Theodicy (redirected from Théodicée)

theodicy

Argument for the justification of God, concerned with reconciling God's goodness and justice with the observable facts of evil and suffering in the world. Most such arguments are a necessary component of theism. Under polytheism, the problem is solved by attributing evil to a conflict of wills between deities. The solution is less simple in monotheism, and it can take several forms. In some approaches, the perfect world created by God was spoiled by human disobedience or sin. In others, God withdrew after creating the world, which then fell into decay.

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Theodicy 

“the justification of god,” the common designation for religiophilosophical doctrines that endeavor to reconcile the idea of a “good” and “judicious” divine governance of the world with the presence of universal evil and that endeavor to “justify” this governance in spite of the dark sides of existence. The term was introduced by G. W. von Leibniz in his treatise Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine dumal (1710).

As theodicy developed, it progressively broadened its view of “divine responsibility” for the world’s existence. Thus, in polytheism, in its primitive animistic forms or in Greek and Roman mythology, the existence of many gods limits the personal responsibility of each god, and their constant discord places their common responsibility in the background. Nevertheless, even from such deities one could expect that which is expected of any elder or judge: the just distribution of rewards and punishments.

Therefore, the first and most common form of criticism of divine “governance” of the world is the question. Why are the bad rewarded and the good punished? The most primitive form of theodicy asserts that in the end, the good will be rewarded and the bad will be punished. Further questions arise: When will this “in the end” ever come? Where is the promised retribution, when a good man dies in despair and an evil one dies unpunished?

Viewing retribution from the perspective not of one man’s life but of infinite time, theodicy saw retribution as coming not to an individual but to an entire race, a condition that was considered just from the point of view of patriarchal morality. However, this line of thought ceased to be satisfactory when the idea of personal responsibility triumphed over impersonal clan ties. In eschatological terms, new forms of theodicy looked not to the race’s perpetuity but to the individual’s perpetuity. Such is the teaching of reincarnation in Orphism, in Brahmanism, and in Buddhism, which presuppose a cause and effect relation between the merits and faults of a previous life and the circumstances of the next birth. Such also is the doctrine of retribution after death that is characteristic of the ancient Egyptian religion, of later Judaism, and particularly of Christianity and Islam; it even plays a role in a number of polytheistic beliefs and in Mahayana Buddhism.

In the view of the ancient idealists, the gods were limited in their governance of the world by a prior-existing inert matter, which opposed a constructive force of the spirit and which was responsible for the world’s imperfection. This view, however, was impossible for biblical theism, with its doctrine of the creation of the world from nothing and of the unconditional power of god over his creation: if the all-powerful will of god predetermines all events, including all acts of human choice, then is not every human fault the fault of god? The concept of predestination, as strictly defined by the Jabarites in Islam and by the Calvinists in Christianity, leaves no room for a logically constructed theodicy. Such a theodicy developed from the principle of the freedom of the will; the freedom of god-made angels and people allows for the possibility of moral evil, which in its turn engenders physical evil. This argument formed the basis for Christian theodicy from the time of the writing of the New Testament to as far as 20th-century religious philosophy (for example, that of N. A. Berdiaev).

Less rigorous in its theism is aesthetic cosmological theodicy, which asserts that the isolated deficiencies of the universe planned by god’s artistic judgment fortify the perfection of the whole. This type of theodicy, or “cosmodicy” (the justification of the world), is found in Plotinus but was given its fullest systemati-zation by Leibniz: the best of all possible worlds is a world with the greatest variety of degrees of perfection; god, in his “benevolence” desiring the best world, does not wish evil but permits it, since without the evil the desired variety cannot be achieved.

Theodicy was subjected to the criticism of many modern thinkers. P. Holbach refuted the arguments of theodicy in The System of Nature (1770). Leibniz’ best of all possible worlds was ridiculed by Voltaire in the novel Candide, or Optimism (1759) and the view that an individual’s torment and guilt contributes to the harmony of the world as a whole was rejected by F. M. Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov.

Atheistic world views regard the objective of theodicy, namely, the “justification of god,” as devoid of any meaning.

S. S. AVERINTSEV