The problem of evil became a secular one, and the philosophy of evil came to focus on the moral category: the evil that men do. Few but religious fundamentalists would continue to use the morally inflected word “evil” to describe natural disasters. Such vast, meaningless destruction made it much more difficult to think of natural and metaphysical calamities as acts of God. As Neiman shows, theodicy never really recovered from the tremors. In the era before that disaster, evil was thought to come in three varieties-natural, metaphysical, or moral-and inquiry into the concept of evil was dominated by theodicy, which is the attempt to reconcile a good and omnipotent deity with evil in the world. In 1755, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, an earthquake destroyed Lisbon, then one of the major cities of Europe. The book is structured around two events that Neiman considers the “central poles” of the modern era, both of which threw philosophers’ understanding of evil into confusion: Lisbon and Auschwitz. In the book “Evil in Modern Thought,” from 2002, Susan Neiman traces philosophy’s struggles with evil over several hundred years.
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