Augustine on evil: The dilemma of the philosophers

Abstract

Hannah Arendt once remarked that Augustine, in addition to being the first Christian philosopher and the only Roman philosopher worthy of the name, was the first man of thought to turn to religion because of philosophical perplexity.1 Clearly, what first brought Augustine to philosophy, and what subsequently led him to turn from his involvement with Manicheaism and Neo-Platonism was his preoccupation with the phenomenon or problem of evil.2 There can be no doubt that in turning to Christianity Augustine preserved his philosophical outlook and interest. What is perhaps not so immediately obvious is that he remained true to philosophical criteria of judgement and philosophical motivations. The general aim of this paper is to explicate, develop and defend this latter claim, the idea that Augustine's involvement with Christianity is deeply and genuinely philosophical in character. More specifically, I shall argue that Augustine's rejection of Neo-Platonism and Manicheaism was rooted in a perception of certain philosophical inadequacies in these world views and that his turn to Christianity can be seen as arising from a desire to provide, through a Christian philosophy, a more adequate philosophical treatment of these inadequacies. Such that, in speaking of Augustine as a Christian philosopher, we ought to place as much stress on the latter as on the former term. In addition, and by way of explicating what I see as the fundamentally philosophical character of Augustine's religious thought, I shall argue that the problem of evil as he addresses and deals with it can be seen philosophically as related to and as an integral aspect of a broader philosophical problem. I regard this philosophical problem, the one in which I want to locate Augustine's treatment of evil, as one which emerges out of the legacy of Parmenides' super-rational ontology and as a problem which was and is dealt with in different ways by different philosophers from throughout the history of philosophy. First of all, what is this larger and deeper philosophical problem which sets the context for Augustine's treatment of evil? Looked at philosophically, the problem of accounting for evil can be regarded as one feature of a more extensive difficulty or dilemma which philosophers must confront once they accept what I shall call the philosophical commitment to reason or logos. This commitment is partially definitive of philosophical thinking and it gives rise to a demand which can be