Augustine and Irenaeus were both advocates of the theory that good cannot exist without evil as evil has no existence except where there is good. Augustine, conversely saw evil as not a separate principle, totally opposed to God but an absence of good that God has permitted which occurs due to the misuse of free will that stems from Adam. God is aware of this misuse but has permitted it because it is still within his control.
Another common ground for the thoughts of Augustine and Irenaeus is in the belief that the quality of life is more important than the quantity. Augustine believed that the quicker man is to develop and become closer the image of God, the quicker his earthly life is over.
For Christians to accept suffering they look to the causal relationship between God and Jesus Christ which becomes operative between Christ and Christians. In this way the Christian response to suffering is practical as well as theoretical; suffering can be accepted just as Christ accepted it.
For the Islam faith suffering is clearly recognised in the Koran and is regarded as instrumental by the purpose of God. The earliest and still poignant problem for the Islamic faith is reconciling the two key elements of the doctrine, an omnipotent God and the freewill he has bestowed on his people. The question these two elements raise is whether suffering is deserved if man is given freewill? The most widely held attitude of Islam is to think of the control of God in a predeterminist sense. That is to say, wrong doing is not in man’s hands therefore God must have willed it. Within Islam there is strong opposition to the determinist school of thought known as Qadariyya, however for the majority of Muslims the problem of suffering is not an academic problem but a way of life. The Koran marks the end of a revolution for Muslims; Allah has spoken clearly and for the last time and will not be heard again until he speaks as a punisher and judge. The Koran teaches to accept suffering as chastisement for sins already committed, and it is emphasised that suffering will remit these sins. It is little wonder then why Muslims are so accepting of suffering in the world. Constant emphasis is seen in the Koran of the religious significance of created natural order, indeed the holy book contains ten times as many verses on the ‘signs of nature’ as it does on religious law, and hence it is believed that God reveals himself in nature. Today 1/5th of the human race is Muslim, and the vast majority of those people are concentrated in 37 countries of the world. It stands to reason therefore that Islam is the only religion that adopts itself to countries it overruns and produces distinct impressions of the faith in different places and ages. In all expressions of Islam the general attitude to suffering is to reiterate the Koran and apply it to new circumstances that may arise. Therefore it would be expected that Muslims who inhabit hazard prone areas of the world would relate natural phenomena of the area to God.
There are other religions of the worlds that try to reconcile the problem of suffering with God, for instance Hinduism, however the idea of suffering for Hindu’s is somewhat different. As with Islam the problem of suffering is directly approached in the scriptures. The Vedas, meaning ‘to know’, set out a straight forward way of understanding suffering. In early Hindu thought the forces of nature were personified as different Gods and suffering was understood as a consequence of personal activity on the part of that particular God. Suffering was therefore dealt with by relationships with particular deities and was often expressed in ritual form. Suffering for Hindus is seen as a daily chore followers of the religion must endure and instances of suffering are thought to be the working out of karma (the exact accumulation of an individuals actions.) The problem of suffering in Hinduism is that there may not be a problem, and the faith comes under criticism for its emphasis on individual’s salvation which can make a person indifferent to this world as it is.
Islam and Christianity share many threads of religious beliefs but while theodicy is a central problem in Christianity, in Islam there is not as much debate over the topic for aforementioned reasons.
Until recently in Christianity a view of theodicy grounded in Leibniz tradition seemed to be the ‘zeitgeist.’ Leibniz in his ‘Theodicee’ (1712) developed a model of human suffering (table 1) that bore witness to the enlightenment thinking of the time. Table 1 is a summary of the 6 classic models that Leibniz put forward as a way of rationalising human suffering, all based on the ‘greater good’ principle, that is suffering exists in order for some greater outcome to be revealed. This theory was widely held and it was not until the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that attitudes towards the Leibniz theodicy changed and the ‘best possible world’ model came under severe scrutiny. Following the 1755 disaster, divine retribution became a prominent explanation of human suffering. The clergy told the people of Lisbon that they were a sinful city and that the earthquake was an act of God’s anger (T.D Kendrick.) Lisbon’s population along with the rest of the western world were forced to ask themselves if God was really all loving in the light of such devastating effects. It is said (T.D Kendrick) that the Lisbon earthquake brought an age to an end: the optimism of the first half of the 18th century seemed to vanish in the aftermath of the earthquake. The Leibnizian theodicy and enlightenment thinking in general became almost satirical, not least due to the work of Voltaire, who openly attacked Leibniz tradition when asking how the ‘best of all possible worlds’ theory be accounted for when innocent thousands of people suffer.
During this great period of confusion the reconciling of God’s love and omnipotence on the one hand with suffering on the other was open to much theorising and debate, not just for theodicists but for sociologists, historians and people in general experiencing suffering of any kind. Not all, however, were as strongly condemning of Leibniz thought as Voltaire was and many people still adhered to Liebnizan theory. Rousseau, Kant and many other academics since have sought a rationale of suffering within the Leibniz tradition as many still do today.
