Two quotes concerning being and evil.

The school year has begun. Not only does this mean I am attending classes again, but it also means that I am around a handful of peers of similar interest. I let my roommate borrow David Bentley Hart's The Doors of the Sea over Christmas break. To my satisfaction, he loved it just as much as I did. His recent reading of the text made discussion of the it inevitable. I flipped through the book to read him my favorite quote. It reads as such:

We are inclined (especially today) to think of freedom wholly in arbitrary or pathetic volition, a potency made actual every time one choose a particular course of action out from a variety of other possibilities... A higher understanding of human freedom, however, is inseparable from a definition of human nature. To be free is to be able to flourish as the kind of being one is, and so to attain the ontological good toward which one's nature is oriented; freedom is the unhindered realization of a complex nature in its proper end (natural and supernatural), and this is consummate liberty and happiness. (70-71)

Returning to this quote months after reading the book brought to mind another quote that I read last quarter. It comes from St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica and in fact, part of it I drew from to form my blog address. It's utterly fantastic and relates to the same topics, which isn't surprising considering the amount of knowledge Hart controls concerning Aquinas in his excellent The Experience of God. Aquinas says that "No being is said to be evil, considered as being, but only so far as it lacks being. Thus a man is said to be evil because he lacks the being of virtue; and an eye is said to be evil because it lacks the power to see well."

I've been reflecting on these two quotes the best few days and haven't come up with any conclusive argument between the two. But it seems obvious to me that the two are interconnected and touching on the same topic in a similar manner. As I dig more into Aquinas and his ideas concerning God and metaphysics this quarter, I hope that a connection starts to form. I post these two quotes here as a mere reference for myself. Hopefully I will return and use them in a paper of sorts.

This idea of evil – not having substance of its own – is, of course, the traditional Christian perspective. What I am interested in unpacking further is the idea of having more being equating with more freedom. So the maximal Being (if we can crudely call God that, though there are some perhaps some linguistic problems to address here) would also have maximal freedom. This is Hart's perspective, and certain holds true for those in the Classical Theistic / Thomistic camp, as opposed to the Theistic Personalism (to use Brian Davies apt term) of philosophers such as Plantinga, Swinburne, etc.

Reading List.

Before I started doing regular blog posts, I thought I would post a general reading list of the texts I'll be reading this quarter. Some of the books, such as Bernard Lonergan's Method in Theology and Samuel Wells' Improvisation will be referenced for their author's techniques in doing philosophy and theology, rather than the actual philosophical "content" of said works. These are works that I won't be trying to finish, but more of what I try to reference when discussing methods of thinking. For that reason I note them here. Several of these books will be read in whole, while others will be used for selected chapters and essays in within.

In my free time I hope to dig into the works of David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox philosopher and theologian who has been an interest of mine for about a year now. It is likely that a post or two will be dedicated to his works. If you are interested, feel free to read any of his books along with me. A few friends are reading The Experience of God with me, which is essentially a work of comparative religion. Hart attempts to articulate a metaphysics (being), philosophy of mind / phenomenology (consciousness), and beauty / goodness (bliss) that captures the "God" that the great theistic traditions speak of when they talk about God. Personally, I highly recommend his small book The Doors of the Sea, which is easily the most helpful book I've ever read concerning the problem of evil, suffering, and theodicy.

• The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart.
• In The Aftermath By David Bentley Hart.
• The Devil and Pierre Gernet by David Bentley Hart.
• Letters to a Doubting Thomas By C. Stephen Layman.
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
• Tolstoy by A.N. Wilson.
• Is There a God? by Richard Swineburg.
• Faith and Rationality, a collection of essays, edited by Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff.
• The Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius.
• God and Other Minds by Alvin Plantinga.
• An Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas by Thomas Aquinas.
• Method in Theology by Bernard Lonergan.
• Improvisation by Samuel Wells.
• What Episcopalians Believe by Samuel Wells.
• The Mission & Death of Jesus in Islam & Christianity by Mathias Zahniser.

And of course, this blog wouldn't really be mine without guest appearances of Kierkegaard, Hauerwas, and Simone Weil.