Aquinas on Evil

This paper explores the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas on the concept of evil. It will focus almost exclusively on his own writings, rather than on commentaries by others, and will trace how his concept of evil is related to other important concepts in his philosophical system.

Aquinas's concept of evil, like his entire philosophical system, already stood at the end of a long and profound philosophical tradition composed of several strands. The Christian strand led directly back to St. Augustine and then back to the Church Fathers and heresiologists of the second and third centuries. One pagan strand led back through the Neoplatonists to the writings of Plato himself, and the other pagan strand, newly restored to European awareness by the impact of Moslem scholarship, led back to Aristotle. It is not easy nor particularly useful to attempt to systematically distinguish these strands within Aquinas's writings. However, it is intellectually clear that they existed, and it is occasionally obvious which one Aquinas is dealing with because of some internal reference or allusion in his writing.

In dealing with the concept of evil, Aquinas naturally had to build upon the thought of St. Augustine, who established the theological position on evil which has been central to all Christian theology (except for that of recent Fundamentalists, who will be mentioned later) for the last 1500 years. Augustine's thoughts on evil were shaped by the fact that he began his adult religious l

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h his emphasis on the reality of the physical world, was far more compatible with the original Jewish theology of Christianity than Plato had ever been. He therefore took on the task of translating all of Christian theology from its Platonic version into Aristotle's terms, and succeeded in doing so. It has been remarked that he therefore made the rise of modern science possible, since he made the study of physical reality intellectually respectable. It seems useful to use Gilby's excellent organization of key theological texts from Aquinas as the skeleton structure for this discussion. He begins with the following sequence of texts. Origen taught that human souls and angels are of the same species. He wished to avoid the ancient heresy of explaining diversity by the dualism of good and evil [this is probably a reference to some Gnostic sect, since Origen seems not to have dealt with the Manichaeans in his writings]. Free will, he thought, was the cause. God made rational creatures at the beginning all equal and the same; then afterward some progressed in the stages of life by adhering to God, while others fell away . . . (Disputations, de Anima, 7; Gilby 84). As will appear later, this concept of free will is central to

Category: Philosophy - A