HistoricalChristian.Faith

The soul-making (Irenaean) theodicy — does suffering make souls?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — as a positive theodicy (unlike Plantinga’s mere defense) the soul-making reading is genuinely disputed, strong at its core and strained at its reach. Its central insight is sound and old: certain great goods — courage, compassion, patience, a freely-formed love of God — are logically the sort of thing that can only be won through a world of real difficulty, so a frictionless paradise could not produce the mature creatures God intends. That much is well grounded and, in the Fathers, near-consensus. What is contested is the further, load-bearing claim that this purpose justifies the actual world — its distribution (suffering falls where it ennobles no one, on infants and animals who make no soul), its magnitude (horrendous evils that destroy rather than build the self — Marilyn McCord Adams), and its structure (it appears to instrumentalize some persons’ agony for others’ growth). Hick answers these only by adding a universalist eschatology (apokatastasis) in which every soul-making is eventually completed beyond death — a repair that saves the theodicy at the price of a further contested doctrine. So the reading holds up as a *component* of an answer and falters as a *complete* one. · advanced by John Hick (1966), reviving Irenaeus

See also: the free-will defense — the rival modern reply, and the classic theodicy-vs-defense contrast: Plantinga shows only that God could have a reason (a defense, needing mere possibility), Hick offers what the reason is (a theodicy, answerable for plausibility). This page and that one are the two poles of the modern constructive answer. The soul-making line also feeds the modern-debate survey and its patristic root is the Irenaeus witness on the timeline; Hick’s universalist completion connects to the universal-restoration timeline.

The claim

Against the Augustinian model — a humanity created perfect, fallen by free choice, and now justly suffering the penalty — John Hick’s Evil and the God of Love (1966) reconstructs what he calls the Irenaean type of theodicy. On this reading humanity was not made finished and did not fall from a height; it was made immature — created in the “image” of God (a rational, moral creature) but not yet in His “likeness” (the earned, mature character of a child of God), and set to grow into that likeness through its own free response. The two-stage reading is drawn straight from Irenaeus, who answered the objection “why did God not make man perfect from the first?” by saying that God “could have made man perfect from the first, but man could not receive this, being as yet an infant.”¹

Hick’s controlling image, borrowed from a letter of the poet John Keats, is the world as a “vale of soul-making”:

this world must be a place of soul-making. And its value is to be judged, not primarily by the quantity of pleasure and pain occurring in it at any particular moment, but by its fitness for its primary purpose, the purpose of soul-making.

— John Hick, Evil and the God of Love.² Two features distinguish it from the free-will defense. First, it is a theodicy, not a defense: Hick does not claim merely that God could have a sufficient reason, but tells us what that reason is — the making of mature, God-loving souls — and so accepts the heavier burden of showing the reason plausible, not merely possible. Second, it answers natural as well as moral evil directly, and without the fallen-spirits conjecture the free-will defense needs: a world of genuine hardship, real risk, and impersonal law-governed danger — a world “set at an epistemic distance” from God, so that faith and virtue are freely won rather than compelled — is exactly the environment soul-making requires. Both natural and moral evils are, on this view, the raw material of growth.³

Who advances it

The name is Hick’s; the substance is patristic. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 180) gives the earliest sustained form: God “made man a free [agent] from the beginning… for there is no coercion with God,” man was made an “infant” who could not yet “receive” perfection, and one cannot knowingly choose the good without knowing its contrary, so that experience yields “a surer and an undoubted comprehension” than untried innocence.⁴ Lactantius (c. 313) supplies the greater-good corollary — a painless world would be a virtueless one, since “no traces of virtue remain in man, the nature of which consists in enduring and overcoming the bitterness of evils” — and Hick explicitly gathers these into the modern statement.⁵ Hick presents the Irenaean type as the great alternative to the Augustinian, and pushes it, controversially, to a universalist completion: because a soul-making purpose that left any soul finally unmade would be a purpose God had failed to achieve, Hick holds that soul-making must continue beyond death until all are brought home — the apokatastasis that the timeline treats as its own question.⁶ In the analytic literature the soul-making theodicy is the standard positive rival to the free-will defense, expounded (and pressed) in every textbook treatment of the problem.

The evidence for

The core is a genuine logical point, not a pious hope. Some of the goods a theist most prizes are what philosophers call second-order goods that presuppose evils to work on: there is no courage without danger, no compassion without suffering to answer, no forgiveness without wrong, no patient endurance without hardship. These are not goods God withholds from a painless world out of stinginess; they are goods that a painless world cannot contain, as a colour cannot exist without extension. If a freely-formed, tested character of this kind is among the greatest goods — and the moral seriousness of the objection to God assumes it is — then a world capable of producing it must contain the very hardships the objection complains of. The point is old (it is Lactantius’s “no wisdom without evils to overcome”) and it is hard to deny.

It answers natural evil head-on, where the free-will defense strains. The free-will defense reaches disease, disaster, and animal suffering only through the far weaker conjecture that they are the work of fallen non-human spirits. Soul-making needs no such move. A law-governed world — one where fire always burns and gravity never relents for the deserving — is a precondition of a moral environment at all: only in a stable, impersonal order can actions have foreseeable consequences, can genuine risk and cost exist, can there be anything to be brave about. Hick argues that a world edited to spare the innocent every natural harm would be a world in which nothing was at stake, and so no soul could be made. Natural evil is thus not an awkward residue but part of the design the theodicy positively predicts.

It fits the Christian shape of redemption. The reading is continuous with a real and central strand of the tradition — not merely Irenaeus but the whole New-Testament theme that suffering “worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope” (Rom. 5:3–4), that the Son himself was “made perfect through sufferings” (Heb. 2:10), that trials are the “trying of your faith” (Jas. 1:3). A theodicy that makes growth-through-hardship the point of the world is not an ad-hoc philosopher’s device but a generalization of the way Scripture already reads suffering in the life of faith.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. As an account of why a good God would make a world with hardship in it at all, the soul-making theodicy is strong: the second-order goods it names really do require an environment of difficulty, and a stable, dangerous, law-governed world really is the precondition of any moral life. As a component of a cumulative answer — sitting beside the free-will defense, the greater-good tradition, and the privation metaphysics — it does real and defensible work, and it does it for natural evil, where the other lines are weakest.

Where it is contested. The reading’s ambition is to justify not hardship-in-general but this world, and three objections press exactly there, each targeting the fit between soul-making and the actual record of suffering:

• The distribution objection. Suffering is not proportioned to growth. If evil were the schoolroom of virtue we should expect it doled out in educative measure — enough to stretch, not enough to crush — and delivered to agents who can learn from it. Instead it falls indiscriminately: on the infant who dies before any character can form, on the senile who lose the self they had built, on the billions of years of animal suffering that schooled no soul at all because no soul was there to school. A theodicy whose whole point is pedagogy is embarrassed by the vast tracts of suffering that teach no one — and Hick’s honest concession that much suffering is, in this life, simply excessive and unjustly distributed is precisely the admission the objection needs.⁷
• Horrendous evils that unmake rather than make. Marilyn McCord Adams pressed the sharpest form: some evils — the torture of a child, the atrocities she calls “horrendous” — are of a kind that, far from building a self, give the participant (perpetrator or victim) prima facie reason to doubt that their life could be a great good to them on the whole. Such evils are dysteleological: they do not serve the growth the theodicy assigns them; they destroy the very self that was supposed to grow. Adams’s conclusion is telling — she thinks generic, “religion-neutral” goods (character, even a completed cosmos) are the wrong size to defeat horrendous evils, which can be defeated, if at all, only by an incommensurate good like intimacy with God Himself. That is a repair from within theism, but it is also a verdict that soul-making, as a stand-alone theodicy on generic goods, does not reach the worst of what it must explain.⁸ Adams’s critique is not only a defeater of soul-making but the front of her own positive horrendous-evils theodicy, weighed on its own page.
• The instrumentalization charge. When A’s agony is justified as the occasion of B’s compassion or the world’s general moral seriousness, A has been used as a means to an end A never chose — a structure critics find morally intolerable, and one the protest tradition (Ivan Karamazov, and after him D. Z. Phillips) refuses outright: no future harmony, they say, can be bought at the price of a tortured child, and to offer one is to insult the victim.⁹ The soul-making theodicy is peculiarly exposed here, because its currency is the use of suffering to produce a good elsewhere.

Hick’s repair, and its cost. Hick sees the distribution and horrendous-evil objections clearly, and his answer to both is eschatological: the soul-making is not completed in this life — it plainly is not — but continues after death until every soul is perfected, so that the final good is universal and the ledger balances only at the end of a very long story. This is a coherent and even elegant move: it concedes the objections’ force in this life and relocates the theodicy’s success to a completed whole. But it saves the theodicy only by buying a second contested doctrine — universal salvation — without which the promised completion is not guaranteed for the very souls the objections name (the crushed, the destroyed, the never-begun). It also does not by itself answer the instrumentalization charge: a good end, however universal, does not obviously license the *route* of getting there through innocent agony. So the repair is real but not free: the soul-making theodicy, pressed to a complete answer, leans on an eschatology the wiki rates as its own open question.

Assessment

Contested. The soul-making theodicy’s core is sound and ancient — that a whole class of the goods theists most value can be won only through a world of genuine difficulty, and that a stable, dangerous, law-governed order is the precondition of any moral life at all. As a part of the answer, and especially as the best available account of natural evil, it holds up and improves on the free-will defense’s strained fallen-spirits extension. What is genuinely disputed — and why the rating is not higher — is its ambition to justify the actual distribution and magnitude of suffering: the pointlessly-placed suffering of infants and animals that schools no soul (the distribution objection), the horrendous evils that destroy the self rather than build it (Adams), and the moral cost of justifying one person’s agony by another’s growth (the instrumentalization charge). Hick meets these by extending soul-making beyond death to a universal completion — a coherent repair, but one that rescues the theodicy only by resting it on the further contested doctrine of apokatastasis, and even then leaves the instrumentalization worry standing. Strong as a diagnosis of why any moral world must cost something; contested as a justification of what this world in fact costs. Rate the core insight sound and the complete theodicy contested, and flag as overreach any presentation of soul-making as a finished answer that has absorbed the horrendous and the gratuitous — its own best defender (Adams) says the generic goods are the wrong size for that, and Hick himself must go to the eschaton to close the account.

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