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Course 15 · Lesson 2.2

Augustine on evil, privation and the will

12 minute read

Lessons in this course

Course 15 outline

Module 1: Stating the Problem

  1. The ancient problem: Epicurus, the Psalms and Augustine
  2. The logical problem: is God’s existence compatible with evil?
  3. The evidential problem: Rowe, the fawn and gratuitous evil
  4. Defense and theodicy: what each tries to do

Module 2: Moral Evil and the Free-Will Defense

  1. Moral evil and human responsibility
  2. Augustine on evil, privation and the will
  3. Plantinga’s free-will defense
  4. Objections: horrendous evils, determinism and the freedom of the saints

Module 3: Natural Evil and Soul-Making

  1. Natural evil, the laws of nature and animal suffering
  2. Traditional accounts: the fall, fallen powers and the groaning of creation
  3. John Hick and soul-making theodicy
  4. Objections to soul-making: excess, injustice and who benefits

Module 4: Providence and the Limits of Explanation

  1. What providence means: creation, sustaining and governing
  2. Providence in Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant thought
  3. Divine sovereignty, human freedom and open theism
  4. Skeptical theism and the limits of human knowledge

Module 5: Job, the Cross and Silence

  1. The Book of Job: Job, his friends and the rejection of easy answers
  2. God’s answer from the whirlwind and the ending of Job
  3. The crucifixion and suffering: Christ’s cry and the meaning of the cross
  4. Divine hiddenness and the silence of God
  5. Unanswered prayer in Scripture and in Christian life

Module 6: Living with Grief and Writing a Response

  1. Lament and the Psalms
  2. Christian accounts of grief: Lewis, Wolterstorff and the tradition of consolation
  3. Caring for those who suffer: presence, patience and what not to say
  4. Writing a reasoned response to the problem of evil

All courses

Program / Course 15: The Problem of Evil and Suffering / Lesson 2.2

What you will learn

  • Explain Augustine’s claim that evil is a privation of good and not a created thing.
  • Describe how Augustine locates the origin of moral evil in a misdirected will.
  • Summarize his account of the fall and original sin and how other traditions read it.
  • State the strongest objections to the privation view.

The big idea

Augustine of Hippo gave the most influential early Christian answer to the question of where evil comes from. He argued that everything God made is good, that evil is not a thing but a lack or corruption in a good thing, and that moral evil begins in a will that turns from a higher good to a lower one. The account protects God’s goodness and gives human choice real weight. Critics ask whether it explains the horror of suffering, or only gives it a name, and Christians disagree about parts of his teaching on the fall.

Key terms

Privation
The absence of a good that a thing ought to have. Blindness is the privation of sight in an eye.
Manichaeism
A religion of the third century that taught two eternal powers, good and evil, locked in conflict. Augustine belonged to it for about nine years before he left it.
Disordered love
Augustine’s term for loving a lesser good more than a greater one, which he saw as the root of sin.
Original sin
The Western Christian teaching, developed by Augustine, that the sin of the first humans damaged human nature and is passed to all their descendants.
Ancestral sin
An Orthodox term for the inheritance of mortality and a weakened will from Adam, without inherited guilt.
Concupiscence
In Augustine and Catholic teaching, the disordered desires that remain in humans after the fall.
Efficient cause
The thing that actively brings something about. Augustine said evil has no efficient cause, only a deficient one.

Background

Augustine (354 to 430) was born in North Africa and became bishop of Hippo. In his Confessions he tells how as a young man he tormented himself with the question of where evil comes from. The Manichees told him that a dark power opposed God. He found that idea unsatisfying, since it made God not the only ultimate reality. Reading certain Platonist writings, and then Scripture, he came to a different view.

His mature thought on the subject appears in the Confessions, the Enchiridion, On Free Choice of the Will and The City of God. Later Catholic and Protestant thinkers, from Aquinas to Calvin, drew heavily on him. His account of original sin was especially influential in the West and was never adopted in the same form in the East.

A caution: Augustine wrote over many years, in several settings, and in debate with opponents. Scholars differ on how to read particular passages. What follows describes his main lines of argument, and flags where interpreters disagree.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: Everything God made is good

Augustine starts from Genesis 1, where God sees all that he has made and it is very good (Genesis 1:31). If God is the creator of all things, and God is good, then every thing in its nature is good. Even a thing that appears bad is good in so far as it exists, since existence is itself a good.

This contradicts the Manichees, who held that matter, or some part of the world, was evil by nature. For Augustine nothing is evil by nature. What is evil is the damage or corruption of something that was made good.

Step 2: Evil as privation

To explain, Augustine uses illness and blindness. Sickness is not a rival substance sitting in the body, but the lack of health. Blindness is the absence of sight. When a thing is damaged it still has some goodness, and if it lost all its goodness it would cease to exist. Evil can only feed on good, as rust feeds on iron.

This is not a denial that evil is real or painful. A blind person really suffers. Augustine’s claim is about what kind of thing evil is. It is a real lack in a real good, and not a second creation. Aquinas later gave the view a precise form in the Summa Theologiae, where he writes that evil is the absence of a good that ought to be present.

Step 3: The origin of moral evil in the will

For moral evil Augustine looks at the will. A will chooses to love some good. Evil arises when a will turns from the higher good, God, to a lower one, such as honor, pleasure or possessions. Such a choice is not a pursuit of evil as evil, but a mistake about what to love most.

Augustine adds that there is no efficient cause of an evil will. If something caused it, it would not be free. He says that trying to find the cause of an evil will is like trying to see darkness or hear silence, since the will falls short by its own act. Many readers find this answer profound and others find it a refusal to explain. In either case, it places responsibility on the creature and not on God.

Step 4: The fall and original sin

Augustine reads Genesis 3 and Romans 5:12 as teaching that the first humans, Adam and Eve, sinned out of pride, that their sin wounded human nature, and that all later humans are born into that wounded condition. In his later works he holds that all humans share in Adam’s guilt as well as his damage, and that this guilt is removed by baptism.

Traditions differ here. Catholics hold a form of original sin in which the inherited condition is a deprivation of grace, and which baptism removes. Most Protestants teach a strong form of inherited sinfulness, with Reformed traditions stressing total depravity, meaning that sin touches every part of a person. The Orthodox deny inherited guilt, though they hold that humans inherit mortality and weakness. Jewish tradition does not teach original sin in the Christian sense. These differences matter for the problem of evil because they affect how far the suffering of the world is traced to the first humans.

Step 5: Objections

The first objection to privation is that it plays with words. Pain feels like a positive thing and not like an absence. Defenders answer that Augustine is not describing how pain feels but what it is in relation to the good, and that the view is meant to defend God’s goodness, not to cheapen suffering. Critics retort that if God made creatures capable of such lacks, nothing is solved by calling the lack a privation.

The second objection concerns origin. If humans were made good and wise, how could a will go wrong at the start? Augustine’s answer is that creatures are made from nothing and are therefore changeable, so they can fail. The critic says that God foresaw this and could have made them otherwise. The third objection is scientific and moral. Many Christians now doubt that the human race descended from a single couple, and others protest that inherited guilt is unjust. These objections lead to the free-will defense and to natural evil, taken up next.

  1. What does Augustine mean when he says that evil has no substance?
  2. In what way is blindness a good analogy for evil, and in what way might it mislead?
  3. Why does Augustine say there is no efficient cause of an evil will?
  4. How do Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant views of the inheritance of sin differ?
  5. Does the privation view make pain less real? Why or why not?
  6. Why might a person who accepts evolution find Augustine’s account of the fall difficult?

Examples

Rust

Rust is not a metal. It is what happens when iron is damaged. It cannot exist without iron and it destroys what it eats. Augustine would say evil behaves in this way, taking its form from good things and bringing them to ruin.

Disordered love

A man loves his work, which is a good thing. When he loves it more than his family, until he neglects them, his love is disordered. Nothing evil was added. The good was given the wrong place. (A constructed example of Augustine’s idea.)

The pear tree

In the Confessions Augustine describes stealing pears with friends as a teenager, not out of hunger but for the sake of the wrongdoing itself. He uses the story to show that sin does not even need an object worth wanting, and that the will can turn to nothing.

Different perspectives

Catholic

Catholic theology follows Augustine and Aquinas on evil as privation and on the fall. The Council of Trent affirmed original sin and its remedy in baptism, though it taught that concupiscence is not itself sin. The Catechism says that the account of the fall in Genesis uses figurative language and affirms a primeval event at the beginning of human history.

Orthodox

Orthodox Christians honor Augustine less as an authority and tend to read Romans 5:12 differently, holding that death spread to all because all sinned. They teach ancestral sin as inheritance of mortality and weakness, without guilt. They also teach that evil has no positive being, a point shared with Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor.

Protestant

The Reformers, especially Luther and Calvin, built on Augustine’s account of the fall and of grace, often more strongly than the medieval church. Reformed confessions such as the Westminster Confession teach total depravity. Other Protestants, such as Wesleyan and Arminian traditions, teach inherited sinfulness while stressing the grace that enables all to respond.

Scholarly and critical

Historians note the influence of Neoplatonism on Augustine’s view of evil as non-being. Critics, including Hick, argue that the Augustinian story of a perfect creation that fell is hard to reconcile with modern science and that it leaves God responsible for foreseeing the fall. Defenders reply that its main philosophical points survive without a literal reading of Genesis.

Why it matters

Augustine’s ideas sit under much Christian talk about evil, even among people who have never read him. Learning them clearly, with their strengths and their weaknesses, helps a student see where the later debates over freedom, the fall and natural evil come from.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: Augustine taught that evil is not real.

Correction: He taught that evil is not a substance, not that it does no harm. A privation is a real lack that really damages.

Misunderstanding: Every Christian tradition accepts Augustine’s doctrine of original sin.

Correction: Catholics and most Protestants follow him in various forms. The Orthodox do not accept inherited guilt. Even among those who accept it, the exact meaning is debated.

Misunderstanding: Augustine thought sexual desire was the original sin.

Correction: He taught that the first sin was pride, a turning from God to self. He later linked inherited disorder with concupiscence, but he did not identify the original sin with sex.

Knowledge check

What does it mean to call evil a privation?

It means that evil is the lack of a good that a thing ought to have, not a thing in itself. Blindness is lack of sight, disease is lack of health. Evil depends on good, since it is always the damage of something good. This allows Augustine to say that God made all things good and made nothing evil.

How does Augustine explain the origin of moral evil?

He traces it to the will turning from a higher good, God, to a lower one. He holds that the evil will has no efficient cause, since if something forced it, it would not be free. The creature, made from nothing and so changeable, fails by its own choice. Critics find this either deep or evasive.

How do the traditions differ on original sin?

Catholics teach original sin as the loss of original grace passed on to all, removed in baptism. Many Protestants, especially Reformed, teach inherited sinfulness reaching every part of the person. The Orthodox teach inherited mortality and weakness without inherited guilt. All agree that humans are in need of salvation.

What are two serious objections to Augustine’s view?

One objection is that calling evil a privation does not explain why God allowed it, and does not reduce the horror of suffering. Another is that the story of a perfect creation falling at the start is hard to square with modern science and with the idea that God foresaw the fall. Defenders reply that the philosophical core stands without a literal reading.

Think it through

  1. Does the idea of evil as lack help you think about suffering, or does it feel like an evasion?
  2. Where in your own life have you seen a good love become disordered?
  3. How much does your view of the problem of evil depend on how you read Genesis 1 to 3?

Independent assignment

Augustine in a page

In your own notebook, write about 400 words. Summarize Augustine’s three main claims (all things are good, evil is privation, moral evil begins in the will) in your own words. Then write the strongest objection you can to one of them, and a reply that Augustine or a follower might give. Mark where you think the reply succeeds and where it does not. Keep the work private.

Further study