First Meditation: Who Is God?
ize, and I would not make it if I did not earnestly believe every
alternative view of the matter to be ultimately unsustainable.
I think it, first of all, to be a claim that follows more or less
ineluctably from any truly coherent contemplation of what it
means to see God as the free creator of all things ex nihilo-
especially when this doctrine is explicitly brought into con -
nection with the question of the origins and ends of evil. The
topic of evil, natural and moral, is obviously a difficult one,
no matter how one approaches it; but it is a topic also that,
treated candidly, confronts us with a very obvious equation,
of crystalline clarity, whose final result I believe must prove
to be either all or nothing (neither of which is a particularly
tractable sum). I have written on the matter before, but gener-
ally have done so only from the side of creation, so to speak, in
terms of how one should think about God from the vantage of
the world we know. Thus I have always been able, as a rule, to
beat a judicious retreat from the mystery of evil at just the right
moment, and to seek a somewhat craven refuge in the classi-
cal metaphysics of divine transcendence-to which I remain
entirely loyal, of course, but which can occasionally provide
too easy an escape from some very terrible quandaries. The
temptation to which I have often yielded has been simply to
invoke the ontology of supereminence or divine impassibility
or the eternal plenitude of the absolute ( or what have you)-all
of which reminds us that God in se is not determined by cre-
ation and that consequently evil does not enter into our under-
standing of the divine essence - and then to leave the matter
there. Now, I still believe all those arguments to be true, as
far as they go; but left to themselves they inexorably devolve
toward half-truths, and then toward triviality: a wave of the
prestidigitator's hand and Auschwitz magically vanishes. So I
want to avoid the easy course on this occasion, and to address