Luigi Pareyson

"(About Fëdor Michajlovič Dostoevskij) He provided neither theology nor metaphysics, but today theology and metaphysics cannot do without him."

"God wants to exist and wants to be what he is, which means that he is free not only with regard to being in general, but above all with regard to his own being, in short, he is not bound either to his own existence or to his own essence."

"God himself, as absolute freedom and original will, contains, indeed is, the answer to the “fundamental question” [What is his name? (Ex. 3:13)], but he does not state it in explicit terms: he merely says “I am who I am, I am who I want to be”, which is a definitive statement. There is nothing more to say: it is an absolute act of will and freedom, by which God makes himself and declares himself master of his own being and of being in general."

"God is master of his own essence, because in him act and essence, essence and will are one and the same."

"[First of all] there is the abysmal nature of God, that is: that void that exists before God and is God himself (the freedom of God, God as freedom) is God as pure beginning, which implies precisely the nothingness of freedom. Before God, there is only God. But God, before God, exists. God's existence can only depend on God himself; we must necessarily admit this kind of divine doubling. God's existence is an act of his original freedom, it is an act of freedom that establishes itself. God's freedom posits God's existence, God's freedom, that is: divine abyssalness, the nothingness of freedom as beginning, posits God's existence, that is, the fruit of this freedom, which thus becomes a historical fact. The first historical fact ever is the existence of God, which is therefore undeducible – which is therefore initial."

"God is being, goodness, truth, or the positive in general, but insofar as it is willed and chosen, victory over possible nothingness."

"The positive choice is itself a choice of goodness, and the negative choice is itself a choice of evil."

"The primacy of reality is in itself a victory over nothingness, and the choice of good is always a judgement on evil, so that God has two aspects in himself: that by which “ab aeterno” good has been chosen by an irreversible act and evil is rejected as a rejected possibility; and that by which evil, as a discarded alternative, subsists forever as the backdrop of possibility and as a hidden but available possibility."

"There are therefore two aspects to God: that in which good is chosen and evil is rejected by an irreversible act, and this is the original positivity, the existence of God to whom the first choice has led; and that in which evil as a discarded alternative remains forever as the backdrop to positivity, as a presence that is forgotten and set aside, as a possibility that has been overcome but remains available. It cannot be said, then, that evil is present as such in the divine essence or nature; nor that instantaneous evil as such already resides in God, and that God, in order to become himself, must identify it and get rid of it. But it must be said that evil is contemporary with divine existence, in the sense that it arises in that timeless act in which original freedom affirms itself only by defeating the alternative possibility of nothingness. In the act in which God originates and therefore is God, that is, in divine existence itself, evil emerges as a reality already established, but as a possibility already discarded."

"[Beauty] is always free and adherent: free because it does not adhere to conceptual knowledge, adherent because it adheres to an interpretation of nature."

"Play is contemplation, removed from the seriousness of passivity as intuition and need, and of activity as intellect and reason."

"The aesthetic sphere is a necessary passage to morality, so much so that only as an aesthetic man is man truly man."

"The only possible education is aesthetic education."

"To see nature as beautiful, it must be considered in its organic productivity, that is, interpreted. Wanting to interpret nature is already loving it: interpretation is already a vision in love with nature that highlights its beauty."

"Even those who do not believe in God cannot cease to be interested in what God represents for a believer, and only philosophy can show this."

"Free evil is better than imposed good."

"Only the awareness that God shares human suffering can prevent suffering from increasing human negativity."

"The fact that in order to exist, God had to defeat nothingness and vanquish evil, that is, put aside the negative, leaves a trace of negativity in him, albeit ineffective and inoperative, as if something remained unresolved and still pending. One has the impression that nothingness is still lurking, like a constant threat, and that latent and dormant evil could reawaken. Negativity and evil are present in God as possibilities that were foreseen but discarded, and therefore now forgotten and irrelevant."

"Evil is not the absence of being, the deprivation of good, the lack of reality, but is reality, more precisely positive reality in its negativity."

"Evil must be distinguished as possible and real: in God it is present as possible, and there man finds it and realises it in history."

"The problem of evil has its roots in the dark depths of human nature and in the secret recesses of man's relationship with transcendence."

"What is important is not reason for its own sake but truth: the value of reason depends on its connection to truth and its ontological roots."

"The only sense in which it can be said that He [Jesus] gives an answer to the problem of evil, and that he himself is this answer."

"Man awakens on the cosmic stage the evil that was dormant in God."

"The temporal dialectic as a struggle between good and evil is that which exists in human temporal history, in which positive and negative, good and evil are always in struggle, always in tension, always together."

"It is not without reason that religious experience focuses above all on the suffering and redeeming God, which confirms that the ultimate recourse to the problem of evil is religion, certainly not morality."