This blog post explores Augustine’s explanation of why an all-powerful God permits free will to bring about evil.
Evil created by free will
From his youth, when he was deeply immersed in Manichaeism, until after his conversion to Christianity, Augustine constantly wrestled with the problem of evil existing in this world. Assuming God’s supreme goodness and omnipotence, the existence of evil could only be a contradiction. Why does evil exist in this world created by God, who is ‘goodness’ itself? And why does an omnipotent God tolerate evil? These questions tormented Augustine relentlessly. Finally, he found an answer to the existence of evil through the concept of Plotinus, the leading Neoplatonist: “Evil is the lack of good.” According to this view, evil is not an active substance but merely an accidental phenomenon. This phenomenon arises from the deficiency in the perfection or nature that natural things inherently possess. In other words, God created the world and its beings as good, but when a deficiency arose in the natural essence of these beings, humans failed to acquire their original good nature. This deficiency itself is evil. Therefore, since this deficiency—that is, the direct cause of evil—is not God, God bears no responsibility for it.
If God is not the direct cause of evil, the next question arises: what is the direct cause of evil? Augustine explains this through the concept of “creation ex nihilo.” According to him, since natural things were created by God out of nothing, they possess an inherent tendency to return to nothingness whenever God’s power is not present. That is, because creatures depend on God’s power, they are necessarily finite and imperfect. Therefore, when a creature’s connection with God is damaged, it becomes deficient in its good nature and inclines toward evil.
So why do creatures become distant from God, falling beyond the reach of His power? Augustine found the cause in human free will. Human beings are endowed with the gift of intellect, enabling them to reach an understanding of God’s reality and the world through an inner illumination from God. However, when humans turn away from this unchanging principle—the inner illumination from God and the true truths discoverable through it—and rely solely on their own judgment, devoid of divine illumination or the senses, they immediately fall into the darkness of error. In other words, by pursuing trust in their own abilities or curiosity, humans become fixated on the external world of objects. This leads them to suffer from the weakness of forgetfulness and prevents them from understanding the path to the soul’s spirituality and righteous action. It is precisely human free will that enables this shift in the direction of attention. That is, God endowed humans with free will, and human evil is caused spontaneously by humans themselves. Ultimately, evil or corruption is not a specific object, but the very act of redirecting attention through free will. And the responsibility for errors in judgment and the resulting misguided direction lies not with God, but with each individual.
At this point, I believe further discussion is needed on the question, ‘Then why did God grant humans free will?’ According to Augustine’s argument, without the free exercise of human will, neither evil nor sin would exist. And if God is omnipotent, He would have foreseen that granting humans free will simultaneously opens the possibility for evil to exist. Nevertheless, if God did grant humans free will—that is, if He foresaw evil but did not prevent it—this inevitably leads back to the question: ‘Why does God permit evil?’
Meanwhile, Augustine explains evil by dividing it into two categories. The first type of evil mentioned thus far is that committed by moral agents. His unique thought emerges in the second type of evil: he viewed evil itself as a ‘punishment’ imposed by God corresponding to human sin. In other words, the soul turning its gaze from the sublime to the base—that is, being dominated by greed—is essentially a minor punishment. Thus, sin itself possesses a punitive character, and through this punishment, humans are tossed about, pursuing material elements like the body as if they were truth. Here, I cannot help but point out that ‘it appears as if God, who is the Supreme Good itself, has bestowed evil upon humanity.’ That is, if being dominated by greed is a punishment, and if it is imposed by God, this leads to the conclusion that God imposed greed upon humanity. Thus, Augustine’s argument concerning evil leaves a sense of regret, revealing a limitation that Christian thought ultimately failed to overcome.
True Happiness
Augustine set the criterion dividing happiness and unhappiness as ‘whether it can be lost against one’s will.’ In his view, things like wealth and honor can be lost against one’s will, making them things that cannot be enjoyed with peace of mind. Therefore, the object we must pursue to be happy must above all be eternal and have a necessary relationship with us. He concluded that only God satisfies all these conditions, and that possessing God makes one truly happy. However, since God is not a possession, God cannot be grasped materially or stored away. How, then, can God be possessed? Augustine believed that to possess God, we must seek God within ourselves. Therefore, possessing God means possessing wisdom of the heart. If the mind possesses true virtue, holds true truth, and participates in it, then it possesses God. Augustine saw those who pursue this true truth and wisdom of the heart as truly happy people.
Here, the problem arises again: how can true truth exist within the finite and imperfect human interior? Augustine explains this problem by stating that the truths perceived in the human mind are revealed to us through the illumination of God, who is ‘Truth Itself’ and the source of all truth. In other words, we need God’s light to grasp the objects of unchanging rational cognition. And through this inner illumination of God, we can attain an understanding of God’s reality and the created world. Consequently, humans are beings who can only be truly happy through God’s grace.
If we exclude the part about ‘God’ from Augustine’s discussion on happiness, the idea that humans must pursue something eternal, not something that can be lost, to achieve happiness, and that this eternal something resides within the human interior—that is, within the wisdom of the heart—can connect with the Buddhist philosophy that ‘my mind is the Buddha’. It is fascinating that such great philosophers, transcending religion, emphasized that the path to escape real suffering and pursue happiness lies not externally but internally.
The Ethics of Love
Augustine viewed ethical actions as stemming from the human ‘will’ desiring to ‘love’ wisdom and truth. Thus, he is often called a representative of ‘intellectualism’. However, what we focus on here is not the will, but love. Augustine saw ‘love’ as the core of ethics, which is why his ethics is generally called the ‘Ethics of Love’. According to him, no matter how good the result of an action may be, if the actor acted with other purposes without love, the action cannot be considered ethical. Therefore, for Augustine, love is a necessary condition for ethical action.
Augustine divides this love into two types based on the attitude with which a person loves. First, loving something for its own sake is called ‘enjoyment,’ while loving something as a means to an end is called ‘use.’ Through this, he distinguishes between objects to be enjoyed and objects to be used. He argues that things of lesser value should be used as means to enjoy things of higher value, while things of higher value should be enjoyed for their own sake. For the theologian, the highest purpose was naturally God. That is, God is the object to be enjoyed as the end in itself. In this way, he argued that the lower, external ‘body’ is used for the higher ‘soul’, the soul is used for the higher ‘spirit’, and the spirit exists to enjoy the highest ‘God’. Augustine believed that love failing to follow this order could lead to the soul’s corruption. In other words, if creatures come to love their own selves more than God, the supreme good, that is, if the order or hierarchy of love’s value is inverted, then evil or corruption—akin to turning one’s back on the divine light’s illumination—can occur. Augustine’s standard for love is determined by the value order of the ‘order of being’. Ultimately, we must love the body more than external things, the soul more than the body, and God more than the soul; failing to do so leads to evil. Here we see that Augustine valued the human interior over external things and regarded the spirit as a higher concept than the body within humanity itself. Accordingly, by transcending the physical and the secular, purifying the soul, and above all loving God, one can comprehend the transcendent mystery of the divine.
The Just State
Augustine declared that all humanity is brothers, bound by blood since we all descend from one ancestor. That is, all humans are descendants of Adam and Eve. Yet, despite sharing the same ancestry, humans develop different natures. Augustine divided such humans into two types: the ‘old man’ and the ‘new man’. The old man is one bound to the flesh, an external person, an earthly being. Conversely, the new man is one born of God’s Spirit, an internal person, a heavenly being. These form groups centered around similar people and their preferences; the gathering place of the old men is called the earthly city, while that of the new men is called the heavenly city.
Here, Augustine’s ‘earthly kingdom,’ or earthly city, does not necessarily mean the state itself. Nor can it be said he viewed the state’s existence negatively. Rather, Augustine saw the state as necessary because it relates to the nature of humans as social animals. Therefore, his concern was not the state itself, but a state that realized ‘justice.’ He declared that a state without justice is no different from a band of robbers, emphasizing the importance of a just state. So what exactly is this justice he speaks of? Augustine states that justice is giving each person their due share. According to him, when God created all things, He provided enough wealth for every human to live in abundance. However, imbalance arose when a few humans seized control of it. Therefore, the justice he envisioned was one where fair distribution to all enabled everyone to live a truly human life. Yet, looking at the entirety of world history, it is difficult to find a nation on earth where such justice was realized. This is because humans, no matter how oppressed, pursue freedom, and this freedom inevitably leads to greed. Thus, Augustine believed true justice comes from God, and its realization is possible only in the Celestial City. In other words, true justice is when all people share what God has given and praise Him together; the heavenly city is where such people gather. In the heavenly city, people form a community of sharing, nourished by the love God has given, so no one needs to perform arduous labor, and it is a society where all can enjoy ultimate rest.
Thus, Augustine believed justice could not be realized on earth. This reveals a skeptical attitude toward human rationality. He saw humans as too free to establish a just state, and consequently, too greedy. However, as previously examined, if humans are beings who can attain true truth with the help of divine illumination, shouldn’t justice also be realizable on earth? In other words, if imperfect humans require the perfect illumination of God to reach truth, and if justice can only be realized in the Celestial City, this seems to imply that the ‘illumination’ God shines upon us might be imperfect. Ultimately, it is regrettable that Augustine arrived at this conclusion primarily to emphasize the role of the Church over the capabilities of individuals and, by extension, the state.
