Must Job Live Forever?: A Reply to Aquinas on Providence

The Thomist 62 (1998): 1-39 MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER? A REPLY TO AQUINAS ON PROVIDENCE TIMOTHY P. JACKSON Emory University Atlanta, Georgia INTRODUCTION IF GOD IS SO GOOD, why isn't God's creation more so?" This is the problem of evil in nuce, and it trades on the fear that perhaps God is not so good after all-indeed, that God may not exist. To assuage this fear we moderns cast about for either (a) convincing empirical evidence of God's real benevolence or (b) imaginative scenarios in which God and evil are logically compossible. Finding (a) would suggest that we are rationally justified, if not compelled, in believing in God's goodness (a theodicy proper), while finding (b) would suggest that we are not necessarily unjustified in doing so (a more modest defense of religious faith). 1 In contrast to us with our post-Enlightenment concerns, Thomas Aquinas is not centrally occupied with the problem of evil. As we will see, this is true even in Thomas's Expositio super Job ad litteram, the place where theodicy questions would seem most pressing.2 This does not mean that Thomas is oblivious to 1 I take the distinction between a theodicy proper and a defense of faith from Terrence Tilley, The Evils ofTheodicy (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1991), 130-33. 2 As Eleonore Stump has noted, the story of innocent Job, horribly afflicted with undeserved suffering, seems to many people representative of the kind of evil with which any theodicy must come to grips. But Aquinas sees the problem in the book of Job differently. He seems not to recognize that suffering in the world, of the quantity and quality of Job's, calls into question God's goodness, let 1 2 TIMOTHY P. JACKSON the relevant issues, for he is clearly aware of the apparent incompatibility of worldly evils and an all-good God (see STh I, q. 2, a. 3, ad 1).3 But the vector of his commentary runs in the opposite direction from that of most modern theodicists: again, moderns tend to reason from the world even with its palpable evil to a real (or at least possible) God, whereas Thomas tends to reason from a palpable God to a defeated (or at least eschatologically defeasible) evil.4 Just as Thomas is aware of the argument from design in the world to the existence of God (the fifth of the "five ways" in STh I, q. 2, a. 3) yet focuses more on the argument to design from the existence of God,5 so he is aware of the argument from the defeasibility of evil but focuses more on the argument to the defeasibility of evil. One can overdraw the contrast here, but first of all and most of the time Aquinas begins with trust in God's providence and asks what follows with respect to the nature and final disposition of evil. Aquinas's concern is not so much with "intellectual obstacles" to justified belief in God as with practical obstacles to the profitable contemplation of God.6 His primary alone God's existence. Instead Aquinas understands the book as an attempt to come to grips with the nature and operations of divine providence. (Stump, "Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job," inReasonedFaith [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993], 333) 3 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1981); all of my subsequent references to and quotations from the Summa rely on this five-volume edition. 4 I call evil "defeasible" if it can be shown by argument (either a priori or a posteriori) not to underminethe overall goodness of human lives, either individually or collectively. Present-day theists tend to argue from the defeasibility of evil to the (possible) existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God who created and governs those lives (cf. Richard Swinburne); atheists and agnostics tend to argue from the indefeasibility of evil to the (probable) nonexistence of such a God (cf. J. L. Mackie and William Rowe); Aquinas, in contrast, tends to argue from the reality of God's eternal love and providential power to the...