for the faiths to which these victims belonged. Traditionally,
Jews and Christians have affirmed God’s goodness and his
absolute sovereignty over history. But how can this faith be
reconciled with suffering on the scale for which Auschwitz
is the symbol?
THEORETICAL POSITIONS. The effort to answer questions of
this sort is commonly referred to as theodicy. The term was
apparently coined by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz
(1646–1716) and is a compound of the Greek words for
God (theos) and justice (dik ̄e). Theodicy may thus be thought
of as the effort to defend God’s justice and power in the face
of suffering. Theodicies result from this effort: they are spe-
cific explanations or justifications of suffering in a world be-
lieved to be ruled by a morally good God.
The theodicy problem. The “problem of theodicy”
arises when the experienced reality of suffering is juxtaposed
with two sets of beliefs traditionally associated with ethical
monotheism. One is the belief that God is absolutely good
and compassionate. The other is the belief that he controls
all events in history, that he is both all-powerful (omnipo-
tent) and all-knowing (omniscient). When combined with
some other implicit beliefs—for example, the belief that a
good being would try to prevent suffering insofar as he is
able—these various ideas seem contradictory. They appear
to form a logical “trilemma,” in the sense that, while any two
of these sets of ideas can be accepted, the addition of the
third renders the whole logically inconsistent. Thus, it seems
that it can be affirmed that God is all-good and all-powerful,
but not also that there is suffering in the world. Similarly,
the fact of suffering can be affirmed along with God’s good-
ness, but the insistence on God’s omnipotence appears to
render the whole ensemble of beliefs untenable. Theodicy
may be thought of as the effort to resist the conclusion that
such a logical trilemma exists. It aims to show that traditional
claims about God’s power and goodness are compatible with
the fact of suffering.
Alternative definitions. Some writers have tried to ex-
pand the term theodicy beyond its classical Western philo-
sophical and theological usage. The sociologist Max Weber,
for example, sought to redefine the term in order to render
it applicable to religious traditions that do not involve belief
in one just, all-powerful deity. In Weber’s usage, the theodicy
problem referred to any situation of inexplicable or unmerit-
ed suffering, and theodicy itself referred to any rationale for
explaining suffering. This wider definition has value for the
comparative study of religion. Nevertheless, without neglect-
ing other religious responses to suffering, I shall here be using
the term theodicy in its classical sense, as the effort to defend
God’s justice and power in a world marred by suffering.
Dissolutions of the theodicy problem. One reason for
holding to the narrower definition of theodicy is that it al-
lows us to see that theodicy in its classical sense is very much
a feature of ethical monotheism. Theodicy in this sense does
not arise in traditions that fundamentally deny or reject any
one of the three major sets of ideas that form the theodicy
problem: the belief in God’s goodness, the belief in his
power, or the belief in the real occurrence of suffering. Reli-
gious positions that fundamentally dissolve the problem may
be classified according to which of the three basic beliefs they
do not accept.
Denials of God’s justice. Some religious positions avoid
theodicy by denying that God (or the gods) is morally good.
Very few religious traditions openly hold God to be evil, al-
though Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, in her book The Origins
of Evil in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley, 1976), has argued that
at least one important motif in Hindu mythology traces suf-
fering to the gods’ pettiness and fear of human power. More
common than an outright denial of the deity’s justice, how-
ever, is the claim that God’s justice is somehow qualitatively
different from our ordinary human ideas of right and wrong.
Words like justice or goodness when applied to God have no
relation to their meaning when applied to human beings.
What would be regarded as wickedness on the part of a
human being—for example, the slaughter of children—may
not be unjust where God is concerned. We shall see that this
view has had some currency in Islam and in Calvinist Chris-
tianity.
Denials of God’s omnipotence. Rather than compromise
the divine goodness, some religious traditions have avoided
theodicy by qualifying the divine power. This view is espe-
cially characteristic of religious dualisms, which explain the
fact of suffering by positing a power or principle of disorder
that wars incessantly with God for control of the world. In
Zoroastrianism, for example, imperfections and suffering in
this world are traced to an ongoing cosmic struggle between
the good deity, Ahura Mazda ̄ (O ̄hrmazd), and his evil antag-
onist, Angra Mainyu (Ahriman). Similarly, the gnostic reli-
gion Manichaeism explained suffering in terms of a struggle
between a “spiritual” god of goodness and light and an evil
“creator” demon associated with darkness and matter.
Apart from dualism there are other ways by which reli-
gions can deny God’s omnipotence. One of the most impor-
tant of these is found in Buddhism, where suffering is traced
to the automatic operation of the moral law of retribution
known as karman. I shall return to karman in connection
with Buddhist teaching as a whole, but for now it may be
noted that karman eliminates the need to justify God (or the
gods) in a world of suffering because it places that suffering
almost wholly beyond divine control.
Denials of the reality of suffering. The final major way
by which to avoid the problem of theodicy is to deny the
third component in the trilemma, that is, that there really
is suffering in the world. This position may seem impossible
since unhappiness, illness, and death are all around us. Yet
in various ways, religious thinkers and religious traditions
have sometimes denied the ultimate reality or significance of
suffering. The philosopher Spinoza, for example, affirmed
that the world seems filled with evil only because it is regard-
ed from a narrow and erroneous human point of view. From
the divine perspective, however, the world forms a necessary9112 THEODICY