For some reason I had been led to think so. Not the least due to the origins of the term itself: Leibniz coined it from something like ἡ δίκη τοῦ θεοῦ, the justice of (the) god, as the title to his 1710 work. A few decades before Milton had set out "to justify the ways of God to men". The notion was in the air, I understood, and this had to do with the voluntaristic turn of late medieval philosophy: if God is not the epitome of reason, if God instead stands above reason and creates its rules, even to the point of overruling contradiction, then our standard modes of justification don't apply to him. We must look elsewhere if we wish to know why he does the things he does. Theodicy becomes a separate discipline. (Sure, the ancient world gave us Job, but Job shipped with his own solution--"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?".)
Then there's Seneca's De Providentia, which I picked up the other night, to read:
YOU have asked me, Lucilius, why, if the world be ruled by providence, so many evils befall good men? The answer to this would be more conveniently given in the course of this work, after we have proved that providence governs the universe, and that God is amongst us: but, since you wish me to deal with one point apart from the whole, and to answer one replication before the main action has been decided, I will do what is not difficult, and plead the cause of the gods.
Here in the very midst of the Roman empire theodicy steps to the fore, taking the form of a legal case. God is on trial, indicted for crimes against humanity. And he's called Seneca to lawyer up. Now, contrary to much contemporary practice, the ubiquity of evil leads Lucilius to merely doubt God's benevolence but not his existence. But for good measure Seneca throws in some remarks to put any qualms to rest regarding his existence, which interestingly take the form of the intelligibility of reality, the order and stability in nature, that is, everything we've already seen in the Timaeus.
And then he launches into defending God's benevolence. Good fathers are stern. In fact, it's a sign of God's favor that you of all people are suffering. It means he thinks you are worth it...[more to come]
And then he launches into defending God's benevolence. Good fathers are stern. In fact, it's a sign of God's favor that you of all people are suffering. It means he thinks you are worth it...[more to come]
