Early Modern Women and the Problem of Evil

Atrocity & Theodicy

Jill Graper Hernandez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317307327
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Early Modern Women and the Problem of Evil examines the concept of theodicy—the attempt to reconcile divine perfection with the existence of evil—through the lens of early modern female scholars. This timely volume knits together the perennial problem of defining evil with current scholarly interest in women's roles in the evolution of religious philosophy. Accessible for those without a background in philosophy or theology, Jill Graper Hernandez's text will be of interest to upper-level undergraduates as well as graduate students and researchers.

1 THE ATROCITY PARADIGM AND CONTEMPORARY THEODICY

DOI: 10.4324/9781315650548-1

The traditional problem of evil says that the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good God is inconsistent with the presence of evil in the world. A perfect creative being would know how (and would have the abilities) to prevent systematic and pernicious harms. Just over three hundred years ago, G.W. Leibniz’s Theodicy became the most significant philosophical monograph devoted to the problem of evil. Since that time, theodicy—a demonstration of whether divine perfection is consistent with evil in the world—has faced significant obstacles. Contemporary atheists forcefully argue that theodicy is a doomed project because it justifies God’s role in undeserved suffering by relying on a concept of ‘evil’ which is too abstract and removed from human agency and brings about atrocious, foreseeable harm.¹ Even recent theists have agreed that traditional theodicy may not be sufficient to account for egregious, historically situated evils.² Fueling this worry from atrocity paradigm scholars is that since the Theodicy, men almost exclusively have been taken seriously as leading contributors to the philosophical project of theodicy, despite the fact that several female contemporaries of Leibniz made noteworthy strides in philosophy of religion, often writing in the guise of political treatises or novels which emphasized civil rights. This book answers the call for philosophers of religion to address whether theodicy can adequately account for concrete moral evils and the suffering of the powerless, meets a need for a comprehensive analysis of the contributions made by female scholars in the early modern period as serious philosophers of religion, and argues these women support the goal of traditional theodicy although they each offer examples of suffering that today would be ultimately rooted in the atrocity paradigm of contemporary atheists.

Can Traditional Theodicy Account for Atrocious Harm?

Theist Marilyn McCord Adams calls these “horrendous evils”, atheist Claudia Card calls them “atrocious harms”, but both agree at least that the category refers to evils as a genre that are culpable, preventable, create intolerable harm, and threaten the great good of someone’s life.³ Such evils must be distinguished from merely concrete instances of evil. The atrocity paradigm scholar does not worry that theodicy does not tell me why I suffer uniquely, nor is she concerned with my problem of feeling separate from God. Instead, the worry is over a certain genre or class of evil.⁴ Atrocious evils are “reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms produced (maintained, supported, tolerated, and so on) by culpable wrongdoing” (Card 2002, 3). Atrocious evils are distinguishable by the pernicious harm caused by the atrocious act, rather than any evil motive of the agent, since the atrocity paradigm focuses on disclosing the vitriol of the evil act rather than blaming persons. Atrocious evils are also avoidable and inexcusable (though they need not be extraordinary). It is not necessary for murder (as an example) to be an atrocious evil, but genocide always is because it results from a system of evil which perpetuates lasting, denigrating harm.⁵

The atrocity paradigm, then, zeroes in on a class of evil. For the atrocity paradigm, what distinguishes evils from lesser wrongs is harm, so the focus of the model is to eradicate systemic evil practices and institutions (Card 2010, 5). That class includes things like racial cleansing, rape, genocide, bombings of children, and hate crimes. What makes a class of harms ‘systemic’ or ‘institutional’ is that the rules that define the power structure foreseeably result in intolerable harms when normally or correctly applied (Card 2009, 214). What makes a systemic harm ‘intolerable’ is that they deprive a person from what is basically and ordinarily necessary to make “a life tolerable and decent (or to make a death decent)” (Card 2002, 16). They are “intolerable” not in the sense that individuals cannot in fact tolerate them but rather that a good life cannot include them so that a victim of an intolerable harm is deprived of something typically needed to make an experience “decent”. The atrocity paradigm atheist’s problem with theodicy is that as a class, these atrocities present a particular difficulty for any defense of a perfect God, since as a system they could and should be eradicated—mere humans are morally culpable when we have the ability to eradicate them and do not. Theodicies suffer for their insufficient accounting for God’s omniqualities against pernicious harms as a class, since an all-good God would want to prevent atrocious evils, an all-knowing God would be able to see when and where they might occur, and an all-powerful God would be able to thwart those actions he sees and wants to prevent.

The atrocity paradigm specifically calls out theodicy as a failed project because it cannot speak to those who truly suffer from (especially) atrocious harms, nor from the perspective of those who suffer, since historically, the authors of theodicy were largely writing from positions of social and epistemic privilege. “[Our] concern is more basic than the classic theological conundrum of how a world that contains evils could have been created by a benevolent Supreme Being. Our concern is with certain logically more fundamental questions of philosophical ethics: What distinguishes evils from lesser wrongs? What kinds of evils are there and how are they related to each other? What responses to evils are honorable?” (Card 2010, 4).

Though the atrocity paradigm moves past the theological worry of whether this is the best of all possible worlds (since it dispenses with the notion of God altogether), theodicy has been firmly situated as a debate between theist apologists and atheist detractors at least since the time at which Leibniz posited that this is the best of all possible worlds. Recently, however, some theists have agreed with atrocity paradigm atheists that traditional theodicy (i.e., whether evil in the world is logically consistent with a perfect God) may not be sufficient to account for systemic, historically situated evils. One theistic response to this difficulty is to distinguish between abstract and concrete senses of evil, and then to provide corresponding theodical arguments for each.⁶

Leibniz’s theodicy seems particularly susceptible to the atrocious harm worry, given that many atheists historically have rejected Leibnizian theodicy particularly for its perceived inability to respond to concrete evil.⁷ It is not a secret, for example, that Voltaire’s Candide was written in part to ridicule the suspected insensitivity of Leibniz’s Theodicy in light of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. To date, however, Leibniz scholars have not addressed the specific worry about how it is that concrete evil could be accounted for by a Leibnizian theodicy—although some point out that Leibniz’s work is not entirely disconnected from actual pain and suffering in the world since he uses examples such as famine, disease, and death while defending God’s goodness in the world.⁸ If Leibniz’s theodical ambitions (and those of traditional theodicy that take Leibniz’s lead) fail to extend to concrete cases, when particular evils call out for justification, the Leibnizian rejoinders could be either that we cannot know that God does not already limit evil⁹ (he writes, “Therefore it is sufficient to have confidence that God does everything for the best and that nothing can harm those who love him. But to know in detail the reason that could have moved him to choose this order of the universe—to allow sins, to dispense his saving grace in a certain way—surpasses the power of a finite mind, especially when it has not yet attained the enjoyment of the vision of God”¹⁰), or that, any individual harms are outweighed by a collective good within the best of all possible worlds.¹¹ (Leibniz notes at T169 f/189, “It is not strictly true (though it appears plausible) that the benefits God imparts to the creatures who are capable of felicity tend solely to their happiness …. The felicity of all rational creatures is one of the aims he has in view; but it is not his whole aim, nor even his final aim. Therefore it happens that the unhappiness of some of these creatures may come about by concomitance, and as a result of other greater goods.”) But, each response has a difficulty: either the necessary connections between good and evil stay on an abstract plane and theodicy appears to lack contact with real evils, or theodicy hedges closer to detailing likely explanations of individual evils, in which case, some say, it descends into farce.¹²

It may be possible, however, to retain Leibniz’s commitment to the best of all possible worlds and to integrate concerns about concrete evil without having to capitulate to the “farce” of explaining every individual instance of suffering. Theodicy could disregard concrete, particular evil—so, worries about my insecurities, disappointments, and inconveniences—and focus on concrete, atrocious evil.¹³ Particular harms are “evils in the amounts and of the kinds and with the distributions of the sort found in the actual world”.¹⁴ Atrocious harms are distinguishable from particular harms on the basis of whether the systemic denigration and intolerable harm stems from a human institution that is perpetuated and maintained culpably (Card 2002, 102). Differentiating between concrete, particular and concrete, atrocious evils is subtle, but important. The former rejects theodicy because God does not prevent suffering for any one person, and the latter represents the atheist’s worry that theodicy cannot explain an entire genre of harms against humanity. Traditional theodicy—whose strongest early expression is Leibniz’s Theodicy—so far has largely focused on justifying each instance of evil with an instance of good. But, this focus limits theodicy’s ability to engage in dialogue with atrocity paradigm atheists, since the atrocity paradigm already asserts that atrocious harms are preventable and gratuitous (so, outside of the ability to be trumped by some later good). Theodicy could treat atrocious harms as the atheist does—as a class—and then could provide reasons for how and why that class of evil is accounted for within a creation of an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient God who would want to prevent atrocious evils, would be able to see when they might occur, and would be able to thwart those actions.

Rather than assess the merits of the contemporary distinction between abstract and concrete evil, we can use it to revisit Leibnizian theodicy to answer, first, whether there is textual support in Theodicy for the distinction, and second, if traditional theodicy like Leibniz’s can justify divine perfection in the face of atrocious harms. It will be difficult to justify the category of ‘atrocious harms’ directly from Leibniz’s text, but I will argue that there is just enough space created by it that others (such as Astell, Macaulay, and Hays) can fully address atrocious harms while also producing theodical arguments. Delineating between concrete, particular and concrete, atrocious harms has several benefits for theodicy. It creates the possibility for theodicy to rigorously (rather than incidentally) engage with concrete evil—and so proponents of theodicy can duck the atheist’s contention that their arguments fail to engage with the lived experience of suffering. My distinction also removes the burden from traditional theodicy to demonstrate that, for each person who suffers, evil contributes to the good whole of the individual’s life, since the concrete evils that are explainable by theodicy are a genre, rather than an instance.¹⁵ Finally, it preserves the uniformly theistic view that the goodness of God extends to the particular, relative to the whole—a result which continues to prove the relevance of theodicy to contemporary philosophy. I will conclude this chapter with a reimagined picture of the actual world—a world in which a system of transmuted goods is created by God for humans to alter the consequences of the atrocious harm they perpetuate. I will then later show that such a picture is supported by scholarship of women in the early modern period, and that transmuted goods can properly address the system of atrocity provided by contemporary atheists.

What to Do with the Concrete?

Atrocity paradigm scholars fault theodicy’s effort to justify God’s role in undeserved suffering because the problem of evil does not, as a metaphysical exercise, require the concept of ‘evil’, since the very notion of God creating an imperfect world suffices to “cast major aspersions on the character of the supreme being” (Card 2002, 13). Theists who remove the power of evil from the concrete in order to salvage the idea of evil as a logically possible concept want both to remove God from culpable wrongdoing and also to contend that God foresees suffering and does not want suffering to occur. Maria Pia Lara writes:

Attempts to justify the existence of both evil and God were not seen as addressing theoretical or moral problems, but rather as a religious burden to explain why suffering is possible if God exists. Thus, philosophies of religion and their theodicies were failed attempts to anthropomorphize nature and God, without really confronting why evil seems to be a definite part of human nature, and why it is necessary for us to take this reflexive step if we are to find a way of accepting human weakness, our dark side, or as Martha Nussbaum would say, our own ‘fragility’.

(Lara 2001, 1–2)

Theodicy which evaluates only the logical compatibility of divine existence with an abstract evil misses just what it means to suffer, and what it means for an individual to feel as though God has abandoned her in her suffering. Some theists would agree. Marilyn Adams (1999, 3) notes, “[Christian theism’s] propensity for generic solutions—our search for a single explanation that would cover all evils at once—has permitted us to ignore the worst evils in particular and so to avoid confronting the problems they pose.” Adams’s worry hints at the fact that theodicy faces the practical difficulty of effectively communicating that a perfect God exists in spite of the significance and felt impact of evil, but it also suggests a stronger philosophical difficulty. In the very least, a theodicy which takes heinous evils to be merely possible ignores that pernicious harms seem to be preventable.¹⁶ (Mere humans, after all, use their considerable abilities to prevent more grotesque harms from occurring every day.)

Card does not regard the enduring interest in theodicy as stemming from a true theological difficulty that must be solved, but from a human moral fault that seeks to place blame elsewhere, and this fault results in “truly gross defects that produce intolerable harms” (Card 2002, 13). A purely abstract conception of evil fails to capture that evil is “a higher order moral concept … [that] presupposes culpable wrongdoing in a moral agent as the source of the harm it does or risks” (2002, 12). Tying ‘evil’ to God removes it from human agency and culpability and leads to a rhetoric in which the oppressed are told to value suffering. Theists, particularly, must shoulder blame for (on one hand) arguing that God is neither complicit with nor culpable for atrocities in the world, and (on the other) encouraging those who are oppressed to turn the other cheek.¹⁷ Those who suffer are told that through one’s personal ‘struggle’ with evil, an individual can “prove one’s moral mettle and worth”.¹⁸ But if evil is instead tied to concrete, systemic expressions of moral evil—those thick instances of evil, ‘institutions of evil’—atrocity paradigm scholars argue the philosopher’s focus can be on preventing atrocities and holding human agents responsible for them. On their view, placing the blame for evil on a non-existent God undermines our human ability within comm...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Atrocity Paradigm and Contemporary Theodicy
• 2 Concrete Evil and Atrocious Harms
• 3 Theodicy, Narratives, and Standpoint
• 4 Theodicy of Early Modern Women
• 5 Challenges for Theodicy from Atrocity
• Bibliography
• Index