and Nietzsche are the primary philosophical references for such thinking (218). He argues that all the projects of Leibnizian theodicy, which are very common in every branch of mainstream Christianity, have failed. Mainstream Christianity is a particular manifestation of what Hegel calls ‘unhappy consciousness’ (das unglückliche Bewußtsein), an attitude that is interpreted as a specific manifestation of original sin endemic in all monotheistic religions (92–110). This pathologically endemic attitude or unhappy consciousness requires a twofold therapeutic treatment: (i) process theology as the most fruitful approach to the onto-theology of creation; and (ii) a grand theological narrative about how divine revelation is at work in history (67–68). For Shanks, whether one expresses this in poetic terms (Nelly Sachs) or in philosophical terms (Hegel), a balanced course between cool ‘rationalism’ and warm ‘realism’ becomes an exigency for any authentic theodicy (35–36, 217–18).
Shanks's argument about theodicy is convincing on two counts: (1) philosophically, it stresses the persisting character of the problem of evil; (2) theologically, it argues that authentic theodicy can no longer be done without going ‘beyond the death of the gods’ of mainstream monotheism, including the ‘god of the philosophers’. Shanks presents himself as a Hegelian (218–19). Even though he claims to take Schelling and Hegel to be complementary thinkers (144), he develops his book as if Böhme and Schelling were to be two necessary preparatory steps towards a mature and completed theodicy in Hegel. In a similar way, he interprets Spinoza and Fichte as antithetical forms of philosophy (146) that are brought to synthesis in Hegel.
At the same time Shanks provides us with a deeply contemporary understanding of Schelling and Hegel. He manages to bring the problem of evil back to the contemporary philosophical debate. His lament about the horrors of evil in the twentieth century is very moving (173–217). Yet his appeal to our concrete ethical commitment to overcome evil in this real world remains overly sketchy and general.
Finally, however, it also has to be noted that Shanks's treatment of Leibniz does not seem very fair, since he reduces the complex and subtle Leibnizian version of theodicy to a simple conventional deism. This seems particularly unfair given Leibniz's enormous impact on Schelling, but also on Hegel. Shanks himself recognizes that Schelling sometimes explicitly endorses Leibniz's views (157). Nevertheless, his own treatment of the latter does not sufficiently reflect this complication. Had Shanks considered Leibniz with the same charity with which he defends Hegel's Science of Logic and Schelling's Philosophical Investigations against Heidegger's criticism (163–66), his overall argument would have profited.
