I know it's been a long time, but won't go into the details. Lethargy and inertia are the main culprits. This is an essay I submitted as an assignment for my humanities course - Introduction to European Philosophy. I must say that trying to understand other people's philosophies, keeping in mind the timeline, is rather engrossing.
The problem of evil has been a longstanding problem in the history of philosophy. To quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The epistemic question posed by evil is whether the world contains undesirable states of affairs that provide the basis for an argument that makes it unreasonable for anyone to believe in the existence of God”. In simple terms, if God exists, why is there so much evil in the world. This essay is to understand St. Augustine’s approach and interpretation of the problem of evil, but for that, we first need to understand what the problem is.
To understand this self contradiction, we first need to define the term God. God has been interpreted in many ways since time immemorial by different schools of thought, and broadly we can divide them into two categories. One is a straightforward interpretation, adopted by most of the religions, that God is an omnipotent, omniscient being, whose existence is to satiate the basic human beliefs that good wins over evil, truth over lies. The other definition of God is a metaphysical one, where God is the prime cause for everything in this world, the driving force, and the ultimate reality to which we cannot apply our concepts and perceptions of the world. Now the problem of evil arises in the first definition of God, and very simply it can be stated as follows – If God exists as an omnipotent, omniscient and morally perfect being-
1. He knows of the existence of evil because he is omniscient.
2. He is powerful enough to remove all evil.
3. He would want to remove all evil, because he is morally perfect.
4. Hence, evil should not exist, because God would have removed it.
However, that is not the case, thus bringing a huge question mark in front of the existence of God or rather, proving that God doesn’t exist! Thus the problem of evil puzzles many.
St. Augustine’s views revolved around the basic fact that without good, there is no evil – without darkness, there is no light. One analogy he used for this is as follows-
What happens to vices when they are not in the human body? Evil is not something that is fully real but something that is dependent on something more real, for there can’t be any disease (evil) without a body (good).
Initially, when Augustine was associated with the Manicheans, he perceived evil as a tangible material substance, with its foul and shapeless mass. However, as he increasingly distanced himself from the Manicheans over the years and embraced Christianity, he formed a view that God, who is supremely good, created all things, and though they are not supremely good, they are good when taken individually. But taken together, they are really good, because they encompass the universe which is a creation of God. In other words, evil doesn’t exist in the physical world. This transition is explained in detail.
According to the Manicheans, good and evil existed in this world individually, and it was the fight between good and the evil, and the balance between them which resulted in any action, or physical consequences. Everything that happened in this world was for maintaining the balance between good and evil. This was the first point where Augustine disagreed with the Manicheans. He said that the very fact that there is a struggle between the good and the evil shows that God isn’t omnipotent, something he very vigorously believed in. That evil could, in some way, spoil the clean white clothes of God was absolutely unacceptable to him. Also, since God created everything, he would not have created any evil, because he was supremely good.
The next point where he disagreed with the Manicheans was when they said that it was not your material substance that was doing the evil. Rather, it was more like your material substance was suffering from evil. So you had no control over your sins, as everything was part of the cosmic balance. Augustine was a strong advocate of free will, saying that humans were responsible for all their actions. The major difference in this theory and the Manichean’s theory is that while Manicheans point to God as the source of evil, Augustine points to himself as the reason for all his sins, as a result of his free will. This was a radical departure from the Manicheans, and eventually he left the unorthodox Manichean sect for the more orthodox Christianity, under the Bishop of Milan. Augustine says, "when I willed or did not will something, I was utterly certain that none other than myself was willing or not willing" -- that is, that any evil that came about as a result of his actions was his fault alone, as he was the one who made the decisions that preceded and resulted in the wrongdoing. However, this raises the even more difficult question that why is it that we have the power to reject good and adopt evil. Why has God given us such a power, when he would have wanted good all over the place in the universe? It is here that we get to know Augustine’s actual views on evil, and how he perceived it. He first asserts that anything that can be evil is good, because only good things will be liable to corruption. If something is not good, there will be nothing to corrupt. If evil were a substance, then it would have had to been good, and since evil as a substance cannot have any good associated with it (as Manicheans said), it cannot exist as something tangible.
In conclusion, St. Augustine says that his earlier theory of evil was built on flimsy grounds, and it pointed fingers at God’s omnipotence and omniscience, something that he believed in. Hence evil, instead of being something tangible, should be something more corporeal, and rather than being the complete opposite of good, it is just a lesser good. Also, God is supreme, and all the evil in the universe arises from us, due to the power accorded in us by God in the form of free will.
In my humble opinion, I concur with Augustine’s theory in saying that Manicheans’ theory of evil was wrong. Also, all evil in the world arises out of free will. But according to me, this is unavoidable because good cannot exist in this world without evil. At one point of time, one will face a choice between a good and a lesser good, and the moment that happens, the lesser good will be termed as evil. It is impossible that good is uniformly spread over the world – such an extreme utopia doesn’t exist. However, I agree with the Manicheans when they say that every action is a result of the struggle between good and evil, with a minor difference. It is not that good is fighting against evil, it’s just an individual who has to choose between good and evil, and the struggle in the thought process behind that decision.
Acknowledgements-
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
www.everything2.com
www.wikipedia.com
www.google.com
History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
p.s. My latest addiction is the DOS Game Zatacka, or Achtung Die Kurve
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