Out of evil comes greater good

By Fr. Vincent Hawkswell

God is all-good and all-powerful. "There is no god besides You, Lord, Whose care is for all people," we hear in the First Reading this Sunday. "Although You are sovereign in strength, You judge with mildness, and with great forbearance You govern us; for You have power to act whenever You choose."

Now come the questions. 1) If God is all-good, why does His world contain evil? In the Gospel Reading, Jesus explains that God sowed only "good seed" in the world, "but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat." 2) If God is all-powerful, why does He not destroy His enemy and undo His enemy's work? Jesus explains that the weeds cannot be uprooted without damaging the wheat. 3) Is God, then (in the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church), "incapable of stopping evil"?

There is no quick answer to this "pressing," "unavoidable," "painful," and "mysterious" question, says the Catechism. The only answer is "the Christian faith as a whole." In fact, "there is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil."

Let us summarize this message. God established Adam and Eve in friendship and familiarity with Himself. In this relationship He invited them to share in His divine life through knowledge and love, and they accepted all good things as free gifts from Him.

However, as soon as a created being becomes conscious of God as God and of itself as self, it faces "the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre," Christian writer C.S. Lewis notes. As a matter of history, Adam and Eve chose themselves: "over and against God," as the Catechism says, against the requirements of their creaturely status and therefore against their own good.

Sin of pride

What motivated them? Behind their disobedient choice, the Catechism says, lurked a "seductive voice, opposed to God": the voice of Satan. Satan seduced Eve by telling her that if she and Adam ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they would be "like gods who know what is good and what is bad."

St. Augustine describes this as an instigation to pride, or self-assertion. God had given Adam and Eve the whole world and had planned to make them divine, like Himself, but they wanted all this without Him, before Him, and not in accordance with Him.

"As a young man wants a regular allowance from his father which he can count on as his own, so they desired to be on their own, to take care for their own future, to plan for pleasure and security," Lewis says. They wanted something "from which, no doubt, they would pay a reasonable tribute to God in the way of time, attention, and love," but which would be theirs, not His.

This sin, the sin of pride, "is the fall in every individual life, and in each day of each individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins," Lewis says. At this moment "you and I are either committing it, or about to commit it, or repenting it," whether we are babies, children, or adults; educated or ignorant; social or solitary. For example, we try, when we wake, to offer the new day to God, but almost immediately it becomes our day and God's share in it becomes a deduction from our time.

Like all choices, Adam and Eve's choice had consequences. Because their choice was contrary to their nature as created beings, the consequences were evil: notably suffering and death. Because Adam and Eve were our first parents and the world's first stewards, this evil affects all of us and the whole of the world.

Evil the soil for good

Why did God allow the original sin? The answer is that He had given Adam and Eve free will, which was necessary for them to relate to Him in love, but which necessarily entailed the possibility of their rejecting Him.

Why did God allow the consequences of their rejection? Presumably He could have simply erased them, but then He would have had to do the same for the next sin, and the next, forever. That would mean taking away our free will, for if He corrected every wrong choice, we would not have any real choice at all.

The fact that God permitted (and permits) sin and its consequences does not imply in any way that He was the author of evil, or that He could not do anything about it, or that it took Him by surprise and spoiled His plan. God saw (or, better, "sees") the whole of history in the very act of creation.

That history includes original sin, but it also includes our salvation, for even when we disobeyed God and lost His friendship, He did not abandon us. First, He sent His Son to redeem us and reopen heaven to us. Then He and His Son sent Their Spirit, Who "helps us in our weakness" and "intercedes" for us "according to the will of God," as we hear in the Second Reading.

Thus, as St. Leo the Great said, God's "inexpressible grace gave us blessings better than those the demon's envy had taken away." In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, "God permits evil in order to draw forth some greater good."

In God's plan for our fallen world He does not need to uproot evil because, "mysteriously," He uses it for good. As J.R.R. Tolkien said in a letter to his son Christopher in 1944, "Evil labours with vast power and perpetual success - in vain; preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in."