Augustine and the Problem of Evil
Does Augustine solve the problem of evil?
- Spiritual progress of an individual soul - Not accomplished by reasoning, instead by faith - Chastised
Michael Mendelson
"NeoPlatonic drama of the soul's immersion and extraction from the sensible/physical world"
Confessions
- "Spiritual autobiography", takes the form of a prayer to God - Recounts Augustine's own struggles with sensuality before conversion to Christianity - Regarded as an intensely personal and beautiful account of Augustine's own conversion experience
Theodicy
- Attempts to justify the existence of evil in the world as part of the best of all possible worlds - Attempts to show that the existence of evil is logically consistent with God's omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence
Augustine
- Born in Thagaste (Algeria) in 354 CE, dies in Hippo in 430 (Vandals took over) - Teaches in Thagaste and Carthage (Tunis), leaves for Rome in 383 - Complains of students not paying fees - Professor of rhetoric of Milan, encounters Neo-Platonic of Bishop
Not Substance
- Evil is merely a lack of things that are good - Supremely good is corruptible - Can't create non-being, beings with reason - Eradicate goodness = eradicate being, absence of good - Lack of reason = desire - Divine providence = greater harmony, being humbled before God
Divine Providence
- God creates the world according to the plan to bring about greatest good, evil is a necessary means to greater good - Must be understood as a whole and not in virtue
Free Will
- Humans are corruptible and choose to do evil - Providence, challenge: reconcile, compatibilism, perspective - Augustine is conflicted with the source of evil - Cause of evil could not be God if God is the Chief Good - Imperfect good, incapable of being corrupted - Pure rational activity
Challenge to Theism
- If God exists, He is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect - Omnipotent: power to eliminate evil - Omniscient: knowledge of where evil exists - Morally perfect: desire to eliminate evil - Natural evil and moral evil exist = disasters, humans - If God and evil exist, He is not omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect - God does not exist
Philosophical
- Read the works of Cicero at 19 - Under the influence of a non-Christian sect called the Manicheans - Two eternal principles, Darkness and Light (with the soul being a particle of Light trapped in the body's Darkness) - Evil is not a 'thing' but a lack or privation of Good, refutation of Manichean position - Milan, encounters Neo-Platonism and finds a philosophical framework which supports Christian scriptures, intellectual acceptance of an intelligible/divine realm distinct from the material world - Neo = new (Platonism) - Dualist = believe in heaven
Evil
Not a thing but an absence of good, God does not create or permit evil because it is not a thing
"Prayer with a Pen"
Takes no account of how potential readers would relate to work
How are spheres of faith related?
Temporality, illusion of freedom
