St. Thomas Aquinas on Suffering and Evil | Fr. Thomas Petri, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This lecture was given on March 16, 2022 at the University of South Carolina. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Father Thomas Petri, O.P. is the President of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies, where he also serves as an assistant professor of moral theology and pastoral studies. Ordained a priest in 2009, he holds a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from The Catholic University of America.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute. For more talks like this, visit us at
0:06.1	Tamistic Institute.org. We're going to be talking this evening just on God and suffering,
0:15.8	or St. Thomas's understanding of suffering and evil. How could God allow evil, for instance? The first thing to say
0:23.9	about this is that for St. Thomas, this is not a very vexing question. I mean, for us, moderns,
0:29.5	it's a very difficult question. But for the medieval's, this wasn't that it didn't cause an
0:34.9	existential crisis in their faith, that there was such a thing as suffering
0:38.7	and evil in the world. And while it's addressed in Scripture, you get the sense that the
0:45.8	authors of the human authors, the sacred authors of Scripture didn't find it especially problematic
0:51.5	either. I mean, throughout the Old Testament, for instance, it's just
0:55.4	understood and accepted that God inflicts suffering on people, the Israelites, especially when
1:01.1	they're not faithful to him and when they're in their sin. God answers the Job, who the Bible says
1:09.5	is a righteous man, who suffers greatly.
1:12.5	When Job finally snaps, if you will, and questions God about his suffering,
1:17.8	God's response is, who are you?
1:20.0	Who are you to ask me these questions?
1:21.8	Did you hang the stars in the sky?
1:24.2	Did you put the earth on its billers?
1:27.2	It was simply accepted that somehow
1:29.4	God was involved in suffering, either as a cause of suffering or permitting suffering, or
1:37.1	the good news in Jesus Christ accepting suffering in his own person, in his own humanity.
1:46.3	I tend to think we're more aggravated by the question of suffering and God's role in suffering because in the modern age, we've sort of as
1:55.2	Christians and those who are believers tend to want to keep God innocent of anything that happens bad because he's such a good
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.