Reorienting the Mind #4: Two Christian Outlooks on Natural Evil
Perhaps in some future age, all the creatures that were will rest together as one.
I. On the Nature of Evil
The traditional Christian view on the nature of evil is that of deprivation: evil is merely a lack, or falling short of, good. Evil is not a positive entity; there is no such substance or entity as "evil." Rather, "evil" simply refers to the ways in which a thing can lack the goodness it is meant to have, the goodness it is capable of.1
Some things are less good than others, but this does not make them evil, simply less good/valuable. Evil only occurs when a thing that is good is destroyed, or brought nearer to destruction, disintegration, disharmony. We can sum this up by saying that evil is not just any lack of goodness, but a deprivation of the good, a falling short of how good a thing is capable of being or ought to be. For all good creatures are in some sense lacking good: they are not God Himself, and so "fall short," "lack" or are "deprived" of that ultimate level of goodness. But we should not call them "evil," which has the connotation of a negative state that should be otherwise. (Ian McFarland summarizes how Leibniz fell into this trap in "The Gift of the Non Aliud.") A lack of goodness is only an evil when it is deprived of that level of goodness which it is intended/meant to have, which it ought to have. And, in the Christian tradition, that level of goodness which it is intended to have is set by (or consists in) its final cause (Gk. τέλος), sometimes called a “proper function.” Evil is a lack of resemblance to a thing's final cause, which is grounded in the will of God for, or a divine idea about, what a thing is. God, as the creator of the world, has certain intentions for His creatures, what they are meant to be, develop into. Each creature (or kind of creature) is meant to resemble the divine in its own special way, to “mirror” the divine reality as an individual and to fit into the broader cosmological system in such a way that the entirety of the cosmos will come to mirror the divine.2
II. Apparent vs Real Evils; Death as an Example
This definition of evil has a profound consequence: many of the things we ordinarily conceive of as evil are not truly evil. Let us meditate on this view of evil as it relates to death, and its theological significance.
A mouse being swallowed by a snake makes us sad, and the world surely loses a valuable creature in the process. But can we call it evil on the deprivation view of evil? Are we justified in wishing the world was otherwise, or in feeling that there is something wrong with this act of predation? Only if we suppose that the nature of the mouse is meant for more good than the goods already found in its life up to that point, and whatever goods that come from nourishing the snake.3 To call such predation evil would be to presume that the diminishing of goodness in its transition into non-being is an unfitting, unnecessary diminishing that contradicts what the mouse is meant for, its final cause.
What about death in general--is death itself evil? Only if we can say that life itself, or biological life itself, is meant for more goodness than death permits; that the dying thing should have possessed or cultivated a higher degree of good than death allowed. That is, death would only be evil if, in some way, it was not part of what God intends for the creature. So is this the case? An answer would require asking the question of each individual kind of lifeform. The death of cells and plankton are very different things than the death of a human being or higher animal. The nature of cells and plankton, the intrinsic goods that their deaths eliminate, and the goods which their deaths result in, are very different from higher forms of life. They do not, on any plausible account, have the same τέλος as a human being. So it is not a question with an easy answer, on the deprivation view of evil.
It seems obvious, in light of modern science, that death itself is baked into the cosmos--life is fueled by death. If the cosmos was created by God, then God Himself built death into it. Some will suggest that this cannot be the case, because death is evil, and God could not will evil (at least not directly)--there must be some other cause of death, perhaps the fall of angels or humans. But this assumes that death is evil, which I have just cast doubt on. Certain things may just be made to live and die, and be no more. Or, perhaps certain things may be made to live, die, and then, in some sense, be again (through resurrection or reincarnation). Of course, death may become evil even for a being meant to die. It is easy to imagine external sources corrupting death, interfering with the timing, mechanisms or ecology of death, and thereby turning the death of the being away from the τέλος of that being. But is death itself, not as influenced by external agents, an unfitting loss? Is it unfitting for some creatures, but not others?
(Note that we can easily say that it would be better or more perfect for God, having willed some animals to die, to also will that they live again. But that’s a separate issue from whether it was evil for God to will them to die in the first place! For their death may be a good thing, when taken with the whole of creation, and their resurrection might be equally good. The question is only about death itself.)
Some in the Christian tradition insist that death was in no way part of God's original intentions, that man does not have biological death as part of his proper function. Others (like Athanasius) say that death, even human death, is a natural part of the world, willed by God, a natural phase of human spiritual development (Eccl. 3:1-11).4 St Basil concurs, seeing all temporal beings as mortal, temporary, including the human body (in its current state).5 And then some (like Augustine) walk a middle path, insisting that the death of some creatures was intended, but not the death of humans.6 Whatever view we take profoundly shapes our eschatological and soteriological narratives--it is no small issue.
And yet there is simply no authoritative, final answer coming out of the Christian tradition on death. To be sure, there is, and has always been, a consensus that the current state of death is evil, and that death outside of God’s grace is a horrid end. For death without Christ results in death unto death, or death unto the second death (Rev. 2:11; 20:6). The hope of resurrection is hope that the finality and power of death has been and will be overcome. But, do we welcome death as a friend restored to right order by Christ, or mock death as an enemy defeated (Isaiah 25:8; 2 Tim. 1:10; Rev. 20:14)?7 Has even death itself been saved by Christ, freed from the power of the evil one, so that we no longer need to fear it (Heb. 2:14-15; 1 Cor. 15:56)?8 Scripture speaks in both ways.9
III. Two Attitudes Towards Natural Evils
Our meditations on the deprivation view of evil ultimately generate a whole host of questions regarding the moral status of nature, death being merely one of many paths for reflection. I have found that two “big picture” attitudes towards evil and suffering emerge from these reflections, and that, just as there is not a single “Christian” view of biological death in itself, there are no grounds for a final adjudication between them. But reflection on them is, in my experience, highly beneficial.
First, we may come to regard the natural evils (those apparent evils in the world besides the consciously chosen evils of will and their results) as only apparent evil. That is, as not truly evil, but simply lesser degrees of goods. To do so would be to regard many evils as illusory, our complaints about them being possible only from a limited perspective. The point here is that there would be no reason to complain or feel that these lesser goods need be changed. The disquieting aspects of creation need not be changed: they are uncomfortable, painful and unpleasant to some extent, but their being is itself a good. Again, this does not apply to those parts of nature made more painful by the destructive choices of agents; the only complaint we should have with the world is over moral evils.
This attitude makes more sense when it is paired with a certain view of God’s goodness. On a view of God that understands His goodness as fundamentally proliferative, we might well think (as Plato, Plotinus, and some Christian authors did10) that God will actualize as many beings or kinds of beings as possible, including beings that subsist through violence and death. It is better for a multiplicity of goods to exist than only the highest possible kinds of goods. Why withhold existence from beings just because they are imperfect? They need not exist in this state forever; the pains and sufferings following upon their being need not be eternal. But why make it so that they never are? Is preventing their death and suffering a greater good than their being? Is finite, momentary suffering so great an evil as to outweigh the good of their being?
We might wonder why God would not simply make creatures like those currently in existence, but without the “nasty” aspects. But what if He has, on some far distant planet, or will in some other aeon? Should He not also make these creatures that we have before us? Does His goodness limit His generous donation of being? Perhaps creation is an infinite (or practically infinite) unfolding of the possibilities contained within God, divisible into phases (ages, aeons) in which all the different kinds of being come to be.11 Our current world may be one among innumerable worlds, and one of the more violent. Perhaps there are many worlds more peaceful, and still many less peaceful, so that we simply find ourselves in one outworking of the creative generosity of God. Should God not allow every gradation of possible beings be, on account of the suffering involved in their mode of being? Especially in light of the final reconciliation of all things, however many things there are, how are we to calculate the overall good of being in light of suffering?
This first attitude insists on reframing the apparent evils of the natural order so that they become goods, or consequences of goods. Outside of the deprivation of good resulting from the will of free agents, there really is no reason to complain--the universe is as it should be. Especially given the resurrection and ultimate eschatological reunion of all creation with God, natural sufferings in this life are trifles anyways.
Alternatively, we could adopt the second, contrary way of seeing things: to see the natural evils in the world as not merely lesser goods, but lesser goods that ought to be otherwise and ought not to have been. That is, we are justified in feeling that something is amiss, something defective about the natural order. Some natural evils represent negative states, not in that they are devoid of good, but in that they should have been otherwise. Even outside of the will of non-divine agents, the universe is not as it should be.
This, of course, leads us back to the problem of evil: why does a world exist in which many things happen which should have been otherwise, if this world was created by a perfect creator? We cannot explain this by pointing to a corruption of the creator's work by foreign intelligences--we have explicitly ruled that out by focusing only on natural evils.
Even if we find ourselves drawn to the first outlook, we should probably absorb the central moral attitudes motivating the second: there are some things God has ordained that we should wish to end, though we should not wish that they never were. We can do this by distinguishing between the intrinsic evil of certain things like suffering, death and violence, and their extrinsic goodness. Suffering and death, though built into creation, do not resemble the divine nature in the slightest, since the divine nature is not only being, but joy itself, life itself, unity and harmony itself. The death of an organism, considered as an event or process occurring for/in an individual, is the antithesis of these properties. Hence, death, suffering, etc can be said to be inherently “evil” in that sense. But, death and suffering also clearly contribute to beautiful patterns of being as a whole; death and suffering considered extrinsically, as an event occurring within an ecological or cosmic context, can play a unifying, joyful, creative, life-giving role. And hence death and suffering, though inherently dissimilar to the divine nature (and thus evil), can be a part of a system which does resemble the divine nature precisely because of the presence of death! The deprivation view of evil must be nuanced in this way (by distinguishing between internal and external deprivations, and between true evils (falling short of an intended or normative good) and mere deprivations).
The cosmos as a whole is inherently good, and so are all its parts (the individual beings that make up the world). However, not all of the experiences, events and processes in the world are inherently good, but only extrinsically good. Would willing such a world be contrary to the nature of the perfect God of love, generosity, and being? Must the perfect artist create a work totally good in every respect?
I have no strong moral intuition here. All I can say is this: I am very glad my dogs exist, even though their being rests upon billions of years of predation. I imagine I would feel much the same way about the most terrifying of dinosaurs. Perhaps in some future aeon, all the creatures that were will rest together as one.
References and Sources for Further Reading
Hart, David B. “Death, Sacrifice and Resurrection.” Lecture. Presented at the Asbury Theological Seminary, November 8, 2011.
Hart, David B. “Death the Stranger.” First Things, June 2012. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/06/death-the-stranger.\
Djakovac, Aleksandar (2017). “The Iconic Ontology of St. Maximus the Confessor.” In Ars
Liturgica, From the Image of Glory to the Images of the Idols of Modernity. Alba Iulia: Reinregirea. pp. 57-68.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being : A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, Mass, 1978.
Athanasius of Alexandria, “On the Incarnation of the Word,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (V2-04), ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, MI: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1891).
Augustine of Hippo. Confessions and Enchiridion. Translated by Albert C. Outler. London: SCM Press, 1955. https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/augustine_enchiridion_02_trans.htm.
Augustine of Hippo, “The Nature of the Good Against the Manicheans,” in Augustine: Earlier
Writings, trans. John Burleigh (The Westminster Press, 1953), 326–248.
Scott MacDonald, ed., Being and Goodness : The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and
Philosophical Theology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Origen, and John Behr. Origen : On First Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Pierce Marks, “Aquinas’ Metaethic: The Link Between Being and Goodness in Aquinas’ Thought,” (2020 Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies Multidisciplinary Graduate Conference, n.d.), https://www.academia.edu/43062743/Aquinas_Metaethic_The_Link_Between_Being_and_Goodness_in_Aquinas_Thought
N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress press, 2017).
The number of sources I could cite here is staggering, and I have several manuscripts underway that will survey the best of them. For a wonderful overview of the issue, see: (Scott Charles Macdonald. Being and Goodness : The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991.)
Arthur Lovejoy gives a wonderful overview of this kind of moral paradigm in (Lovejoy, Arthur. The Great Chain of Being, Ch. 2). The three best primary sources to read on this are the works of St. Augustine, St. Maximus the Confessor, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Each of these three, and the Christian tradition in general, build upon the thought of Plato and Aristotle, giving their work a divine-conceptualist spin. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is the touchstone work on virtue ethics, and provides the scaffolding for subsequent thought. See my references section for the works I recommend starting with.
Obviously, when humans get involved in the process, things can clearly go wrong: we can make it so that the death of the mouse is truly evil, that it occurs at a poor time, or that the proportion of mice dying is ecologically bad. But here I am talking about natural evils, not caused by the wills of agents like humans.
Athanasius, in On the Incarnation of the Word, develops the view that human beings were made mortal, able to die. And hence, death was built into the cosmos from the beginning, even for humans. The difference is that the biological death was not meant to be a “death unto death,” but a transition into the next stage of being. Biological death was willed by God, for animals and man, but its results and context have become distorted and therefore evil. Biological death after the fall became death unto corruption, but, prior, was merely death unto incorruption. Man is, per Athanasius, an “animal who is essentially impermanent” (Athanasius. On the Incarnation, 3).
Life in the garden, prior to the fall, was always meant to be a temporary state, followed after by a higher life and immortality. “But knowing once more how the will of man could sway to either side, in anticipation He secured the grace given them by a law...if they kept the grace and remained good, they might still keep the life in paradise without sorrow or pain or care besides having the promise of incorruption in heaven; but if they transgressed and turned back, and became evil, they might know that they were incurring that corruption in death which was theirs by nature…” (Athanasius. On the Incarnation, 3.4). That is, man is free to live in accordance with beauty and goodness, with a plethora of possible expressions of this beauty, and, upon death, to be kept from perishing (“of every tree that is in the garden, eating thou shalt eat”), or to live in the ways which lead to self-disintegration and non-existence (“but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, ye shall not eat of it, but on the day that ye eat, dying ye shall die”) (Athanasius. On the Incarnation, 3.5).
NT Wright, in The Resurrection of the Son of God, surveys a wide spectrum of Jewish and Christian views on the afterlife. Particularly interesting for our purposes is that Athanasius, by affirming humanity's natural mortality, seems to be tapping into a line of thought developed very early on, perhaps in the text of Genesis itself, which claimed that the human being would cease to be without direct, divine intervention, not due to their possessing some immortal component capable of surviving death on its own (Wright, N.T. The Resurrection of the Son of God, pgs. 92, 104, 107-108). Still, the point is that biological death was part of the plan!
For Athanasius, “...the salvation of man from nature doesn’t only mean salvation from death, but from the mortal way of existence. Death is not something added from the outside to the created nature, but something that is inherent for it…” (Djakovac, Aleksandar (2017). “The Iconic Ontology of St. Maximus the Confessor.”)
(Basil, Hexameron, Homily I.5.) This creation is a world in addition to the immaterial, "a school and training place where the souls of men should be taught and a home for beings destined to be born and to die… such also is the nature of the creature which lives in time…"
Augustine took this view: that death was willed by God for some creatures, but not human beings. In On the Nature of the Good Against the Manicheans, he says: "When things pass away and others succeed them there is a specific beauty in the temporal order, so that those things which die or cease to be what they were, do not defile or disturb the measure, form, or order of the created universe. A well-prepared speech is beautiful even though all its syllables and sounds pass in succession as if they are born to die." So, death is baked into the universe--for non-humans, at least. But he also says elsewhere that “man has a unique penalty as well: he is also punished by the death of the body. God had indeed threatened man with death as penalty if he should sin.” (Augustine. Enchiridion, VIII.25.) Thus, human death was not built into the universe, not willed by God from the beginning, but is only a result of sin.
But, the possibility of death was willed by God, as the penalty for or consequence of disobedience. The human soul is not immortal on its own, but only with the help of God. Thus, the very nature of the human soul is to die without God, though God, of course, wills that humans live. “The reason for the prohibition was to show that the rational soul is not in its own power but ought to be subject to God, and must guard the order of its salvation by obedience, or by disobedience be corrupted. Hence God called the tree which he had forbidden to be touched the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, because anyone who had touched it contrary to the prohibition would discover the penalty of sin, and so would be able to distinguish between the good of obedience and the evil of disobedience” (Augustine. The Nature of the Good, XXXV).
David Bentley Hart’s lecture on the unnaturalness of death is a beautiful struggle with these ideas. See: (Hart, David B. “Death, Sacrifice and Resurrection.”)
Christ is said to have the keys to Death and Hades (Rev. 1:17-18), having defeated Satan who previously had power over death (Heb. 2:14-15).
An excellent example of how theology can't just be read off from scripture in a straightforward way. In my view, scripture flat out contradicts itself on the issue of death. Yet, this is no problem, for scripture is not necessarily inspired as a theological textbook, but as a text forcing us to grapple with these ideas, reconciling what at first appears contrary, or being drawn to insight by what is truly contrary. Scripture may be inspired in very complex, subtle ways.
For an overview of the “Principle of Proliferation,” see The Great Chain of Being by Lovejoy, pg. 64-65.
This is exactly what Origen taught, in On First Principles. Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, entertains the same idea (Book. XI, Ch. 9). Many Christians were likewise excited by the post-Copernican expansion of the universe beyond our solar system, and saw in it the confirmation of theism. For a God of infinite love, goodness, creativity, power and perfection would not merely create a finite cosmos, but many, perhaps infinite. This tradition stretches from Plato through Christianity. For a wonderful overview, see: (Lovejoy, Arthur. The Great Chain of Being.)