9. All that is, is good
9. ALL THAT IS, IS GOOD
If God made all things, did He make bad things too?
Every being that is not God, is God’s creature. Now every creature of God is good (1 Tim 4:4), and God is the greatest good, therefore every being is good. . . . No being can be spoken of as evil . . . as being, but only insofar as it lacks being. Thus a man is said to be evil because he lacks some virtue, and an eye is said to be evil because it lacks the power to see well (I,5,3).
St. Thomas was once invited to a dinner with King Louis and his court. The absent-minded professor did not join the conversation at the meal but was thinking through some theological problem. Suddenly he banged his fist on the table and muttered, “That will settle the Manichees!” The court held their breaths at this absent-minded breach of etiquette in front of the king, but the wise king called for his secretary to write down St. Thomas’ argument before he forgot it. What was the argument? It was probably the very quotation above. Manicheeism claimed that since there were good things and bad things, there were two gods: the good one made good things and the bad one made bad things, which the Manichees identified with material things.
St. Augustine was held back from Christianity, and suckered into Manicheeism, for years by the problem of evil. He wondered: If God is the maker of all things, mustn’t He be the maker of ill things? Why did the good God make evil? Why did God create mosquitoes and volcanoes and hemorrhoids? Then one day he realized that he did not need another, evil God to make these things, as the Manichees said, but that these things are not evil.
Augustine said, “I sought for the cause of evil, but I sought in an evil way.” He was looking everywhere else but in the mirror. Evil is in our sins, which come from us, not in our being, which comes from God. We love to blame matter, or our bodies, or others, or “society”, or our parents, or chance, or evolution, or genetics, or our ancestors, or the Devil, or even God, for the evil in our lives. But God is all-good, so we can’t blame God; and all that God made is good, so we can’t blame any of that. God made even the Devil good in the beginning; the Devil corrupted himself by his own rebellion. The devil can only tempt us, not force us. So we are left with nothing to blame but ourselves.
There have always been heresies that blamed evil on matter: Manicheeism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism in ancient times, various “spiritualities” or spiritualisms in ours. These isms are not only an insult to God and His creation, but also a convenient but dishonest excuse for our own sins. “My hormones made me do it” is no better an excuse than “the Devil made me do it.”
When St. Thomas says that “no being can be spoken of as evil . . . as being, but only insofar as it lacks being”, he does not mean that evil is unreal, illusory, or fantasy. Blindness is a real physical evil, but it is not a thing, an entity, a being; it is a defect or lack or privation in a thing: the privation (deprivation) of sight in the thing we call an eye. The eye is good, the blindness is not. The soul is good, the sin is not. God made the eye and its sight but not the sightlessness, the privation of sight; God made the soul and its virtues, and its love (for “God is love”), but not the sins, the vices, the lack of virtue, the lovelessness.
All the being, all the positive “stuff”, is good, for it all came from God before we turned it against Him. God made the metal in the earth that we made into the nails that we hammered into His Son’s hands and feet, and He made the flies that buzzed around His bleeding head on the Cross. And God made our strength of mind and will that we used to command the hands and hammers.
He said, after each day’s work of creation, “It’s good!” Let us dare to agree with Him. Let us love everything He loved into being. All that is, is good; all being is good; being as such is good, ens est bonum. It is better to be than not to be; that’s why God said, “Let there be!” He’s just got this thing about being. We should too!