Augustine of Hippo · Theology
Augustine spent years tormented by one question: if God is good and made everything, where does evil come from? His answer - that evil is not a thing but a <em>lack</em>, a hole in the good - reshaped how the West thinks about evil itself.
Of all the questions that tormented the young Augustine, one held him longest: unde malum? - where does evil come from? It is the hardest problem any believer in a good and all-powerful God must face. If God is wholly good and made everything that exists, then either God made evil (so God is not wholly good), or something made evil that God did not (so God is not all-powerful), or evil somehow has no maker at all. For nine years Augustine thought he had the answer, embracing the Manichee religion, which solved the problem by splitting reality in two: a good power and an equal evil power, locked in eternal war, with the material world as their battlefield. It was tidy, dramatic - and, Augustine came to believe, completely wrong.
Augustine’s breakthrough, helped by reading the Neoplatonists, was startling: evil is not a thing at all. Everything that exists, insofar as it exists, is good - because all being comes from God, who is goodness itself. Evil, then, is not a positive substance but a privation (privatio boni): a lack, a corruption, a falling-short of the good that should be there. Blindness is not a thing; it is the absence of sight. Disease is not a thing; it is the body’s health gone wrong. Evil, Augustine argues, is like that everywhere: not a presence but an absence, not something God created but a wound in something God created good. God made all things good; evil is what happens when good things are damaged, diminished, or turned from their proper end.
Putting it together gives Augustine his answer. God created a world full of good things, including the supreme good of free, rational creatures who can love and be loved. But genuine freedom necessarily includes the possibility of misuse - a love that could not refuse would not be love, and a will that could not turn away would not be free. Evil entered not because God made it, but because free creatures turned their good wills away from the supreme Good toward lesser ones. God permits this because the good of genuine freedom and genuine love is worth the risk it carries. And - Augustine adds - God is powerful enough to weave even the evil that results into a larger good, so that the whole of creation, evil included, is more glorious than a world with no freedom at all. This bundle of moves - evil as privation, moral evil from free will, and God bringing good out of evil - is the foundation of Western theodicy, the project of ‘justifying the ways of God.’
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Augustine defined evil as a privation of good, not a positive thing. Reconstruct that argument, and state the strongest objection to it, in your own words.
Leads to Epicurus.
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