Seamus, and me, and evil makes three

So, Seumas Macdonald. He has a newsletter (which are all the rage these days), and in it, he is reading along with James K. A. Smith's On the Road with Saint Augustine. Seamus's April 24 edition quotes Smith quoting Camus and then switches to his own thoughts.

After his talk at the monastery, a priest who was an ex-revolutionary stood during a time of discussion and confronted Camus: “I have found grace, and you, Mr. Camus, I’m telling you in all modesty that you have not.” Olivier Todd, his biographer, recounts: “Camus’s only response was to smile. . . . But he said a little later, ‘I am your Augustine before his conversion. I am debating the problem of evil, and I am not getting past it.’” pp. 178-179

The question of evil is an intractable one. Where does it come from? Why is there evil? I think those are great questions to ask. I also think they are devilishly hard to answer. And I have two comforts in this. Firstly, I do think Christianity provides a better means for wrestling with this question than any other philosophy. Secondly, I think we ought to suspicious of any system of thought that wraps it all up in a nice rational package, ties a bow on top, and says, "there, makes sense, doesn't it?"

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I like Seumas's insight that if we could really solve evil, then it would not be evil at all. As Smith writes, "To make sense of [evil], to have an explanation for it, to be able to identify the cause would mean that it has a place in the world. But then it isn’t evil. Evil is what ought not to be, the disorder of creation, the violation we protest."

This very much reminds me of what I have posted before about what "creation" means. Perhaps these nodes: the incarnation, creation, evil, are the places this drapery of life hangs down from but to which no human beings may climb (save one).

Indeed, speaking as a Christian man, I think that the Bible sets up that problem and does not answer it. Why? Because its answer comes at the end of the story. One knows one is at the end of the story when that question is answered. And one knows who the hero has been all along because only the hero can answer it. Having said this, it puts atheists and self-appointed skeptics to shame because, thinking they have skewered God’s character on a pole, they are simply repeating where we are in the story and claiming they have discovered some secret. It is no secret. It is the plot."