ANSELM BY BRIAN LEFTOW
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ก.พ. 2015
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Many thanks, this layman would like to watch again.
Let's imagine I'm heading a location far away by car in winter, and there are two possible roads: one shorter, climbing a mountain, and one longer but safer. The former, the shortest one, might be closed because of severe weather conditions. I don't have informations about it, but of course if it's the case, I'd be forced to take the longer path. Hence IT'S POSSIBLE THAT IS NECESSARY for me to take the long road. But this doesn't imply that I have to take it beforehand. Am I missing something?
Either way, Brian you're a great theologian and an outstanding lecturer!
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great resume
*Is the 'reality' of pain a problem for Augustine's thesis that evil is the absence of good?*
I do not think so. Let us accept that pain is a real real effect and that it is a bad thing. (I don't think it always is bad for us but just that it sometimes it is - and that fact is all that is needed.) Let us also accept that evil is, as Augustine maintained, the absence of good. First of all we must notice that this ontological thesis does not entail that no relevant effects can be had. Darkness is the absence of light but it can still cause our bumping into things.
How? Strictly, what has the effect is not the absence _per se_ but its absence within a context - the fact that something good is incomplete. Darkness is where light isn't. It is the positive fact that light is not where it should (or might otherwise) be that causes us to bump into things. Likewise, take damage to the body, mind or spirit to be the incomplete proper functioning of these things. Then it would be this incompleteness of proper functioning, not mere absence as such, that causes pain.
But isn't incompleteness just absence? No. It is not absence _simpliciter_ but absence _in_ a positive context that demands its presence. If there were no light at all, if light simply did not exist, it would make no sense to talk about darkness. (I don't think the reverse is true.) Likewise, if goodness of the world did not exist (which would mean that the world did not exist, given the thesis that existence is what is good) then it would make no sense to talk of evil. Good and evil are not equal (or even somewhat unequal) positive realities. That is the theology of Star Wars and Harry Potter. The deep asymmetry between them is that goodness can exist independently and evil cannot. Thank goodness!
Alternatively we could just say that pain is just not a bad thing. There would be some justification for this. Pain signals that we need attention - anything from a paracetamol to surgery. If it felt good, we might die too soon - even though from enjoyment. Thus, pain would be construed as a _good_ thing. What would be bad is the _cause_ of pain - the incomplete or corrupted functioning of something good inside us.
IMO, Anselmo sees a problem in the Augustine's thesis of evil as absence of good in what today we call 'natural evil', ie evidently negative happenings not clearly traceable back to human faults or sins, as the pain delivered e.g by sickness or natural disaster. He surely was not challenging the ontological preeminence of good over evil, and It's quite plausible he was well aware that some of the pain and suffering of that sort can enter in the God's plan, potentially producing positive outcomes (similar to a 'necessary evil' or a 'painful therapy'), but that's a different story from acknowledging them as 'absence of good'.
Augustin had copied from Grenada’s library