HistoricalChristian.Faith

Stump’s narrative (Thomistic) theodicy — is suffering the means to the sufferer’s own union with God?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — Eleonore Stump’s Thomistic, narrative-based theodicy is the most fully worked-out contemporary answer that meets the person-centred demand: God is justified in permitting an adult’s suffering when, and because, that suffering is the best available means to that same person’s own greatest good — union of love with God, either by averting the worst thing for her (the self-willed isolation from God that is hell) or by leading her to the best. Its strengths are real: it satisfies the constraint Adams pressed (the good must be the sufferer’s own), it is embedded in a genuine tradition (Aquinas’s moral psychology of the fragmented and integrated will), and it is defended not by bare assertion but by close reading of biblical narratives. But three things keep it genuinely disputed: its scope is by design restricted to “mentally fully functional adult human” sufferers, leaving the hardest cases of the distribution objection (infants, the severely impaired, animals) untouched; the benefit that is supposed to defeat the suffering is, on Stump’s own account, opaque and hard to identify; and the load-bearing premise — that suffering is the best available means even for omnipotence — is exactly what a critic will deny. Strong as a person-centred theodicy for the cases it addresses; contested as a general answer. · advanced by Eleonore Stump (2010)

Related arguments: the sufferer’s own good — see also Marilyn McCord Adams’s horrendous-evils theodicy, the other person-centred answer that locates the justifying good in the sufferer herself.

The claim

In Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (2010) Eleonore Stump reconstructs and defends the theodicy she finds in Thomas Aquinas. On the Thomistic value-theory she adopts, the best thing for any human person — her deepest flourishing and her heart’s truest desire — is union, a personal relationship of love, with God. But such union is impossible while a person’s will is internally divided against the good; the will must first be healed and integrated. Suffering, on this account, can be the means by which that healing happens — and God is justified in permitting it when it is the best available means to that person’s own greatest good:

God is justified in allowing human beings to endure suffering such as that experienced by Job, Samson, Abraham, and Mary in the stories, because, through their suffering and only by its means, God gives to each of the protagonists something that these sufferers are willing to trade their suffering to receive, once they understand the nature of what they are being given.¹

The controlling test Stump sets herself is deliberately first-personal: does God’s allowing the evil a person suffers “enable her to flourish, or enable her to have the desires of her heart; and is her suffering the best available means, in the circumstances, to achieve those ends?”² The justifying benefit, that is, must be a benefit to the sufferer herself — either the aversion of the worst thing that could befall her (permanent, self-chosen separation from God) or the attainment of the best (deepened union). And the benefit must truly defeat, not merely outweigh from outside: “unless the benefit is such that it could not be gotten without the suffering and such that it outweighs the suffering, the benefit does not defeat the suffering for the sufferer.”³

Stump’s distinctive method is to test this account against narrative rather than abstract proposition. Half the book is a close, second-personal reading of four biblical stories of suffering — Job, Samson, Abraham (and Isaac), and Mary of Bethany — on the conviction that the knowledge of persons and of love which the theodicy trades in is knowledge that stories carry and syllogisms cannot. The scope is explicitly bounded: she offers a defense of the possibility that such a God exists consistently with suffering, aimed at the evidential problem as it arises for the suffering of mentally fully functional adult human beings.

Who advances it

The argument is Stump’s, developed over decades of work on Aquinas and consummated in Wandering in Darkness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010).⁴ Its raw material is Thomistic: Aquinas’s account of the human good, of love as willing the good of the beloved and desiring union with her, and of the divided will that must be integrated around the good before union with God is possible. Stump’s contribution is to turn that value-theory into an answer to the problem of suffering and to defend it through narrative. She stands with Marilyn McCord Adams in the person-centred turn — both insist, against the greater-good and soul-making traditions, that the good which justifies a person’s suffering must be a good to that person — while differing in cure: Adams looks to the incommensurate good of beatific intimacy engulfing the horror; Stump to suffering as the ordinary, if painful, means by which a fragmented will is healed into the union that is the person’s own deepest desire.

The evidence for

It satisfies the person-centred constraint that sinks the rival theodicies. Adams’s decisive objection to the greater-good and soul-making answers is that their justifying goods are the wrong size and the wrong address — goods enjoyed by the world, or by others, or by an abstract cosmic whole, not by the sufferer. Stump’s account is built to meet exactly that demand: the benefit that justifies God in permitting a person’s suffering must be her own flourishing or heart’s desire, and must be unobtainable without the suffering. It is, in that sense, the constructive theodicy the person-centred critique calls for.

It rests on a real and coherent tradition, not an ad hoc device. The Thomistic machinery — the human good as union with God, love as desire for union, the will divided against itself and in need of integration — is a worked-out moral psychology with independent standing, not a premise invented to escape the problem. If that account of the human good is right, then the claim that suffering can be the means to a person’s integration and union is not arbitrary but follows from what a person most deeply is and wants.

Its narrative method answers a real gap. Much of the sting of the problem of evil is that abstract theodicies feel morally tone-deaf before actual anguish. Stump’s wager — that the knowledge of persons, love, and suffering which a theodicy needs is knowledge stories deliver — lets her test the account against the texture of lived suffering (Job’s, Mary’s) rather than against toy examples, and to show what “a benefit the sufferer would trade the suffering to receive” could concretely mean.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. Within its stated scope the account is strong and honest. It meets the person-centred demand squarely, it is grounded in a genuine value-theory, and it takes the phenomenology of suffering seriously rather than explaining it away. As an answer to “can God be good to an adult sufferer in permitting her suffering?” it is among the most serious constructive proposals on offer.

Where it is contested. Three objections keep the verdict short of sound.

• The scope is narrow by design — and it is the excluded cases that are hardest. Stump limits her defense to the suffering of mentally fully functional adult human beings, setting aside the suffering of infants, of the severely cognitively impaired, and of animals. But those are precisely the cases the distribution objection and Rowe’s fawn press: suffering that schools, integrates, or unites no one because the sufferer has no capacity for the relevant psychic goods. A theodicy of the sufferer’s own flourishing simply does not reach a sufferer incapable of flourishing in the required sense, so the account leaves the sharpest form of the problem where it found it.
• The defeating benefit is opaque. Stump concedes that flourishing and the desires of the heart are not transparent — a sufferer may have the benefit that defeats her suffering without knowing she has it, and observers may fail to see it too. That candour is a virtue, but it cuts against verification: if the benefit can be present yet undetectable, the theodicy’s central empirical claim (that in the actual cases the suffering did yield the person’s greater union) becomes very hard to check, and the account risks being unfalsifiable in exactly the cases where suffering appears to have destroyed rather than integrated a person.
• “Best available means” strains against omnipotence. The load-bearing premise is that the suffering is the best available means to the person’s integration and union. But why, for an omnipotent God, should any particular suffering — still less suffering on the scale actually observed — be the best or only route to healing a will? The same omnipotence objection that presses the “only way” theodicy applies here: unless the necessity is real, the “trade” the sufferer would accept was one God need not have offered.

These do not refute the account — within its scope its logic holds, and the wiki does not discount it for resting on theological premises about the human good. But they mark it as one serious, strongly-defended reading among rivals, disputed on scope, verifiability, and necessity: genuinely contested, not settled.

Assessment

Contested. Stump’s narrative theodicy is the most fully developed contemporary answer to meet the person-centred demand that a justifying good be a good to the sufferer: God permits an adult’s suffering when it is the best available means to her own greatest good, union of love with God, either by averting the worst (self-willed separation from God) or leading to the best. It is grounded in a real Thomistic value-theory and defended with unusual care against biblical narrative rather than toy cases, and on those strengths it clears the bar the greater-good and soul-making theodicies stumble at. But it is genuinely disputed on three fronts: its scope is deliberately confined to mentally functional adults, leaving the hardest distribution cases (infants, the impaired, animals) untouched; the defeating benefit is, by Stump’s own admission, opaque and so hard to verify; and its “best available means” premise strains against omnipotence. Rate it contested — a strong, honest, person-centred theodicy for the cases it takes on, not a general solution — and flag as overreach any presentation of it as answering the problem of evil as such rather than the bounded (if central) problem of adult human suffering it expressly sets out to address.

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