Faced with evil, from one excess to another

Feb 18, 2023

The recent deadly earthquake in Turkey and Syria has cruelly raised the question of evil: how can a benevolent God allow such things?

The massive earthquake that rattled Turkey and Syria left a toll that is very high. More than 21,000 dead as I write these lines. That is just a provisional figure, to which we must also add thousands of injured and homeless people who must face the harshness of the climate.

As always in the face of such tragedies, the question of evil, or the excess of evil, is raised. The experience of evil and the goodness of an “all-powerful” God seem to be mutually exclusive, even to the point of questioning divine existence itself.

If creation is truly good, why does it cause desolation and death? If God exists, why does He not prevent evil from entering creation? Whatever answers we might give to these questions, evil, whether suffered or committed, will always remain an enigma.

Evil is always already there. Its origin is elusive. It has an unfathomable anteriority. It is therefore useless to look for an explanation for its origin. On the other hand, what we have to do is engage our freedom to face this evil, as best we can. Evil then becomes what we fight against, and we turn to the future for our hopes.

In the words of Paul Beauchamp, a Jesuit biblical scholar: “It is excess that is at the origin; it is the excess of good that alone can overcome the excess of evil”. An excess of good to which everyone can contribute, in his or her own way, by showing solidarity with the victims. -- LCI

(Dominique Greiner, a moral theologian and Assumptionist priest, is a senior editor at La Croix.)