Question 22
How do evil, suffering, and hiddenness challenge unreceived plenitude?
An account of created goodness must explain defect and permission without making suffering an ingredient of divine perfection.
In this question
The short answer
God's causation of positive created actuality does not identify every moral defect with God's own intention. Evil concerns a failure of an appropriate good, but that does not make its consequences unreal. Nor does a good response to suffering establish that the suffering was needed or justified. Divine goodness faces a further question: why are grave evils permitted, and why is God's presence often obscure? Simplicity provides constraints on an answer, not a complete explanation of every case.
Privation identifies an injury
Blindness is a privation because sight belongs to the appropriate good of an eye. Its character is understood through the good that is absent. Calling it privation does not say that no one suffers or that nothing destructive happens. Moral evil similarly concerns a disorder in a real act: intelligence, bodily power, and intention can be exercised against the good they ought to serve.
Aquinas distinguishes the actuality involved in an action from its defective order. That distinction allows a first cause of created being without identifying the first cause as author of every sinful intention. This does not explain every permission or settle divine concurrence. Summa theologiae I, q.49, aa.1–2.
The question is why evil exists if the almighty Creator cares for all creatures; the Catechism situates its answer within the whole Christian faith rather than a single explanation.
To this question, as pressing as it is unavoidable and as painful as it is mysterious, no quick answer will suffice.
Finite limits are not all evils
Three cases need separation. Ignorance can deprive a knower of an appropriate perfection. Succession constitutes a melody, so removing it would destroy that good rather than perfect it. Danger can occasion courage, but courage's value does not authorize manufacturing danger. A limit may therefore be a defect, a constitutive condition, or an adverse circumstance met well. No single formula covers all three.
This matters wherever suffering is fitted into a story. Later reconciliation does not prove that betrayal was justified. A person's growth does not make the injury an entitlement of the injurer or an instrument owed to an observer. The Catechism affirms that God can bring good from evil while maintaining that evil does not thereby become good. CCC 311–312.
Permission and absence remain questions
Freedom helps explain possible wrongdoing, not every permission. Natural suffering also exceeds human choice. Divine hiddenness adds another difficulty: a person may sincerely seek God and experience no recognizable answer. Labeling every silence beneficial asserts the disputed conclusion without argument.
Christian faith places these questions within Christ's death and resurrection, judgment, and promised restoration. That horizon warrants hope and practical resistance to evil; it does not reveal the reason for every loss. Care, protection, truthful lament, and support for harmed persons already enact real goods. They need no speculative justification of the injury before they can begin. CCC 309–314.
The strongest objection
Does leaving particular evils unexplained concede that divine goodness is false?
An unexplained evil is not a demonstrated contradiction, but neither is the absence of contradiction a sufficient defense of divine goodness. The evidential challenge concerns whether the world gives adequate reason for trust in a perfectly good source. That challenge deserves direct argument alongside the theological grounds for hope. Conceptual distinctions prevent mistaken inferences; they do not remove the burden.
What follows
- The distinction between created actuality and moral defect is a metaphysical argument consistent with Catholic teaching. The permission of particular evils and the force of hiddenness remain substantive philosophical and theological questions.
Sources
Connections
- Providence and evil
Suffering must be addressed without making tragedy a need in God.