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Updated: May 31, 2025
In order to render the object of his idolatry more and more RATIONAL, the believer despoils him successively of all the qualities which would make him REAL; and, after marvellous displays of logic and genius, the attributes of the Being par excellence are found to be the same as those of nihility. This evolution is inevitable and fatal: atheism is at the bottom of all theodicy.
This orgie of philosophic thought, identifying error with existence itself, and developing the axiom of Proudhon "Evil is God," will bring back the mass of mankind to the Christian theodicy, which is neither optimist nor pessimist, but simply declares that the felicity which Christianity calls eternal life is accessible to man.
We have honestly endeavoured to construct a Theodicy, or to vindicate the divine glory as manifested in the constitution and government of the moral world. We have endeavoured to reconcile the great fundamental doctrines of God and man with each other, as well as with the eternal principles of truth.
It has prevented a Leibnitz from refuting the sophism of a Bayle, and induced a Kant to declare a theodicy impossible. It has, indeed, as we shall see, crept into and corrupted the whole mass of religious knowledge; converting the radiant and clearly-defined body of truth into a dark, heterogeneous compound of conflicting elements.
Here we at once come to the interesting negative fact that there is nothing in tradition to indicate that Socrates ever occupied himself with theological questions. To be sure, Xenophon has twice put into his mouth a whole theodicy expressing an elaborate teleological view of nature. But that we dare not base anything upon this is now, I think, universally acknowledged.
So this question becomes urgent: Why, the absolute's own total vision of things being so rational, was it necessary to comminute it into all these coexisting inferior fragmentary visions? Leibnitz in his theodicy represents God as limited by an antecedent reason in things which makes certain combinations logically incompatible, certain goods impossible.
The possibility of proving the existence of one omnipotent and all-beneficent God, and the impossibility of refuting the positive dogmas, save the harmony of faith and reason, which Bayle had denied. The conclusion of the New Essays and the opening of the Theodicy are devoted to this theme. The second part gives, also against Bayle, the justification of God in view of the evil in the world.
Secondly, the ancient philosophers laboured under the insuperable disadvantage, that the sublime disclosures of revelation had not been made known to the world. Hence the materials were wanting out of which to construct a Theodicy, or vindication of the perfections of God.
There is no room here for the Job who abhors himself and repents in dust and ashes nor for Plato's One behind the Many; no perceptible room, in such a world, for any of the absolute values, the transcendent interests, the ethics of idealism, any eschatology, or for Christian theodicy.
The riddle of theodicy thus becomes easier, for what surrounds us in nature and history has not come direct from the hand of eternal wisdom, but is in the first place the product of the developing, striving world, which only gradually and after many mistakes and failures works out what is inherent in it as eternal idea and aim.
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