Augustine on Evil

Today's Reading

Read Genesis 1:31 — the verdict on creation: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good."

Read Genesis 3:1-7 — the entry of evil into a world that was made good. Notice: the serpent does not create anything. He twists what is already there.

Read Isaiah 45:7 — the harder verse: "I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord, who does all these things." Sit with how uncomfortable this verse is.

Read Romans 7:18-20 — Paul's anatomy of his own divided will: "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing... if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me."

Read 1 John 1:5: "This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all."

Reflection

Before he was a Christian, Augustine spent nearly a decade as a Manichee. The Manichees offered a clean answer to the problem of evil that, for a long time, satisfied him. There were two ultimate principles in the universe: a god of light and a god of darkness, locked in eternal combat. Evil was not a problem the good god had to answer for, because the good god had not made it. Evil was its own substance, with its own creator, parallel to and opposing the good. The reason there is suffering is that there is another power. Tidy. Symmetrical. Wrong.

What pulled Augustine out of this was the Bible's stubborn refusal to play along. Genesis 1 ends with God surveying everything he has made and pronouncing it very good. Not good with an asterisk. Not good apart from this corner that some other god got to. Everything. There is no room in the Christian doctrine of creation for an equal-and-opposite evil principle. There is one Creator. He made everything that exists. And he called it good.

But then where did evil come from? If God is supremely good and made everything, and if evil is here, then either God is the author of evil — which 1 John 1:5 directly denies ("in him is no darkness at all") — or evil is something other than a thing God made.

This is the corner Augustine had to think his way out of, and the answer he reached, in Book 7 of the Confessions and across Books 11-14 of the City of God, has shaped Christian thought ever since. Evil, he came to see, is not a thing in itself. It is privatio boni — the privation, lack, corruption, or distortion of a good. Disease is not a substance; it is the corruption of health. Lying is not a substance; it is the perversion of truth-telling. Cruelty is not a substance; it is love bent in the wrong direction.

Or, in his own words from the Confessions: "All things are good even if they are corrupted. They could not be corrupted if they were supremely good; but unless they were good they could not be corrupted." The thought is delicate. To be corrupted, a thing has to be the kind of thing that could be corrupted, which means it has to be a thing — a good thing — first. A stone cannot be corrupted; it has nothing to corrupt. A virtue can be corrupted, because there was something there to spoil. Evil presupposes the prior good. The cancer presupposes the cell. The lie presupposes the speech. The murder presupposes the life.

In the City of God he sharpens it further: "Evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name 'evil.'" And: "Evil is no nature; but the corruption of nature is evil." Evil is parasitic. It cannot exist on its own. It rides on the back of created goods, twisting them, but it cannot create.

This sounds, on first hearing, like a philosopher's trick. It is not. It does serious pastoral work.

First, it preserves the goodness of creation. The body that is failing you was not a mistake. The relationship that hurts you was not built badly from the start. The institution that betrayed you was not, in its origin, a power of darkness. They are good things — they remain good things — that have been wounded, distorted, corrupted. The grief you feel at their corruption is the appropriate grief. You are mourning the right thing. You are not mourning a thing that should not have existed; you are mourning the marring of a thing that is, at its root, very good.

Second, it preserves the goodness of God. God is not the author of evil because evil, strictly speaking, is not authored. It is a wound on what was authored. God made the cell; the cancer is the cell broken. God made the will; sin is the will misdirected. God made love; lust is love truncated. The Manichee solution — that there is another god making the bad things — is not just heretical. It is unnecessary. The privation account explains where evil comes from without compromising either the goodness or the singularity of the Creator.

Third, it gives evil a kind of metaphysical weakness. If evil is not a thing but a corruption of things, then evil cannot ultimately last. It depends on the good for its existence the way mold depends on bread. Take away the bread, the mold has nothing to live on. The Christian hope is not that the good and the evil will fight forever. The Christian hope is that the good is real and evil is, in the deepest sense, not. Hell is the place where the privation goes all the way down — the final unmaking. Heaven is the place where every wound has been healed because the underlying creation has been restored. Evil does not get an eternal kingdom because evil cannot, on its own, sustain a kingdom.

But — and this is where pastors and philosophers have always pushed back — the privation account has limits. It is wonderful against impersonal corruption. The cancer cell, the failing kidney, the slow degeneration of memory — these fit the model exactly. They are the corruption of goods. The privation account names what is happening and refuses to grant it the dignity of being its own creator.

Active human malice is harder. When a torturer chooses, with full knowledge and deliberation, to inflict suffering for the pleasure of inflicting it — to call that the privation of a good seems thin. The torturer is doing something. The genocide is something. The abuser is something. To call them merely the absence of love can sound, to the victim, like a philosophical evasion of the obvious moral fact that evil is not just absence; it is force.

Augustine knew this. In City of God Book 14 he describes evil not as a static lack but as a positive willing of the lack — the will turning, freely, away from the supreme good toward a lesser one. The evildoer is not nothing. The evildoer is something — a creature, made good — whose orientation has been bent. The act of bending is real, the bent will is real, the harm is real. What is not real is any rival creator behind the bent will, any independent power of darkness that authored it. The evildoer is responsible. He is not, in his evil, anything other than a corrupted good making its corruption visible.

Even so, Christians who hold the privation account hold it carefully. It is not a complete answer to the problem of evil. It is one part of one. It does not explain why God permits the corruption to continue, or why he does not heal it now, or why some are crushed under it while others walk free. Those are questions the rest of this plan will keep approaching. The privation account does, however, do this much: it tells you that the world you grieve was made good, and the wound you bear is a wound on something good, and the God who made it is not the god of the wound. He is the god of the underlying gift, who is at work — slow, patient, eventually total — to restore what evil has marred.

Augustine ended his most personal book with the cry of a man who had finally seen who that God was: "Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!" The Manichee god of darkness had melted away. What was left was the Creator, the underlying Beauty, the One in whom is no darkness at all.

Going Deeper

Take an evil you are angry about today — something specific, in the news or in your own life. Apply Augustine's question: what good is this evil corrupting? Name the underlying good. Mourn the corruption. Then ask: who is the One who made the underlying good, and what is he doing about its corruption? Notice that the privation account, far from minimizing evil, makes the act of evil more sharply criminal: it is the marring of a gift.