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  • Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering by Eleonore Stump
  • Jack Miles
Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010), 668 pp.

“The man who argues that philosophy . . . has made no progress emphasizes that there are still Aristotelians, not that Aristotelianism has failed to progress” (Thomas Kuhn, 1962). As for Aristotelianism, so and more so for Thomism, but Eleonore Stump offers a neo-Thomist theodicy that makes progress by embracing “the desires of the heart.” Desire, engaged through biblical narratives, becomes crucial: “If a sufferer managed in the midst of his suffering to hold the belief that God would give him the desires of his heart, it would not take away the pain of suffering. How could it possibly? Nonetheless, the belief would radically [End Page 391] alter his experience of that suffering.” For Susan Neiman (Evil in Modern Thought, 2002), theodicy is bad faith by definition. Stump, who quotes Neiman on her last pages, begins at the metaphysical pivot where Neiman stops. For Stump, it is not theodicy but resignation that is bad faith by definition.

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