Analysis Of Augustine's Defining Evil

Augustine attempted to answer a very large question in his writings, he attempts to define evil.

Augustine himself was no stranger to evil, and like many of the Saints, he was not one in his early life. Augustine expressed great remorse of some seemingly trivial deeds he had committed when he was a young adolescent. One of the most famous examples he provides is his story of the pear tree. He and his friends had trespassed into a neighbors garden and had stolen all the fruit from his tree. This might seem like only a small sin, however Augustine demonstrates great regret in having participated in this act. Augustine is not as much concerned with the actual act of stealing from the tree, but the they didn 't even eat the fruit. They had no

Augustine claims that God never created evil. Evil itself only exists out of the logical nature that good exists; “what else is darkness except the absence of light?” (Augustine 12.3.3) If good exists and God is all good, then evil is turning away from God. What you are turning towards is not evil, but the evilness is the the actual act of turning. When we turn toward worldly pleasures we are sinning not because these worldly pleasures are inherently wrong, but because its impossible to face both pleasure and God. Augustine admits himself to have resided in this city, “In my youth I wandered away, too far from your sustaining hand, and created of myself a barren waste.” (2.10.1) He speaks with regret as he was seduced by pleasures, but this gives also him the authority to speak from experience. He warns his readers to not to turn God, because outside of God there is no goodness, those who do will ruin

He takes a very logical and easy to understand approach of understanding how God and sinning works. God is all good, therefore anything that is not God must be evil. However, I do have some arguments with some of his ideas on the world and human nature. Augustine often cites the creation story in his arguments, claiming that God created the world and it was good. He then says the fall of Adam is what created the initial problem of evil, “if Adam had not fallen away from thee, that brackish sea--the human race--so deeply prying, so boisterously swelling, so restlessly moving, would never have flowed forth from his belly.” (Confessions 8.10.22)” This implies that Augustine believes the Orthodox Christian teaching that humans were created in the image of an all good being, therefore it must mean that they started off good and then fell. St. Irenaeus claims that if both humans and the world were naturally good, then it would remain in a static state, for if evil did not exist then suffering would not exist as well. If suffering does not exist then how can humans things like compassion? Humans can express goodness if there is no evil to dispell, therefor humans were never actually created in an all-good state. If there was no evil then how could they fall? St. Irenaeus instead proposes that the creation of humans is a two step process; we are initially created in the image of God, but only have to potential to strive for the