Horrors

In his The Poetics of Evil: Toward an Aesthetic Theodicy , Philip Tallon examines Marilyn McCord Adams’s use of “horrendous evils” as a starting point for theodicy. Tallon writes, “One key advantage of horrors is that their unrelentingly negative vision drives us to look beyond them for some larger framework wherein they can find resolution. Whereas tragedy aims to offer some solution to the problem of evil within the realm of the immanent, horror demands eschatological resolution,” and this forces us to look to Jesus for “a vision of the ultimate defeat of evil.”

He adds, “Individual horrors snap the threat with which Augustine sought to tether beauty and evil but in doing so break free and allow us to find a bloodier but more satisfying beauty: a beauty scourged, shamed, and crowned with thorns.”