Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas is smuggling a metaphysical grenade into a sentence that sounds like a soothing moral truism. "Good can exist without evil" isn’t optimism; it’s a claim about what reality is made of. In Aquinas’s medieval Christian worldview, goodness is not a preference or a mood. It’s convertible with being itself: to exist is to possess some measure of goodness. Evil, by contrast, isn’t a rival substance stalking the cosmos like a dark twin. It’s a parasite, a lack, a failure of a good that ought to be there.

That asymmetry is the whole point. By insisting that evil "cannot exist without good", Aquinas denies evil the dignity of independence. A murderer still relies on the good of life to violate it; a lie depends on the good of truth to be intelligible; corruption is legible only against an assumed order worth corrupting. Evil is derivative. It can only deform what already has value.

The subtext is a direct rebuttal to the seductive symmetry of dualism (the idea that light and dark are equal cosmic powers) and, more urgently, a philosophical answer to the problem of evil: if God is good, why does evil exist? Aquinas’s move is to relocate evil from God’s creative act to the fractures of finite creatures. This doesn’t make suffering disappear, but it reframes it: the world isn’t built on a battle between equals. It’s built on an underlying good that can be wounded, precisely because it’s real.