Augustine explains the problem of evil in terms of free will, seeing that God did not create evil and that evil occurs because humans misuse their free will. He blames humans for the existence of evil, while maintaining God’s intrinsic goodness and omniscience.
Evil created by free will
From his youth as a Manichaean to his conversion to Christianity, Augustine was constantly troubled by the problem of evil in the world. The existence of evil is a contradiction in terms if we assume God’s all-powerful goodness and omniscience. Why does evil exist in a world created by God, who is “good” itself? And why does an omniscient God allow evil to exist? These questions haunted Augustine. Finally, he found an answer to the existence of evil in the Neoplatonist Plotinus’ concept of “evil is the deficiency of good.” According to him, evil is not an active entity, but an accidental phenomenon. It is caused by a deficiency in the perfection or nature of natural things. In other words, God created the world and the beings in it good, but a deficiency arose in the natural nature of these beings that prevented humans from acquiring their original good nature, and this deficiency is evil. It follows that God is not the direct cause of this deficiency, or evil, and therefore God is not responsible for it.
If God is not the direct cause of evil, the next question is what is the direct cause of evil? Augustine explains this with the concept of “creation out of nothing”. According to him, because natural things were created by God out of “nothing,” they always have a tendency to return to nothing unless the divine power is withdrawn. In other words, because creatures are dependent on the divine power, they inevitably have finitude and imperfection. Therefore, if their connection to God is compromised, they lack a good nature and tend toward evil.
Why, then, do creatures become alienated from God, and why does God’s power become ineffective? Augustine traced the cause to man’s free will. Man was originally endowed with the gift of intellect, which enables him to arrive at an understanding of the reality of God and the world through an inner illumination from God. But when man turns away from this immutable principle, this inner illumination from God and the true truths that can be discovered by it, and relies solely on his own judgment, which is neither sensory nor divinely illuminated, he immediately falls into the darkness of error. In other words, by trusting in his own abilities or by following his curiosity, man becomes attached to the external objective world, suffers from the glaze of forgetfulness, and is unable to understand the spirituality of the soul and the path to right action. It is man’s free will that enables him to change the direction of his attention: God has endowed man with free will, and man’s evil is caused by man himself, voluntarily. In the end, evil or corruption is not a specific object, but rather the free-will change of direction itself, and the individual, not God, is responsible for the error of judgment and the resulting misdirection.
At this point, I think we need to further discuss the question: Why did God give humans free will? According to Augustine’s discussion, without the free exercise of the human will, there would be no evil or sin. And if God were omniscient, he would have foreseen that by giving humans free will, he would have opened up the possibility of evil. Nevertheless, if God has granted humans free will, i.e., if he has foreseen evil but not prevented it, this brings us back to the question: why does God allow evil to exist?
Augustine, on the other hand, divides evil into two categories. The first, which we’ve already mentioned, is the evil committed by moral agents; the second, which is where his distinctive idea comes in, is that he sees evil as a “punishment” imposed by God in response to human sin. In other words, the soul’s turning from the higher to the lower, or being ruled by greed, is essentially a lesser punishment. Sin itself, then, has a punitive quality, and this punishment causes man to be drawn to and fro and to seek material things, such as the body, as if they were the truth. Here, then, I must point out that ‘it seems as if God, the highest good itself, has imposed evil on man,’ i.e., if it is a punishment for man to be ruled by greed, and if it is imposed by God, this leads to the conclusion that God has imposed greed on man. As such, Augustine’s argument about evil shows a limitation that Christian thought never quite overcame.
True happiness
Augustine’s distinction between happiness and unhappiness is based on whether something can be lost against one’s will. In his view, things like wealth and honor are things that can be lost against one’s will, and therefore cannot be enjoyed with confidence. Therefore, the object we should pursue in order to be happy must, above all, be permanent and have an inevitable relationship with us. He sees only God as fulfilling all these conditions, and says that if we can possess God, we are truly happy. But since God is not a possession, it is not something that can be materially grasped or stored. So how can God be owned? Augustine believed that in order to possess God, we must find it within ourselves. To possess God, then, is to have the wisdom of the heart. If the heart has the right sobriety, if it holds and participates in true truth, then it possesses God. Augustine saw the truly happy person as one who seeks this truth and wisdom of the heart.
The problem again is how true truth can exist within the finite and imperfect human being. Augustine’s answer to this problem is that the truths perceived by the human mind are revealed to us by the illumination of God, who is “truth itself,” the source of all truth. In other words, we need divine illumination to grasp the immutable objects of rational perception. And it is through this divine inner illumination that we are able to arrive at an understanding of the reality of God and the created world. The result is that human beings can only be truly happy by the grace of God.
If we leave out the “God” part of Augustine’s discussion of happiness, the idea that humans must seek something permanent, not something that can be lost, in order to achieve happiness, and that this permanent something is within us, the wisdom of the heart, can be connected to the Buddhist philosophy of “my heart is the Buddha. It is interesting to note that these great philosophers transcend religion and emphasize that the way to escape the suffering of reality and pursue happiness is within, not without.
The ethics of love
Augustine saw ethical behavior as stemming from man’s “will” to “love” wisdom and truth, and hence he is called a representative of “jurisprudence”. However, it is love, not will, that we will focus on this time. Augustine saw love at the heart of ethics, which is why his ethics is commonly referred to as the ‘ethics of love’. According to him, no matter how good the outcome of an act is, if the actor acts out of love and with no other purpose, the act is not ethical. Therefore, for Augustine, love is a necessary condition for ethical behavior.
Augustine divides this love into two kinds, depending on the way a person loves. The first is called “enjoyment,” which is the love of things as ends in themselves, and the second is called “use,” which is the love of things as means to an end. In this way, he distinguishes between objects to be enjoyed and objects to be used, arguing that things of lower value should be used as a means to enjoy things of higher value, while things of higher value should be enjoyed for their own sake. For him, as a theologian, the highest end is of course God, which is to say that God is an end in itself to be enjoyed. In this way, he argued, the lower external “things” are used for the higher “body,” the body is used for the higher “soul,” and the soul is used for the enjoyment of the highest “God. Augustine believed that love according to this order, if it fails, can lead to the corruption of the soul. In other words, if creatures come to love their own self rather than the supreme good, God, then the order or hierarchy of love values is overturned, and evil or corruption, such as the aforementioned turning away from the illumination of divine light, can occur. For Augustine, the standard of love is determined by the order of values, the order of being. In other words, we must love the body over external things, the soul over the body, and God over the soul, or else it will lead to evil. Here we can see that Augustine emphasized the inner life of human beings over external objects, and that he considered the mind to be a higher concept than the body. Therefore, if we purify our souls from the physical and worldly, and love God above all else, we will be able to understand the mysteries of the transcendent God.
The just state
Augustine saw humanity as brothers to one another, bound by blood because we all descended from the same ancestor: we are all descended from Adam and Eve. However, despite sharing the same ancestors, humans have different personalities. Augustine divided human beings into two kinds, one called the “old man” and the other called the “new man.” The old man is bound to the flesh. The old man is the one who lives in the flesh, the outward man, the man of the earth. The new man, on the other hand, is born of God’s Holy Spirit, is an inward man, a heavenly man. They form groups of like-minded people and around things they like, and the place where the old man gathers is called the earthly city, and the place where the new man gathers is called the heavenly city.
Augustine’s reference to the earthly kingdom, or earthly city, does not mean the state, nor does he view the existence of the state as negative. Rather, Augustine saw the state as necessary because it is related to human nature as a social animal. Therefore, it is not the state itself that is problematic for him, but the state that realizes “justice.” He emphasized the importance of a just state, saying that a state without justice is like a band of robbers. But what does he mean by justice? Augustine says that justice is giving each person their due. According to him, when God created the world, he gave all humans enough goods to live in abundance. But a few humans took control and created an imbalance, so justice, in his view, is to give everyone a fair share so that everyone can live a human life. However, if we look at the entire history of the world, it is difficult to find a country on earth where this justice has been realized. Augustine believed that true justice comes from God and can only be realized in the heavenly city, which means that it is possible to give everyone what God has given them. In other words, true justice is when all people share what God has given them and praise God together, and the heavenly city is where people who live this way gather. In the heavenly city, people form a community that shares God’s love in the form of food, so that no one has to do hard labor and everyone can enjoy final rest.
In this way, Augustine believed that justice could not be realized on earth. This reveals his skepticism about human rationality. However, as we have seen, if humans are capable of reaching the truth with the help of divine illumination, shouldn’t justice be possible on earth? In other words, if imperfect humans need perfect divine illumination to reach truth, and justice can only be realized in the heavenly city, this seems to suggest that the “illumination” that God shines on us can be imperfect. In the end, it is unfortunate that Augustine came to this conclusion in order to emphasize the role of the church rather than the power of the individual and therefore the power of the state.
