5. Theodicies after Kant. Kant's emphasis upon the
inward, moral basis of theodicy had lasting conse-
quences upon followers and opponents alike. The in-
tense moralism of Fichte is shown in his view that
nature is the battle-ground on which man achieves
freedom. Condemning Leibniz for undertaking a
theodicy with “indeterminate abstract categories,”
Hegel finds one in history. At the conclusion of his
Philosophy of History he wrote, “That the history of
the world is this process of development and the actual
coming-into-being of spirit, underneath the variable
dramas of its histories—this is the true theodicy, the
justification of God in history” (Glockner ed., 11, 569;
see also 11, 42). The attainment of freedom in the state,
and the process of self-conscious assimilation by men
of the absolute justify the sufferings of history. Leaning
upon Hegel's dialectical logic, later Hegelians showed
that this was a return to the Neo-Platonic theory that
evil is a more complete good seen partially. (See also
Josiah Royce, for instance, in Studies in Good and Evil
[1898], passim.)
Another type of post-Kantian inversion of the prob-
lem of theodicy is found in the work of the French
personalist, Henry Duméry, author of The Problem of
God in Philosophy of Religion (Evanston, 1964), who
reflects also the influence of such Kant-inspired thinkers
as Henri Bergson and Nicholas Berdyaev. God cannot
be objectified; to find the answer to the place of evil
we must discover the immanence of God as the
transcendent unity, the radical spontaneity, the power
to change, within man. The internal dialogue of the
person with the absolute within him is the path to the
resolution of evil and the vindication of God. This is
Kant with some Bergsonian support.
In the nineteenth century there were other attempts
to overcome the problem of theodicy by reinterpreting
the nature of God. Scientism absolved nature from all
good or bad, and the growth of social injustices and
concern for their reform emphasized moral evil and
human responsibility rather than the justice of God.
The conception of a God perfectly good but without
absolute power was revived with effectiveness by John
Stuart Mill, William James, E. S. Brightman, and
others, who thus vacated the theodicy problem rather
than solved it. Darwin's theory of evolution intensified
the meaning of evil in nature by stressing the role of
struggle, but also invited a positive but hardly justified
argument by the Social Darwinists that nature supports
progress and the improvement of forms of life.
Thinkers like R. A. Tsanoff have found natural evil to
arise from the disharmonies and disturbed relations
which take place between old and new orders of life,
while Henderson and others offered statistical evidence
of a teleological principle in nature. Thus encouraged,
theistic and idealistic thinkers revived the Irenaeian
theodicy, holding that evil and freedom are the
divinely chosen conditions by which men are disci-
plined to become members of the Kingdom of God.
In the face of the great moral and historical catas-
trophes of this century, and the decline of philosophical
theology which accompanied them, the problem of
theodicy has been largely absorbed through the rise
of religious humanism, or a fideism which distrusts
intellect, or a secular skepticism. Yet there is renewed
evidence that the problem is still alive, in recent dis-
cussions by thinkers of an analytic type who have
restored and given rigorous formulation to the objec-
tions of Hume and Kant, with what must be admitted
to be still inconclusive results. Since these discussions
move from the question of theodicy to the question
of evidence for the existence of God, they need not
be discussed here. The works by Hick, Flew and
MacIntyre, and Pike listed in the Bibliography will
introduce the reader to these recent studies.
