You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The Augustinian theodicy is the most influential backward-looking Christian response to evil: it explains present suffering by reference to a primordial fall from an original perfection. Rooted in the writings of St Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), it has shaped Western Christian thought on sin, grace and salvation for more than 1,500 years. A point of exam technique must be made at the outset. The AQA 7062 specification names three responses to evil — Hick's soul-making theodicy, the free will defence, and Griffin's process theodicy. The Augustinian theodicy is not on that named list. It is, however, very widely taught as essential context and enrichment: it is the historical foundation of the free-will tradition, the natural contrast-class to Hick's soul-making approach, and a recurring target of the criticisms (especially Schleiermacher's) that motivate the spec-named theodicies. Treat it as important background to be deployed in comparison and evaluation — not as "the spec's set theodicy".
Augustine was born in Thagaste (in Roman North Africa) in 354 CE. Before his conversion he adhered for several years to Manichaeism, a dualist religion that explained evil by positing two co-eternal principles: a kingdom of light (good) and a kingdom of darkness (evil), eternally at war. Augustine came to reject this dualism as both philosophically and theologically disastrous: an independent principle of evil, equal to God, destroys God's sovereignty and makes God finite. His mature theodicy — developed across the Confessions (c. 397–401), On Free Choice of the Will (De Libero Arbitrio), and The City of God (c. 413–426) — is in large part an attempt to explain evil without Manichaean dualism, preserving both God's goodness and God's status as sole creator.
Understanding what Augustine was reacting against illuminates why his theodicy takes the shape it does. Manichaeism offered an emotionally satisfying answer to evil: there are two ultimate principles, light and darkness, good and evil, and our suffering is the work of the dark power, against which even the good God struggles. The young Augustine found this attractive precisely because it absolved both God and the human self of responsibility for evil — evil was an alien intruder. But on reflection he came to see two fatal flaws. First, if the evil principle is genuinely co-eternal with and independent of God, then God is not the sole creator and not omnipotent; the good God is finite, hemmed in by a rival. Second, dualism cannot explain how a wholly good God could be threatened or harmed by darkness at all, since to be vulnerable is already to be imperfect. Augustine's whole theodicy is the constructive alternative: by making evil a privation rather than a principle, and by tracing its origin to the free choices of creatures rather than to an independent dark power, he can keep God as the single, sovereign, wholly good creator of a wholly good creation, while still accounting for the reality of evil. The privatio-boni doctrine and the free-will account of the Fall are therefore not arbitrary; they are precisely the moves required to answer Manichaeism without lapsing into either dualism (which limits God) or the claim that God created evil (which corrupts God's goodness).
Key term: A theodicy (from the Greek for "God" and "justice") is an attempt to justify God in the face of evil — to give the actual reasons a good, omnipotent God has for permitting suffering. This is stronger than a defence (Lesson 5), which only shows evil and God to be logically compatible.
Augustine's most foundational metaphysical claim is that evil is not a substance or positive thing. Drawing on the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, he holds that evil is privatio boni — a privation of good, a lack or corruption of a goodness that something ought to have. As blindness is the absence of sight and disease the absence of health, so evil is the absence of due goodness. This yields three theologically decisive consequences:
This move lets Augustine affirm that God is the creator of all that is, without making God the author of evil. It does, however, attract the objection (below) that calling the Holocaust a mere "privation" trivialises active, positive cruelty.
It is worth seeing how the doctrine connects to Augustine's account of the hierarchy of being and the disordered will. For Augustine, everything God made is good, but created goods form a hierarchy — God at the summit, then spiritual creatures, then bodily ones. Evil enters not when a creature loves a lesser good, but when it loves a lesser good in place of a greater one, or loves itself in place of God. Sin, on this analysis, is "disordered love" (amor inordinatus): the will turning from the immutable good (God) to mutable goods. This is why Augustine can say evil is a privation and yet take it with deadly seriousness — the privation is a real wounding of the will's proper order, not a mere nothing. Aquinas later took up and refined the privatio boni tradition, distinguishing evil suffered (the privation of a due good, as blindness is in an eye) from evil done (the privation of due order in an act of will), and insisting that evil always exists "in" a good as its subject, since only what is actual, and so good, can exist at all. The tradition is therefore more sophisticated than the slogan "evil is the absence of good" suggests.
If creation is wholly good, where does evil come from? Augustine's answer is the Fall — evil enters through the free choices of rational creatures who turn from God to lesser goods:
Augustine stresses that the Fall was freely chosen. God neither caused nor willed it; the creatures were not compelled. The responsibility for evil therefore rests with the misuse of created freedom, not with God — which is the seed of the entire later free-will tradition (Lesson 5).
Augustine probes the angelic fall with particular care, because it raises in its purest form the question that Schleiermacher will later turn against him. If the angels were created perfectly good, in the immediate presence of God, what could possibly have moved them to fall? Augustine's answer is that the cause of an evil will is not some thing (which, being created, would be good) but a "deficient" rather than an "efficient" cause: the will simply defects from the higher good, and to seek the cause of this defection is, he says, like trying to see darkness or hear silence. Pride — the wish to be one's own master rather than to depend on God — is the form the defection takes, but pride is itself the first expression of the turning, not an antecedent thing that explains it. Critics find this unsatisfying: it seems either to leave the Fall uncaused and so unintelligible, or to imply that the very possibility of defection was a flaw God built in. This is precisely the pressure point that Lesson 4's soul-making theodicy will exploit, and Lesson 5's free will defence will try to convert from a weakness into a strength.
Augustine developed the doctrine of original sin to explain how Adam's act affects all his descendants. He held that all humanity was, in some sense, "seminally present" in Adam — present in him as future generations are contained in their progenitor — and so all share in both the guilt and the corrupted nature that followed the Fall. Human nature is thereafter marked by concupiscence (disordered desire) and cannot achieve salvation by its own effort; only God's grace, given through Christ, can restore the broken relationship. This is why Augustine's approach is sometimes called soul-deciding rather than soul-making: the decisive event lies in the past, and salvation depends on grace, not on a developmental process.
Key term: Original sin is the doctrine that, in consequence of the Fall, all human beings inherit both a corrupted nature inclined to sin (concupiscence) and a share in Adam's guilt — so that humanity cannot save itself and stands in need of grace. Augustine's reading of "seminal presence in Adam" gives this inheritance a quasi-biological form.
The phrase "seminally present in Adam" deserves unpacking, since it carries much of the theodicy's weight and exposes it to one of its sharpest objections. Augustine's thought is that the whole human race was contained in Adam as in a seed, so that when Adam sinned, human nature itself was wounded, and every descendant inherits that wounded nature as a matter of biological and moral solidarity, not by imitation. This is how Augustine can hold both that we are genuinely guilty in Adam (and so justly subject to the Fall's consequences) and that the human predicament is not merely the sum of individual sins but a corruption of nature transmitted by ordinary generation. The doctrine does real explanatory work — it accounts for the universality of sin and the need for a universal redeemer — but it is also where modern biology presses hardest, since there was no single ancestral pair from whom all humans descend in the way the doctrine requires, and "seminal presence" cannot be given a literal genetic sense. This is one reason many theologians now read the whole Adamic narrative as a symbolic depiction of the human condition rather than as transmitted biological fact.
Augustine extends the Fall's effects beyond moral evil to natural evil. On his account the disorder of the natural world — disease, predation, natural disaster, bodily death — is a cosmic consequence of sin. The harmony of creation was disrupted when humanity turned from God, so that natural evil is ultimately traceable to moral evil. The attraction of this view is its unity: a single event explains both kinds of evil. Its great vulnerability is that modern science decisively contradicts the premise of an original deathless paradise (see Criticisms).
Augustine also offers an aesthetic theme. Viewed sub specie aeternitatis — from the standpoint of eternity — the universe is a perfectly ordered whole, in which even evils contribute to the beauty of the total composition, as shadows give depth to a painting or dissonance enriches a piece of music. Linked to this is the principle of plenitude: a creation containing every grade of being, from highest to lowest, is richer and more perfect than one containing only the highest. Evil, regrettable in itself, has a place within the harmony of the whole when seen from God's perspective rather than ours.
Finally, Augustine's tradition embraces the paradox of O felix culpa — "O fortunate fault" or "happy fault", echoed in the Easter Exsultet: "O happy fault that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer." The thought is not that God willed the Fall, but that God's providence brought from it a good greater than would otherwise have existed: the Incarnation and the redemption of humanity in Christ. The evil of the Fall is, in the end, outweighed and transfigured by the good of redemption.
The theodicy faces serious objections, several of which are precisely the pressures that motivate the spec-named alternatives.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.