The problem of Evil and Providence in the Book of Job : Aquinas's critical interpretation of Maimonides
(2012)
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Details
- Authors
- Supervisors
- Counet, Jean-Michel
- Abstract
- (en) Our field of study is centered on evil and providence especially in the Book of Job, a book argued to be the locus classicus of the problem of evil—in a world that is said to be under the providence of a divine Creator. While Maimonides would follow an allegorical, esoteric interpretation of the Book of Job, Aquinas’s more scientific approach would be based on a literal sense of the Scripture. The first thing that will be done by Maimonides, is to try to divest the Scripture of its anthropomorphic language presenting God as possessing of attributes of existence, power, knowledge, life, will, attributes which nourish the false image of God and the false idea of providence among the masses. Consequently Maimonides rejects any affirmative human discourse about God. By the theory of analogy, Thomas Aquinas on the contrary makes possible a human discourse about God that Maimonides refuses. This permits the human language to express positively what it knows of God. Maimonides argues that divine providence and perfect happiness depend on the intellectual perfection of each human being and not on moral righteousness. This theory of providence as consequent upon the intellect is based on the metaphysics of emanation which produces the Active Intellect that controls the world of generation and corruption. Whoever is not intelligent suffers evil that is consequent upon the privation or absence of providence. Job, a rich man was never said to be intelligent nor wise at the beginning of the story. He was attached to the imagination and to matter, which prevented him from accessing the providential overflow coming from the Agent Intellect. Aquinas replaces the theory of emanation which produces the Agent Intellect, by creation understood as productio totius esse and insists that the Agent Intellect is found in each individual person. He rejects that providence may be the function of any intellect. On the contrary, providence is the divine plan which governs, preserves and orders all things to their end. Against Maimonides for whom suffering is evil and the result of the absence of providence, Aquinas interprets suffering as a positive tool in the plan of divine providence. God permits the sufferings of Job so that his virtue might become clear. To understand suffering as punishment and well being as blessing of God signifies that the ultimate end of man is in the possession of material goods, but this is not correct. However, the ultimate end of man is in the other worldly life. Job in his sufferings, believed already on this eternal reward in union with God. Evil is not consequent upon the absence of providence but rather, a privation of the good that ought to be in a subject. Finally, Aquinas argues against Maimonides, that ultimate happiness does not depend on intellectual perfection but on the action of God. Each rational creature has a naturale desiderium to see God that the lack of intellectual perfection cannot prevent from being realized. For the realization of this ultimate happiness, God becomes the forma intellectus of the created intellect such that it becomes elevated to the intellectual vision of the divine essence. It is this vision that Job and others less intelligent as him, finally possess in the interpretation of Thomas Aquinas.
- Affiliations
Citations
Anyaegbu, M. (2012). The problem of Evil and Providence in the Book of Job : Aquinas’s critical interpretation of Maimonides. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/161943