Christian Theodicy: A Critique of William Gass’s Anti-Theology

Abstract

This paper presents a justification for a Christian theodicy. It starts by critiquing William H. Gass’s depiction of Christianity as superstitious, ignorant, and evil. It shows that his view is based on a caricature (that is, God as a quasi-gnostic Demiurge) of the Christian understanding of God and evil and totally ignores and misses the contributions of (what I call) the Classical View of theodicy within the Christian intellectual tradition (that is, from Origen to Karl Barth). I also evaluate the underlying nihilism of Gass’s writings as self-refuting and furthermore argue that a Christian theodicy overcomes this nihilism and encourages a “vocation of the good”.

William H. Gass was a philosophy professor, essayist, and novelist from Washington University and is considered to be one of the most influential fictional writers of today. He wrote philosophical essays such as Habitation of the Word (1985), Finding a Form (1996), A Temple of Texts (2006), and Life Sentences (2012), and highly acclaimed “post-modern” fictional works as The Tunnel (1995) and Middle C (2013). He won such awards as the American Book Award (for The Tunnel), The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism (for A Temple of Texts), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and The National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (three times).

This paper presents an approach to a Christian theodicy by critiquing William H. Gass’s dismissal of Christians for trying to offer one. He is wrongheaded about religion, and, though a gifted teacher of philosophy, novelist and essayist, his writing agenda is crosswise to his nihilistic impulses. By showing this inconsistency, I hope to make a persuasive case for a Christian theodicy and for a commitment to promote the goodness of the creation.1

1. Gass on Religion

In 2004, Gass writes an essay titled “Evil” as a book review in Harper’s of Susan Neiman’s well-reasoned book Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Thought (Gass 2006). He praises the book but spends little time reviewing it. Rather, he presents his thoughts about evil. “Evil it seems to me, is a mosaic made of petty little pieces placed in malignant position mostly by circumstance in company with the mediocrity of the bureaucratic mind, and empowered, of course, by a gunslinger’s technology.” (Gass 2006, p. 114) He states that cars and cigarettes in themselves are harmless but can destroy lives. What may seem innocent may in fact be a malicious vice. He claims, “every virtue has seven vices.” (Gass 2006, p. 339) The world, thus, suffers more harmful actions than constructive ones.

This pessimistic realization leads Gass to reject the efforts of religion to explain God’s existence and evil. Religious belief is superstition, offering only deluded answers and hope and, thus, corrupts our lives. “Maybe it is the manufacture of myth and the promotion of superstition [that is, religion] that is evil. I rather like that idea.” (Gass 2006, p. 411) Alongside the malevolent, malicious, and pernicious acts in the world, Gass places religion. He alludes to the religious wars, inquisitions, and hatred, but his disdain and rejection of it are deeper than citing historical problems. He maintains that Christianity per se is evil. Its basic fault is ignorance. In fact, in the book Life Sentence, Gass defines evil as ignorance. He says,

I have taught philosophy, for fifty years—Plato my honey in every one of them—yet many of those years had to pass before I began to realize that evil actually was ignorance—ignorance chosen and cultivated—as he and Socrates had so passionately taught; that most beliefs were bunkum, and that the removal of bad belief was as important to a mind as a cancer’s excision was to the body it imperiled.

(Gass 2012)

Gass means a certain sort of ignorance. A page before the above quote, he says he wrote The Tunnel from a conviction “that no nation or race is worse; that the evil men do every day far outweighs the good [of art and science],” (Gass 2012, p. 50) and for that reason “Skepticism was my rod, my staff, my exercise, and from fixes, my escape. (Gass 2012, p. 51) Christianity’s ignorance is its self-deception about the absence of goodness in reality. Because religion is ignorance, it is not checked or humbled by reality, and consequently, it has forgotten that its doctrines are empty metaphors, thereby it easily promotes delusions and even cruelty towards others.

2. The God Gass Rejects: A Quasi-Gnostic Demiurge

Gass thinks at the root of Christianity lies a pernicious theology, encapsulated in Rousseau’s syllogism—“Then, like a schoolmaster, Rousseau summed the problem in a single sentence. ‘If God exists, he is perfect; if he is perfect, he is wise, powerful, and just; if he is wise and powerful, everything is for the best; if he is just and powerful my soul is immortal.’ This domino-arranged rhetoric made its fall-down easy for Voltaire.” (Gass 2006, p. 406). Voltaire (and Gass) easily refutes the syllogism because it is a reductio-ad-absurdum. That is, if we think God is perfect and makes only perfect worlds, then God’s uses evil for perfect ends or what we think is evil is actually a mistaken definition and not real at all. The contradiction is if something is really evil (i.e., antithetical to what is good), then it cannot be perfected into a good means, but if it can be perfected, then it is in reality not evil, and we would be wrong to call it evil. Either position seems absurd to our natural moral repulsions to humanities’ malicious, destructive actions and propensities.

Gass calls such a view of God a problem, and, indeed, it is a problem for a particular view of God. Gass’s understanding of the problem expressed in Rosseau’s syllogism relies upon a cosmology often linked to Plato. In the Timaeus, the Demiurge is like a benevolent human craftsman who overcomes the resistance of matter to form rational patterns as good as they can be, reflective of the eternal Forms in creation. It produces the ideality of the Ideals in the phenomenal world. According to Francis Cornford, this is the first account in the history of philosophy of a creator.2 The Demiurge makes the world with its changing and recalcitrant materiality metaphysically intelligible by creating immanent standards of the Ideal Forms in the phenomenal world.3 Evil for Plato contradicts the rationality and order of the Demiurge’s work. Since the Demiurge’s work is never irrational or destructive, Plato’s Demiurge does not make or use evil.

However, in Voltaire and Gass’s rejection of the notion a perfect God who creates a perfect world with evil in it, they do assume a certain kind of Demiurge, one closer to certain Gnostics than to Plato. Carl O’Brien has traced the transformation of the understanding of the Demiurge from Plato to the Gnostics (O’Brien 2009). Although Plato uses the notion of the Demiurge elsewhere in his writings (Philebus, the Republic, and the Laws), it does not become a serious part of his legacy until Numenius, a contemporary of Valentinus of the second century, uses it in his cosmology. The Demiurge harmonizes matter to the Ideas but does not know the Ideal realm itself. Consequently, since the Demiurge is closer ontologically to materiality than to the First God who creates the Ideal forms, the world is profoundly capricious. The Demiurge does not make the world rationally intelligible. It just primarily governs it.

In their rejection of the Hebraic idea of God who made the heavens and earth and made them to be good, some Gnostics used the concept of the Demiurge to disassociate the eternal Spirit and the Spiritual Christ from the world’s materiality. However, this use is a break from the concept of the Demiurge in Plato and his follower Numenius (2nd century C. E.). Even though Numenius does not equate the Demiurge with the First Principle of creation, nonetheless, the Demiurge does not create or use evil. But some Gnostics used the concept to explain why they thought the physical realm would be antithetical to the spiritual realm. For instance, Marcion of Sinope (against whom the Bishop of Lyons, Irenaeus, rebuffed) regarded the true God as alien to the world and humanity.4 Theologically, it becomes easy for people who want to maintain a doctrine of creation and redemption from creation to use Marcion’s explanation of the Demiurge to account for how the fate of the world, even though filled with darkness and death, is still within a divine plan. As the architect of the specifics of the world, God makes and uses evil, and as the savior of the world, God liberates our souls from the caprice and temporality of the world. This popular theology obviously contains a contradiction between the idea that God as a Demiurge both creates the world, which contains evil, and also redeems us from it. Hence it is subject to a reductio-ad-absurdum, which is the very criticism Gass makes.

When Gass rejects Christianity as malicious nonsense, he is rejecting a popular theology shaped by a quasi-gnostic explanation of a Demiurge. Such a view should be ridiculed, as Voltaire did in his Candide. Gass then reasons that we have two major concerns—the factual case of evil and its definition. No doubt, evil exists. The real issue is its definition. Religion’s definitions are not only worthless, but they are also harmful. According to Gass, no serious philosopher accepts a theological account of evil. (Gass 2006, p. 408). Gass must mean Rousseau’s picture of God, a transcendent engineer who lords over all. The worship of such a being is idolatrous, and we would better serve our chances in understanding and dealing with evil, if we denied its existence. Moreover, for those that persist in faith, Gass has harsh words—“our present time, when so many of our good citizens go to church in the comfort of their arrogance, their ignorant antique orthodoxies, and with smug fanaticism push the nation and the world toward catastrophe.” (Gass 2006, p. 28)” If we could only expunge religion, we would then eliminate much of what is evil in the world.

Gass is wise enough to admit that, even without religion, we would still have to admit we have created evil, that “lies about man were as prevalent as those about God had been.” (Gass 2006, p. 412) The seeds of evil are buried in humanity’s inherent tendency towards vice. The gloss of virtue actually covers human greed and ignorance. We cannot blame nature or non-existent metaphysical principles. Mindless nature is indifferent to the moral effects of our actions. As conscious beings, we can be perverse and pernicious, and, hence, “that the evil men do every day far outweighs the good.” (Gass 2006, p. 406).

This despairing observation leads Gass to this conclusion—“The question is whether it is better to die of a good life or from a bad one. If we fail (and I wouldn’t bet on our success), there will be one satisfaction: We shall probably be eaten by our own greed, and live only in our ruins, middens, and the fossil record.” (Gass 2006, p. 418) The humanity’s evil deeds eviscerate any hope that we will learn a lesson and stop justifying our vices with religious doctrines and practices. Nihilism is more honest and intelligent that the lies of religion.

Gass gives a similar critique of religion in “Sacred Texts.” He uses Plato’s description of the Demiurge in the Timaeus to account for the origins of sacred texts. The Demiurge creates the world according to the perfections of the eternal forms and establishes the four elements of nature (fire, water, air, and earth) and the rotating planets according to perfect, mathematical ratios. However, the lower parts of the cosmos, consisting of objects that change and disappear, cannot express eternal perfection. Hence, a wide ontological gap exists between eternity and human experience. Into this gap steps what Gass calls the Bards.

They like to scream and bellow, rant, promise, and threaten. Thus, as in past times Plato told it, did sacred books come into being first as the word of God, told and retold, memorized and related syllable by syllable, through generation after generation of prophets, seers, oracles, sibyls, gurus, and rishis, and then set down in various forms of writing, which would be finally gathered, compiled, and anthologized to make the sacred texts.

(Gass 2006, p. 360).5

Priests, scholars, and institutions arise to protect the sacred texts. All of them are “the spin doctors of the sacred, (Gass 2006, p. 367) only promoting their prejudices, greed, and ignorance. Consequently, “Sacred books are as dangerous as snakes, but what makes them particularly poisonous is their sophistical methods of argument, and consequent abandonment of reason, their rejection of testing and debate, and their implicit disparagement of experience, since they, not life as lived, contain all that really needs to be known. (Gass 2006, p. 370) Thus, unsurprisingly, we need to “strip sacred works of their rank.” (Gass 2006, p. 374)

Why does Gass reach such a negative assessment of sacred texts used by religious people? An answer can be seen in his 1957 article, “The Case of the Obliging Stranger.” Because we all know without needing proof that baking an obliging stranger to eat her (and failing at that ask another obliging stranger over for dinner) is morally obviously wrong. Yet, Gass’s main criticism is not against murderous social paths but against “moralist” who think they need to clarify to us why they have answers for such crimes.

Insofar as present moral theories have any relevance to our experience, they are elaborate systems designed to protect the certainty of the moralist’s last-ditch data. Although he may imagine he is gathering his principles from the purest vapors of the mind, the moralist will in fact be prepared to announce as such serenities only those which support his most cherished goods.

(Gass 1957)

The morally obvious is clear, and, thus, we do not need moral oligarchs, and we do not need “sacred texts” to inform us about our obvious moral obligations.

Gass’s disdain towards religion parallels his rejection of moralism. Both are lifeless and dogmatic, imposing creeds, and just as we do not need the moralist, we do not need religion. Recall the quote from Life Sentence, “I began to realize that evil actually was ignorance—ignorance chosen and cultivated.” (Gass 2012, p. 51) Both moralism and religion are evil because they are ignorant. Even though Gass does not specifically name the moralists and the pious, he most likely is thinking of the cruelly judgmental people of society, the self-serving rulers, the despotic tyrants of the world, the many types of malicious misanthropes that dwells among us, and those who use sacred texts to reinforce prejudices and who oppose the dismantling of stultifying and antiquated social customs and morality.

Gass depicts the moralists and pious as negatively as possible, and hence easily condemns them. Of course, we should oppose cruel oligarchical moral dictators. However, this “straw-figure” does not accurately describe the sacred texts of Israel and the Church. The Testaments of the scriptures are filled with lived-experiences, lessons learned and lost, of human failure and accomplishments, of divine revelation within muddled affairs and of disobedience toward it, and of troubling and often compelling mysteries at the heart of the human experience. Indeed, some adherents to these scriptures have assumed what H. Richard Niebuhr depicts as “Christ Over Culture,” but it is a hasty generalization to imply every Christian is an oligarchical moral dictator, who presumptuously claims moral infallibility.

Gass shows a lack of knowledge of the long, deliberate, debated intellectual tradition within Christianity, a tradition that tries to clarify the origins of its scriptures and how to remove personal prejudice and self-aggrandizement from using the sacred texts and who rationally critique the texts so to find what they may say about the eternal. Of course, obscurants’ dwell in Church’s history. However, Gass egregiously commits the fallacy of composition when he implies their presence must define the whole of the Church’s use of its sacred texts.6

Even though Gass has much to teach us about modernity’s cynical appraisal of metanarratives and quixotic messages of salvation, he is wrong about Christianity.

3. The “Classical Christian Tradition”

Nonetheless, Gass is right in one way—it is better to be clear-headed and despairingly see reality and evil for what they are than believe in the God he depicts as myth and superstition. However, the God he rejects, expressed in Rousseau’s dilemma, is not the God depicted in the Classical View of Christian theology. The God of Rousseau’s dilemma is more of a quasi-gnostic Demiurge, of a powerful being objectively distinct and separate from creation, acting upon it, who either uses evil or should have prevented it. Gass is right to say its adherents have unsuccessfully offered defenses for this God. It would be better to deny the existence of such a being. Gass also may be right that no “serious” philosopher advances a quasi-gnostic Demiurge.

However, Gass shows a lack of acquaintance with the long, subtle, and sophisticated discussion of God and evil in the history of Christian theological and philosophical reflection. Within this long discussion, there are various theological-philosophical orientations that try to account not just for how to reconcile the theistic view of God with evil but also how to understand a proper way to live within a world marred by evil. For example, there is the long and compelling Irenaean approach articulated by John Hick in Evil and the God of Love (1966) that runs from Irenaeus through Frederick Schleiemacher to contemporary “soul-making” theodicies such as Frank Tupper’s A Scandalous Providence (1995) that emphasizes as bad as evil is, evil cannot prevent God from transforming human nature and the world through religious inspiration and the moral model of Christ and the saints. This approach provides many within the Church an intelligibly thoughtful and compassionate way to be mature and courageous before the great harms and ruins of human history and not promulgate, as Gass maintains, a “comfort of their arrogance, their ignorant antique orthodoxies, and with smug fanaticism push the nation and the world toward catastrophe (Gass 2006, p. 28).”

However, to offset Cass’s dismissal of a credible intellectual history within the Christian traditions, I call attention to the Classical View, not because of its explanatory superiority over the Irenaean approach or because of its metaphysical insights into the nature of God and evil (even though I believe they are intellectually compelling), but because it represents a serious legacy of theological and philosophical reflection that deals with the reality of evil and the difficulties of believing in a God who is the creator of a world in which the pernicious effects of evil are so rampant. This intellectual legacy is found in various forms from the earliest to the most recent periods of Christian, theological reflection (for example, from Origen, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Thomas, to Karl Barth).7 Those aligned with this theological tradition also have a “temple of texts” that informs and motivates their interpretations of how to live meaningfully in a world fraught with suffering and evil.

In each of these “texts”, we do not find God as a quasi-gnostic Demiurge fashioning finitude according to a perfect plan, but the “all in all”, the necessary foundation of contingent reality, the creative power of every instant. God does not work on creation as an efficient cause manufacturing an artifact (as Gass inaccurately depicts Christian theism). That would be the engineering quasi-gnostic Demiurge. Rather, the Classical View sees the relationship of God to creation as contingency is to necessity, as sight is to illumination, as divisibility is to what always can be divided. The world exists because God necessarily exists as its Creator. Moreover, in each representative of this intellectual tradition, evil is never the work and will of God but the contradiction of the divine and creation. Evil is negativity, a shadow, the absence of being, the chaotic nothingness within creation. With this understanding of evil, the Classical View is much closer to Plato’s view that evil is opposite of the good (and God) than to the quasi-gnostic Demiurge.8

Although individually unique, they represent a tradition of theological reflection, building on the fundamental beliefs garnered from the scriptures that God is good, that creation depends entirely for its reality upon a Creator, that evil is adversarial to God and creation, and that God will overcome evil and its effects. Since my only point is to present (though somewhat tendentiously) the presence of a cogent and defensible intellectual tradition within Christian history that does not resemble the quasi-gnostic Demiurge, the reader should excuse me for not paying more attention to their complexities and their scholarly debates.

3.1. Origen

Origen of Alexandria (184–253) works hard to apply to Christian theology the Platonic tradition of the supremacy and influence of the unconditional nature of ultimate reality, yet as equally he works to avoid Plato’s idea that a Demiurge is needed to explain the diversity and problems of conditioned reality. In his On First Principles, Origen stresses the utter contingency of creation dependent upon the necessity of an eternal God, that creation is not an object made but an emanation from God. He puts great emphasis on the word katabolea to explain the acts of creation (Saunders 1966). The root of the word is “to throw downward,” which suggests that creation is the result of God’s nature being thrown downward. The lower aspect of creation depends on the higher condition of God’s being. Within creation there are two natures, the corporeal and incorporeal. The corporeal, physical creation is made to conform to the incorporeal, rational nature of creation. Throughout all of creation, it is possible to see the how God is in each individual object.

Evil occurs when people willfully turn away from their rightful katabolea, when they reject the quality of being that relies absolutely on God. God does not and cannot cause this turning away, that is, a necessary-existing being cannot cause misaligned contingency. Also, because God remains the necessary being of all creation, God works through the redemptive actions of Christ to restore all of creation to its original connection and reliance upon God. This culminates when God will be the “all in all.” Even the most contingent aspect of reality, i.e., the corporeal, will be transformed to manifest God’s glory. “When God shall be all in all, the whole of bodily nature will, in the consummation of all things, consist of one species, and the sole quality of body be that which shall shine in the indescribable glory which is to be regarded as the future possession of the spiritual body.” (Origen, On First Principles, 341). Origen is attracted to the explanatory fruitfulness of Plato’s use of the divine nous (i.e., rational intellect, Mind) and its relationship to the structure of the phenomenal world. Origen uses the notion of the nous to explain the ontological connection between the infinite rationality of God and the inherent rationality of the world.

Not everyone agreed with Origen’s ideas of the soul’s pre-existence and the universal restoration of creation to God, and he was declared posthumously a heretic at Constantinople in 553. However, he articulates an essential feature of Christian theology—creation is a contingent reality, necessarily dependent upon God and that God does not and cannot do evil. Neither Plato’s Demiurge nor a quasi-gnostic Demiurge created the world.

3.2. Augustine

St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) like Origen uses Platonic ideas without adopting the notion of the Demiurge. Creation is not an object upon which God acts, but an expression of creative power. Time does not exist before creation as though it were something parallel to God’s eternal existence, but it starts at creation as though it occurs inside the eternal nature of God. Without eternity, time would not exist, and every instant of time depends on and reflects the unconditional reality of God. Creation is not an alien object outside of God’s being but an occurrence within the divine reality, and because God is eternally good, creation shows the temporality of that goodness. “That God in his goodness created good things, and that all things which do not belong to God’s own being, though inferior to God, are nevertheless good, and the creation of God’s goodness.” (Augustine 1972) The great diversity of creation is not as problematic for Augustine as it is for Origen, who thinks the lower parts of creation occur because they had rebelled more than the higher parts. In Augustine’s view, the heavens and earth are ontologically good in all their details and radiate in their realities the glory and beauty of their creation. Hence, to be is to be good and to be beautiful.

However, evil presents a special difficulty for such an Augustinian view of creation. If creation is good because it is the creative action of God, then what is evil and how is it overcome? Augustine provides one of the most influential theological renderings of evil in the history of Christian reflection. Evil is the privation of goodness, the absence of being (Augustine 1972, p. 454). Evil is not matter nor is it a rival deity to the Creator God. It is corruption, enervation, and perversion of the goodness of being. As purely negative, it is not an efficient cause of anything, but a deficient cause. Evil does not exist as a thing but is a taking away and robbing of existence. As the eternally good Creator, God does not and cannot create evil, since evil per se is anti-creation, anti-goodness.

Even though the reality of evil is tragic and devastating on creation, its nature as a deficient cause does not prevent God from accomplishing God’s creative acts of goodness and beauty. God’s goodness and reality are great enough to overcome evil. At this point, he uses one of his most controversial phrases—Felix culpa. Adam’s sin (and consequently evil) is a fortunate mistake. Because Adam sinned, Christ came and redeemed the world, and, consequently, a redeemed world is better in being and goodness than a world that did not need divine redemption. This view does not mean that God planned and uses evil. That would be contrary to the necessary being and goodness of God. The felix of the culpa is that God now acts within creation in even more powerfully good and beautiful ways in redeeming it than in creating it, that God’s goodness can make the world even better by overcoming the evil that humanity introduces and inflicts within creation.

Augustine knows he had a logical problem with such a rendering of evil. If all of creation is good and God cannot by God’s necessary existence contradict the goodness and reality of creation, then from where does evil come? It comes from humanity misusing its freedom, which God gave humanity and thus is good, but which humanity uses to contradict the being and goodness of creation and God. Freedom within the goodness of creation is good, but because it entails the ability to contradict creation’s goodness, God is not responsible for making something good that is perverted by the creature who exercises it to do harm. Evil results from humanity’s pernicious choices to corrupt and deny the goodness and beauty of creation.

Of course, this “free-will defense” of God has not convinced everyone and remains an intense philosophical and theological debate. However, it is important to see that it results from holding two essential claims of the Christian faith—God is good, and creation depends on God, and humanity is responsible for evil, not God. Augustine is not forced to address the problem of how a good and all-powerful God would create evil and use it to work divine providence. That problem is not relevant to Augustine’s agenda.

3.3. Anselm

Close to 600 years after Augustine, the Augustine monk, philosopher, and archbishop, St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), worked out many of the modal possibilities of the Classical View claims about God and evil. Eternal goodness, beauty, and justice are essential elements of God’s existence, which means that God cannot create a world or do anything contrary to these elements. Creation hence manifests a feature of divine reality. Anselm finds the word “rectitude” especially helpful to account for the connection between creation and its Creator. Rectitude means truthful existence, being capable and functioning according to a design (Anselm 1998). Since God creates the world, its particular rectitude is to depend upon God as its source of goodness, beauty, and justice. The world is designed to do this and experiences a fullness of being in its right relationship to God.

God is not an external being to time and space, fashioning finite beings and ordering their positions and movements according to an external design. The design principle in all existence is the finite expression of the infinite nature of God’s goodness, beauty, and justice. It is not that God is above or beyond creation but is the necessary being and creative power of goodness, beauty, and justice to all reality. Nowhere in Anselm’s thinking does the conceptual metaphor of God as a quasi-gnostic Demiurge fit.

Evil, as the privation of being and goodness, then is contrary to God. Basically, evil is anti-rectitude. It violates and mars the goodness, beauty, and justice of creation. Anselm explains the source for this violation and marring in De Case Diaboli. He talks about Satan as a thought experiment to account for the reality of evil. Humanity does evil in corrupting and perverting the rectitude of creation. Yet, because Satan as an angel is more powerful and consequential, its evil is more disastrous than a single person. In this view, the more power a being has, the more destruction it can cause. The destructive consequences of an individual may be bad, but of something like a nation, they are far worse.

Because evil is the deprivation of being, God cannot use it and is not responsible for it. Anselm’s explanation of this is complicated and debatable. It relies on Aristotle’s modal table to show that God, who necessarily exists and hence cannot contradict God’s own self, works only to promote goodness, beauty, and justice, and that it is impossible for God to incorrectly create a being who would either not have rectitude or would be designed to reject and abandon its rectitude. Evil comes from a creature who misuses its rectitude by willing to reject its purpose as part of the overall rectitude of creation. This misuse is not a mere accident or uninformed choice. It is the deliberate rejection of being a creature with certain rectitude, and in rejecting its purpose, it pretends to re-make its own purpose. Thus, it pretends to be God. Self-idolization is at the heart of all evil. It is not God allowing, willing, and using evil to work the divine will. It is people and powerful groups who seek to destroy the goodness, beauty, and justice of creation that are responsible for the evil in the world.

My overall point is not that Anselm is right or convincing in these details, but that he is part of tradition of theological reflection that thinks about God and evil upon a model opposite of a quasi-gnostic Demiurge, and that the issues Gass brings up to dismiss the seriousness of religious explanations of God and evil are irrelevant to this tradition.

3.4. Thomas Aquinas

The same can be said of St. Thomas Aquinas’ explanation of God and evil. There is not a quasi-gnostic Demiurge anywhere in his thinking. Though he relies on Aristotelian notions of actuality and potentiality to explain God, creation, and evil, he is consistent with the Classical View in emphasizing that God is not an object outside of creation maneuvering it toward a goal and that, because God is so powerful and perfect, God can use evil to work that end. God is being itself, pure actuality, which cannot not be God, and as such, is the good to which all creation desires. Finite beings are potential being in that they can change and also not exist. They become what they should be by desiring the goodness of God and in doing so, they actualize their potentiality to become more real and more like the goodness they desire. God hence shapes creation, not as Plato’s Demiurge or a quasi-gnostic Demiurge would with external hands forming reality, but by enabling creation to realize its fulfillment.

In On Evil, Thomas adopts Augustine’s notion that evil is the privation of being and goodness. “But since evil is nothing else but the privation of a due perfection, and privation exists only in a being in potentiality because we say a thing is deprived which is designed by nature to have something and does not have it, it follows that evil exists in good inasmuch as being in potentiality is called good.” (Aquinas 1994). Evil occurs in that which can become corrupted, and since God as pure actuality cannot be corrupted, God cannot either will or do evil. It would be a contradiction, and God does not have the potential to contradict God’s actuality.

Evil comes from the human will when it rejects the goodness of God and goodness of creation. This rejection is a denial, not a construction of a rival good. Hence, evil is deprivative of goodness. God does not cause the human will to deny and abandon the goodness of its life, creation, and God. If God had not created the world in a good way, there could not be the privation of that goodness. In this sense, God would be an accidental cause of evil, but not a primary cause. However, God would not be culpable for creating a being to be good and then for that being to corrupt that goodness.

If Thomas were asked to respond to the Rousseau dilemma, he would not try to answer the question. The dilemma presupposes a perfect being outside of creation working upon it to fashion a world. Thomas has no concept of God “outside” of creation (that is, acting as an efficient cause upon creation) but rather of creation actualizing within the necessary existence of God. Evil is a problem for Thomas, but it is not the problem that Gass presents it to be. Gass rejects a picture of God that Thomas would as well.

Thomism was the dominant theology for centuries and continued the Classical View. The Protestant Reformation swerved away from this Classical View, not because they rejected it (Luther was Augustinian and Calvin quotes him extensively) but because they wanted to move aside the philosophical concepts of Platonism and Aristotelianism to make room for a theology relying on biblical phrases to explain God’s nature, creation’s dependence on God, and the reality of evil. Also, in the 19th century theologies emerged which differed greatly from the Classical View (e.g., Schleiermacher). Instead of relying on notions of being, and nonbeing, actuality, and potentiality, they borrowed from phenomenological claims like the “feeling of absolute dependence” and Kantian claims that ethics is the basis of religion.

3.5. Karl Barth

Karl Barth revived the Classical View in the 20th century. Though Barth learned from the Reformers to rely primarily upon the scriptural language (he was almost as much a biblical theologian as a systematic one), he consistently carries on the Classical View of thinking of the relationship of God to creation and of evil as privation. God and creation for Barth share an ontological connection. “The reason why God created this world is that God’s eternal Son and Logos did not will to be an angel or animal but a man, and that this and this alone was the content of the eternal divine election of grace.” (Barth 1958, p. 18). God is not on object unlike creation and alien to its finitude, but rather God can become part of creation. The distinctions between eternity and time, infinite and finite, which imply a mutual exclusivity and resistance to each other, are changed in looking this way. God can be both a Creator and a creature. It is not contrary to God’s nature as the Creator to become part of creation, though if God were a quasi-gnostic Demiurge, it would be ontologically impossible for God to become incarnate within creation.

Barth further explains this capacity of creation in terms of the nature of God as a triune God. The Holy Spirit unites the Father and Son in sanctifying the world to God. Creation occurs within the nature of God as triune Creator of the world. Every aspect of creation is thus intimately felt inside the triune God. Creation and God are inseparable in their being and not capable of becoming alien and strange to each other.

One of Barth’s most imaginative and suggestive doctrines is his account of evil as Das Nichtige. (Barth 1961, pp. 349–68) The natural translation is “nothingness,” but the word does not capture all Barth means by it. Evil is chaos and the opposite of creation, which God rejects in electing to create the world. Like Augustine’s idea of privation, evil deprives God’s work and lessens creation’s goodness and thus assaults the fabric of creation and consequently God’s nature as the Creator who creates within God’s own creative reality as the triune God. God cannot will the contradiction of God’s self and the purpose of creation; hence God does make or use evil. However, as the source of creation, God is not defeated by evil. Evil mars creation and God as its Creator, but because God becomes the redeemer of creation by becoming incarnate within creation, God fights back. In that the Creator God can become the incarnate Christ and can enjoin the battle against the ancient menace and danger of chaos and annihilation, God will be the victor, not by ignoring evil or by being more chaotic and annihilating to evil than it is towards creation but by making the power and goodness of creation become even more real and manifest.

Nowhere in Barth’s theology (and the Classical View) do we see the God Gass depicts and rejects as myth and superstition. The Rousseau dilemma is irrelevant to a tradition that explains creation’s relationship to its Creator as contingency to necessity, not as an artifact to an engineer. If God were like a quasi-gnostic Demiurge who manufactures a world and shapes it as a carpenter would design a house out of building material, then it would be legitimate to raise the issue that if such a builder is good and powerful, then the builder must be either impotent to stop the flaws within his work or malevolent to put the flaws in the construction. It may be that popular theology envisions God as an engineer, but this is a failure to learn from the Classical View. Creation is not an artifact but an expression of the being of its Creator. Evil is not a divine device or a rival deity but a corruption and enervation of the being of creation and thus an adversary and threat to God as the Creator.

The Classical View, however, is not without logical and conceptual problems. If creation is dependent upon God as contingency is upon necessity, is creation an emanation from the divine being or a novel event? If creation occurs, so to speak, within the divine being, then are the temporal distinctions lost in the divine eternity? Also, is not God somewhat culpable for creating free-will humans with capacities to misuse their freedom to do harmful evil? These are serious issues, and I am not claiming the Classical View can offer totally convincing answers. However, because it rejects the God depicted by Rousseau and Gass, the Classical View is not logically required to defend itself against Rousseau’s critique and Gass’s dismissal of it.

4. Gass and the “Vocation of the Good”

There is more to Gass’s writing agenda than only the rejection of the Christian God. His last statement in “Sacred Texts” expresses it—“We shall probably be eaten by our own greed, and live only in our ruins, middens, and the fossil record.” (Gass 2006, p. 418) A profound pessimism about improving the world underlies the essay.

Gass is a selective reader, who has learned from authors that left ideas and insights, not ruins, middens, and fossils. They are living authors who contribute to valuable beliefs and convictions worth perpetrating, because, in Gass’s view, they make us better humans, more intelligent, courageous, and moral. Gass might argue that for each virtue articulated and promulgated by these authors, seven vices have followed, and that consequently in spite of the good these authors have done (himself included), in the end, the world is worse for what they thought and wrote. Gass does think the world is worse because Christians go to church and believe in myths and superstitions, but he does not think the world is worse because of the authors in his temple of texts. In fact, we need them.

4.1. Gass’s Nihilism

Is Gass’s nihilism, thus, plausible? His definition of evil as “a mosaic made of petty little pieces placed in malignant position (Gass 2006, p. 414) implies that it takes an accumulation of acts to constitute evil. It implies we can keep a ledger of virtues on one side and then seven vices they cause on the other. If we could, then certainly the world is much worse off every passing day. However, this seems an impossible ledger to keep for two reasons. First, we cannot neatly separate virtues and vices into discreet, measuring units. If we were to pull out a vice, so to speak, and number it on the right side of the ledger, then we would also be pulling out many choices, effects inescapably connected to the vice. The ledger would be very messy.

Second, it is unimaginable to think we can quantify all the virtuous and vicious acts in human history and reach any kind of conclusion that would convince us that the world is worse than it was at some point in the past. It seems arbitrary to say 51% more vicious acts rather than 49% would lead to ruins, middens, and the fossil record. Possibly, the 49% of virtuous acts could prevent the 51% of vicious acts from defeating our efforts to improve the world. To say that we can settle in a quantifiable way whether the world is more prone toward the destructive consequences of evil than the constructive consequences of goodness is wrongheaded from the start.

However, Gass’s real point is more metaphysical than empirical. In the chapter titled “Finding a Form” in the book of that name, he says:

Early on I learned that life was meaningless, since life was not a sign; that novels were meaningful, because signs were the very material of their composition. I learned suffering served no purpose; that the good guys didn’t win; that most explanations offer me to make the mess I was in less a mess were self-serving lies. Life wasn’t clear, it was ambiguous; motives were many and mixed; values were complex, opposed, poisoned by hypocrisy, without any reasonable ground; much of adult society, its institutions and its advertised dreams, were simply superstitions that served a small set of people well while keeping the remainder in miserable ignorance.

(Gass 1996)

Because life is meaningless, without a cosmology or teleology, (Gass 1996, p. 272), it is willful ignorance to write fiction with a plot. No narrative story can accurately depict reality and our experiences within it. Life is not story with a plot, and thus a writer must reject narrative explanations. In fact, Gass says of his own agenda that “My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository.” (Gass 1996, p. 46)” We cannot stop from turning all of our best efforts into ruins, middens, and fossils and, thus, should not pretend our philosophies and fictions can make the world meaningful. Reality is ultimately pointless. We cannot improve the world and that goodness will not win in the end.

Gass implies an inevitability to humanity turning its best efforts into only more ruins, middens, and fossils. This notion of evil’s inevitability reveals a central inconsistency in Gass’s definition and explanation of evil. In his definition, evil seems more circumstantial than inevitable. It “is a mosaic made of petty little pieces placed in malignant position mostly by circumstance.” (Gass 2006, p. 418) However, his prognostications are about evil’s inevitability. He wants to say that evil results from our presumed virtues but also that the world will assuredly get worse. The upshot of his essay is that though humanity makes evil, we cannot stop its appearance or growth. For Gass, honest, clearheaded, and courageous persons should admit and accept this pessimism.

However, Gass writes to persuade us to adopt certain views, to help us live more authentically as humans in the world. He perpetuates a certain intellectual and literary tradition, which he maintains clarifies reality better than other traditions (especially the Judaic/Christian tradition) and which, by adopting it, he makes the case that the legacy should be continued for future readers to study, apply, and change their lives.

I think an inconsistency is obvious—even though Gass believes we inevitably create more ruins, middens, and fossils with our efforts, he in practice believes that there is a goodness in his work and his intellectual and literary legacy. In theory, he is a pessimist, but in practice he seeks to construct a better society (at least to his readers). He acts as though the goodness in his works will withstand the relentless corruption of them. It may appear that I am putting thoughts in Gass’s mind, but my main point is that (as illustrated in Gass’s teaching and writing agenda) we instinctively believe that there is a goodness to our best efforts that is not reduced to our actions and is greater in reality than our particular deeds.

My proof for this claim about Gass’s is his own reliance and propagation of an intellectual and literary legacy. It is not incidental to Gass’s purpose that he titles the book A Temple of Texts, as though he contends that by reading and taking seriously this legacy, we enter into a sacred space that defines the good ideas, moral commitments, and authors. He urges the reader to enter into this temple. For instance, Gass presents Voltaire’s anti-theism as a belief that is more conducive to authentic living than, for example, Leibniz’s theological optimism. He knows that Nietzsche’s tireless exposing of the genealogy of our morals as the conflict of wills couched in euphemisms of truth and pity is more ennobling of the human effort to face the misery of the world than, for example, Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. Gass finds more insight in Rilke’s creative use of language and imagination to interpret our experiences in a world without an obvious metaphysic to it than he would, for example, in the profoundly traditional narratives of T. S. Eliot’s poetry or in the manifestations of the divine in nature in the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins. These ideas reveal commitments to what a reasonable and courageous person ought to do in a world fraught with ruins, middens, and fossils. Gass must hope that the good he does as a writer outlives him and shapes future generations of readers, just as those writers shaped him.

On occasion, Gass admits the task of an artist and writer is more than the display of style and method. Near the end of Finding a Form, after berating the “moralists” for abusing the artists with their unfounded moral dogmatism, he says of the value of writing, “I do happen to feel, with Theodor Adorno, that writing a book is a very important ethical act,” because it can “spit in the face of the [corrupt and debauched society of the] present.” (Gass 1996, pp. 290–91) However, the value of writing is more than defiance against the moralist. It can also supplement the fleeting images of beauty the world.

It is the artist’s task to add to the world’s objects and ideas those delineations, carving, tales, fables, and symphonic spells which ought to be there; to make things whose end is contemplation and appreciation; to give birth to beings whose qualities harm no one, yet reward even the most casual notice, and which therefore deserve to become the focus of a truly disinterested affection. There is perhaps a moral in that.

(Gass 1996, pp. 291–92)

Hence, as a writer, Gass wants to leave a moral legacy, because it would be better, more important, and real to us than the world of oligarchical moralists.

Consequently, to defend why we must learn from this legacy and why it defines what kind of people we ought to be, Gass would have to articulate an ontology of the good, which would not reduce goodness only to what we will it to be but to what it is in itself. If his notion of the good is only what we will it to be, then, frankly, it is no better or worse than what religious people or evil people will it to be. However, Gass would never equate the good he promotes with the others, and thus he must be relying on a sense of what reality ought to be.

4.2. The Vocation for the Good

Gass as a writer represents what we can call the “vocation for the good.” The phrase refers to those who believe what they do actually improve lives and consequently makes society a better place to live. The notion of the good is important, and, of course, a clear definition is debatable. I do not mean by it a transcendently perfect reality by which we can measure in all ways all our actions. Rather, I mean it in the sense Hans Jonas uses it, when he makes the distinction between what we ought to do and what ought to be (Jonas 1984). The obligatoriness of moral action reflects what we think about the reality of something, and that reality conditions the actions which determine whether we properly act or not. It is the case that we do not merely accept whatever happen to be the reality that generates a sense of obligation in us. We make distinctions and discriminations between what ought not to be and what ought to be. We always make ontological judgments about the value of the realities we experience and fashion our lives according to the reality (or realities) that promises fulfillment for our loves and possibly the world. The “vocation of the good” thus means people committing themselves to certain actions that promote what they think ought to be, what they maintain to be the proper ways for people to act in light of the nature of reality.

A person adopting a “vocation of the good” could be a person committed to a marriage and family; an artist producing art works; a police person protecting a neighborhood; a nurse caring for the sick; a writer writing about evil; and so on. It could be Aristotle trying to restore the aristocratic virtues of courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice in a time of cultural decline and cynicism, because he thought without these virtues, society cannot continue, and people cannot find purpose and fulfillment. It could be the rationale to Kant’s insistence that for individuals and culture to mature beyond the religious and regional wars that ravaged Europe for a hundred years we must ground ethics upon universal, rational principles, so that we can peaceably and convincingly settle our moral quandaries and disputes. It could be the motive for the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations after the two world wars of the 20th century. It could be the former victims of apartheid in South Africa implementing Truth and Reconciliation so that healing could occur, and a country scarred by racism and oppression could find a way to progress toward justice and shared happiness.

In each instance, people believe they make the world better, though the difference may be small. Their actions are more than the particular acts but a contribution to a goodness, which the doers think they increase by their actions, and which outlives the duration of their deeds. They think there is actually more goodness in the world because of their vocational activity.

Of course, they may not articulate an ontology of goodness or be philosophically committed to such an ontology, but their vocational actions presuppose an ontology of goodness, that by their deeds they are overcoming destructive or lethargic forces to human history and expanding the presence and transformative power of goodness. This may not require the support of a metaphysical system, but it does presume a worthy goal to seek. Surely, not every family, artist, police person, nurse, writer, institution, etc. takes on this vocation. Some are willfully destructive towards others and falsify reality. Yet, those who adopt the “vocation for the good” in that they intend a constructive agenda with their actions, persevere in their efforts to introduce more goodness in the world in spite of the presence of lies and destruction.

The importance of the “vocation of the good” frankly highlights a problem in appreciating Gass’s writing agenda. According to Philip Stevick, Gass’s purpose as an author is inconsistent with his nihilism. “[His] body of work seems so whole and continuous partly because the nonfiction and the fiction overlap so easily that a distinction between them seems artificial.” (Stevick 1991). That is, Gass has an agenda to prove something and to represent how we ought to think and believe about the world. There is thus a disjunction between a pessimism that says our efforts only turn into ruins, middens, and fossils and a vocation that works for the good of others and society. Both cannot be true. The former denies the integrity of the latter, and the latter either denies or puts limitations on the former. His pessimism has no way to dissuade a society of walking away from its “vocation for the good,” of seeing our lives and history as a boring and boorish attempt to roll perpetually a stone up a mountain.

However, I do not think Gass believes his agenda is false and should be dismissed, even though that might follow from his antecedent position of nihilism about life and reality.

Frankly, Gass is not totally nihilistic. Always aware of the ethical and existential fissures in our finitude, Gass’s philosophical and literary legacy does not see itself as just another set of ruins, middens, and fossils.9 In his output, he knows there are such things, but Gass marshals his best intellectual and literary creativity to keep them from increasing. His actual position could be that life and reality have to be rightly interpreted and that his agenda attempts to offer a correct interpretation of life and reality. That at least would be logically consistent and is perhaps Gass’s real position.

At this point, Gass could interject and say that the criticism I am raising (that is, his nihilism is inconsistent with his agenda as a writer of philosophical essays and fiction) is irrelevant to his project, that, because he is attempting to present as clearly and forthrightly as possible the bleakness of human existence, he is under no logical burden to conform his convictions and authorial appeals to any notion of the vocation of the good.

Yet, Gass cannot escape the fact that because he sees himself affirming and perpetuating an intellectual tradition canonized in his Temple of Texts, he is subject to the inner-logic of an intellectual tradition, and this inner-logic reveals the inferiority of his project in comparison to what I have been calling the Classical View within Christian history.

An intellectual tradition is a multi-generational dialectical conversation among people who attempt to sustain an inquiry into certain prevalent and consequentially serious problems of human experience by asking probing questions about the problems and by offering answers and solutions to these questions, which are passed on to future generations to critique and incorporate into their attempts to sustain the inquiry. The problems at the center of an intellectual tradition show themselves to be inescapable to reflective and serious-minded people. They are existentially demanding for a people who desire an informed and coherent life, so to be the kind of people who seek to make themselves and the world a more intelligible and moral place. Consequently, the people of an intellectual tradition marshal their analytical and probing interests to understand rightly these problems so that answers and possible solutions can be offered to subsequent generations who would be conditioned and fashioned in their own self-understanding to deal with the same issues.

The overall intentionality of an intellectual tradition follows three steps: first, a recognition of certain problems; second, a questioning of their characteristics, causes, and effects; and third, a response to the problems. Intellectual traditions persevere when they carry on to the third step without either contradicting their clear recognition of the problems or serious efforts to expose and rightly respond to them. Of course, there can be different intellectual traditions that deal with the same problems and thus offer different answers and solutions to the problem. Even though the rivals may oppose each other and may think that the other tradition represents what they seek to overcome or refute, one tradition shows its superiority as an intellectual tradition by offering coherent and persuasive solutions that clearly acknowledge and respond to the originating problems. A superior tradition is not only a contrary viewpoint to the rival but a correction to it by pointing out that its solution can better explain what the rival’s view cannot explain within its own recognition of the problems.10

Gass’s agenda as a writer lacks the resources to sustain the intellectual tradition that he claims as his “Temple of Texts” and, furthermore, undermines his attempt as a writer to offer a way to recognize and intelligibly assess the perpetual harms and malice that occur in human history. His solution to despise the Christian attempt at a theodicy and to deflate any sense of providence in history aggravates the very problem that his writing agenda tries to reveal and tries to embolden others to acknowledge with realism and honesty. He assumes that nihilism is the only proper way to face the misery and malice of the world, but such a thorough-going nihilism also undermines his own insistence to be taken seriously as an author who has not only an intellectual point but a moral position that others should adopt and emulate. Nihilism is not a solution to a problem that provokes us to seek intellectual insight and moral motivation to sustain a multi-generational dialectical conversation. In fact, it stops the conversation by insisting that, because human history and destiny are all pointless, the conversation is not worth maintaining.

Moreover, at this point, Gass could interject and say that the Classical View, which tries to clarify profound theological claims about God, creation, evil, and redemption is no different than a multigenerational, serious-dialectical investigation into the characters and plot of the Harry Potter fictional series or the Star War movie series, that the Christian theological legacy with its accompanying scholars and believers is no different than those that presume an obvious fictional story to have actual insights into reality and the prospects of humanity securing a meaningful place in the world. The Classical Tradition, Gass may assert, uses words and arguments that intend to depict the nature of reality, but, because theism is nothing but the self-serving pontifications of either fearful people who cannot face the true meaningless of reality or presumptuous people who want to use their religion to dominate over others, the Classical View is hence useless in accurately describing the metaphysical void of our experiences or it is delusional in encouraging the believers to think they are privileged and blessed in contrast to the heretics and heathens surrounding them.

Yet, if Gass were seriously to consider the business of metaphysics, he would see that the Classical View is not about fictional accounts of reality but about the basic features of reality. Even though metaphysical systems differ in their explanations of substance, change, time, and so, the following claims about the nature of reality serve as an approach to doing metaphysics, an approach that resonates in general ways with the metaphysical accounts of Plato, Aristotle, St. Anselm of Canterbury, St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Christian Wolf, Hegel, and A. N. Whitehead.

Metaphysics address the question of what is, of what is the nature of being itself. We exist and think it is important to know why we exist. Thus, we assume our existence has an importance. If we did not exist, we would not be asking the question. Being must be valuable. Furthermore, because it is better for reality to exist than not to exist, it would be incoherent to think that the absence of reality would be the cause of reality, of reality being better than reality not being. If it is better to have being than not to have it, then it is consistent to reason that being ought to be. The fact that realty exists indicates that its opposite would be a denial of the value of the existence of reality. Hence, it is valuable that being is, rather than not be.

Because we believe being ought to be, we can infer that it is good that being is. Existence has an inherent value to it. The goodness of being is that it exists and not not-exist. This goodness indicates that the perseverance of existence shows its value over against its absence of existence or its destruction. In this light, we can say goodness (in a metaphysical sense) is the perseverance of being, and, consequently, any action that enables and contributes to the perseverance of being is also a good act. In this sense, perseverance means the power to exist rather than not exist and the power to sustain existence over against the eviscerating and disintegrating of what exist.

Whether being per se is the necessary cause of all existing contingent realities or the essential power of existence of every contingent reality, being is always directed towards its own perseverance, which, thus means, that being integrates and consolidates its manifestations towards wholeness of being. The perseverance of reality as a whole makes its integration more complete, and because the perseverance integrates all aspects of reality into a coordinated whole, the direction of perseverance is towards an orderly reality. Actions that contribute to the integration of individual things into a purposeful ordering of reality are good actions. They further the principle of being itself (that it is better to persevere in existence than not) by enabling particular things to have complementarity in their integrative wholeness, in their position in relation to the order of reality.

Although destructiveness and corruption occur in our experiences of the world, they happen because being and its inherent goodness precede in reality their own destruction and corruption. The power of being is its perseverance of existing, and this perseverance integrates and consolidates what exist into a display of the goodness of existence. The more this perseverance integrates and consolidates, the more it resists and can overcome the effects of destruction and corruption. The stronger the connections are among particular existing things, the more they can resist and possibly overcome destruction and corruption. The more integrated the particulars of reality are into an ordered wholeness, the more power of existence the particulars have to stay off destruction and corruption. Destruction and corruption make the non-being of existing things more evident and makes it occur, but in that an orderly world persists and that particular things can continue to be integrated and coordinated into a meaningfully good reality in spite of the presence of the threats to being and its goodness, we can reasonably conclude that the power of being and its goodness is greater than what may cause its destruction and decay.

I grant that the details of this approach to metaphysics are highly debatable and, to be more convincing, they need much more explanation. However, this approach provides a plausible understanding of the nature of reality and how and why reality persists, even with destructive and corrupting events occurring in it. If this approach is a plausible metaphysic (which I can argue it is), then the Classical View is also a plausible account for our fundamental experiences of reality: first, it offers an explanation why being is better than nothing and why being is good (God’s creation of the heavens and earth); second, it acknowledges the reality of destructiveness and corruption (evil as the deprivation of being); and third, it offers an explanation on how being itself overcomes the appearances of destruction and corruption (redemption by God through Christ).

The Classical View is rich in biblical and theological terms and resonates with the liturgies and worship of Christians across centuries, but it is also a metaphysical account that not only communicates the language of the church, but it also communicates a fundamental understanding of reality itself, the treat of evil within reality, and how goodness prevails. Of course, the religious language to an anti-Christian like Gass comes across as offensive nonsense, but even the atheist would have to admit that if the intellectual energy put into constructing a metaphysical system is intellectually beneficial to understanding our place within the world, then the Classical View is reasonable and can contribute to the intellectual efforts to understand rightly our place within the world.

Furthermore, the Classical View in Christianity does offer a solution that Gass cannot. It acknowledges the middens and ruins of human history just as much as Gass’s nihilism does. It does not ignore or underestimate the pain and grief replayed throughout all generations. It is realistic about the depravity of human existence and questions and probes just as thoroughly and poignantly as does Gass’s “Temple of Texts” into the causes and consequences of evil. Consequently, because the Classical View offers an intellectual tradition that is both realistic and hopeful, that is humbled by the forces of human suffering and is hardworking for a good that can transform human existence, and that recognizes the shortcomings and incompleteness of its tradition but also offers to its future generations texts that possibly can help them to be courageous and constructive in dealing with the evils of the world, the Classical view shows its superiority as an intellectual tradition.

The Classical View is superior because the notion of the good expressed throughout its intellectual tradition overcomes the inconsistency within the tenuous intellectual tradition Gass believes he is perpetuating. Central to the Classical View is the goodness of creation, of the substantival reality of being itself and of how all of creation is coordinated into an ordered realm in which the reality of its creator, i.e., God, is evident and in which God interacts with each aspect of creation by being the necessary existing reality that enable the contingent realities to exist. This goodness of creation, though marred and harmed by evil, is never eradicated or permanently crippled by evil but is able to preserver through the corruptive work of evil by the interactive presence of the divine creative power. The Classical View testifies of this goodness and, consequently, should be taken seriously as an intellectual tradition.

For the word “good” in the “vocation for the good” to have the content implied in Hans Jonas’ claim that what we ought to do presuppose what ought to be, it would need to refer to a wholeness of life, an integration of people with others and nature. Less than this wholeness cannot give enough content to the good to enable people to resist and perhaps overcome evil and the tendency towards the ruins, middens, and fossils. The aims of pleasures, possession, and patriotism are powerful but malleable and easily corruptible by the vices of vanity and greed. For instance, human history is full of authors, politicians, and nations who made the world worse by promulgating hate and malice. If their aims were all the content of the good that we could seek, then Gass’s cynicism would be correct. Yet, it would be preposterous to think that people could morally justify their pursuits by saying they know the desired ends increase the dismay and despair of the world.

People commit to the “vocation for the good” because they think what they do should be what is needed to fulfill human life within the particular realities and demands of the world. They assume their actions represent what our experiences of life in the world should be. This wholeness, hence, indicates the purpose for life. An act is good if it contributes to the wholeness of human experiences, and this sense of contribution implies teleology. That is, the wholeness is the purpose of the aims of good acts. In doing good deeds in the “vocation for the good,” we actualize to a degree the purpose/final aim and, thus, increase its presence.

In correcting the malicious, destructive effects of evil, we in part overcome the ruins, middens, and fossils; we repair the damage. Although Gass would reject a notion of a final aim, his vocation presupposes it—that is, he contributes to an intellectual and literary tradition, because he thinks it is necessary for people to live more faithfully to their intelligent natures and fulfill their places in the world. He presupposes an aim which is bigger than the tradition and his books—the aim to be authentically human, which for him means being smart, perceptive, courageous. These characteristics are not ends in themselves, but virtues necessary to reach authentic human existence in a world in which evil occurs. These virtues are compelling for us because they do lead to a reality greater than their functions. If it were not possible to be an authentic human being in a world in which living as such a being would integrate one into the larger purposes of creation, then frankly the virtues would not make any sense and not be compelling. It is incoherent to summons readers to be smart, perceptive, and courageous because such virtues help us to see that all our efforts will lead to seven vices and more dismay. Gass promotes these virtues so that we will not be deceived by superficial and false views about reality and human evil (i.e., the Christian ones in particular) and that we can live correctly as thinking, creative, and valuing beings within a radically contingent and fragile world. Yet, by living this way, the world will become a better place, a place much like a temple, not another set of ruins, middens, and fossils.

It is not my intention to dismiss outright Gass’s insights and writings. He offers valuable observations about a section of our society’s current self-understanding. His writing style with its acute wording and flowing sentences is enviable and worthy of emulation. However, it is my contention that his assessment of Christianity and his use of nihilistic claims within his vocation as a writer are inaccurate and untenable.

5. Conclusions: Commitment to the Goodness of Creation

The Classical View makes sense of why we, who are threatened and marred by the many ruins, middens, and fossils of human evil, are oriented towards a final aim, towards trying to materialize a wholeness, completeness, and integration of life into the world. The belief that the most fundamental feature of existence is its goodness, not the perversity and corruption of evil, reinforces the drive to overcome injustices with justice, misery with healing, despair with hope, ignorance with knowledge, and so on. Of course, many people commit injustices, perpetuate misery and despair, and champion ignorance as platforms for society, religion, and science, but these people cannot argue that their actions promote anything that could remotely be called a final aim, a purpose of life, an experience of wholeness. It may be that these “evil” people and their deeds will always be with us, but their presence does not nullify or eradicate the goodness done by the “vocation for the good”.

My point has been that the theodicy expressed in the intellectual-theological tradition of the Classical View gives us compelling reasons never to resign to the evils in the world but to work to overcome their middens and ruins with an affirmation of the goodness of the world and with moral actions that actually integrate people with others, nature, and God.