The Privation of Good and The Neverending Story
Yesterday in my theology class, my professor expressed his disagreement with Augustine's conception of the nature of evil. Augustine essentially argued three things:
- God created all things, so that nothing exists that God did not create.
- God created all things to be Good.
- Therefore, from (1) and (2), evil cannot be a creation of God, and therefore evil cannot exist in the way that Good exists. Therefore, evil is not the presence of something in its own right, but the lack of the Good that God originally instilled in his creation.
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I think that even though Augustine did a good bit in trying to avoid dualism, he still fell into a trap of elevating the spiritual (form) above the earthly (matter), in saying God created the heavens first and then the earth. This came through in a lot of his thinking, e.g. avoiding any sexual relations after he turned from machineism/neoplatonism to christianity.
-your RUF buddy, jonathan
Posted by Unknown | 1:04 PM
Hmmm...I've never liked Augustine's argument because it seems like (similar to what your prof was saying) he's suggesting that evil is somehow less real than good.
I think of evil as just as real and tangible (if you can use that for such abstract categories) as good. I agree that evil is always good that's been twisted or changed into evil, but now it really does exist as evil, not simply a privation of good. Like a chemical change in science: When you burn toast in the toaster, you've created something different (the bad) out of what you originally had (the good). I see God's restoration as a reversal of that process, turning the existing evil back in to something good.
Posted by andrew | 5:07 AM
Cannot it exist by not existing, in the way that the Nothing does and does not exist?
Actually, maybe the issue here is that we aren't Platonists. I was trying to make sure that I was correct in my understanding of Augustine's argument, and, in the introduction to one of my copies of Confessions, the author pointed out that nothing exists in Platonic thought unless it is a substance. So, in that way of thinking, a substance couldn't pop into being unless God actually created it.
Regardless, I still think Augustine gives primacy to good in a way that skillfully avoids dualism. I guess I'll just be stubborn. :)
Posted by Jacob | 7:07 AM
But can't we simply say that God created the world good and then evil was simply introduced later according to God's sovereign purposes? It just doesn't seem like Augustine's is a needed solution, because very few Christians go the dualist route of saying that evil has always existed alongside God.
Posted by andrew | 10:03 AM
The question, in my mind, isn't so much "When did evil come into being?" but "What is evil?" I think that it is important to deny that evil exists to the same level of reality as good exists.
All of God's creation is good, because God created it that way. For something to be evil, then, is not because God created it that way, and it is also not because someone other than God created evil--it is "evil" because the good has been robbed from God's good creation.
Let me give an example from C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters: adultery is not evil because Satan created something evil out of nothing; rather, adultery is evil because it takes something good (sex) out of its good setting (marriage).
In Screwtape Letters, the demon Screwtape explained that the hosts of hell, if they could, would even prefer to get rid of the pleasure involved in adulterous sex, since the pleasure itself was something that God created good. But, they had to keep that pleasure, because the only way they were able to bring about evil was through taking good things out of their proper contexts.
Thus, I just don't think that it's possible for evil to exist in the same way that good exists. Satan will never be able to produce anything evil in and of itself, but he will only ever be able to corrupt things by removing the fullness of good that God created them to have.
Posted by Jacob | 9:04 PM
Thanks for the response, Jacob. I think I understand Augustine and Lewis's point better now. Something to chew on.
Posted by andrew | 3:30 AM