By Michael Stoeber

Theodicies are structures of philosophy that try and rationalize the life of evil in a God-centred international. they don't regularly take note of the responses to evil via mystics, those that declare that fact should be attained through religious in addition to via highbrow event. Michael Stoeber analyses the contribution that mystical suggestion makes to setting up a competent theodicy. one of the authors whose works he discusses are Dostoevsky, Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume, Kant, Meister Eckhart and Evelyn Underhill.

The challenge of evil is given a good non secular rationalization simply via arguing that evil is critical in enjoyable a few divine telos or function. however the most sensible non-mystical teleological responses own critical defects, problems that are conquer in theology that proposes a magical telos. This teleology consists of facts which justifies theodicy, in addition to a robust pastoral thrust. additionally, it explains the impulse to evil in human typical by way of a divine theogonic procedure which distances God from evil and debts for evils which don't serve the magical telos in the course of the doctrine of soul-making rebirth. Stoeber holds that mystical theodicy offers a coherent and cogent reaction to the matter of evil.

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Extra info for Evil and the Mystics’ God: Towards a Mystical Theodicy

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Thus Dostoevsky, through Ivan, gives a subtle counter-example to those who criticise the freedom that free-will theodicy entails. To deny the freedom in the manner of the Grand Inquisitor is to eliminate the dignity and the lovability of the individual person. Like Ivan, the Inquisitor loves humanity but not the person; his concern is to control and manipulate in order to secure against the unjustified suffering of the many that Christian freedom entails. In contrast, love of the person requires respect for his or her individual dignity which in turn rests on their autonomy.

Moral and physical evils arise in part from the metaphysical, which is the limitations or natural imperfections of creatures. Evil does not have substantive form but is the privation of the good in both human beings and the natural world. In the context of Leibniz's notion of physical evil we can draw out a conception of natural evil. These are evils in the natural world quite distinct from those that occur in human action. Justification of these evils is possible in the view that they arise in the ideal conditions or imperfections necessary to the overall plan of God.

P. 138:25) Freedom, considered necessary in this best of all possible worlds, gives rise to the many terrible evils that human beings encounter. God cannot be responsible for these evils; freedom places the direct responsibility of moral evil upon the creature. Though God allows sin, He is not the doer - He commits no moral improprieties that would contradict His goodness. Further, He could have created a world where there is no human freedom, and consequently no moral evil, but such would not have been the best possible world to manifest and communicate His attributes.

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