What is Evil? Why Does God Permit It? | Fr. Dominic Legge, OP

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2020

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This lecture was given at Harvard University on November 20, 2019.

For more events and info please visit thomisticinstitute.org/events-1.

Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P., is the Director of the Thomistic Institute and Assistant Professor in Dogmatic Theology at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.L. from the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America, and a doctorate in Sacred Theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He entered the Order of Preachers in 2001, after having practiced constitutional law for several years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has also taught at The Catholic University of America Law School and at Providence College. He is the author of The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I think maybe I'm going to try and be maybe less formal. Is it less formal to sit or more formal? I don't know. Maybe I'll stand and keep my notes on the table. How about that?
0:13.0	The mystery of evil. The problem of evil is one of the great and difficult questions. It's sometimes referred to under the title
0:22.5	of the Mysterium Iniquitatis,
0:25.7	which actually is a scripture quotation from St. Paul
0:27.9	from 2nd Thessalonians chapter 2,
0:30.4	talking about the mysterious workings of the Antichrist in Creation.
0:34.8	So from that, there's been some reflection on the mystery of
0:40.9	iniquity. So to speak about evil as a mystery. Okay, evil is mysterious. But it's mysterious
0:50.3	in a way different from the mysteries of the Christian faith, I would suggest. Why?
0:57.0	Because the mysteries of the faith are mysteries of light. They are things intelligible in themselves, like the triune God or the incarnation of the Word of God, that the Son of God is true God and true man.
1:16.8	These are mysteries that are intelligible in themselves, but that are above us.
1:22.3	And so we can, in some measure, enter into them and understand them in some way, even though we can't
1:30.3	exhaust them, but they're intelligible of themselves. But evil is a mystery that is not
1:37.3	intelligible of itself. It's a dark mystery. We can't get to the bottom of it. We can't offer
1:43.3	a complete explanation for it,
1:45.2	not because it's above us,
1:47.9	but in a certain way because it's below us,
1:51.5	because it's dark of itself.
1:53.4	It's opaque for reasons that I'll explain in a moment,
1:57.2	ultimately because it has to do with non-being,
1:59.9	and only being is intelligible.
2:03.6	Evil is also sometimes posed as an objection to the existence of God, and maybe some of
	...

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.