Strathmore University SHSS Medieval Philosophy The Problem of Evil: Augustine of Hippo By Cecil Agutu Email: agutuco@gmail.com February 23, 2013 There was tension in that whereas God was good and created everything which was good, evil was real and experienced in the world. The Manicheans taught that evil was created by God and was a thing (nature). The Manicheans had put Good and evil at the same level as coeternal principles (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Augustine approached the problem of evil in a different way. He argued for the existence of God and that he was good. God is the creator and did not create evil because evil is not good and is not a thing. Being is good. God is the Supreme Being and is perfectly good. Goodness comes in degrees. Augustine says that “Evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name evil. […] evil must be a privation of goodness”. Evil is the act of a person choosing a lesser good. It is a privation of the will which has turned away from God to lesser things as opposed to being a substance (Kouki, 2011). In tackling the Manicheans, Augustine steered the argument to a fundamental question of “what is evil?” as opposed to their question “whence is evil?” He established that evil is contrary to nature but not as a substance. Evil falls away from the essence and tends to nonexistence. God did not create evil. As to the second assertion of the Manicheans that evil is hurtful he points out that whatever is hurtful takes away some good from that which it hurts. Without such a loss, it would not be hurtful. The third assertion is that evil is corruption. Whereas corruption opposes nature and hurts, it does not exist in itself but in the substance which it corrupts. Thus the thing corrupted is not corruption. It is not evil. To be corrupt does not imply the absence of good but that the thing can be deprived of good, a situation which is not tenable if there was an absence of good. In these three arguments, Augustine destroys the Manichean argument on evil (Class notes, 2013). 2 REFERENCES Kouki, G. (2011) Augustine on evil. Retrieved February 15, 2011 from http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5124 Lecture Notes (2013) Medieval Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.htm. Saint Augustine. 3
