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Baruch Spinoza was one of the seminal thinkers of the Enlightenment. Born into the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1632, Spinoza eventually developed heterodox ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of God. His controversial positions led Amsterdam’s Jewish religious authorities to issue a “herem” against him—a Jewish ecclesiastical censure similar […]
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Paradise Lost is an epic poem written by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608–1674). The poem dramatizes the biblical account of the fall of man, using two narrative arcs: one about Satan, the other about Adam and Eve. The concluding book of Paradise Lost appears below. In it, the Archangel Michael comes to Adam in a
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In the excerpt below from Leviathan, the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) takes up the problem of evil, focusing his attention on the case of Job. Hobbes asserts that, in the Book of Job, the justification for Job’s affliction centers on God’s power. Hobbes uses this interpretation of Job to further his political philosophy
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John Calvin (1509–1564) was a French theologian, ecclesiastical statesman, and leading figure of the Protestant Reformation. His Institutes of the Christian Religion is a manual of Calvinist Protestantism, a movement which has had a major impact on the formation of the modern Western world. The excerpts below address several issues related to the problem of evil,
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Martin Luther (1483–1546), the great intellectual leader of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, viewed human existence as a spiritual battlefield, with each person’s eternal fate hanging in the balance. To properly equip individuals for the spiritual trials they will face, Luther believed that everyone has both a right and a need to direct access to
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Thomas Kempis (1380–1471) was a German-Dutch cannon regular, a category of clerics in the Catholic Church who live together in a vow-based religious community. He is credited with authorship of the devotional manual The Imitation of Christ, which emphasizes the importance of focusing on one’s interior life and maintaining strict dedication to Christ. With his
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In Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich, a 14th century English mystic, describes a series of revelatory visions that she received from Christ after she fell deathly ill at the age of 30. After making a full recovery, Julian wrote down her recollection and interpretation of these “Showings,” which was her original title for the
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First published in 1400, The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories written in Middle English by the famed English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. “The Pardoner’s Tale,” which appears halfway through the collection, is an exemplum, a medieval literary and oratorical form often used in sermons to demonstrate a moral principle. “The Pardoner’s Tale” illustrates the
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Any survey of literature on the problem of evil would be remiss if it neglected to take note of the importance of liturgical writings, many of which have profoundly affected both individual and collective responses to the experience of evil. Dies Irae (“The Day of Wrath”) is a medieval Latin poem typically attributed to Thomas
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Can good be the cause of evil? Can the supreme good, God, be the cause of evil? In the paragraphs below, Thomas Aquinas examines these two facets of the problem of evil, concluding that God is the cause of the just penalty for sin (the ‘evil’ of death), but God is not the cause of
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