“Evil is revealed to us in the world at first under the aspect of suffering and sorrow. The world is empty, cold, and indifferent (cf. ‘the indifferent nature’ in Pushkin). It is a non-responding wasteland. We all suffer because of evil. Evil, sown everywhere in the world, causes us to suffer. And the contemplation of this universal suffering brings us sometimes to the brink of despair. Universal suffering was not discovered for the first time by Schopenhauer. It had already been attested to by St. Paul (Rom. 8:20-22), who gives us a very clear explication: evil is introduced in the creature by sin. All creation suffers. There is a cosmic suffering. The entire world is poisoned by evil and malevolent energies, and the entire world suffers because of it.
The intricate problem of Theodicy was first inspired by these facts of suffering. It was one of the primary questions of Dostoevsky. The world is hard, cruel, and pitiless. And the world is terrible and frightening: terror antiquus. There is chaos in the world; there are subterranean storms, an elemental disorder. Man feels himself frail and lost in this inhospitable world. But evil encounters us not only externally, in an exterior milieu, but also internally, in our own existence. We also are sick – we ourselves – and we suffer because of it. Again there is an unexpected discovery – not only do we suffer from evil, but we do evil. And sometimes one is delighted with evil and unhappiness. One is sometimes enraptured by the Fleurs du mal. One sometimes dreams of an “ideal of Sodom.” The abyss – it has a sinister appeal. Sometimes one loves ambiguous choices. One can be enchanted by them. It is easier to do evil than to do good. Everyone can discover in himself this “subterranean” darkness, the subconscious full of malignant seeds, full of cruelty and deceit. Alas – the analyses of Dostoevsky (and of many others) are not morbid dreams of a pessimist who looks at life through a black glass. It is a truthful revelation of the sad reality of our existential situation. One could find the same revelations in the ancient teachers of Christian spirituality. There is a delirium, a spiritual fever, a libido at the core of ‘this world,’ at the core of our existence.”
