The presence of evil and death in Creation

This article by Father Georges Leroy, a young Orthodox theologian completing his doctorate at the Saint-Serge Institute in Paris, offers a theological reflection on the origin and nature of evil and death in creation. Drawing primarily on Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius of Alexandria, Irenaeus of Lyon, and Mark the Monk, the study adopts a speculative approach rooted in the patristic tradition. The central idea is that God did not create death for man made in his image: death belongs to the mode of existence of lower species and only invaded the human condition as a consequence of the fall, conceived as a lowering of the person to the rank of the individual-species. Evil, for its part, is defined as a privation of being, a parasite of divine energies. The contribution of the article lies in the convergence established between this Nyssean intuition and a hypothesis formulated as early as 1964 by Father Maurice Zundel, which had until then gone unnoticed.