Evil became a "problem of theory" for the first time, we learn, in the later tiffany earrings of the seventeenth century, and it complicated the production of theodicies. John Milbank maintains, in his Theology and Social Theory, that religion is not basically theodicy. The big dictionaries say that a theodicy is "a vindication of the divine attributes, especially justice and holiness, in respect to the existence of evil: a doctrine or theory intended to justify the ways of God to men." Milton's Paradise Lost and Newman's A Grammar of Assent are formidable instances of the genre. Milbank writes:
The notion [that religion is basically theodicy] is itself derived from the intellectual history of the West, where, from the late seventeenth century onwards, the word "God" came to denote merely an ultimate causal hypothesis, rather than the eminent origin and precontainment of all created perfection. A first cause conceived on the model of efficient causality, or the instantiation of logical possibility (Leibniz), was not, like the medieval God, good by definition. Instead, his goodness had to be "demonstrated" in terms of the necessity of local imperfections for the most perfect harmony of the whole.
In the Middle Ages, as Kenneth Surin has shown in his Theology and the Problem of Evil (1986), suffering and evil "were regarded as negative or predatory in relation to Being and therefore as a problem only 'solvable' in practice." Milbank has cheap tiffany the evidence further:
Where evil was seen as the manifest upshot of a perverse will (it being presumed that without free assent there could be no perfect goodness in creatures) and suffering as the sign of the deep-seated effect of such perversity, there was no real problem of evil, and so no science of "theodicy." In the seventeenth century, by contrast, attributions of evil to the effects of the fall of demonic powers and of humanity went into decline, and thus tiffany jewellery was approximated to the theoretically observable fact of imperfection, to be rationally accounted for.
Hence the eighteenth-century distinctions between metaphysical evil, natural evil, and moral evil. Metaphysical evil is to have a wrong sense of the world, and to live its consequences. Natural evil is floods, earthquakes, disease, suffering, and other catastrophes. Moral evil is the bad things that particular individuals do. Hence, too, Kant's definition of the good as a man's submission to the rule of the moral law: it follows that evil is a man's submission of the rule of the moral law to his inclinations. A man is good if he takes the moral law into his life as his governing principle, evil if he derogates from that principle. To the Enlightenment, evil is yet another fact to be accounted for. We are children of the Enlightenment when we ask: Can an evil deed be accounted for by appeal to the evildoer's early life, his social environment, original sin, or other causes? Or is the evil deed ultimately opaque, beyond cause?
