The Problem Of Evil

While browsing through history books in the library I stumbled across one with what struck me as having an odd picture on the cover. It was a baby picture.

It was not just any baby, though, it was a baby picture of Adolph Hitler.  The book was “Explaining Hitler” by Ron Rosenbaum. It is an examination of various schools of thought about what made Hitler the force of evil he turned out to be.

It turns out there are more than a few competing schools of thought on this subject.  One school even insists that we should not try to understand Hitler.  According to this school of thought, attempting to understand him always leads to some kind of excuse making.

Whatever your own thoughts, it is clear that this baby picture comes about as close as possible to imagining the complete opposite of the many crèches and representations of the child whose birth we just celebrated.

Looking at the picture, there is nothing obvious (to me at least) that this baby will grow up to be a ruthless dictator.  It is just a picture of a pudgy, round-faced infant with a bowl haircut and a startled expression sitting in an overstuffed chair. Yet this baby grows into a man who plunges Europe into a terrifying maelstrom of brutality, violence, and systematic cruelty.  He becomes one of the great killers of the 20th century – a role for which there is entirely too much competition.

How does a baby turn into a monster? Why do some people depart so far from newborn innocence? Why does God allow it?

The Hard Question

The first two questions are questions that we have some experience in answering. Psychology, direct experience, and the lessons of history provide this experience. The third question – why God allows it – is much harder to approach.  Even so, there is an entire branch of theology/philosophy devoted to it.

A theodicy is an attempt to explain how evil and pain can exist if God is all powerful and all good.  It is a philosophical step beyond a simple defense of God’s goodness against the charge that evil, pain, and suffering invalidate the description of God as being all loving, good, and wise.

The 20^th century presented a challenge to faith, and not just Christian faith. It was not unique in having horrific events and examples of wickedness and evil. However,  one could fairly say that evil became another thing that the century saw fully industrialized, mass produced and widely distributed. Because of this, theodicies proliferated and were elaborated and attacked in turn.

Most people do not operate on the abstract philosophical level occupied by elaborate theodicies. For example, Job’s comforters speak from the absolutism of their personal abstract theologies/philosophies. Job answers them from his faith and his experience, not from theory. When he does express his confusion and disappointment, he does so on concrete terms.  God answers him in a similar way.

Similarly, most of us do not operate in the more rarified altitudes of theology and philosophy.  We express doubts and disillusionment in more personal and concrete terms, and generally seek answers on a similar level.

Blaming God

I underwent adolescence in the 1960s, a period in history that was arguably as turbulent and emotional as adolescence itself. For a while there it seemed as though everything was a new moral issue of great consequence.  The war in Vietnam, the war on poverty, countless liberation movements, and the “new morality” itself were all moral issues we contended with.  It seemed like there was a new burning cause around every corner.

Curiously – or perhaps inevitably – every cause had adherents and opponents appealing to faith and to religious values to bolster their position.  It is not a surprise, then, that embedded in many of these controversies was a sometimes tacit, sometimes overt involvement with the problem of evil.

There was a high level of secularism (in comparison with the previous generation) in the conflicts.  As such it is only natural that the conflicts would give rise to a rejection of many theodicies. C. S. Lewis saw this coming. His book “God In The Dock,” published in 1970, seven years after Lewis’s death, takes its title from Lewis’s observations over a 24 year period.  Instead of seeing himself as a defendant, modern man had placed himself in the role of prosecutor, demanding God justify the fallen state of the world.

My experience in the 1960s validated Lewis’s observation. My contemporaries seemed much more likely to blame God for the troubles of the world—or the combination of God and His followers—than humanity alone. We were certainly not inclined to blame ourselves for the imperfection of the world around us!

Facing The Truth

But the truth was, and is, that we are responsible for our acts and the consequences of those acts. On one level we cannot know how it happened that the startled looking baby grew into one of the great villains of the 20^th century. But on another – and a personally uncomfortable level – we know exactly how the baby became the monster. Step by step, incident by incident, choice by choice, the child became a man. And the man became a personification of the worst of humanity.

I am not convinced that “with age comes wisdom” is necessarily true.

Actually, that is being polite. All too often with age comes obstinacy.  Along with the obstinacy comes a hardening of perspective, and a narrowing of vision.  A surrender to a lifetime collection of grudges, resentments, and prejudices set in as well.

God is not responsible for our sins and their consequences. The hard truth is that we are responsible ourselves.

On the other hand He did give us free will, which gives us the capability to choose sin. By choosing to sin we join in with and confirm our participation in the original Fall.

But we have also been redeemed. And when we think upon how our redemption was accomplished we can see that it is no good blaming God for giving us free will.  This is because by His redeeming sacrifice, He took upon Himself the burden of our misuse of it.

Our Paths

Our individual path from the relative innocence of infancy to adulthood is the only path we are capable of truly knowing.  Other people’s journeys are their own.

I do not know how that baby in the picture became a figure of nightmares. I do know my own path, and it has led me to accept my need for regular Penance and especially my need to embrace the Eucharist, and graces I have been opened to through baptism, confirmation, anointing for healing, and marriage.

May God grant us all the grace to choose more wisely and devoutly, more each day than the day before.