Explain the Theodicy of Augustine (25)
Augustine of Hippo was a latin philosopher and theologian from Romanian Africa. His writings were very influential in the development of Western Christianity. He is widely known for his theodicy in which he attempts to prove why a perfectly good, almighty and all-knowing God permits evil.
Augustine’s opening premise was that God, who was perfect, and therefore omnipotent and omnibenevolent, made a good world. He based his understanding on the teaching of Genesis 3, where God declared that his creation was good at the end of each of the first five days and very good at the end of the sixth. The universe, which a hierarchy of beings from God down to angels, humans and the rest of creation, was ordered and in harmony.
However, after the creation of a good universe, both angels and man fell. The fall of Adam and Eve is outlines in Genesis. Augustine argues that they clearly freely chose to disobey God. They chose not to do what is good and rejected what God had told them to do and in so doing chose “non-being” material things rather than fullness of their being, God. Hence, by their original sin of disobedience to God’s instructions, Adam and Eve introduced a break and discord between them and their creator, God. Humanity fell from a close relationship with God.
This “choosing of evil” was actually choosing to not live up to the standard of goodness that God intended; because it was choosing not to do that which is good, it is a privation. By this, Augustine meant that evil is the lack of goodness, like blindness is the lack of sight. In other words, evil, in Augustine’s theodicy, is not a substance, but the lack of good. In latin, the phrase is ‘Privatio Boni.’ We can think about this idea of privation using many examples — cold is the absence of heat, ill health is the absence of health — and these things only have understanding in relation to what they lack. Adam and Eve now lack “right order” and harmony with God — they have chosen to be deprived.
The idea of ‘lack’ is very important. It is not evil that a stone lacks the ability to talk, or a worm lacks the ability to walk. These are qualities that the stone and the worm lack, but because they lack them doesn't mean they are evil. However, when a man chooses to sin, he is evil in the sense that he fails to live up to his morally good and God-given nature. And the choice to do this is due to our free will and hence, carries with is responsibility. If someone cannot use their arm due to an accident, they lack the health of the arm, but they cannot help this, unlike the lack of kindness we show when we are cruel to someone.
Evil therefore exists because of Adam and Eve’s free moral choice. When temted by Lucifer, they use their free will to not live to a standard that they were created to live up to, and through this disobedience, evil enters the world. Both moral and natural evil stem from the wrong moral choices made. Pain in childbirth and hard work making the soil productive are both immediate results listen in Genesis 3. Moral evil comes through Adam and Eve’s choice, which sets them at a distance from God; Natural evil is due to the imbalance of nature being upset and the work of the fallen angel Lucifer. However, Augustine argued that free will is a good thing in itself as it enables good and right choices to be made and is worth the price of evil occuring. Of course, if God is perfect, he would have known humanity would make a wrong choice and fall, but he chose for humans to have free will so that they could freely love him rather than be robots without a choice.
Augustine argued that the goodness of the world is seen clearly when people choose to do good as it stands in contrast to when people do evil and misuse their free will, such as “a dash of black makes the colours in the painting stand out” — Phelan. This is known as the aesthetic principle, as Augustine writes:
“In the universe, even that which is called evil, when it is regulated and put in its own place, only enhances our admiration of the good; for we enjoy and value the good more when we compare it with the evil.”
God did not create anything imperfect; he could not therefore have created evil, thus, evil is not a “thing”. Augustine did not deny that evil existed; it “exists” not as a seperate “thing”, because God would have had to have made it if it was a thing, but evil exists as a lack of goodness. However, Augustine did later go on to say that evil comes from God due to the fact that he keeps human beings in existence, and they are beings who have this free choice to become evil.
Therefore, as all humanity is descended from Adam and Eve, all humans inherit their sinful nature, which chooses to live in rebellion towards God and to not reach the standard for which God created us. For Augustine, “all evil is either sin or punishment for sin”.
