Bad Will and the Mystery of Evil

Abstract

In Chs 5–6 I argued that Augustine, just like Aristotle, teaches that the absence of compulsion and the absence of ignorance are negative conditions of voluntary action, and that the presence of the right sort of efficient causation, and of knowledge, are positive conditions of voluntary action. The conclusion of Ch. 7 was that Augustine, somewhat like Aristotle, is also committed to the view that voluntary action is normally rational in an important sense (though not quite the same sense as Aristotle’s). The relevant sense is that Augustine believes that voluntary action, to be understood as such, must at least be directed towards some good (and ideally, of course, to one very particular good, the supreme good of God himself). Augustine’s doctrine of the rationality of action, then, is a weaker one than Aristotle’s, and not precisely the same as Aristotle’s; but (as I have argued) it is nonetheless a doctrine of the rationality of action.

It is commonly held that Augustine’s ontology, in which evil is treated as a privation, does no more than evade the problem which it is professed to solve; and that his deeply Christian sense of the reality of moral evil caused him to relapse into Manichaeanism with his doctrine of original sin, in which the Not-Being, the Nothing out of which man was created, is transformed into a Something with fatal power. In fact the originality of Augustine appears just in his steady refusal to hypostatise evil.

John Burnaby, Amor Dei, p. 37

The first man is summed up in one act: he took the fruit and ate of it. About that act there is nothing to say; one can only tell it; it happens and henceforth evil has arrived.

Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, p. 244

The Apostle meets the problem by leaving it unsolved.

Robert Wallis, chapter heading in his translation (1887) of Augustine’s contra Duas Epistolas Pelagianorum