Yesterday I re-read My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, about a Hasidic Jew born with a genius for painting, and the struggles he has between his art and how it is misunderstood by his community.
Part of the story in the beginning deals with Jews in Stalin's USSR, as Asher's father works for a famous rabbi and tries to help Soviet Jews to emigrate. One emigrant in the US says to Asher "Stalin, may his name and memory be forgotten". My reaction to this phrase was "No, you don't want to burn all copies of Gulag Archipelago, do you?"
Without Stalin, would there have been a Solzhenitsyn? Solzhenitysn pondered this paradox once, in commenting on the beautiful buildings of St Petersburg, and remembering how they were built by serf labor, in suffering. And then he asks if the suffering of Soviet times will also produce beauty.
St. Paul addresses this paradox, in Romans chapter 3:5-8"
5 But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? (I speak in a human way.) 6 By no means! For then how could God judge the world? 7 But if through my lie God's truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? 8 And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.
God can produce beauty out of evil, but that is not a justification for evil. I think the theme of these verses is that God does not need evil to create beauty.
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