TWENTIETH LECTURE
Let me now consider the line of what is bad in human actions eternally known by God. We must therefore examine the metaphysical problem of evil.
First, Evil is neither an essence nor a form nor an act of being, evil is an absence of being; it is not a mere negation, but a privation: the privation of the good that should be in a thing. This privation exists really in things. The evil which is a fault is a greater evil than the one which consists in suffering.
Second. The cause of evil is not any efficiency whatsoever of evil as such, because evil is no being, therefdore no cause. In the case of the evil in action, the cause of this evil is another evil or privation existing in something good, that is to say, some defect of the agent, which agent itself is good in so far as it is a being.
In the case of the evil in beings, or in agents, the cause of this evil is, generally speaking, and to the extent that natural agents are considered, something good operating by accident beyond its own direct finality; in other terms, this cause is the opposition between material natures, the good proper to the one and toward which alone it tends by itself, being thus linked to the evil or privation of another.
Third. Now what is the cause of evil, in the case of the evil in voluntary and free actions? This evil proceeds from a defect in the active power, that is to say, in the will. And this defect in the will must be a voluntary and free defect, since it is the evil of a free ction which proceeds from it. But this voluntary and free defect in the will cannot be itself an evil -- that would be a vicious circle. This voluntary and free defect in the will is not a privation, but a mere negation: the mere absence of consideratioin of the rule -- which becomes an evil only at the very moment when the act of will is produced with such a defect.
Here again we have the metaphysical root of evil in human actions: a mere negation, a non-being, freely introduced by man in the dynamism of his will, -- not by any act whatsoever, but by a non-act, by the free non-consideration of the rule. What we must conceive here is a merely negative initiative of human freedom, which, so to say, freely "nihilates". Of this "nihilation" human freedom has the first initiative, it is first cause in the order of the nothingness which is the root of the evil in action.
With regard to divine influence, we can say that without it man can do nothing, but that without it man is able to do nothingness. Nothingness is theonly thing which we can do without God. God is not cause of evil. And therefore there is an exception -- the only exception -- to the principle that God knows only that which He wills and causes. God knows evil of free actions, and He neither wills nor causes it.