Evil becomes a `problem' philosophically and/or theologically when the world is seen as the creation of a superior being who is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good. When one perceives the pervasiveness of evil around us, and at times even within us, such a view prompts one to ask, `why'. The popularity of the work of Harold S. Kushnor, Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? suggests the dilemma in which people find themselves as they ponder the apparent incongruity embedded in the above view. Even allowing for a certain unwarranted and naive arrogance on the part of such `good' people--who apparently have not seriously understood the stories of Job and the Galilean--it does seem that reconciling the picture of an all-knowing, all-powerful and good God with, say, the Holocaust demands a `leap of faith' not easily come by for a faithless generation.

For Thomas Aquinas this latter conviction may be presumed, based on his own deep spirituality. However, such an appeal to the conclusions of his Christian faith was not the answer he allowed himself in his difficult situation at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century. For he had been called upon by its Chancellor, Bishop Aimeric de Veire, to confront head-on the subversive effects of the Averroist Aristotelian, Siger of Brabant, the recognized master in the University's Faculty of Arts.

In a certain sense Aquinas was ill-prepared for this task. Although he had studied Aristotle with St. Albert the Great, what he had been taught about the ethical writings of the Stagirite is at best problematic. First of all, only fragments of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics were circulating in the first half of the thirteenth century and their translation into Latin was only in an incipient stage. Moreover, commentaries on Aristotle's works used by the masters in the Faculty of Arts were viewed as tainted with Averroism by Thomas's peers in the Faculty of Theology. To compound the problem, it is almost certain that Aquinas did not know Greek; hence, he had to rely on translations made by others, principally by the Dominican, William of Moerbeke, Archbishop of Corinth.

All of this notwithstanding, Thomas had to get on with the arduous task assigned him. He had to reconcile a questionable Aristotle dressed in Arab garb with a Christian theology of creation, human freedom, immortality of the soul, and God. Quite often the pieces of the `picture' he had to work with simply did not fit. The creativity of his work stands precisely in its integration of these many pieces, creating thereby a new base line for Dante and other key figures of the Renaissance and for the modern age to follow.

For Thomas, reason, was not an abstract faculty operating on its own. Rather, it was substantially wedded to the senses and the will in the lives of human persons and their actions. To this corresponded a special sensitivity not merely to essences or possibilities, but to the actual exercise and unfolding of being, that is, to the existential order. In understanding the nature of evil as it plays itself out in the drama of human history, this existential awareness contrasts to that of another great medieval philosopher, Duns Scotus. Whereas Scotus' thought turned to a world of "what might have been" had man and woman not sinned, for Aquinas the existential fact is the "happy fault" of original sin. Throughout his philosophical investigations Thomas is ever cognizant of this reality of sin and redemption.

Nevertheless, he remains intent on not allowing this to intrude into processes of human intellection which constitute his philosophical reasoning. Divine revelation serves rather in a twofold manner: as a negative force it restrains one from embracing error, and as a positive force it acts as a stimulus or catalyst in suggesting new avenues for human exploration. In the matter of moral evil human reason has two specific functions: as regulator/ruler of human passions and habits, and as regulated/ruled by divine law ascertainable by human reason through reasoning based on a careful probing of the universe around and within us.

To understand Aquinas' ground breaking work on the perennial problematic of moral evil it is necessary to situate it within the context of his entire system. This makes it possible to see his thought as more than an apologetic "theodicy" in the sense of Leibniz. Rather, his deep grappling with the human situation in confronting evil. Required a crucial advance in metaphysics as a foundational contribution to ethics and eventually to social philosophy. Tracing Thomas' work on the cause of moral evil to its foundations is the purpose of this study.

The problem of evil has always arrested the attention of the greatest minds. For many it has proved an insurmountable obstacle to the acceptance of a purposeful universe, an Infinite Good, or a meaning for life. Often it proved to be a scandal leading the human mind into paths of agnosticism, nihilism and despair. Thomas recognized the stupendous "mystery of iniquity" infesting a fallen world and did not presume to explain away the problem thus created. Still his principles afford an explanation of the problem, and help render the mystery of evil intellectually bearable. He accomplished this by not treating the problem in isolation, but by viewing its mysterious and vexing character against the background of his metaphysics on goodness and finality. It is the good that provides a quasi-justification of evil. Aquinas never assigns a final cause as such to evil; evil always will be willed or permitted in terms of the good itself. Only thus can its undesirable and destructive character really be appreciated.

Such an approach to the problem and mystery of evil saves one from dangerous extremes. It keeps one from hypostatizing evil in any Manichaean sense. It prevents evil from rendering being and life an absurdity after the manner of much contemporary thought. Finally, it precludes any escape into unrealism by a denial of the concrete character of evil which would assign pain and evil to a purely mental realm, where as a figment of the imagination it could be talked or thought out of existence.

Instead, Thomas' integration of the nature and causality of evil into the more general framework of being and the good provides a realistic approach for his metaphysics of moral evil. This places evil in the context of a purposeful and intelligible universe, whose principle of integration and order is the good itself. It neither relegates evil to the world of makebelieve nor does it fashion it into a world of its own. Rather, it faces squarely its continuing threat to meaning, purpose and happiness in an otherwise intelligible universe, and assigns it its rightful place in the potency of being itself.

The purpose of the present work is to investigate Thomas' philosophy on the nature of moral evil, the most destructive of all evils, and to do so in terms of its ultimate cause in the will of the free creature. The direct or primary concern here is not with a psychological explanation of the will's causality of evil action, but rather to establish the metaphysical roots of moral evil, as evidenced in the defective will. The digressions into the ethical area are intended to be not ex professo treatments of ethical or moral problems, but necessary adjuncts to any thorough investigation of the will as a cause of moral evil. Hence the direct work of this study concerns the cause of moral evil in terms of the voluntary non-consideration of the rules of reason and divine law. This will require an investigation of the intellectual and volitional causes involved.

Finally, although it might be said that the tradition of classical, systematic and holistic analysis and/or commentary on the Thomistic corpus ended sometime in the mid-sixties of this century, valuable insights into certain specifics of his thought may be found in subsequent works. It has been deemed appropriate selectively to integrate some of these more recent studies into the bibliography where they promises to enrich the integral understanding of Thomas' synthesis.

Edward Cook