Augustine and The Problem of Evil

899 Words2 Pages

In the beginning, God created the world. He created the earth, air, stars, trees and mortal animals, heaven above, the angels, every spiritual being. God looked at these things and said that they were good. However, if all that God created was good, from where does un-good come? How did evil creep into the universal picture? In Book VII of his Confessions, St. Augustine reflects on the existence of evil and the theological problem it poses. For evil to exist, the Creator God must have granted it existence. This fundamentally contradicts the Christian confession that God is Good. Logically, this leads one to conclude evil does not exist in a created sense. Augustine arrives at the conclusion that evil itself is not a formal thing, but the result of corruption away from the Supreme Good. (Augustine, Confessions 7.12.1.) This shift in understanding offers a solution to the problem of evil, but is not fully defended within Augustine’s text. This essay will illustrate how Augustine’s solution might stand up to other arguments within the context of Christian theology. Augustine’s idea of corruption is grounded by the assumption that any given thing must start out good to be corruptible. The revelation that God created the universe as Good means that it is also created with the potential for corruption. However, one might ask, where does the force for this corruption originate? If change is to occur to an object doesn’t there have to be a force acting upon the objects? For example, if one rests a fishbowl on a shelf so that it will not fall, one can assume it will not fall unless something or somebody else comes and pushes it. The fishbowl, having been placed on the shelf cannot fall just like any body of creation into the universe can... ... middle of paper ... ... effects of a corrupting entity, what then is Christ’s work? How can a physical sacrifice save the world from sliding into nonexistence? The answer comes from another adjustment; Christ comes to pull creation back towards the eternal God. Salvation through Christ is does not look like Him coming as a warrior to vanquish the evil forces, but Him coming as a loving servant to heal the corrupted beings (i.e. sinners) back to their original state of grace. Thus, the idea of there being a war between forces of God and Evil is not compatible with truth of the Gospel; rather that God designed the world in harmony and wishes it to return to this state. This proves that, in the end, Augustine’s answer to the problem of evil is correct in accordance to Christian Confession. Works Cited Augustine, and Henry Chadwick. "Book 7." Confessions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Print.

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