How can a loving God allow his beloved creature, made in his own image, to die?
Genesis tells us that death was not in God’s original plan. Man freely chose the path of pride, thereby cutting himself away from his maker and falling back toward that sea of nothingness from which he came. Christ, the “second Adam,” tells us that death is not final and that the gates of Paradise will re-open for us. “Death is not natural,” writes St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa theologiae. He reasons as follows: “God made in man whatever is natural to him. Now God made not death. Therefore death is not natural to man.” Furthermore, according to the Angelic Doctor, death is not compatible with man’s end, which is his happiness. “Death,” consequently, “is the punishment for sin.” Here, Aquinas is echoing the first chapter in the Book of Wisdom: “Death was not God’s doing… To be for this, he created all.” The opening of the Book of Wisdom provides an interesting contrast with that of Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, in which the Nobel prize-winning author states that the primary philos
