Aquinas and the Cry of Rachel: Thomistic Reflections on the Problem of Evil by John F. X. Knasas (review)

Professor John F. X. Knasas (University of St. Thomas, Houston), known as an “existential Thomist” for his emphasis on Aquinas’s metaphysics of being, has taken on one of the most hotly debated topics in philosophy of religion: the problem of evil. In Aquinas and the Cry of Rachel: Thomistic Reflections on the Problem of Evil, Knasas does not shy away from addressing the “hard cases.” Along the way, he considers an impressive array of alternative positions, which makes sense since one of Knasas’s aims is to argue that there are several philosophically viable answers to how God and evil can coexist. Knasas also unfolds an innovative, metaphysically grounded philosophical psychology that helps explain why our prima facie intuitions about certain instantiations of being, their inherent preciousness, and evil are often incorrect, or at least philosophically unprovable. Finally, Knasas has clearly done his textual homework; in the course of the monograph, he probes myriad texts from Thomas on evil, most of which he translated by himself (often with additional references to other translations and related debates). There is a fluidity between Knasas’s interpretive and constructive projects that might present an obstacle to some interested readers. Even so, Knasas’s work is valuable well beyond the Thomistic discussion, due to its treatment of so many key alternative accounts, as well as the challenges he poses to them.

Chapter 1 sets up the work via a discussion of Jacques Maritain’s insistence that human persons are irreplaceable “wholes” unto themselves. Although this sentiment is widespread and plays an important role in the literature on evil, Knasas argues over the course of the book that the truth of this idea can only be known theologically (viz., via special revelation). In a purely philosophical context, even a theistic one, we can at most verify that human beings are “principal parts” of the universe. For Knasas, this means that other parts of the universe are generally, but not exclusively, oriented toward the good of such higher parts and that human beings have special obligations to each other on account of their status. Philosophy cannot prove, however, that human persons are ends in themselves whose individual flourishing God can never override for the sake of another individual, the species, or the universe more broadly.

As Knasas moves into his initial exposition of Aquinas on the metaphysics of being, human psychology, and evil in chapters 2–4, he draws on the psychology of three paradigmatic reactions to evil noted in chapter 1: Rachel’s inconsolable cry for her dead children (Matt 2:16); the retreat of the survivors to small, earthly joys in Albert Camus’s The Plague; and the insistence on fatherly love in Anthony Flew’s “Theology and Falsification.” Knasas holds that these responses to evil, while certainly understandable psychologically, are limited in their ability to raise philosophical doubts about the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good creator God. “[T]he problem of evil,” Knasas says, “is generated by an inappropriate aggrandizement of persons and other things” (16).

Knasas’s philosophical psychology draws on the metaphysics of being so prominent in this and his other works. The crux is this: Human persons are not just beings—potential forms endowed with existence. They are also “intellectors of being,” which renders them special “epiphanies” of being, and thus also of the good. In virtue of their ability to appreciate existence itself, the whole of created being, and its Source, human beings have a privileged status before God and moral obligations to their fellow intellectors.

At the same time, Knasas argues, human persons are not philosophically quite as important as is often assumed, and the process of discerning being can play tricks on the human mind. Mentally taking in existents that lie at spatial, temporal, or conceptual extremes—a vast ocean view, a single atom, a fast...