Deviations
The core problem of theodicy—reconciling a loving, all-powerful God with acute suffering, sickness, death, evil, violence of all sorts—is badly solved by separating the Creator, God, from "his" Creation, human and/or physical.
It is far more fair to reality to recognize that violence is since, say, the Big Bang (and its thunderous echo in Genesis, reprised, for example, at the death of Jesus) as is evil since the key moment suggested powerfully for the ages in those early pages of the Bible.
One senses a Kierkegaardian spiral "repetition" of the explosion in a birth (or the overwhelming human and animal act that prepares it) which has been persuasively compared to a shipwreck by several geniuses.
At the climax of the most delicately exquisite poem of the French language—"The Afternoon of a Faun" (and Debussy's epoch-making musical version of it)—is the image of a volcanic eruption, "Etna."
To separate God from the violent and joyous appearance of a new child, or a masterpiece, is frivolous and (pivoting sideways) deviant. The Gnostics and Marcionites tried it and were happily repudiated by the early Church. The anguishing dilemma ("Cornelian drama") of theodicy is best dealt with by ultimate faith like Abraham's on Mount Moriah, of Job, Jesus on the Cross, Anne Frank, who reportedly died with a smile on her lips.
Contrariwise, the endless series of deviations, going back to Eden and the Greek equivalent, indicated by Mallarmé, from the death-challenging, holistic, and musical (poetic) Orphic to the narrative, and sequential (prosaic) Homeric, as well as the progressive fetishization of logos, merely rational manipulative intellect, has led over the millennia to a total crisis of culture, a sort of cancer of runaway brain, a "sclerotic" hardening of the Western heart, a loss of spontaneity, a devastating birth dearth and radical decline of family, faith, culture, high art.
Pope Benedict XVI cheered us when he deplored the drastically falling birth rate in Europe and the loss of living wellspring "freshness." Yes! But the ancient deviation progressively undermined Catholicism as well as the whole Western tradition. The sacred/natural spontaneity—of birth, authentic creativity—suffered a crucial blow when the birth-givers, women, were spiritually subordinated by scared-running (dreading their own natural impotence) males—Judaic, later Greek, Christian—as Robert Graves maintained in The White Goddess.
The Hebrews honored women anyway, as in God's injunction to Abraham, "heed Sarah" and the strength of biblical figures like Rebecca, Rachel, Judith, Esther, the beloved of the Song of Songs, and Shekinah, and the Virgin Mary represented the Christian partial effort to atone in the Middle Ages and later, especially in Italy and with John Paul II. All our best Judeo-Christian writers—Goethe, Balzac, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Mann, Proust, Joyce, Camus—made similar heroic attempts, putting maternal figures (as well as "mama's boys") at the heart of their masterpieces. But the original deviation proved crippling still: the exclusion of the female from the Trinity was a major mistake contributing to the dooming of Western tradition to the showdown we are now facing (or not).