Reconsidering the Problem of Evil: The International Context of the Early Modern Discussion1

1. The research of this essay was supported in the last several years by a sabbatical leave grant of Niagara County Community College and several short-term postdoctoral fellowships including an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellowship of the Huntington Library, a Lewis Walpole Library fellowship of Yale University, a William Andrews Clark Library fellowship of UCLA, a John D. and Rose H. Jackson fellowship of the Beinecke Library at Yale University, a visiting research fellowship of the Yale Center for British Art, and a Pforzheimer Fellowship of the Harry Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas at Austin. For the crucial support of all these institutions and the involved librarians and staff members I would like to express my sincere gratitude.

Abstract

The problem of evil has recently gained renewed attention. As before, what is so mind-boggling is not just the horrific aggression of man against man but the fact of offenders not easily being demonized into new versions of Iago or Macbeth. Somehow, what Hannah Arendt terms “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” has to be dealt with, but the very effort to do so can be problematic if the idea of original sin is somehow resurrected. To examine the issue beyond the conventional framework of Christian-Platonism, it is important to remember the wider international context of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when the matter first came up for discussion and when the philosophical and religious ideas received from the Far East provided for it a provocatively different frame of reference.

Notes

1. The research of this essay was supported in the last several years by a sabbatical leave grant of Niagara County Community College and several short-term postdoctoral fellowships including an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellowship of the Huntington Library, a Lewis Walpole Library fellowship of Yale University, a William Andrews Clark Library fellowship of UCLA, a John D. and Rose H. Jackson fellowship of the Beinecke Library at Yale University, a visiting research fellowship of the Yale Center for British Art, and a Pforzheimer Fellowship of the Harry Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas at Austin. For the crucial support of all these institutions and the involved librarians and staff members I would like to express my sincere gratitude.

2. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, rev. and enl. edn (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), 287.

3. Ibid., 252.

4. Maria Pia Lara, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Maria Pia Lara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 14.

5. Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 52.

6. Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, trans. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1965), 169.

7. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1993), Bk 1.26.

8. Robert Merrihew Adams, “Must God Create the Best?” in God and the Problem of Evil, ed. William L. Rowe (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 25.

9. Alvin Plantinge, “The Free Will Defense,” in God and the Problem of Evil, ed. Rowe, 110.

10. Immanuel Kant, “On the Failure of All Theodicies,” in Michel Despland, Kant on History and Religion: With a Translation of Kant's “On the Failure of All Attempted Philosophical Theodicies” (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1973), 283–97, 292.

11. Job 23:13, 23:14, New King James Version.

12. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 147, 149.

13. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 208, 167.

14. Lionel Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 34. Jensen may object to any implication of calculation in the accommodation policy of Ricci. Ricci had a compelling personality and the Chinese, as Jensen points out, embraced him and many of the other early Jesuit missionaries “as fellow Chinese” (145). However, it is important to bear in mind that Ricci did not go to China to become a Chinese, and even though he did very much assimilate himself to the Chinese culture, he still had a job to do and he always remembered that.

15. David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner Verlag, 1985), 18.

16. Matteo Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583–1610, trans. Louis J. Gallagher, S. J. (New York: Random House, 1953), 93.

17. John S. Gregory, The West and China since 1500 (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 38.

18. Domingo Navarrete, The Travels and Controversies of Friar Domingo Navarrete, 1618–1686, ed. J. S. Cummins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), II.146, 176.

19. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, in Brutus, On the Nature of the Gods, On Divination, On Duty, trans. Hubert M. Poteat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 226.

20. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin's Press, 1965), 29.

21. Fung Yu-Lan, “A General Statement on Neo-Confucianism,” in Chu Hsi and Neo-Confucianism, ed. Wing-tsit Chan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), 23.

22. Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, trans. and comp. Wing-Tsit Chan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 3.

23. Yuen-ting Lai, “The Linking of Spinoza to Chinese Thought by Bayle and Malebranche,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (1985): 151–78, 154.

24. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “New System of Nature and of the Communication of Substances, as Well as of the Union of Soul and Body,” in Leibniz: Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1951), 114.

25. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, trans. E. M. Huggard (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1952), 155.

26. Arnold H. Rowbotham, “The Impact of Confucianism on Seventeenth-Century Europe,” The Far Eastern Quarterly 4 (1944–45): 224–42, 235.

27. He is known to have read Navarrete, and in his 1616 essay “Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese,” he left a long and clear record of his close readings of Longobardi, a dissident Jesuit, whose posthumously published anti-Ricci treatise Traite sur quelques pointes de la religion des Chinois was the primary source of Navarrete's anti-Jesuit information.

28. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), II.498.

29. Earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), I.240, 328, 331.

30. K. Claire Pace, “‘Strong Contraries … Happy Discord’: Some Eighteenth-Century Discussions,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 40 (1979): 141–55, 155.

31. Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. James P. Pettegrove (New York: Gordian Press, 1953), 159–60.

32. Shaftesbury, “The Moralists,” in Characteristics, ed. Robertson, II.106.

33. Sir William Temple, “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or, of Gardening,” in The Works of Sir William Temple (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), III.238.

34. Shaftesbury, “The Moralists,” II.125.

35. Colin Mackerras, “Introduction,” in Sinophiles and Sinophobes: Western Views of China, ed. Colin Mackerras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xxvi.

36. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), No. 22, 79–80, No. 10, 55, and No. 12, 58.

37. Ibid., No. 65, 220, 221, 221, 220, 221.

38. Ibid., “Preface,” 4.

39. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 60.

40. Lord Byron, Manfred, in Byron's Poetry, ed. Frank D. McDonnell (New York: Norton, 1978), I.ii, 40–1.

41. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 57.

42. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 21.

43. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or, on Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 250.

44. Kant, Critique of Judgment, No. 60, 201.

45. Ibid., No. 29, 114.

46. Richard J. Bernstein, “Radical Evil: Kant at War with Himself,” in Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 57.

47. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 4.

48. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 4.

49. Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” and “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History,” in Kant's Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 54 and 226, respectively.