2. Christianity and Saint Augustine. It is only when
the Western theistic religions, all of them influenced
by the Hebrew scriptures and by Greek thought, seek
a clarification and defense of faith in the face of
paganism and heresy that the problem of theodicy
becomes vital. The retributive theory of suffering re-
mains strong in these faiths, although protests were as
old as the Book of Job and the teachings of Jesus and
Paul. The eschatological hope of a final judgment and
promise of eternal life with rewards for the faithful
and good, and punishment for sinners, was the ultimate
justification of a moral world order. But the questions
of why a creator of perfect power, wisdom, and good-
ness can create a world containing evil, and how his
foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom,
developed as foci for discussion. A tough-minded
orthodoxy (Tertullian, for example) turned to the
paradoxes of the gospel as justification for theoretical
skepticism and an affirmation of faith in the impossible.
But, for most thinkers, Platonism provided an antidote
for doubt and for the dualistic heresies of Gnostic and
Manichee. A universe which is the creation of a perfect
being must, to adequately reflect his greatness, be as
full as possible of all degrees of finite goodness and
thus also contain levels of evil as their negation; in
such a world, Greek thought supports revelation in
holding man to be free and therefore capable of evil,
yet destined also to find his way from the lower level
of sense and matter to the higher level of grace.
It was Saint Augustine who, after passing through
Manichaean and Neo-Platonic phases of thought, pro-
vided that complex synthesis of doctrines about evil
and the justification of God which came to prevail in
Western Christian orthodoxy; it was adapted by
Thomas Aquinas to the Scholastic tradition and by
Leibniz to the context of the modern scientific and
rationalistic moods.
Augustine's theodicy is eclectic and resists sys-
tematization. He modified Plotinus' theory of evil as
negation by making it a matter rather of privation—
in each created being that is evil which deprives it
of the particular form or purpose which is natural to
it. To this must be added Augustine's concern about
the inwardness of experience, the motive rather than
the external consequence of action. Evil is deficiency,
therefore no cause can be found for it (
City of God
XII, 7). Hence evil has no independent status; it is
always parasitic on the good (
Enchiridion, Chs. 13, 14).
But since being and goodness must be defined in terms
of the particular final cause inherent in each created
being, only free creatures can experience evil.
When the will abandons what is above itself and turns to
what is lower, it becomes evil, not because that to which
it turns is evil, but because the turning itself is wicked
(City
of God XII, 6).
So man's fall brought evil into the world, and it is
relative to man and to other free creatures.
To this theory of evil as privation, Augustine adds
analogical arguments of an aesthetic and part-whole
nature. What appears to be evil seen in isolation or
in too narrow context could be seen as a necessary
component in a larger context. Thus evil can be under-
stood in relation to good as ugliness stands to beauty;
it provides the contrast (darkness, disharmony) which
lets the good (light, harmony) stand out more brightly
and perfectly. Thus death, to which everything tran-
sitory is subject, itself enhances the degrees of perfec-
tion in creation. Likewise the atonement provides a
completely just balance for sin, preserving the harmony
and goodness of the whole.
The wide range of arguments by which Augustine
sought to exonerate God from any charge of moral or
metaphysical imperfection and to derive all evil from
man's sin were the foundation for theological optimism
in the first centuries of the modern world. Thomas
Aquinas used both his theory of privation and the
so-called aesthetic argument, and although there were
departures from it in such Scholastics as Ockham, it
established the tradition of philosophical theology.
(Summa Theologica I, 4-49; On Free Will III, 9, 26.)
The theory that evil is necessary to the total good
because it serves as discipline to the moral and spiritual
life is neglected in Augustine, but has been traced to
another church father, Irenaeus, by John Hick in Evil
and the God of Love (1966). The “Irenaean type of
theodicy,” also indebted to aspects of Platonism, holds
that the evils of the world are required by a God of
love who seeks the development of his free creatures
from their original innocence into full spiritual beings.
Hence, as in Augustine, there is no intrinsic or surd
evil; evil is justified as the means of developing man
from bondage to self-conscious participation in the
Kingdom of God. This disciplinary view, which Hicks
argues was eclipsed by the Augustinian arguments, was
revived after Kant by Schleiermacher and others, and
found support in theistic interpretations of evolution
in the nineteenth century.
