This chapter explores Aquinas’s account of God’s perfection, goodness, and the problem of evil. Aquinas argues that God is perfect because he lacks all potentiality and is wholly actual, with every creaturely perfection pre-existing eminently in him. God is good, not as a member of a genus, but as the Creator whose nature grounds and causes the goodness of creatures. Goodness, Aquinas maintains, is convertible with being, while evil is privation of good – either as suffering (malum poenae) or wrongdoing (malum culpae). He denies that God directly causes evil, holding instead that evils suffered arise incidentally from the flourishing of other beings, while evils done derive from human free will. The chapter contrasts Aquinas’s approach with modern debates – such as Mackie’s logical argument from evil, Rowe’s evidential argument, and Plantinga’s free will defence—showing how Aquinas resists theodicy by emphasising God’s transcendence and the derivative character of creaturely goodness and freedom.

Thomas’s views on providence and divine causality differ considerably from the way we understand these concepts today. As mentioned in the Introduction, modern constructs of providence and divine causality render it difficult to make sense of the Christian message. In this chapter, it will be argued that given his teleological perspective Thomas construes divine causality not so much as efficient but rather as final causality. Also, when Thomas calls God a ‘universal cause’, this should not be construed in terms of omni-causality, as if God predetermines every event, be it necessarily or contingently. Another important theme is the so-called ontological dissymmetry between good and evil as privatio boni. The chapter concludes by making some observations on the connection between the arbitrariness of afflictions and the gratuitousness of charity within a providential ordering.

This chapter offers a close reading of Part II of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The second part of the novel introduces the reader to a sightly later period in Heinrich’s life, after the tragic event of Mathilde’s death. Heinrich is now a wandering Pilgrim who has returned to a dream-like version of his homeland in Thuringia. He has a vision of Mathilde and their child that awakens his wish to be reunited with his beloved. Heinrich meets Cyane, who, he learns, was his sister in a previous life. Cyane then introduces Heinrich to Doctor Sylvester, and the two engage in conversation about nature, evil, virtue, and conscience.

In this chapter I argue that God’s love and goodness make it impossible for him either to intend the evil of human death or to delegate the authority to take a human life. This concludes my argument for the absolute norm against intending death.

One: I begin with an account of Stephen Gregory’s prizewinning horror novel The Cormorant, which synthesises much of the history of representing the cormorant as evil. I then trace this tradition across time, looking closely at the origins of the Satanic cormorant in medieval and early modern European theology, art and literature, notably in paintings by Bellini, Mantegna and Carpaccio, and I address Milton’s choice in Paradise Lost to bring Satan into Eden in the form of a cormorant. I describe the long-term impact of Milton’s Satanic cormorant in literary prose from Jane Eyre to Dracula and in scientific writing from Willughby to Bewick, and finally I provide a reading of a poem by Denise Levertov in which the cormorant is characterised as an avian Nazi. In the process, I reflect on the nature of metaphor and the apparent inevitability of anthropocentrism in writing about nonhuman animals.

I introduce the cormorant and its cultural history as ‘hated’ bird, noting that the book is both the history of a bird and a book about greed and prejudice. I distinguish between the zoological cormorant and the cultural cormorant, and I describe the cormorant’s centrality to conflict between the fishing industry and environmentalists, not least in Europe, and I also address the tendency of tree-nesting cormorants to kill their nest trees with their droppings. I then turn to parts of the world (Norway, Japan, China) where cormorants have at times been viewed positively, but I finish by noting the variety of ways – often contradictory ways – in which the bird has been understood as evil and has been the object of prejudice.

This chapter begins with an interpretation of the final sections of the ‘Spirit’ chapter of the Phenomenology. Here, Hegel diagnoses the paradoxes of Kantian theodicy before going on to elaborate, in a highly allegorical idiom, how he envisages overcoming the dichotomy between divine and human standpoints that plagued his Leibnizian and Kantian predecessors. By developing the thesis that evil is a structural possibility of rational self-conscious, the culminating dialectic of ‘conscience’ posits an essential relation between human freedom and the historicity of the good; the ideal of conscience, of a unity between natural and ethical wills, is their continually coming apart. The chapter then moves away from the Phenomenology to elaborate the resulting picture of Hegelian theodicy in its own terms, drawing also on Hegel’s preface to his Philosophy of Right. Hegelian theodicy stands revealed as reconciling us to reality by fulfilling a primarily diagnostic function, resolving our theodical puzzlement by explaining its mistaken, but intelligible, origins. To bring out the specificity of this view of Hegel’s project, the chapter ends by contrasting it with two recent alternatives, Michael Rosen’s ‘right Hegelian’ and Robert Brandom’s ‘left Hegelian’ interpretations.

This chapter elucidates the ways in which “narrative can serve as a tool for the orientation of consciousness.” The dual narrative of the Confessions – nine books of personal narrative, joined by a book on memory to a cosmic narrative of creation and redemption – conveys, and is intended to convey, theological truth. In his theological work Augustine draws on, amplifies, and corrects (as he sees it) such figures as Origen (though only at second hand), Basil of Caesarea, and Ambrose to articulate his own distinctive views on knowing and willing, the condition of the fallen human will, and the source and destiny of creation. In concluding remarks that elegantly distil the unity of the Confessions, that chapter observes that “Augustine cannot give an account of his life that is not also an account of the work of God.”

Plotinus provided an explanation of evil which was original and philosophically challenging. While deriving everything from one source, the absolute transcendent Good, Plotinus does not trivialize the phenomenon of evil or reduce it to human moral deviation, as do other philosophical and religious approaches, but traces evil back to a metaphysical principle, matter, the source of evil in the world and in human souls. In Chapter 11 I present Plotinus’ account of evil and discuss to what extent it can be defended against a series of criticisms formulated by Plotinus’ successors, in particular by Proclus.

This chapter consists of two parts. The brief first part provides an overview of some of the main issues connected with sin that were discussed by early scholastic theologians. The second part focuses on the problem of the source of evil actions: are they 'from God' or 'from humans or the devil'?

In Tusculans 1 Cicero gives a lengthy rebuttal of the thesis that death is an evil. This raises a puzzle: how can such a one-sided presentation aspire to reveal whether it is more plausible that death is or is not an evil? Invoking the Tusculans’ practical aim – the removal of emotional disturbance – does not fully satisfy, since it is unclear how effective persuasion can be if the contrary position does not receive a fair hearing. I show that as main speaker in the book Cicero warns against over-confidence in embracing positions that one wishes to be true; and I argue that as author Cicero portrays the interlocutor of Tusculans 1 as a salutary example of how not to approach the kind of questions about death with which the work engages. We are encouraged to see the interlocutor’s failure as one not of character but of inexperience in philosophical method.