The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters

This luminous ground of God, is the ground that upholds all creation, “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars” as Dante put it,30 the depths of our own heart, awareness itself utterly steeped in and saturated by God.

This world is full of beauty and horror, but the unchanging reality underneath it all is the love of God that creates, sustains, and redeems all things. It is the constant holding us together.

Theodicy names the abstract “problem of pain”—the logical dilemma of how God can be good and all-powerful even as horrible things regularly happen in the world. And it also names the crisis of faith that often comes from an encounter with suffering.2

what we call goodness is, in its essence, God in his aspect as the original source and ultimate fulfillment of all love, drawing all things to one another by drawing them to himself.