Well, here's +Basil the Great's take on this:
"Famines and droughts and floods are common plagues of cities and nations which check the excess of evil. Therefore, just as the physician is a benefactor even if he should cause pain or suffering to the body (for he strives with the disease, and not with the sufferer), so in the same manner God is good Who administers salvation to everyone through the means of particular chastisements. But you, not only do you not speak evilly of the physician who cuts some members, cauterizes others, and excises others again completely from the body, but you even give him money and address him as savior because he confines the disease to a small area before the infirmity can claim the whole body. However, when you see a city crushing its inhabitants in an earthquake, or a ship going down at sea with all hands, you do not shrink from wagging a blasphemous tongue against the true Physician and Savior....And you may accept the phrase 'I kill and I will make to live' literally, if you wish, since fear edifies the more simple. 'I will smite and I will heal'. It is profitable to also understand this phrase literally; for the smiting engenders fear, while the healing incites to love. It is permitted you, nonetheless, to attain to a loftier understanding of the utterance. I will slay through sin and make to live through righteousness. 'But though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day'. Therefore, He does not slay one, and give life to another, but through the means which He slays, He gives life to a man, and He heals a man with that which He smites him, according to the proverb which says, 'For thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from death'. So the flesh is chastised for the soul to be healed, and sin is put to death for righteousness to live.... When you hear 'There shall be no evil in a city which the Lord hath not wrought', understand by the noun 'evil' that the word intimates the tribulation brought upon sinners for the correction of offenses. For Scripture says, 'For I afflicted thee and straitened thee, to do good to thee'; so too is evil terminated before it spills out unhindered, as a strong dike or wall holds back a river.
"For these reasons, diseases of cities and nations, droughts, barrenness of the earth, and the more difficult conditions in the life of each, cut off the increase of wickedness. Thus, such evils come from God so as to uproot the true evils, for the tribulations of the body and all painful things from without have been devised for the restraining of sin. God, therefore, excises evil; never is evil from God.... The razing of cities, earthquakes and floods, the destruction of armies, shipwrecks and all catastrophes with many casualties which occur from earth or sea or air or fire or whatever cause, happen for the sobering of the survivors, because God chastises public evil with general scourges.
"The principal evil, therefore, which is sin, and which is especially worthy of the appellation of evil, depends upon our disposition; it depends upon us either to abstain from evil or to be in misery.
"Of the other evils, some are shown to be struggles for the proving of courage... while some are for the healing of sins... and some are for an example to make other men sober." +Basil the Great "That God is Not the Cause of Evils" "Ελληνες Πατερες της Εκκλησιας" (Greek Fathers of The Church) 7-94, 98-102
That is going to take some time to digest. A cursory reading will not do it justice. I am in the middle of finishing the preparation of a lesson I have to teach for church tomorrow so please excuse my not giving it the attention it deserves tonight.
Oh, yes the "pedagogic" evils of divine love...this is one of Orthodoxy's darker teachings. God brings on evils to to "prevent" real evil (sin). Yeah, after 6,000 years of such loving lessons, everyone knows how well this works preventing the "real" evil...