Evil as Privation | Prof. Thomas Ward

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on February 22nd, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies.

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About the Speaker:

Thomas M. Ward is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He specializes in the history of philosophy and theology of the Middle Ages and has contributed over thirty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters to these fields of study. Ward is the author of After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher (Word on Fire, 2024), Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus (Angelico, 2022), Divine Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and has translated, with commentary, John Duns Scotus’s Treatise on the First Principle (Hackett, 2024). He has been a NEH Fellow (2022) and Harvey Fellow (2009-2011), and is a past winner of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy Founder's Award (2013) and the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Rising Scholar Essay Contest (2018). Before taking up his current post at Baylor, Ward taught in California at Azusa Pacific University (2011-2012) and Loyola Marymount University (2012-2017). He studied philosophy at Biola University (BA 2004) and theology at Oxford University (M.Phil 2006), where he was Head Resident at the Kilns, the former residence of C.S. Lewis. His PhD in philosophy is from UCLA (2011). Ward is married with six children and is a member of St. Peter Catholic Student Center in Waco.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:07.0	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.0	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.0	To learn more and to attend these events,
0:21.7	visit us at Thomisticinstitute.org.
0:24.8	So today I want to talk about a major theme
0:29.8	in classical Christian thought.
0:34.1	The idea that evil is not a real thing or a real property of things, but is instead the lack or
0:44.1	privation of goodness. And I say that this is a major theme in classical Christian thought,
0:50.1	because we can find it articulated in many major Christian thinkers.
0:56.9	St. Augustine, probably most famously, St. Thomas Aquinas treats evil this way.
1:04.5	Boethius in his consolation of philosophy has some very poignant words about this view.
1:13.3	So in the material that I'm presenting, we will read just a tiny bit of Botheus and reference St. Thomas Aquinas a little
1:20.7	bit. But I want to make clear that this is a sort of distillation of or a synthesis of material we could find in any number of Christian
1:31.6	thinkers from the deep past.
1:33.2	And when we, by the end, I hope to say something about why the view that we will be presenting
1:44.0	maybe doesn't feel as intuitive to us anymore
1:48.3	as it did to these great thinkers of the past, but suggest that even if it seems startling
1:58.2	or counterintuitive, that there is, in fact, good reason to continue to
2:03.6	believe in our own day as these great thinkers from the past believed that
2:10.6	goodness is the primary thing and evil is only the corruption of goodness.
2:18.1	Okay.
	...

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