Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

EVIL: QUESTIONING AND CHALLENGING THEOLOGY AGAIN AND AGAIN 95a. Malum physicum: Physical evil refers to the evil which,so to speak, is part of the very constitution of the world and ofhuman nature. We encounter it directly as a physical phenomenon,for example, in a storm or hurricane, in an earthquakeand in natural catastrophes of every sort. Such evil alwaysmeets us as an extra-human or super-human power, capable ofdestroying the vital environment of human beings. Weencounter it in the so-called “law of the jungle”, we encounter itin the illnesses that can strike us from one day to the next.Physical evil is always an evil that destroys harmony and equilibriumand causes suffering.b. Malum metaphysicum: This notion, introduced byLeibniz, expresses the finitude of created beings and theabsence of perfection, as well as humanity’s awareness of thatsame perfection. The human being experiences this dimensiondeep within his own existence where it emerges, for instance, infragility, illness and death as a limit on his physical and spiritualpossibilities. This evil intersects with the contingency, therelativity and the limitedness of human existence and with theconsciousness of the consequences that follow from it: uncertaintyof meaning, despair, anguish, and especially death. 2c. Malum morale: Moral evil consists essentially in the disorderof human freedom and will. It is the evil caused freely,consciously and intentionally by man as action or omission. Itis understood theologically as sin.These classical distinctions remain valid even today, yetthey do not capture and express all the complexity of our contemporaryexperience of evil. They are limited, for example, bytheir typical emphasis on human beings as individualsapproaching these dimensions of experience and reflection.2The existential anguish linked to metaphysical evil was described andanalyzed in a relevant way by Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death,trans. Alasdair Hannay (London: Penguin Books, 1989). The notion of“metaphysical evil” is criticized and rejected by some scholars. CharlesJournet characterizes it as “Leibniz’s error”. Charles Journet, The Meaningof Evil (New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1963), 42-43.