Unknown. It turns out that this is some kind of indivisible spiritual atom.

Confessor. Perhaps yes. But it is better not to use this term. Thus, the beginning of free will is a property of the soul, which consists in the incomprehensible possibility of performing certain actions without causally determined dependence. This property, given to the soul by God, makes man God-like, distinguishes him from all living creatures and in the moral sense opens for him the path to God-perfection, and gives the proper meaning to the concept of good and evil. Absolute good is what the will of God does. For man to do good means to choose and do with his own free will that which will coincide with the will of God. Such free volition will unite man with the Divine principle, give him eternal life as a partaker of the Divinity, and will make the task of God's perfection not abstract, but absolutely real. Now, at last, we come to your question -- what is evil and who created it? Evil is not an independent entity, so it cannot be said that God created it. It was created in man by the same principle that creates every human action, free will. What is it? This is such a free will that opposes the Divine will. Such opposition, the lack of unity of the human will with the Divine will, as it were, tears man away from the Divine principle and entails terrible consequences that create a variety of evils. I will nevertheless give you here a whole series of judgments on the evil of the Holy Fathers and Teachers of the Church.

"Evil is not any essence that has real existence, like other beings created by God, but is only the deviation of beings from their natural state, in which the Creator has placed them, into the opposite state. Therefore, God is not the author of evil, but it comes from the beings themselves, who deviate from their natural state and destiny" (Dionysius the Areopagite).

"We are not created for death, but we die through ourselves, we have been destroyed by our own will" (Tatian).

"Adam prepared his own death through separation from God. Thus, it was not God who created death, but we ourselves brought it upon ourselves by evil permission" (Basil the Great).

Now, having a definite answer to the question of what evil is and where it came from, let us try to answer another of your questions -- about suffering. What was the fall of man? In violation of God's commandment. This commandment was the expression of the Divine will with which the free will of man could be in accord, and then all life would be connected with the Divine principle. Or it could be in contradiction to this will, and then the connection with the Divine principle was broken and life outside of God began. Man fell, that is, he chose the second path.

Unknown. Wait, what kind of freedom is it if a person had to keep the commandment of God?

Confessor. Yes. He had to, if he wanted good, if he wanted to have a life without evil, but he was completely free in his choice, and if he wanted evil, that is, if he wanted to oppose the Divine will, he could choose this path, and he chose it.

You do not like references to the Holy Fathers, but listen to how beautifully St. Irenaeus of Lyons says about it: "Believers believe by their own choice, in the same way those who disagree with His teaching disagree by their own choice... To those who abide in their love for God, He grants fellowship with Him. But communion with God is life and light, and the enjoyment of all the good things that He has. On those who by their own choice distance themselves from God, He imposes that separation from Himself which they have chosen by their own agreement. But separation from God is death and... deprivation of all the good things that He has. Therefore those who, through apostasy, lose these above-mentioned things, being deprived of all good, suffer all kinds of punishments. However, God does not punish them directly, but this punishment falls on them because they are deprived of all that is good" (Against Heresies, Book 4, Ch. 39, 4).

Life outside of God "of one's own will" immediately gave power over man to those elements that were in complete harmony only when man was connected with God. When this bond was severed by the Fall and the self-assertion of the human will, everything fell into a state of disorder, struggle, division, suffering appeared as the opposite of blessedness and death as the opposite of life. The question of suffering is most closely connected with the question of evil, because suffering is its direct consequence. Therefore, the answer to the question will be the same. Who created suffering? It was created not by God, but by the free will of man who has fallen away from God. Therefore, to destroy suffering means to destroy evil and restore absolute good. But it is impossible to "make" people good by the power of God, as has already been shown before.

Unknown. Don't understand. After all, one person committed a sin, and all living things suffer and die?

Confessor. In the Christian worldview, as in a perfect building, it is impossible to pull out one brick without damaging the whole. This universe cannot be taken in parts. Your question is again based on a misunderstanding. You take what God created not as a single whole, but as a collection of some independent parts, where the fate of one part has no relation to the other. God entrusted all living things to man not only in the sense that He gave him power over this living kingdom, but as the most perfect, as the bearer in nature of the image of God, as the head uniting all living things with the Divine, and thus entrusted him with the responsibility for the fate of all life. Therefore, the fall of man was the fall of all life, its falling away from God in the person of man. Therefore, as you will see later, the restoration of this unity through the "new Adam" was at the same time the salvation not only of humanity, but of all life.

Unknown. Yet you have not answered my main question: why did the omniscient God, knowing what the freedom He had given him lead to, create the world? And what is the point of creating a person, knowing in advance that he will fall away from God and turn his whole life into continuous suffering, and not only here, but also beyond the grave.

Confessor. I have not yet considered this question because it concerns not so much the existence of God as the fate of man. We have talked so far about what evil and suffering are and who created them. Now you pose a completely different question, about God's attitude to sin and suffering. This question leads us to the great mystery of the Atonement. Only faith in the Atonement gives a complete answer to the question of the fate of fallen man and God's attitude towards him. But it is better to speak of this at another time, so that we may consider in detail such an important question.