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CHAPTER FOUR THE PROBLEM OF EVIL Upon completing his account of God as Goodness, Beauty, and Love, Dionysius immediately raises the inevitable question: “If the Beautiful and Good is beloved and desired and cherished by all things . . . how does the multitude of demons not desire the Beautiful and Good . . . and, in general, what is evil, and whence does it originate, and in which of beings is it?” (DN IV.18, 716A ). As is well known, the ensuing discussion of evil draws very extensively on Proclus’ treatise On the Subsistence of Evils,1 although Dionysius does not follow Proclus’ account without alteration.2 His own position is that evil is not a positive attribute of any being, but rather a deficiency of goodness , and hence of being, in a thing which to some extent is and is good. This position aligns Dionysius with other Christian thinkers such as Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas. But the very familiarity of this “privation theory of evil,” especially in its Augustinian and Thomist versions , may tend to obscure its full meaning and depth. A careful philosophical consideration of this doctrine in its Dionysian form reveals that the identification of evil as non-being is not a shallow “cosmic optimism,” an absurd denial of the obvious fact of evil in the world,3 but a profound and compelling theory which is more philosophically satisfying than many other accounts of evil. The doctrine of evil as privation of being follows as a necessary consequence from the production of all things by God. If absolutely all that is, with no exception whatsoever, is made to be by God, the Good, then evil cannot be included within the whole of reality as anything that is at all. But the derivation of all reality from a God who is Goodness itself is not a philosophically unjustified article of faith, which could easily be falsified by the evident presence of evil in the world. It is rather, as we have seen, a philosophical consequence of the intelligibility of being: since being is intelligible , therefore it has the Good beyond being as its first principle, and every being is a different manifestation of goodness. The traditional claim that 53 54 THEOPHANY “every being, insofar as it is a being, is good”4 is virtually a restatement of the law that to be is to be intelligible, for the intelligibility of anything consists in its goodness. That which is altogether devoid of goodness has no intelligibility , no unity, no identity, and hence is not anything at all. Nothing can be and be evil, insofar as it is. A wholly evil being is a contradiction in terms, for it would be a wholly unintelligible being, and so not a being. It is from these fundamental considerations that the Neoplatonic doctrine of evil as deficiency is developed. The foundations for the privation theory of evil are established in Plotinus. As is well known, Plotinus identifies evil with the matter which underlies sensible things (e.g. I.8.5.8–10). But this matter, for Plotinus, is not a positive metaphysical component of sensible things that is other than form. Rather, since to be is to be intelligible, only form is, and sensible things are not, strictly speaking, composites of matter and form but rather lesser, “dimmer ” forms.5 In opposition to Aristotle, therefore, Plotinus understands matter, insofar as it is not form, as privation (see e.g. II.4.16), the ontological deficiency of sensibles in relation to purely intelligible realities. Matter, or evil, then, is the partial non-being which belongs to sensible things in that they are not reality itself but images or appearances (see, e.g. II.4.16.3–5). For Plotinus, therefore, matter is identified with evil not as anything which is, an evil being, but rather precisely and only as non-being, as the deficiency of being which constitutes sensibles as sensibles rather than pure forms (see esp. II.4.12.1–7). Hence matter or evil, considered by itself in abstraction from any and all form, is non-being. “But when something is absolutely deficient— and this is matter—this is essential evil without any share in good. For matter has not even being—if it had it would by this means have a share in good; when we say it ‘is’ we are just using the same word for two different things, and the true way of speaking is to say it ‘is not’ ” (I...

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