51. “God allows evil only so as to make something better result from it” (St. Thomas Aquinas).

“God allows evil only so as to make something better result from it” (St. Thomas Aquinas).

YOUCAT Catechism + Catechism of the Catholic Church Lesson 51

Ave Maria series

Divine Providence (continued)

51.  If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, why does he not prevent evil?

“God allows evil only so as to make something better result from it” (St. Thomas Aquinas). 

[309-314, 324]

Photo above: Saint Edith Stein.  Edith and her sister Rosa, born Jewish, converted to the Catholic faith.  They were arrested by the Nazis on August 2, 1942 and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they died in the gas chamber a week later on August 9.  Edith was canonized by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1998. She is one of the six patron saints of Europe, together with St. Benedict of Nursia, Sts. Cyril and Methodius, St. Bridget of Sweden, and St. Catherine of Siena. …..51

Evil in the world is an obscure and painful mystery.  Even the Crucified asked his Father, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).  Much about it is incomprehensible.  One thing, though, we know for sure:  God is 100 percent good.  He can never be the originator of something evil.  God created the world to be good, but it is not yet complete.  In violent upheavals and painful processes it is being shaped and moved toward its final perfection.  That may be a better way to classify what the Church calls physical evil, for example, a birth defect, or a natural catastrophe.  Moral evils, in contrast, come about through the misuse of freedom in the world.  “Hell on earth”—child soldiers, suicide bombings, concentration camps—is usually man-made.  The decisive question is therefore not, “How can anyone believe in a good God when there is so much evil?” but rather, “How could a person with a heart and understanding endure life in this world if God did not exist?”  Christ’s death and Resurrection show us that evil did not have the first word, nor does it have the last.  God made absolute good result from the worst evil.  We believe that in the Last Judgment God will put an end to all injustice.  In the life of the world to come, evil no longer has any place and suffering ends.  40, 286-287

“What did not lie in my plan lay in God’s plan.  And the more often something like this happens to me, the livelier becomes the conviction of my faith that—from God’s perspective—nothing is accidental.  St. Edith Stein (1891-1942)

“God whispers to us in our pleasures; speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”  Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963, English writer, author of The Chronicles of Narnia)

309-314, 324

Providence and the scandal of evil.

309 If God the Father almighty, the Creator of the ordered and good world, cares for all his creatures, why does evil exist? To this question, as pressing as it is unavoidable and as painful as it is mysterious, no quick answer will suffice. Only Christian faith as a whole constitutes the answer to this question: the goodness of creation, the drama of sin and the patient love of God who comes to meet man by his covenants, the redemptive Incarnation of his Son, his gift of the Spirit, his gathering of the Church, the power of the sacraments and his call to a blessed life to which free creatures are invited to consent in advance, but from which, by a terrible mystery, they can also turn away in advance. There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil. –Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition

310 But why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it? With infinite power God could always create something better.( Compare St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I,25,6.)¹⁷⁴ But with infinite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world "in a state of journeying" towards its ultimate perfection. In God's plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection.( Compare St. Thomas Aquinas, SCG III,71.)¹⁷⁵ –CCC

311 Angels and men, as intelligent and free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love. They can therefore go astray. Indeed, they have sinned. Thus has moral evil, incommensurably more harmful than physical evil, entered the world. God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil.( Compare St. Augustine, De libero arbitrio 1,1,2: Patrologia Latina 32,1221-1223; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia I-II,79,1.)¹⁷⁶ He permits it, however, because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it:

For almighty God. . ., because he is supremely good, would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself.( St. Augustine, Enchiridion 3,11: Patrologia Latina 40,236.)¹⁷⁷  –CCC

312 In time we can discover that God in his almighty providence can bring a good from the consequences of an evil, even a moral evil, caused by his creatures: "It was not you", said Joseph to his brothers, "who sent me here, but God. . . You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive."( Genesis 45:8; Gen 50:20; compare Tobit 12:12 (Vulg.).)¹⁷⁸ From the greatest moral evil ever committed - the rejection and murder of God's only Son, caused by the sins of all men - God, by his grace that "abounded all the more", (Compare Romans 5:20.)¹⁷⁹ brought the greatest of goods: the glorification of Christ and our redemption. But for all that, evil never becomes a good. –CCC

313 "We know that in everything God works for good for those who love him."( Romans 8:28.)¹⁸⁰ The constant witness of the saints confirms this truth:

St. Catherine of Siena said to "those who are scandalized and rebel against what happens to them": "Everything comes from love, all is ordained for the salvation of man, God does nothing without this goal in mind."( St. Catherine of Siena, Dialogue On Providence, ch. IV, 138.)¹⁸¹

St. Thomas More, shortly before his martyrdom, consoled his daughter: "Nothing can come but that which God wills. And I make me very sure that whatsoever that be, seem it ever so bad in sight, it shall indeed be the best."( The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elizabeth F. Rogers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), letter 206, lines 661-663.)¹⁸²

Dame Julian of Norwich: "Here I was taught by the grace of God that I should steadfastly keep me in the faith. . . and that at the same time I should take my stand on and earnestly believe in what our Lord shewed in this time - that 'all manner [of] thing shall be well.'"(Julian of Norwich, The Revelations of Divine Love, tr. James Walshe SJ (London: 1961), ch. 32,99-100.)¹⁸³ –CCC

314 We firmly believe that God is master of the world and of its history. But the ways of his providence are often unknown to us. Only at the end, when our partial knowledge ceases, when we see God "face to face",(1 Corinthians 13:12.)¹⁸⁴ will we fully know the ways by which - even through the dramas of evil and sin - God has guided his creation to that definitive sabbath rest(Compare Genesis 2:2.)¹⁸⁵ for which he created heaven and earth. --CCC

IN BRIEF

324 The fact that God permits physical and even moral evil is a mystery that God illuminates by his Son Jesus Christ who died and rose to vanquish evil. Faith gives us the certainty that God would not permit an evil if he did not cause a good to come from that very evil, by ways that we shall fully know only in eternal life. --CCC