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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2023
AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO (354–430 CE), the most influential of the Church Fathers in the development of Western Christianity, asked after God. Yet these questions, explicitly theological as they were, should not blind us to the theological drift of rationalistic questioning as such: if everything has a reason, then the question of how X was caused by Y must lead us in turn to ask what caused Y, and so on. Questioning why things are the way they are, then, leads back to a first cause. And as we saw in the case of Aristotle, it is a short step from identifying a first cause to finding God.
But if all reasons relate back to God, then does the evil in the world also originate there? Aristotle’s God, being unchanging and impersonal, does not will evil. Augustine, however, believed in a personal creator God. How to absolve this God of evil? Even before his conversion to Christianity, while still a Manichee (Manichaeism was a Gnostic religion widespread in Augustine’s day), this paradox had troubled Augustine: ‘In my ignorance, I was disturbed by [this] question’, for piety ‘forbade me to believe that the good God had created an evil nature’ (Confessions 3.7 and 5.10).
It wasn’t only the Manichees who felt that evil must be sourced elsewhere than in God. Centuries earlier, in Plato’s Republic (379c), we find: ‘while god must be held to be the sole cause of good, we must look for some factors other than god as cause of evil’. Plato is here objecting to the stories of the gods told by the poets, which portray them as pernicious:
‘In reality, of course, god is good, and he must be so described.’
‘Certainly.’
‘But nothing good is harmful, is it?’
‘I think not.’
‘Then can anything that is not harmful do harm?’
‘No.’
‘And can what does no harm do evil?’
‘No again.’
‘And can what does no evil be the cause of any evil?’
‘How could it?’
Yet unlike Plato, who was able to hold that God is responsible only for good ‘because he cannot be responsible for everything’ (Republic 379c), and unlike the Manichees, who believed God ‘infinite in all respects but one, namely the mass of evil opposed’ to him (Confessions 5.10), the Christian Augustine believed in an all-powerful God. Excusing such a God of evil is not so straightforward.
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