Confessor. Why does Almighty God allow evil to exist? Why did He not destroy evil and make everyone good by a single act of His will? This is the first question you put to me. The very formulation of this question seems to me to be a misunderstanding. For example, imagine the question: Can Almighty God commit sin? Obviously not. But if He cannot commit sin, then He is not omnipotent? Is it possible to seriously raise such questions? And your question only seems different at first glance. "Can Almighty God make people good?" But this means to destroy the basic property of good and to turn "good" into moral nothingness.

Unknown. I don't know what you mean.

Confessor. If good were a simple and inevitable consequence of the power of God, it would be, like any other phenomenon of the material world, causally conditioned, and therefore would lose its moral content. I have already shown you, when we were discussing immortality, that a causally determined phenomenon cannot have a moral evaluation. That which is deprived of liberty can be neither good nor evil, but is inevitable. The concepts of good and evil presuppose "freedom of choice" in man. But where we are talking about freedom, we can no longer talk about causal dependence. So, in a logically formal sense, your question contains a misunderstanding, which will become quite obvious if the question is put in this way: why does not Almighty God Himself, by His power, make people good, that is, deprive them of freedom, without which no good can exist at all?

Unknown. Of course, the question does not make sense in such a formulation.

Confessor. But this formulation follows from the essence of the concept of good. Thus, the answer to the question: why God Himself does not make people good and incapable of doing evil, is clear. Because He gave them freedom. It is on this concept of freedom that we will now dwell in more detail. When we talked about immortality, I was considering free will, because it was necessary to show the meaninglessness of this concept to an unbelieving mind. Now we will try to consider this concept from the point of view of its positive content, so important not only for the solution of the question of evil, but also for many other questions.

The concept of freedom is one of those concepts which, like eternity and infinity, are on the one hand incomprehensible to our reason, and on the other hand, are affirmed by it as something that undoubtedly exists. Man thinks according to the laws of causality. For the limited human mind, every phenomenon must have its cause. He cannot think of action and phenomenon as "causeless". But freedom is causelessness, something primary, unconditioned by anything previous, some mysterious principle, completely incomprehensible to us. Freedom for our reason has no limit in the sense of causality, just as infinity has no limit in space or time. And if we were to conceive of freedom as causality, we would arrive at the same hopeless situation as trying to comprehend infinity in time and space. If we break the chain of the causal series and say, "This phenomenon depends on such and such a cause," and then set a limit, our reason will immediately ask: What was the cause that determined this last of these causes? If, however, we say: no, it was the last cause, and it is not conditioned by anything, we thereby affirm the incomprehensible concept of free will as causelessness, which undoubtedly exists.

Unknown. But why can't the causal series be recognized as infinite?

Confessor. Can. But this would be a denial of free will. But you and I have been talking about freedom as an indubitable fact, and we only want to comprehend the meaning of this concept. A causal series can be carried on indefinitely only to explain the mechanical causes of conditioned phenomena, and not to explain freedom. If you talk about an infinite series of causes and effects, you will simply refuse to solve the question of freedom at all. This is especially clear when it comes not to man as the first cause of this or that action, but to God as the first cause of all that exists.

Unknown. Explain this in more detail.

Confessor. For the believing mind, God is the first cause of all that exists, the beginning of all existence. Himself having no beginning and therefore eternally abiding. It is impossible to comprehend this, just as it is impossible to comprehend the eternal existence of anything. To deny God as the first cause and to say that the world has existed eternally is to say the doubly incomprehensible. In the first place, it is incomprehensible, just like all the eternal and therefore eternal existence of God; And secondly, it is incomprehensible in the sense of the absence of a first cause in a world where everything operates according to the law of causality, and where it is never possible to arrive at the first cause of the entire causal series of phenomena. Faith in God solves this question differently. It pushes the state of the eternal First Cause into the pre-material realm, into the realm where there are no transitory, causally conditioned phenomena. This is what has always been there, before the creation of the world. And the material world thinks in a way that is understandable to the human mind, as having a beginning and created in time. And therefore the material world lives according to the law of causality, not freedom: it also has its own first cause, the Power of God, which created it.

Unknown. Does what you say reveal the positive content of the concept of freedom? As long as you are constantly showing me why it is possible and even necessary to recognize this incomprehensible concept, and not revealing its content.

Confessor. Yes. It is absolutely necessary for me to point this out beforehand, because otherwise your mind will refuse to perceive what follows and is already comprehensible.

Unknown. Perhaps you are right.

Confessor. Let us now turn to the very content of the concept of freedom. We are created in the image and likeness of God, and "freedom of will" is the likeness of the Divine principle in us. We point out the different properties of the Godhead, but this does not mean that we think of God as something "complex" composed of various elements, just as materialism thinks of matter. God is absolutely simple, indecomposable and indivisible. Thus His attributes are nothing but a perfect human description of this one and indivisible Essence. Such is the human soul, created in His likeness. We say: thought, will, feeling, but these definitions do not correspond in the complexity of the elements of the soul. The soul, as the likeness of God, is not complex, it is an indivisible and simple unit. Freedom of will in this unit is not one of its constituent elements, but one of its properties.