Beauty and evil: Theological aesthetics and theodicy in Augustine, Whitehead, and Hegel

This study is a historical and systematic consideration of how an aesthetic theodicy is possible. To counter the prevalent reductive reading of aesthetic theodicy into a single dominant logic, three spectral types of aesthetic theodicy are suggested in Augustine, Whitehead, and Hegel.;While classical theism rightly defends a radical monotheism that God is the ultimate terminus of explanation of all things, its static and acosmic framework appears to be less adequate to explain why God is not the only metaphysical agent in this cosmos-making process.;Process theodicy introduces an important correction in this regard that the creative adventure of the world has a most radical kind of meaning: the God-making process of actual entities. Yet Whitehead introduces a co-eternal principle of creativity into his theological framework in order to explain the problem of evil, which seems to me to violate the very theological grammar of radical monotheism. The creative adventure of actual entities without the monotheistic principle tends to render the universe non-directional.;This study sets out and defends the hypothesis that Hegel's aesthetic theodicy of theo-drama offers an adequate theoretical framework or response to the problem of evil, which mediates Augustine's aesthetic theodicy of harmony and Whitehead's aesthetic theodicy of adventure. From Hegel's perspective, both the cosmos-making process of God and the God-making process of actual entities are ontotheologically interrelated.;The Hegelian imagination of the being of God as a trinitarian theo-drama of redemption allows both an asymmetrical monotheistic relationship between God and the world on the one hand, and a radical creative openness in history on the other. The immanent Trinity offers a certain deep structure or directional plot to the world, the world reenacts it in its interpretative freedom, and the absolute spirit is the intersubjective improvisation of plot and action into an open-ended theo-drama. The holistic truth of these three moments is what Hegel's God means as the inclusive Trinity.