Explain the Augustinian theodicy (25)
The man behind this theory was Augustine of Hippo, who lived between 354 and 430 AD; his theory was based on two assumptions he interpreted from their corresponding Bible passages. These are Genesis 3 and Romans 5: 12–20. The general messages that he interpreted from these passages were that evil did not come from God, as God’s creation was faultless and perfect, and that evil came from within the world. This theodicy, like all theodicies, is something that is put in place to address a criticism of God. The main criticism is the question that if God is all loving and all powerful, i.e. he is powerful enough to change all of our lives for the better and loves each and every one of us enough to want to do something about it, then why do evil and suffering exist? The above theodicy addresses this criticism by saying that evil didn’t come from God but from within the world, and thus as everything God creates is perfect then seeing as God did not technically create evil it therefore can exist.
The Genesis passage of the Bible is the story of Adam and Eve, and their ‘Fall’ in the garden of Eden. God forbade them to eat from the Tree of Knowledge as it would provide knowledge of all the horrors of the world such as sin and death. The ‘Serpent’ nesting in the tree convinced Eve to pick a fruit from the Tree; she does so and passes some to Adam to eat. God evicts them from the Garden as punishment for disobeying his instructions. In Romans however, St Paul describes that Jesus giving his life to save us negates Adam and Eve’s Original Sin, and thus makes righteousness available to us.
The theodicy itself can be summarised like so: Adam and Eve’s disobedience resulted in sin and death coming into the world, and this caused an imbalance in human nature and in Creation. Because we are descended from Adam and Eve (we are seminally linked), we therefore deserve to be punished due to our lineage. This punishment comes in the form of Natural Evil, which in turn comes as a consequence of the natural imbalance caused by ‘the Fall’. Yet God doesn’t intervene. This lack of intervention isn’t because he can’t but because the suffering is a result of our own human action, and God’s perfection is reflected in what he himself made, not what we caused. Something evil cannot be perfect, therefore God cannot ‘take the blame’, or set it right because it wasn’t his fault. Our knowledge of sin and death in the Garden of Eden was an imperfect thing, and was free of perfection. Whilst this statement may seem like I’m repeating myself, my point is that to say that ‘evil’ is ‘that which is bad’ is wrong according to the Bible. The Bible states that evil is merely an absence of good; it is a privation. This idea was later adopted by Thomas Aquinas, but it was Augustine who started it off.
In the beginning, the Garden of Eden was a paradise — no death, no suffering; hunger, thirst, etc, were absent entirely and there was complete harmony. Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit could be interpreted as a ‘Pandora’s Box’ of sorts, as this action released sin and death into the world, separating us from God — with every sin we commit we are driven further away from him. The Seven Deadly Sins take us further still from God than usual sin, as a result of their higher potency as alleged by the Bible.
