Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

EVIL: QUESTIONING AND CHALLENGING THEOLOGY AGAIN AND AGAIN 109dialogue used to be the enlightened unbeliever, the partner indialogue of any contemporary theology is suffering man whohas concrete experience of the persisting situation of disasterand is therefore conscious of the weakness and finiteness ofhuman existence.” 38The treatise, De malo, belonged to the classical tracts ofneo-scholastic teaching in the first half of the twentieth century.This treatise was a largely abstract philosophical one. However,the Second World War and the revelations of the atrocious evilsymbolized by the name “Auschwitz” have caused a radicalquestioning of these classical scholastic treatises in which evilwas understood primarily as the absence of a good that shouldbe and therefore as something which in itself does not exist assuch. 39 After Auschwitz, such an explanation of evil was itselfinterpreted as a kind of theological banalization. It seemed toconstitute nothing but feeble, undue abstraction in the face of aglobal “administrative massacre.” That massacre and so manyothers could not be considered simply as the absence or lack ofsomething, but instead required recognition as an atrociousreality. Protestant theologian Dorothee Sölle straightforwardlybranded this simple, traditional discourse on evil as “theologicalsadism.” 40Such verdicts, coupled with the observation we havealready seen from Elie Wiesel that it is no longer possible to dotheology after Auschwitz, have had their effect. In the immediate“post-Auschwitz” period, theology tended either not explicitlyto confront the problem of evil or to restrict its discourse tohighlighting the limits of any theological thinking on evil. Insuch a way, theology wanted to guard against any purely theoreticalor abstract treatment of the subject insofar as such treatmentsare never adequate to the challenge of evil, and serveonly to underline theology’s seeming impotence. 4138Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ (New York: Crossroad, 1984),160.39“Privatio debitae perfectionis.” Thomas Aquinas, De malo, I, 1-3. Seealso Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q 48 ad 1. See also note 5 above.40Dorothee Sölle, Suffering, trans. Everett Kalin (Philadelphia:Fortress Press, 1975), 22-28.41Such positions are investigated and discussed with expertise by