Burns 1 Andrew Burns Prof. Burns RELI 300 8 March 2010 An Analysis of the Development and Content of St. Augustine’s Solution to the Problem of Evil as Presented in the Confessions, its Derivatives, and Related Works 1. Problem of Evil Lactantius, an early Christian apologist, composed De Ira Dei to persuade others of God’s wrath. His targets: Epicureans, followers of the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus who, nearly 600 years earlier, taught God is “free of trouble” and “never angry” (Cicero qtd. in Penwill 25). Lactantius, whose understanding of Epicurean philosophy was rather lacking, quotes Epicurus: God either wishes to take away evils and cannot, or he can and does not wish to, or he neither wishes to nor is able, or he both wishes to and is able. If he wishes to and is not able, he is feeble [imbecillus], which does not accord with the notion of god. If he is able to and does not wish to, he is malicious [inuidus], which is equally foreign to god. If he neither wishes to nor is able to, he is both malicious and feeble and therefore not god. If he both wishes to and is able, which alone is fitting to god, when, therefore, are there evils and why does he not remove them (qtd. in Penwill 30). Lactantius acknowledges this is a “formidable argument” but claims it is also “easily refuted.” According to Lactantius, God could easily remove the world’s evils, but chooses not to because these evils allow man to develop a more “discerning intellect” (31). Penwill quips: “Yes, the presence of evil may enable me to exercise my intellect in discerning between evil and good; it may therefore make me choose not to become a tyrant; but it doesn’t help me very much if I am being tortured to death by one of the
Burns 2 tyrant’s henchmen” (31). The Epicurean paradox is not “easily refuted”; a skeptics ax lies at the root of every solution, and those that bear no fruit are cut down and cast into the fire. With each new theodicy, skeptics respond with more sophisticated renditions of the same problem. They write with ease as the theologian struggles with great difficulty—what justifies unspeakable evils? Simplified, the problem of evil begs for the reconciliation of faith and reason. If (i) God is omnipotent, and (ii) God is omnibenevolent, yet (iii) Evil remains ubiquitous, does not (iii) conflict with (i) or (ii)? But can there be an answer? Some say no. Others, like Ludwig Wittgenstein, propose: “If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered” (Wittgenstein 187). Within Christendom, the theodicy of St. Augustine of Hippo, a third century theologian, remains the most widely successful theodicy yet devised, inspiring the works of, inter alia, Thomas Aquinas, John Milton, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and Bertrand Russell. 2. The Development of St. Augustine’s Theodicy Most of what we know of St. Augustine’s life comes from his prolific writing, particularly his spiritual autobiography, the Confessions. Styled as a letter to God, St. Augustine’s Confessions recounts his search for eternal truth, beginning with his earliest childhood memories and continuing through his conversion to Christianity. Covering a variety of topics, from the oratorical beauty of Cicero’s Hortensius, to his mother’s mystical premonitions of the future, Confessions is a book of struggles, including a struggle with Epicurus: “Who made me? Is not God not only good but the supreme Good? Why then do I have the power to will evil and reject good? Is it to provide a reason why it is just for me to undergo punishments? Who put this power in me and implanted me with the seed of bitterness (Heb. 12:15)” (Augustine Confessions 114). His other famous work, City of God, spends twenty-two volumes answering this question. Though raised by a very devout Christian mother, Monica, young Augustine of Hippo saw Christianity as simply one of several possible philosophical paths to choose
Burns 3 from. His father, a pagan, funded, on credit, Augustine’s first-rate education in Carthage (26). There, in the bustling metropolis, Augustine fell in with “men proud of their slick talk, very earthly-minded and loquacious”—the Manichees (40). While he would later call their’s a “false religion,” for nearly nine years—from ages nineteen to twenty-eight—Augustine followed Manichaeism (52). The philosophy appealed to a young Augustine, giving him leave to practice a debauched lifestyle—free to cast his private responsibility for his soul’s health into “the cosmic maelstrom” (Evans qtd. in Saulytis 4).1 2.1.1 Manichaeism Mani was born on 14 April 216, the son of Patik, a Christian Gnostic of royal blood, in or near Seleucia-Ctesiphon2 (Stanford 14). At age four, his father brought him to live in a baptist community founded by Elchasai (14). According to Mani, he received his first divine revelation from the King of the Paradise of Light at the age of twelve, and his second at age twenty-four (14-5). He grew convinced that former prophets, such as Jesus, Buddha, and Zoroaster, though divinely inspired, gave incomplete guidance on God’s teachings (21). At twenty-six, he took it upon himself to educate the world about the “Religion of Light”—it proved wildly popular. By the seventh century, Manichaeism stretched from modern-day Spain to China and Tibet (18). Mani portrayed the world as a struggle between two substances—the light substance, or God, and the dark substance, evil—each encompassing a separate sphere in the universe. Mani preached that though each substance possesses infinite power, the light—the spiritual—is more infinite, but the darkness restrains the light within the material. The light battles darkness to escape, the darkness loathes release a quantum of light. In this way, man’s body and soul is a microcosm of the struggle of good and evil in the universe; salvation consists of freeing the soul by denying the body physical pleasures (Saulytis 3-4). 1 2
As an auditor, Augustine was not required to adhere to the rigid asceticism charactaristic of Manichaeism. Modern-day Al-Mada’in, Iraq
Burns 4 Mani’s teachings, at least initially, provided Augustine a “plausible solution to a difficulty which appeared to [him] insoluble on the premises of orthodox Christianity: the problem of evil” (Augustine qtd. in Saulytis 3). The existence of two substances obviates proposition (i), that God is omnipotent, for two infinite substances cannot both be omnipotent: one could not destroy the other. Even the different sizes of infinity is coherent in light of modern set theory, for ℵ0 is a smaller infinite set than ℵ1 , which is a smaller infinite set than ℵ2 , and so forth. 2.1.2 Augustine’s Dissatisfaction with Manichaeism The text of the Confessions hints that even at his most devout, Augustine remained rather skeptical of Mani’s teachings, comparing them to hallucinogenic drugs (41). The little faith he did possess stemmed from an admiration of the apparent completeness of Manichean philosophy, all nicely bound in highly ornate tomes. He admired the air of learnedness the Manichees projected, and “shunned the Bible’s restraint” (Augustine Confessions 40). With additional learning though, this admiration wore thin. A growing familiarity with the teachings of various philosophers and with the “rational, mathematical order of things” aggravated an incipient disillusionment with the illogical and inadequate explanations Mani provided (75). On one occasion, he searched ornate tomes for the cause of solar and lunar eclipses and found a tale about the sun and the moon veiling their eyes from a terrible battle between light and darkness (75). Confronting Manichean scholars about glaring errors bore little fruit, save the fig bits the “elect” spat forth. Most claimed ignorance and urged Augustine to seek out Bishop Faustus, the most learned Manichean: “In the nine years or so during which my vagabond mind listened to the Manichees, I waited with intense yearning for the coming of this Faustus. Other Manichees, whom I had happened to meet, were unable to answer the questions which I put. But they promised me that once Faustus had come and had a conversation with me, these questions and any yet greater problems I might have would be resolved very easily and clearly” (77). However, rather than reaffirming his faith,
Burns 5 Bishop Faustus destroyed it. Ignorant in the liberal arts, he failed to answer with sufficiency a single question posed by Augustine. “I wanted Faustus to tell me, after comparing my mathematical calculations which I had read in other books, whether the story contained in the Manichee book was correct, or at least whether it had an equal chance of being correct [. . . ] He modestly did not even venture to take up the burden. He knew himself to be uninformed on these matters and was not ashamed to confess it” (79). After then consulting Bishop Ambrose, Augustine became agnostic as to the veracity of the Manichean claims, and for a while refused to adopt any new philosophy: “I doubted everything” (89). 2.2.1 Neo-Platonism Plotinus was born in Lycopolis, Upper Egypt around 205 (U˘zdavinys and Bregman 4). At 28, a nascent interest in philosophy drew him to the inner circle of the obscure yet dominating Ammonius of Alexandria (7). After nearly eleven years under Ammonius, Plotinus’ desire to learn philosophy from the Persians and Indians lured him eastward (Gerson Plotinus xiii). In 243, Plotinus attached himself to a military expedition to Persia, led by Emperor Gordian III, to attack the newly created Sassanian Empire, led by Shanhanshah3 Shapur I (U˘zdavinys and Bregman 10). While in Mesopotamia, the emperor’s soldiers assassinated him but allowed Plotinus to flee to Antioch (10). Arriving in Rome around 245, he lectured on Ammonius’ and his own philosophy until his death around 270 (U˘zdavinys and Bregman 11; Gerson Plotinus xiii). Within thirty years of his death, Plotinus’ disciple, Porphyry, compiled the Enneads4 , a collection of Plotinus’ 54 treatises (U˘zdavinys and Bregman 12). Plotinus taught that the One is the ‘first cause’ and that everything in the universe is an emanation of it (Gerson “Plotinus” 4). The first emanation of the One is the νooς, or ´ the Divine Mind. The νooς ´ is the root of the Platonic Forms, the “eternal and immutable entities that account for or explain the possibility of intelligent predication” (5). The νooς ´ 3 4
Literally, king of kings. Literally, the Nines so called because Porphyry divided the treatise into 6 groups of 9 sections.
Burns 6 is also the “instrument of the One’s causality,” as everything below the νooς ´ on the hierarchy of Being owes its differentiable qualities to the processes of the One acting through the Platonic Forms of the νooς ´ (5). The second emanation of the One is the ψυχη κoσµoυ, or World Soul (6). The ψυχη κoσµoυ represents the desires that are external to ´ ´ the νooς ´ (which is internally satisfied with contemplating the various Platonic Forms) (6). As everything in nature acts out of a desire—the desire to know, the desire to survive, etc.—the ψυχη κoσµoυ facilitates desiring by projecting the Platonic Forms of these ´ cognitive states into the mind of the desirers. Lastly, furthest from the One, the final product of the One’s emanations is matter, which is evil. Unlike the Manichees, Plotinus viewed evil, not as a substance, but as a state, the state of non-being (7). Non-being, however, is not absolute non-existence, but rather, “ ‘other’ than being” (Rist 156-7). In designating matter evil, Plotinus reasoned that, matter, being the final emanation of the One, is totally devoid of being. Since Plotinus treated as axiomatic that being is good, it follows that matter, which is totally devoid of being, must necessarily be evil. 2.2.2 Augustine’s Attacks on Plotinus Neo-Platonist literature, especially the Enneads, “formed the intellectual bridge for Augustine from Manichaeism to Christianity...[and] made clear to him that the problem of evil could be solved without having to recognize the existence of a positive, diabolical principle co-eternal with God” (Saulytis 6). However, Augustine did not find Plotinus’ teachings free of error; indeed, he found some Plotinian teachings incompatible with his growing Christian faith. Firstly, Augustine objected to Plotinus’ characterization of matter as evil. Plotinus and Mani both agreed that matter, either by analogy to darkness or by virtue of its remoteness from the One, possessed some opposite of light or being—evil. Augustine disagreed, writing: “Certainly the greatest and supreme Good made lesser goods; yet the Creator and all that he created are good” (Augustine Confessions 116). In Genesis, God describes everything he creates as “good,” and, after finishing creation, he describes
Burns 7 all of his creation as “very good” (Gen. 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). “[Clearly,]” Augustine reasoned, “whatever things exist are good, and the evil into whose origin I was inquiring is not a substance, for if it were a substance it would be good. Either it would be an incorruptible substance, a great good indeed, or a corruptible substance, which could only be corrupted if it were good. Hence [. . . ] [God] made all things good, and there are absolutely no substances which [God] did not make” (Augustine Confessions 125). In this way, “Augustine reject[ed] the ancient Platonic, neo-Platonic, Gnostic, and Manichean prejudice against matter and la[id] the foundation for a Christian naturalism that rejoices in this world, and instead of fleeing from it as a snare to the soul, seeks to use it and share it in gratitude to God for His bountiful goodness” (Hick qtd. in Saulytis). Secondly, Augustine objected to Plotinus’ position that “matter exists eternally and is not in any sense a temporal creation,” that it is instead the product of an “atemporal ontological dependence” on the One (Rist 157; Gerson 5). Augustine argued that since Genesis begins by specifically describing the creation of the universe, ex nihilo: “in the Beginning, God created heaven and earth” (Gen 1:1), time must be partitioned into before and after creation. Even Plotinus himself, though favoring his argument of atemporal ontological dependence, did recognize that Augustine’s position was a logical alternative conclusion (Rist 157). Lastly, Augustine disputed the Plotinus’ assertions about the relationship between the Creator and the created. According to Plotinus, everything in the universe is a direct extension of the One by emanations. Augustine rejected this, arguing a necessary distinction between God and creation. God, according to Augustine, is removed from his creation, which is a projection of his divine intent. As only God is perfect, inferior things are increasingly less perfect: “As is normal in the model-copy relationship, the copy is more vague and indefinite since it is farther away from true Being” (Rist 155). For Augustine, God represents the one true Being and his creation represents the gradient of lesser beings, with evil the privation of being. Salvation consists of emulating the imago
Burns 8 Dei, and through Christ, transcending God’s hierarchy to join with Him. On this last point, Augustine struggled bitterly to “lift [his] mind’s eye out of the abyss,” ascending into an intense introspection that broke only after a beatific vision revealed his errors: “When first I came to know you, you raised me up to make me see that what I saw is Being, and that I who saw am not yet Being” (Augustine Confessions 123). 3. A Summary of St. Augustine’s Theodicy Augustine realized quite early in his philosophical transformation that, if he truly wanted to justify to himself his conversion to Christianity, he needed to find a logical explanation for the existence of evil with which to refute the Manichees. Though initially willing to wait until ”something preferable [to Manichaeism] should come to light,” the revelation of Manichaeism’s colossal falsity, his relocation to Milan, his interaction with Catholic Bishop Ambrose, as well as several conversations with his friends Alypius and Nebridius, compelled him to search out a comprehensive solution to the existential problem: ”Then where and whence is evil? How did it creep in? What is root and what is its seed?” (Augustine Confessions 115) 3.1 Evil: Tending toward Non-Being The Second Law of Thermodynamics proposes that the entropy of an isolated system in disequilibria will tend to increase over time. Stated more simply, the derivative of the exergy in the universe is less than or equal to zero:5 dB ≤0 dt
(1)
Entropy is a suitable analogy to Augustine’s conception of evil: both are intangible, entropy an absence of order, evil an absence of being. Like Plotinus, Augustine believed evil is best described as “non-being” and good and evil best imagined as a gradient of good, beginning with God and continuing through lower goods. However, unlike 5
Exergy is the total amount of energy in a system available to do work. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, but some forms of energy are not available to do work. S ∝ B
Burns 9 Plotinus, Augustine proposed that God sits outside the closed system of the universe, operating as the “highest good and therefore the most intensely real being,” unaffected by the entropic influences of non-being. Within his creation, “diminishing degrees of goodness are at the same time diminishing degrees of being” (Augustine qtd. in Saulytis 10). Nature tends toward corruption: dg ≤0 dt
(2)
This isn’t to say that Augustine believed God’s creation evil, on the contrary; according to Augustine, all of God’s creation is good (Augustine Confessions 125). Rather, the tendency of the goodness of things to diminish, just like the tendency of exergy to diminish and entropy to increase, is a natural progression of God’s divine will, and permits distinction between variations of good and degrees of slipshod. “Tendency” indicates a natural inclination toward a certain path, not an arrival. The available exergy in the universe shrinks toward zero, but it shall never equal zero,6 similarly “as long as nature continues to exist in any way at all, some good remains, ‘for corruption cannot injure it, except by taking away from or diminishing that which is good’” (Augustine qtd. in Saulytis 12). This “entropic” evil, commonly called natural evil, is not the only evil Augustine recognized. Its anthropomorphic counterpart, moral evil, also occupied a considerable amount of his work; he distinguished between the two not on substance, but on application. The natural evils involve the unfortunate manifestation of diminished being in the universe—a star’s destruction by a black hole, a brain tumor, etc.—the natural consequence of a “privation of being”; moral evils, however, involve a sensible, willful choice to do wrong or, as Augustine gracefully articulates, moral evil is “perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance, [God], towards the inferior things”—the decision to violate God’s laws (Augustine Confessions 126). If we assume that God’s laws 6
At least not in the predictable future.
Burns 10 keep order, the connection with natural evil remains evident. Different definitions notwithstanding, for Augustine, both natural and moral evil stem from the same fundamental truth, that evil is a tendency toward corruption: “For who can doubt that the whole of that which is called evil is nothing else than corruption? Different evils may, indeed, be called different names; but that which is evil of all things in which any evil is perceptible is corruption” (Augustine qtd. in Saulytis 11). 3.2 Mortal Taste: The Origin of Evil Augustine realized that the problem of evil contained both an etiological and teleological component—that once one honed in on a definition for evil, which Augustine did, two questions arose: “When did evil come into the world?” and “What purpose does it serve?” Arguably, the answer to the first question might, to some extent, dictate the answer to the second, but both remain sufficiently distinct to pose individual problems to Augustine. To answer the first problem, Augustine continued his previous line of thinking—evil is the perversion of the will toward the inferior. According to Augustine, angels and humans were endowed, from the beginning, with free will, including that with which to do evil. The evil alternative to good will, the evil will, left open the possibility that the created might abuse its freedom and twist its face from the image of God toward the inferior. His theft of the pears confirmed, in his mind, the wide latitude God permits his creation to will good or ill: “Wickedness filled me. I stole something which I had plenty and of much better quality. My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and doing what was wrong” (29). Drawing parallels, first with Milton’s Satan and then with Genesis’ Adam and Eve, moral evil first came into the world the moment the first angel and first man twisted away from the highest good, and toward the inferior (Saulytis 13). Milton’s Satan turned his face from God out of pride, “aspiring / To set himself in glory above his peers” (Milton 14); Adam and Eve, having previous instruction to avoid a certain tree, turned their faces from God and toward the inferior out of naivet´e and perhaps out of a
Burns 11 rebellious desire to do wrong. (I find it quite ironic that the object of Adam and Eve’s sin, fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, has provided little in the way of knowledge as to good and evil.) As to the cause of the turning of the will, Augustine chose not to guess, writing enigmatically: “Let no one then, seek to know from me what I know that I do not know; unless, perhaps, he wishes to learn how not to know that which we should know cannot be known” (Augustine City of God 508). 3.3 Why Evil?: The Best of All Possible Worlds The name Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, a French polymath, is likely obscure to anyone ill-versed in advanced physics, mathematics, or obscure historical figures. Nevertheless, Monsieur de Maupertuis is the man responsible, perhaps, for mathematically buttressing the third and final piece of Augustine’s solution to the problem of evil. Thus far, we can define Augustinian evil and distinguish between his natural evil and moral evil. We also know that, according to him, the first instance of moral evil occurred when God’s first sentient creation sinned. What remains unsolved is the teleological portion of the problem of evil: Why evil? Why didn’t God create automata that never sin and obey his every command? Wouldn’t that have been a better world? No sin, no corruption, no suffering, no death, the universe running like an expensive watch? Augustine response: no. According to Augustine, God, in his infinite wisdom, decided that providing humans with the opportunity to sin and allowing natural and moral evils to occur better advanced his divine objective, the substance of which we are utterly incapable of knowing. He created everything good, but having created it ex nihilo, and not, as Plotinus proposed, ex Deo, he knew of it’s liability to corruption and tendency toward not good and not-being, but that is his intention ab intitio. God does not think as man does—“For [God] evil does not exist at all, and not only for [God] but for [God’s] created universe, because there is nothing outside it which could break in and destroy the order which [he has] imposed upon it” (Augustine Confessions 125). Instead, God views the “likely elements which are thought evil” as
Burns 12 merely “conflicts of interest,” precisely orchestrated to perpetuate the ultimate plan (125). Man, limited by his mind, is incapable of seeing the big picture; too firmly engrossed in one part of God’s plan and totally ignorant of another: “Of this order the beauty does not strike us, because by your mortal frailty we are involved in part of it, that we cannot perceive the whole, in which these fragments that offend us are harmonized with the most accurate fitness and beauty” (Augustine qtd. in Saulytis 18). A modern Augustine might further explain: “Who but God knows of Schrodinger’s cat? ¨ Whether he be dead or living? For it appears man’s reasoning says both:
Ψcat + observer = (ΨD × Ψobserver sees a dead cat ) + (ΨD × Ψobserver sees a live cat )
(3)
And if a cat confounds a man, how little he can know of God’s intentions. Thus ignorant, we best praise all creation, even His hurricane, which in perceived caprice, lays waste a burgeoning city. Alas, ‘heaven is cloudy and windy, which is fitting for [earth]’ (Augustine Confessions 125).” The greatest good is achieved by allowing that which we deem “evil” a place in the universe: “[Y]e thought evil against me; [but] God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as [it is] this day, to save much people alive.” (Gen. 50:20). As for Monsieur Maupertuis, he is credited, erroneously, as having invented the principle of least action: “Action is the integral (in the calculus sense) of the product of mass, velocity, and distance traversed, and any happenings in nature are such to make the action least” (Kline 65). Mathematically speaking, Maupertuis proposed that the true path of a system consisting of N generalized coordinates q = q1 , q2 , . . . , qN between two specified states q1 and q2 , where p = p1 , p2 , . . . , pN are the conjugate momenta of the generalized coordinates, is an extremum of the abbreviated action functional: Z def
S0 [q(t)] =
p · dq
In Maupertuis estimation, this principle was “a universal law of nature and the first
(4)
Burns 13 scientific proof of the existence of God” (66). “Once it becomes known that the laws of motion are founded on the principle of the better, no one will doubt that they are due to an all-powerful and all-wise Being, who may have given bodies the power to act upon each other, or who may have used some other way which is even less known to us” (Maupertuis qtd. in Ekeland 63). Maupertuis’ pen pal, Leonhard Euler, wrote: “Since the fabric of the universe is most perfect and the work of the most wise Creator, nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum or minimum does not apply” (Euler qtd. in Kline 66). Gottfried Leibniz, to whom both were indebted,7 wrote in his own Theodicy: “God has chosen the best of all possible worlds” (259).
7
It was actually Leibniz who proposed this principle several decades earlier.
Burns 14 Works Cited Augustine. The City of God against the Pagans. Trans. R. W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print. Augustine. Saint Augustine: Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford’s World Classics, 2008. Print. Ekeland, Ivar. The Best of All Possible Worlds: Mathematics and Destiny. University of Chicago, 2007. Print. Frist, John M. ”Plotinus on Matter and Evil.” Phronesis 6.2 (1961): 154-66. Print. Gerson, Lloyd P. Plotinus. London: Routledge, 1998. Print. Gerson, Lloyd P. “Plotinus.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 5 Sept. 2008. Web. 6 Mar. 2010. Kline, Morris. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1982. Print. Leibniz, Gottfried. Theodicy. BiblioBazaar, 2008. Print. Milton, John. Paradise Lost: A Poem, in Twelve Books. 1750. Print. Penwill, John. ”Does God Care? Lactantius v. Epicurus in the De Ira Dei.” Sophia 43.6 (2004): 23-43. Print. Saulytis, Giedrius. Augustine and the Problem of Evil. Essay. Stanford, Amitakh. Eliminating and Solving the Problem of Evil: Mani, Manichaeism, and the Attempted Refutation by Augustine of Hippo. 3rd ed. Print. U˘zdavinys, Algis, and Jay Bregman. The Heart of Plotinus: The Essential Enneads. Ed. Algis U˘zdavinys. World Wisdom, 2009. Print. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Harcourt, 1922. Print.