Problem of Evil

One of the most controversial ideas of medieval Christians was confirming their belief that “God is all good, is all powerful, and created “everything” while evil persists in the world. If God was the source of everything in the world, then did he create evil too? Augustine approaches the question of evil, by defining evil as something that results when the human will is misguidedвЂ"therefore, our will is the source of evil rather than God. This allows Augustine to still name God as the creator of all things and all goodness.

In order to proceed on to the question of “the source of evil,” we must first justify what evil is. Augustine states below that:

Since every being, so far as it is a being, is good, when we say that a faulty being is an evil being, we just seem to say that what is good is evil, and that nothing but what is good can be evil, seeing that every being is good, and that no evil can exist except in a being (Klima, 310).

Augustine realizes that the statement above depends on whether evil is a “thing” or not. If not a thing, that means evil was not created. Augustine approached this problem in a different way. According to Augustine, God is the absolute existence, and thus immutable despite his own immutability “things that He made He empowered to be, but not to be supremely like Himself” (Klima, 313). Consequently, since God is the source of all life and goodness, there cannot be such a thing as perfect evil since he does not empower it to be. Augustine realizes that evil is not a force that opposes goodness, but something that lacks goodness. Within nature goodness prevails in different degrees, “to some He communicated a more ample, to other a more limited existence, and thus arranged the natures of beings in ranks” (Klima, 315). Therefore, we can state that evil is something with the lowest possible degree of goodness and thus the lowliest of all beings. Augustine observed evil that comes from a human being as a privation of goodness, Moral Evil. Augustine’s further arguments logically derive from the definition of evil as a privation of goodness.

First of all, Augustine perceives evil as a deficiency of being. He believes that “every entity, even if it is a defective one, in so far as it is an entity, is good” (Klima, 310). More importantly, Augustine assumes that everything in nature which has its own rank and species, and a kind of internal harmony which surely is “good” (Klima, 315). Then God is the highest being in order and thus the most powerfully real. Although diminution of goodness also means the diminution of being, all things, He created, must be good because everything that exists is given existence from God, and by his nature he does not generate anything that is not good in nature. This idea is found in several verses in the Bible. “He created anything and saw goodness” (Genesis 2). The idea that God saw goodness in everything created is well supported even by the Bible. Therefore, according to Augustine, there is nothing that is evil by nature.

What is evil then is the fact that it is evil “for good to be diminished.” Evil is nothing else than corruption or deprivation of the measure or the form or the order that belong to nature but when this order “is corrupted, however, its corruption is an evil, because it is deprived of some sort of good (Klima, 310)”. Privation or diminution of goodness in order or rank explains that evil occurs when one turns its direction away from reaching towards goodness, upwards to attain a higher rank in the order of beings.

Augustine defines moral evil as “privation of good” (Klima, 309), it does not imply that evil is simply “a lack” of goodness. Something that lacks goodness by its nature, is not evil it is rather the act of falling down in rank after being brought into existence. Despite the fact that all creations receive their existence from God the Creator, trees and beasts are brought into existence as beings that are lower in the order of nature; being lower in the rank does not mean they fall away from themselves. Evil enters when one ceases to do what one is meant to. When things deprive in their form or order, they tend towards nonexistence. However, for how do they hurt them but by depriving them of “integrity, beauty, welfare, virtue” (Klima, 313). If things remain, though corrupted, then some good still remains. What Augustine implies of privation or corruption of goodness is that corruption continues the entity loss not only the good but also to the being proper to it. For example, a brave man becomes coward, strong man becomes weak, moral man becomes immoral. In contrast, the supreme good is incorruptible and different from corruptible substance. This leads to the conclusion that evil is something that necessarily derives from the existence of something good.

However, the question still remains. Evil is not something created by God, but it still exists. What is the source of the evil then? Augustine addresses the source of evil as something that results from abusing the free will of rational beings. “Thus the true cause of the blessedness of the good angels is found to be this that they cleave to Him who supremely is. And if we ask the cause of the misery of the bad, it occurs to us”(Klima, 315); what Augustine implies through this passage, it is clear that rational beings with free will are capable of doing either something good or evil. In the beginning, angels and humans were given free will. It is their own choice either to obey God or not. This is the way that evil perceived, “for its defections are not to evil things, but are themselves evil; [that is to say, are not towards things that are naturally and in themselves evil, but the defection of the will is evil.] Because it is contrary to the order of nature, and an abandonment of that which has supreme being for that which has less” (Klima, 317). According to Augustine, if the movement of the will, when it renounces something higher in the order turns instead to something lower, is the cause of evil. “It is not because it is evil to which it turns, but because the turning itself is wicked” (Klima, 316). This implies that when God created, he did not create evil. It was will of angels and humans to commit sins when they turned away from God. From then, this act of sin has passed down to next generations, allowing evil to persist in the world.

Then what is the causes the will to turn away from