Patristic piety, from the earliest Fathers to St. Maximus the Confessor and beyond, never lost sight of the important distinction between the Creator and His creatures. God is indeed ontologically other, and separated from the created realm by an unbridgeable gap or ‘spacing’ (diástêma); yet the crown of His creation, humanity, is able to know Him through His energies (energeiai), manifested in various ways throughout the created order. The Platonic philosophical tradition, however, insisted upon contemplation (theôria) as the unbreakable link between existents and the higher principles on which they depend for their being. This contemplation was not only the mode of communion with the deity proper to lower orders of existence; it was also the connecting link between the productive triad of One, Intellect, and Soul. Since all was believed connected by this ‘golden chain’ of intellectual co-dependency, human freedom and uniqueness (what some contemporary theologians would call personhood) had no place, for the ultimate goal of all was unity. As Plotinus explained, in his treatise “On Nature and Contemplation and the One” (Ennead 3.8.10):

[T]he origin (arkhê) is not divided up into the All (to pan), for if it were divided up it would destroy the All too; and the All could not any more come into being if the origin did not remain by itself, different from it. Therefore, too, we go back everywhere to one. And in each and every thing there is some one to which you will trace it back, and this in every case to the one before it, which is not simply one, until we come to the simply one; but this cannot be traced back to something else. (tr. Armstrong 1967, 395-397)

The origin or source, for Plotinus, is indeed different (hetéras) from its productions, but this difference or otherness is not ontological, for everything is ultimately traced back and subsists in relation to the One, i.e., all things have the One as the ground of their being (ousia). The division (meros) characteristic of lower entities is not a permanent state, and certainly not one in which personhood is freely developed in relation to God; rather, it is an unstable situation that is only remedied by a contemplative reversion (epistrophê) to the immediate source of one’s being. In the case of the second and third principles, Intellect and World-Soul, their productive and maintaining powers, respectively, are effectual only because they simultaneously proceed from and revert to the absolute One.

Any attempt to come to provide a philosophical explanation of the triune God on the basis of this Platonic system obviously renders Christ and the Spirit ontologically dependent upon the Father, and therefore of lesser rank; and it renders the creation a necessary efflux of God, with no real value apart from its dependence upon the divine ousia. The One’s difference or otherness, in the Platonic-Plotinian schema, is not due to its free act of calling existents out of non-being, but rather to its effortless overflowing of essence. Whereas all beings or hypostases, including the second and third divine principles, susbist by way of their contemplative dependency upon the One, the One itself contemplates and depends upon nothing but itself (cf. Ennead 5.2.1). Herein lies it otherness. Communion and freedom are alike impossible.

Theophilus of Antioch, writing a century before Plotinus, described, through the language and concepts available to him – and to the limited extent that it is possible do so – the inner life of God, which is that of a freely willing creator: “the power of God is shown in this, that, first of all, He creates out of nothing, according to His will, the things that are made” (Ad Autol. 2.13, ANF 2:99). God’s logos and sophia were not, for Theophilus, subordinate hypostases emanating from the Father. We have seen that Theophilus, borrowing a Stoic distinction, conceived of the Logos as the expression of the Father’s internal thoughts, actualized for the purpose of creation. The Spirit (pneuma) he conceived as having a two-fold power or purpose: to hold the cosmos together in a divine embrace, and to penetrate the material realm with a vivifying and maintaining power.

[B]y the Spirit which is borne above the waters, [Moses] means that which God gave for animating the creation, as he gave life to man, mixing what is fine with what is fine. For the Spirit is fine, and the water is fine, that the Spirit may nourish the water, and the water penetrating everywhere along with the Spirit, may nourish creation. For the Spirit being one, and holding the place of light, was between the water and the heaven, in order that the darkness might not in any way communicate with the heaven, which was nearer God, before God said, ‘Let there be light.’ (Ad Autol. 2.13, ANF 2:100)

This is sublime imagery: the Spirit-filled water flowing through the rifts and rills of matter, being carried to every inch of the created realm, giving life and sustenance to all. God, while wholly other, surrounds and penetrates this realm, holding it lovingly in His hand and nourishing it with His Spirit (Ad Autol. 1.7). It is a relation of a proud creator to His glorious creation. Possibly a bit too anthropomorphic for the subtle tastes of Platonic philosophers, but if we pass beyond the poetry to the theological conception, we arrive at a view of God that at once maintains His complete transcendence and otherness, and brings to the fore His intimate relationship with His free creation. The intimate connection between principles that we have seen in the Platonic schema, and which was attractive to Christian theologians, was hereby maintained by Theophilus, yet without sacrificing the purely Christian concept of God as a triune power whose loftiness exceeds human intellectual capacity. “The containing spirit,” writes Theophilus, “is along with the creation contained by the hand of God. As, therefore, the seed of the pomegranate, dwelling inside, cannot see what is outside the rind, itself being within; so neither can man, who along with the whole creation is enclosed by the hand of God, behold God” (Ad Autol. 1.5, ANF 2:90).

Big Evil

The occasion for these reflections on the problem of evil is my reading of the sixth essay, “On Nature of Evil,” in Bogoljub Šijaković, Between God and Man: Essays in Greek and Christian Thought (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag 2002). This collection of seven essays, written between 1985 and 2001, covers such topics as anthropology and self-knowledge (the famous Apollonian dictum “Know Thyself”), paradox and mysticism, guilt and repentance – to name but a few. What interests me here, however, is Professor Šijaković’s nuanced, philosophical, and at times even subtly poetic discussion of evil in our world.

Professor Šijaković’s chief concern is the result of viewing evil as strictly meontic – i.e., as having no existence, being no-thing, simply the absence of good. However, since the good is God, and God is not a “what” but a “who,” a person and not a mere substance – or, more accurately, God’s substance is His person, the person of the Father – then evil must not be considered a substance, even if that ‘substance’ is no-thing; rather, evil is properly understood as an “ontological usurpation” (p. 91) resulting from the faulty exercise of human freedom. Evil, then, is “personological” (ibid.); the concept of “metaphysical evil” can never, as Professor Šijaković explains, be resorted to as an explanation for the intrusion of “senselessness and madness” into our world. Certainly there is such a thing as “natural evil” (disasters, disease); however, as Šijaković explains, by the mere fact that we use the terms good and evil as “moral categories” (pp. 92-93, my emphasis), we are tacitly acknowledging that all evil “bears witness to the abuses of human freedom [and] rests on freely made decisions of the will” (p. 93).

However, it is often easy to explain away evil – especially natural evil – by resorting too readily to the exercise of human freedom, and its sometimes negative results, as a cause. Stanley Harakas, for example, in his book Toward Transfigured Life (Minneapolis: Light and Life 1983) makes an attempt to exonerate God of any blame for natural evil with the example of the destruction of a village in the French Alps by an avalanche. Harakas tacitly places the blame on the villagers, who should have somehow been aware that the location of the village was not a safe one, and so built elsewhere (p. 75). It was their free choice to build in a bad location that caused the evil of the loss of life, not God or some abstract system of nature or fate. Taken to its extreme conclusion(s), of course, Harakas’s attempt at theodicy ends in absurdity. Suppose, for example (following Harakas’s ‘reasoning’) that, wishing to eat a healthier diet, I purchase a bag of salad tainted – unbeknownst to me – by some potentially lethal chemical. I eat the salad, sicken, and die. Who is to blame? The company who distributes the bagged salad? The farmers who grow the vegetables? The government agency whose job it is to inspect the various sites of manufacture? All of the above? Or perhaps the blame should be placed on my hypothetically deceased self? That’s it! I shouldn’t have been such a lazybones. If only I had grown my own veggies in my backyard, I’d still be here today.

Things get trickier, of course, with moral evil, especially when we enter the misleadingly black and white realm of victims and perpetrators. How often do we hear the families of victims of violent crimes demanding ‘justice’? Invariably, this ‘justice’ involves retaliation or vengeance against the perpetrator of the crime. When the ‘justice’ in question involves the government-sanctioned murder of the perpetrator, then evil has only succeeded in doubling itself; now not only has one human being bearing the image of God been eliminated from existence, but two! It seems to me that one of the least remembered biblical verses, especially among so-called conservative Christians (particularly in the United States) is Romans 12:19-21. Šijaković is, fortunately, sensitive enough to the complexity of the problem of evil to avoid the Herculean task of attempting an explanation for the varieties of moral evil in our world. He does, however, give us a much-needed warning: “The biggest evil is when evil succeeds in convincing us that there is no evil” (p. 99). On the ontological level, evil may indeed be no-thing; but it can usurp the being of the world, and turn the positive ascendancy of life into a degeneration, a return, as St. Athanasius would put it, into the nothingness out of which God called us (De Incarnatione 3.3.1-5).

Evil must be personalized; for it is, according to Šijaković, precisely our personal powers of reason, scientific ability, and education that provide evil with an opportunity to burst forth from nothingness into existence. While reliance upon our God-given gifts of rational understanding, creativity, ingenuity, etc., can indeed result in contributions to a better world, it is easy to overlook the increased opportunities for ontological usurpation (evil) created by such progress. This is, of course, a perennial problem, and one for which there is no ready solution. As Christians, we have faith that God will, when the time is right, return His creation to its intended state – which, for us, means deification (theôsis). In the meantime, we would do well to follow the advice of Professor Šijaković: love the other, even to the extent of taking responsibility for his or her own evil – that is the only path to salvation from evil (p. 104).