Aquinas and Maritain on Evil:
Mystery and Metaphysics
Edited by James G. Hanink
Book Overview
While creatively drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain made the problem of evil a life-long philosophical inquiry. Indeed, Maritain tells us in his God and the Permission of Evil (1966) that "If philosophers lived up to their calling in the new age into which we have entered, the crucial work for them would be to renew the theory of evil . . . By examining it more profoundly."
Exploring the problem of evil, indeed, its profound mystery, comes near the heart of the Christian philosopher’s vocation to seek a fuller understanding of the faith. To join in that endeavor, is to struggle within a constricting web of near paradoxes. That struggle will soon enough put us in mind of Job. With Job we will come to reflect on God’s providence
and the folly of conventional "wisdom." The contributors to this volume offer reflections that probe the experience of both good and evil and try to understand something of their nature. In doing so they search out the origin of the evil that we ourselves bring about and from which we all suffer.
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Contents
James G. Hanink, “To Renew the Theory of Evil”
Federico Tedesco, “TheParadoxes of Evil as the Rationis Exodus in Deum”
John J. Conley, S.J., “Job, Our Contemporary”
Mary Catherine Sommers “Topsy-Turvy: The Problem of Providence in Aquinas's Commentary on Job”
James V. Schall, S.J., “How Evil is Evil? How Good is Good?”
Siobhan Nash-Marshall, “Evil, Pain, and the Problem of Properties”
Jonathan J. Sanford, “On Vice and Free Choice”
John F.X. Knasas, “Maritain and the Cry of Rachel”
Laura L. Garcia, “Does Maritain Solve the Problem of Evil?”
Steven A. Long, “God, Freedom, and the Permission of Evil”
Bernadette E. O'Connor, “Insufficient Ado about the Human Capacity for Nothing, Too Much Ado about the Human Capacity for Being, and Maritain's Dissymmetry Solution”
Michael D. Torre, “The Grace of God and the Sin of Man: The Drama of Man Before God”
Nikolaj Zunic, “The Measure of Morality”
Eric Manchester, “Creation and the Probability (But Not Necessity) of Evil”
Bryan R. Cross, “Aquinas on the Original Harmonies and the Problem of Evil”
John F. Morris, “Why Must We Not Do Evil?: Avoiding vs. Allowing Evil and the Principle of Double Effect”
Denis A. Scrandis, “How Maritain's Choice of Evil Forms the Moral Object”
Andrew Jaspers, “The Evil of Lying: ACase in Thomistic Realism”
Robert Vigliotti, “The Anti-Humanism of Technological Humanism”