The Problem of Evil: a New Study

John Hick, lecturer in the philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, has written one of the most serious and important studies of the problem of evil to appear in English for a long time. I t is a work both of historical interpretation and of systematic construction. While it is, under both aspects, not wholly invulnerable (what effort at reconciling evil and God ever is?), it is argued with such unusual persuasiveness and verve that it will force any serious reader to examine more critically his own theodicy touching the problem of evil. Prof. Hick suggests that the efforts of Christian thinkers to deal with the problem of evil and its origin can be categorized generically as Augustinian or Irenaean. He examines the former view in three main streams of tradition: (1) the Catholic one, as exemplified in Augustine himself, Hugh of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, and in a modern Thomist, Charles Journet; (2) the Calvinist tradition (Calvin and Karl Barth) ; (3) eighteenth-century optimism (Archbishop William King and Leibniz). Characteristic of this first effort to reconcile the existence of evil with an infinitely good God are the following points: the goodness of creation as the work of God; the privative character of evil; the origin of. sin and other evils in the free choice of angels and men constituted in an initial condition of innocence and perfection; the permission of evil by God with a view to effecting greater good; the principle of plenitude and the aesthetic conception of the perfection of the universe; a final dichotomy between the saved and the damned. Hick sees several valid insights in this Augustinian view and incorporates them into his own synthesis. This is essentially a development of the Irenaean insight, whose most prominent modern representative is Schleiermacher. Its primary features, as they finally appear in Hick's own solution, may be set forth, somewhat baldly, as follows: (1) There was no original state of innocence and perfection; rather man was created as fallen, that is, in a situation of relative autonomy and "epistemic distance" from his Creator such that sin was virtually inevitable. (2) God is ultimately responsible for sin in the sense that "His decision to create the universe was the primary and necessary precondition for the occurrence of evil, all other conditions being contingent upon this, and He took His decision in awareness of all that would flow from it" (p. 326). (3) Evil finds its explanation not in a mythical pri1 EVIL AND THE GOD OF LOVE. By John Hick. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Pp. xii + 404. $6.95. Numbers in parentheses in the text are page references to the work under discussion.