Where does evil come from? Augustine might have a well-reasoned answer. The following is an excerpt from an ENS book review I wrote on Augustine’s magnun opus, City of God.
The doctrine of the origin of evil is a towering philosophical achievement of the City of God. In this book Augustine relentlessly wrestled with the question of where things started to go wrong in God’s created order. The typical argument goes like this: if God created all things, and evil is a thing, then the inescapable conclusion is that God created evil. This formulation is incongruent to the tenets of the Christian faith. In Books 11 and 12, Augustine relentlessly hacked at this conundrum by proposing two syllogisms that took the arguments to a different direction. First, (a) that all things God created are good; (b) that evil is not good; (c) therefore evil was not created by God. And second, (a) that God created everything; (b) that God did not create evil; (c) therefore, evil is not a thing.
The key to Augustine’s argument was the idea of being and goodness. God is the ground of all being, and anything God created was good (12:2). From here he painstakingly traced the origin of evil using the angelic realm as the backdrop of his arguments. What is evil? Augustine says that evil is not a “thing” with its own positive nature. It is the absence of good (12:7). Think of it as a moral hole: when goodness is removed, what is left behind is nothingness. In other words, evil is the shrinking or the abandoning of goodness (12:6). So when we say something is evil, what we are really saying is that it’s missing the goodness that should have been there in the first place. The reason why Augustine spent so much time theologizing about the angels is because the perverse turning away from good first happened in that realm. In the subsequent books, Augustine would trace the spreading of evil to the garden of Eden and the rest of human history.
Augustine’s sustained argumentation about the origin and cause of evil is an exercise of remarkable intellectual brilliance. He masterfully combined theology, logic, and metaphysics to locate the point of divergence between the city of God and the city of man. Augustine himself admitted there are areas of knowledge that our human mind cannot reach and yet he proceeded to theologize, with a rather thin Scriptural grounding, the inner life and metaphysics of angelic beings. While the overall output is intellectually satisfying, it is notable that the amount of speculation is a bit more than what’s revealed in Scripture.
Jojo Agot 