Eleonore Stump

In Simon Wiesenthal’s book _The Sunflower: On the Possibility and Limits of Forgiveness_, Wiesenthal tells the story of a dying German soldier who was guilty of horrendous evil against Jewish men, women, and children, but who desperately wanted forgiveness from and reconciliation with at least one Jew before his death. Wiesenthal, then a prisoner in Auschwitz, was brought to hear the German soldier’s story and his pleas for forgiveness. As Wiesenthal understands his own reaction to the German soldier, he did not grant the dying soldier the forgiveness the man longed for. In _The Sunflower_, Wiesenthal presents reflections on this story by numerous thinkers. Their responses are noteworthy for the highly divergent intuitions they express. In this chapter, I consider the conflicting views about forgiveness on the part of the respondents in _The Sunflower_. I argue that those respondents who are convinced that forgiveness should be denied the dying German soldier are mistaken. Nonetheless, I also argue in support of the attitude that rejects reconciliation with the dying German soldier. I try to show that, in some cases of grave evil, repentance and making amends are not sufficient for the removal of guilt, and that reconciliation may be morally impermissible, whatever the case as regards forgiveness.

In this chapter, suffering is described as a function of what a person cares about, so that for a human being to suffer is for him or her to be kept from flourishing. But what we care about has a subjective side too—denoted as ‘the desires of the heart’. Thus, the ‘problem of suffering’ is the task of accounting for the fact that many people are kept from flourishing, or from having the desires of their heart, or both. With respect to flourishing, the chapter follows Aquinas in regarding suffering as “God’s medicine for human beings,” and this claim is supported by allusion to empirical studies on ‘adversarial growth’. But the more obstinate problem is why people fail to get the desires of their heart and are heartbroken as a result, and to answer this the chapter turns from Aquinas to the biographies of John Milton and Claiborne Park.

Dante is a superb Thomist; and, in his _Divine Comedy,_ he puts flesh on Aquinas’s sophisticated philosophical and theological views by means of an allegory with novelistic elements. In the _Inferno,_ Dante the traveler exemplifies the way in which to do well what the sinner in hell did horribly. The punishment of the sinner shows the ugliness of a particular evil, and the actions of Dante the traveler show something powerfully good that is the alternative, the near neighbor, of the evil. By this twinned means, the nature of the seven deadly sins is vividly exposed, and true goodness and love, opposed to all the seven deadly sins, is illuminated and poignantly depicted. Furthermore, Dante is not only a superb Thomist and an insightful philosopher in his own right, but he incarnates the philosophy in narrative; and that makes all the difference in the world to his ability to give us insight into evil.

One kind of interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement, often associated with Anselm and recently defended by Richard Swinburne, supposes that the life, suffering, and death of Christ are somehow requisite to satisfy God’s justice or goodness or some other divine attribute. For God to forgive human beings for their wrongdoing, Christ’s life and death on the cross are needed. This chapter argues against that view. It presents a traditional account of love and forgiveness, and then examines the implications of this account for Swinburne’s view of atonement. The chapter concludes that Swinburne’s view of atonement is incompatible with this traditional account even when provision is made for retributive punishment.

There ought to be some connection between the atonement and solutions to the problem of evil. Whatever the reason God has for allowing the suffering of a particular person, at that time, in that way, it seems that her suffering somehow needs to conduce to her ultimate good. But if there is salvation from sin leading to union with God, _that_ seems to be the ultimate good for all human beings. And so it seems that there should be some intrinsic connection between the benefits postulated by an interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement and the benefits highlighted by attempts at theodicy or defense. In this paper, the possibilities are explored for bringing together theodicy and the doctrine of the atonement.

The doctrine of the atonement differs from other major Christian doctrines, such as the doctrine of the incarnation, for example, in having no formula specifying its interpretation. For this reason, it is possible for there to be highly divergent interpretations, all of which count as orthodox. In this paper, by focusing on the nature of love, guilt, and shame, I highlight the problems for the two main kinds of interpretation into which varying orthodox accounts of the doctrine of the atonement fall. My purposes is to point out where we might profitably focus for further reflection on the doctrine.

In this paper, I contrast the notion of natural law on a secularist scientific picture with the notion of natural law in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. I show the way in which the highly various metaphysics of the two worldviews give rise to such divergent notions. In this connection, I look at contemporary arguments against reductionism in the sciences and in recent metaphysics. I argue that this new antireductionist approach sits more easily with the Thomistic worldview than with the secularist scientific view.