[This column originally appeared in the February 1989 issue of catholic eye, and was also included in the book of collected Canavan pieces for catholic eye,  Pins in the Liberal Balloon.]

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Cardinal Ratzinger has remarked that the problem of evil has exercised the minds of men at least since the Book of Job. That book, however, has not succeeded in putting everyone’s mid at rest on the question of why God permits evil to afflict the just as well as the unjust. I remember a lunch-table conversation some years ago in which a young priest said that he had never found God’s answer to Job satisfactory. I understood how he felt, but I suspect that it is the only answer we shall ever get, because it is the only answer we can get.

You will recall that after Job’s long lament about his afflictions and his friends’ efforts to be helpful by assuring him that his sufferings must be the penalty for his sins, God scolds the friends for their presumption, then directs a lengthy speech to Job. Briefly and colloquially put, God’s answer to Job comes down to this: “Were you there when I made the world? You weren’t? Then shut up!”

And rightly. It would be impossible for the Lord who brought the universe into being out of nothing to get finite minds to see the situation as it was, so to speak, on the day before the creation, when all the options were open. Nor could he enable us to understand why he chose to create this world rather than another and possible one. Omnia exeunt in mysterium: at the end of every line of inquiry, the human mind encounters mystery.

We must therefore accept what we cannot possibly comprehend. We must also admit that  we have no standards by which we can find God or his universe wanting, because we could get such standards only from the universe that God made. To what are we appealing when we declare the heavens unjust? Beyond the universe as it is, there is only God, and beyond God there is nothing. There is no standard above him by which we can pass judgment on him or his works.

One thought, however, occurs to me, not as solving the problem of evil, but perhaps throwing some light on it. It is that most of the evil in the world is the result of God’s having decided to create free creatures. When we think of evil, we think too readily of the loss of life, the suffering, and the damage caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, plagues, and other natural disasters—what insurance companies call acts of God. But the worst horrors of our world, from the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin to the daily diet of tales of cruelty, exploitation, and degradation served up in each morning’s newspaper, are not natural disasters or “acts of God.” Directly or indirectly, they are due to human beings choosing evil.

We could, and some of us do, blame God for having made us free, but that is tantamount to blaming him for having made us at all. It is our nature to be free, and without our freedom, we would not be human. Our freedom makes our crimes and sins possible, but it is also what makes us, as the Bible says, the image and likeness of God, capable of freely serving him, capable also of sharing in his divine life forever.

To live as a human being is to choose. Life is choice, a destiny from which we cannot escape by refusing to choose, and the necessity of choice entails the possibility of choosing evil as well as good. From this possibility God will not save us by depriving us of our freedom, for in so doing he would dehumanize us. We are his creatures, but his free creatures, and he will not save us against our wills.

The consequences of the human abuse of freedom are horrendous, and they explain most of the evils from which mankind suffers. We could cope with a world in which the only disasters were natural ones. It is pride, greed, lust, anger, envy, gluttony, and sloth that cause the evils which we inflict on one another and so often make human life a hell.

The consequences of sin fall upon the innocent as well as the guilty, often from generation to generation. Among these consequences is a genuine lessening and diminution of freedom, not all of it due to our personal sins. None of us today enjoys a godlike freedom which easily and without struggle resists temptation. We have inherited a nature which is free indeed, but weakened and blinded by the sins of our ancestors, right back to the first ones, and which is therefore prone to repeat and multiply the sins of the past.

It is this fallen and sinful world into which Christ came to save us. He does not do it by taking us out of this world; our salvation is accomplished here, in the world as it is. Nor does he restore the lost paradise or promise a future one to be built by reforming social institutions. Above all, he does not save us by taking away the freedom that makes sin possible, or by abolishing sin’s dreadful consequences. His salvation takes place within each of us individually, through the grace that heals our wounded wills and enables us to grow into a life lived without sin and in harmony with God’s will.

I do not mean to imply that social institutions do not need to be reformed—how could the institutions of proud, greedy, and lustful men not need reform?—or that reforming them would do no good. But, as every papal encyclical on social questions insists, no reform will work without a profound conversion of our wills from evil to good. The “problem of evil” lies mainly in our freedom and what we have done with it. The mystery remains: why God in his infinite wisdom chose to create and then redeem the likes of us.