Optimism and Evil in Early Christian Thought

Leibniz, Classical Theism, and the Problem of Evil - Chapter 5 (2 of 3)

Greetings, subscribers. As followers of Theological Letters know, I recently finished my forthcoming book on Leibniz and the problem of evil, and I have been posting fresh installments from every Sunday.

To date, I have posted the Introduction and all of Part I — Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4. Last week, I posted the first installment of Part II, with section 1 of Chapter 5, Optimism Before Leibniz. Today, I share section 2.

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Optimism and Evil in Early Christian Thought

To no surprise, both Judaism and Christianity are amongst the ancient advocates of providence. Their testimony both echoes and diverges from pagan views in significant ways.

By way of echoes, both Jewish and Christian writers set their view in contrast with the Epicurean atheists, who deny providence.¹ Like the pagan advocates providence, the Jews and Christians insist that the world and its order is brought about and upheld by the divine Mind — by the Word (Λόγος) or Wisdom (Σοφία). For the Christians, the former is taken from the prologue of the Gospel of John and refers to the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. For the Jews, the latter refers to the wisdom literature of sacred Scripture and Jewish tradition, according to which God creates the world through the character of Wisdom — though, as we will see, Alexandrian Judaism also speaks of God’s Logos.² In either case, the beginning of the world finds its cause in the divine Word or Wisdom,³ and by this same Word or Wisdom, all things are held together, ordered, and moved at every moment. Also like the pagan advocates of providence, Jews and Christians insist that God is Good, and his Goodness is no less important than his Wisdom to why God creates, orders, and cares for creation.⁴

When speaking about divine governance of the world, Jewish and Christian literature employ some of the same metaphors found amongst pagan thought, such as God is like the head of a household, caring for its members, or like the governor of a city, caring for its citizens.⁵ Like in pagan thought, there is an accompanying notion that this governance is not always direct but includes delegation or indirect providence by means of secondary causes. We see the notion in Plato, for example, where God entrusts several spheres of rational beings (from the gods to the soul) to care for the world,⁶ and the notion persists in later Platonists who, likewise suggest, that God delegates governance to gods, the World Soul, and demons.⁷ We find a similar notion in Judaism and Christianity, where God establishes man and the hierarchy of angels, to whom he delegates the workings of natural elements, the care of nations, the care of individuals, and even things like animal birth.⁸ Though God is provident over the whole cosmos, he nonetheless governs by means of secondary causes, delegating to men and to the hierarchy of angels care for specific parts of creation.

A more surprising commonality is the Jewish and Christian echoes of the theory of the Forms and even of Plato’s absolute Living Being. Regarding the former, both Jews and Christians see in Genesis confirmation that God has archetypal Ideas, echoing the Middle and NeoPlatonic tendency to locate the Forms in the divine Mind. Why? Quite simply, in Genesis, God refers to these Ideas when calling various creatures into being.⁹ From this Philo argues that just as an architect sketches in his mind a city before he builds it, so does God construct an “intelligible cosmos” in his mind as a model for the visible world.¹⁰ The same argument appears in the early Christians. Origen makes the same point using the analogy of a ship or a house.¹¹

In both Philo and Origen, the intelligible cosmos exists within God’s Logos. For Philo, the Logos is the divine Mind,¹² while Origen understands the Logos to be the second person of the Trinity.¹³ And in keeping with Genesis, Origen refers to the divine Ideas as “words” (λόγοι).¹⁴ Thus, the archetypal logoi exist within the Logos, the second person of the Trinity.

This notion that God has archetypal ideas was ubiquitous amongst the Christian Church fathers.¹⁵ Augustine argues the point in his Genesis commentary, and like Origen, he places the divine Ideas in the second person of the Trinity.¹⁶ Yet, Origen’s account moves much closer to Plato’s absolute Living Being. Origen speaks as if the Logos is composed of the logoi, as if the Son of God were comprised of the archetypal Ideas he houses.¹⁷ In short, Origen seems to make the second person of the Trinity the absolute Living Being after whom our world is modeled.

Such a suggestion would not be fully rejected by later Eastern Church fathers, though it would be corrected. The difficulty with the Origenist view is that it creates a dilemma. Either the Logos, being God, is eternal and immutable and the archetypes of which he is composed are equally eternal and immutable. Or these archetypes are freely generated and could be otherwise, in which case the Logos, too, could be otherwise, since the logoi compose his substance. The ramification of the latter, of course, is that the Logos is not God but a creature.

Both options were anathema to the Christian mind. The latter conclusion echoes the heresy of Arius by calling the Son of God a creature. According to Christian tradition, the Logos is the second person of the Trinity and is of the same nature as God the Father, which means that, like the Father, the Logos is immutable — a fact thoroughly established and codified at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D.¹⁸ Yet, Christian tradition is equally committed to the view that God freely creates our world, which means his designs for it are contingent and could be otherwise. Hence, the former position (that the logoi are eternal and immutable) is no less problematic.

The resolution to this tension that originates in the Cappadocians and echoes throughout later fathers in the Christian East draws a distinction between God’s essence (ουσία) and his energies (ἐνέργειαι). This distinction originates in Aristotle and develops through Alexandrian Judaism until its reception and development in early Christianity.¹⁹ The feature that is most important for our purposes is that there is a distinction between the nature of a thing and the energetic expressions of that nature — such as the distinction between mind per se and the expression of mind in speech or logical inference. Alexandrian Jews and Eastern Christians employed the concept to explain how God is both immutable and free. Immutability refers to the divine nature as such — the nature of God does not change. The freedom of God, however, refers to the energies that exude from the divine nature, freely articulating it, like a musician who expresses his creativity in acts of composition. Unlike the divine nature that wholly transcends the world and human comprehension, these energetic expressions are finite and graspable, the energies being how creatures come to know God. To quote Basil of Caesarea,

For he who denies that he knows the essence does not confess himself to be ignorant of God, because our idea of God is gathered from all the attributes which I have enumerated. But God, he says, is simple, and whatever attribute of Him you have reckoned as knowable is of His essence. But the absurdities involved in this sophism are innumerable. When all these high attributes have been enumerated, are they all names of one essence? And is there the same mutual force in His awfulness and His loving-kindness, His justice and His creative power, His providence and His foreknowledge, and His bestowal of rewards and punishments, His majesty and His providence? In mentioning any one of these do we declare His essence? If they say, yes, let them not ask if we know the essence of God, but let them enquire of us whether we know God to be awful, or just, or merciful. These we confess that we know. If they say that essence is something distinct, let them not put us in the wrong on the score of simplicity. For they confess themselves that there is a distinction between the essence and each one of the attributes enumerated. The energies are various, and the essence simple, but we say that we know our God from His energies, but do not undertake to approach near to His essence. His energies come down to us, but His essence remains beyond our reach.²⁰

Employing the essence-energies distinction, the Eastern fathers were able to grant the immutability of God while affirming that he freely generates the logoi within the Logos. The solution breaks the binary distinction between God and creatures into a threefold distinction between creatures, God’s essence, and God’s energies. We can see this in the ontology of Maximus the Confessor, for example. Maximus offers a threefold division between God, his works (ἔργα) that did not begin in time, and those things that participate in God’s works but did begin in time.²¹ The first and the last group represent the divide between God and creation. But what of the second group? Here, Maximus places the divine attributes of goodness, immortality, infinity, simplicity, and more.²² Unlike Western traditions that treat the divine attributes as essential properties of the divine essence, the Eastern fathers identify the divine attributes as processions (προδοί) or energies (ἐνέργεια) that articulate what God is supersubstantially — as seen in Basil before Maximus. Maximus’ ontology echoes earlier writers, like Pseudo-Dionysius, who speak of the “things around God” that are in some sense God.²³ This middle place is where we find the logoi.

Maximus insists that the logoi do not exist as entities.²⁴ Rather, the logoi “subsisted before the ages”²⁵ as divine and good acts of will (θελήματα),” a point again made by Pseudo-Dionysius.²⁶ By identifying the logoi as subsisting before the ages (i.e., before creation) as divine acts of will (θεία θελήματα), the placement of the logoi in Maximus’ ontology becomes clear. They are neither the supersubstantial God (group one) nor creatures (group three), but divine acts that precede time, articulate the divine nature, and are in some sense part of God (group two). Like all divine acts, processions, or energies, the logoi are free articulations of the supersubstantial God.²⁷ Yet, unlike in Origen, the fact that the logoi are freely produced and could be otherwise is no threat to the full divinity of the Logos in whom the logoi reside.

Here, we begin to see the Judeo-Christian divergence from their pagan counterparts. The Christians insist that God freely creates and freely upholds the world.²⁸ Few pagans ascribe free choice to God in making the world, even when defending the freedom of creatures. Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover does not choose to move the world but does so by his supreme desirability. The Stoics insist that the world cycles are necessarily identical and indicate no divine choice in their generation. Perhaps the only pagan touchstone is Plato, who describes God as deliberating about making the world.²⁹ But Plato’s Demiurge looks to the absolute Living Being, the model for the visible world, and there is no indication that the Demiurge creates the absolute Living Being. And when interpreting whether this means that the Demiurge chooses this ideal model from amongst several alternatives, Plutarch denies the implication.³⁰ Hence, there is something truly novel about the Judeo-Christian view that God freely generates archetypes for the world and freely creates, orders, and cares for the material cosmos.

Equally novel is the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing. In every pagan view, God is a craftsman (δημιουργός) of matter, not a creator (κτίσις) of matter. The sole exception amongst the pagans is found in pantheistic alternatives, such as the Stoic theory that matter is God’s own substance. Judaism and Christianity alone argue that God creates matter out of nothing.³¹ God not only freely produces the designs of the world and freely chooses to make the world, but he also produces the very material of which it is made.³²

Now, this novelty in Christian thinking naturally raises the question of evil, given their pagan counterparts. For at least one of the purposes of the Demiurge doctrine amongst the Platonists was to supply a second principle by which to explain evil, since God can only do what is best. We see the two-principle strategy before Plato in Empedocles, who introduces a second deity, “Strife” (νεῖκος), to actively thwart the order brought about by Love.³³ Plato, like Empedocles, introduces a second principle, matter, to explain the defects of our world, but the principle is not evil, merely unstable.³⁴ Yet, as we saw, later Platonists describe matter as actively thwarting the will of God,³⁵ while also appealing to the free activities of rational beings within the world.³⁶ Those pagan philosophies that avoid this solution often tend toward pantheism, with the result being dismissive. Heraclitus, for example, suggests that what men call evil is really just unpleasant. From the divine perspective, all is good.³⁷ And the Stoics, like Heraclitus, suggest that the trials of our world are less evil than unpleasant, but they are so by design, meant to draw out man’s character and occasion the formation of virtue.³⁸ Yet, Christianity is committed to the reality of evil, to the perfect Goodness of God, and to the absence of a second principle that might explain evil. Thus arises the lingering question for the Christians, whence cometh evil?