Evil According To St. Augustine Free Will Essay

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Recommended: Augustine talks about evil

Bailee McNeel
USCH 1112
Free Will and Evil According to St. Augustine
In his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo offers a theory on the idea of free will that is becoming increasingly relevant today. Augustine’s beliefs surrounding free will stem from his theory that, if everything God created is good, then any sin that we commit are our own responsibility, and that it is our duty to use our free will to allow good into ourselves. He believes that we as people need to learn to use our free will to control our inherently corrupt nature, rather than use it to further us down the path of sin. The only way to do so is by taking responsibility for one’s own sin, and by getting rid of the absence of good in ourselves by allowing God to enter our lives instead.
Augustine believes that people are responsible for our own sin. He believes that free will exists within us, and is part of the reason why we choose to sin, as well as why some are able to resist the temptation of sin. In Book One of …show more content…

His issue with this belief seems to stem from the idea that, by saying that evil has power over ourselves, we as people don’t have to feel responsibility for our actions, and therefore our sin. He eventually comes to the following conclusion: God is incorruptible, and since God made all things good, God could not have created evil, which is not good. Since God created everything in the existence, and everything that God created is good, then evil must not exist (7.XIII). It is by this argument that Augustine comes to the conclusion that, what the Manichees perceived as “evil,” was defines by Augustine as an “absence of good.” In other words, evil is what is left when people refuse “goodness” and God, and that any evil that we do is our own choice. This forces people to take responsibility for their actions, both good and

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