chapter 9
Augustine on the origin of evil: myth and metaphysics James Wetzel
We know vividly from the Confessions that Augustine’s struggle to conceive of the boundless reality of God turns on what he imagines evil to be. His considered view of the matter, that evil exists only as a “privation of the good” (privatio boni), a form of non-being, is a Neoplatonic commonplace.1 But Augustine puts his own stamp on the bare metaphysics. He speaks in City of God of the split within the angelic ranks between the angels who fall into themselves and eternally darken their minds and those who hold steady to the deliverances of divine light; he speaks of Satan, the perverted lightbearer and father of lies, who shows up in Eden in a serpent’s guise and seduces the woman into a fateful transgression; he speaks of Adam, her mate and the model of a human sinner, who sees through the serpent’s deception but grievously underestimates the cost to him and his race of his obscurely motivated disobedience. In Confessions, the privative nature of evil is intimated in Augustine’s Adamic need to bring his flesh and spirit into some sort of sane conjunction. At a critical point in the Genesis story of creation and parting – a story of trouble in a garden paradise (Gen. 2:4b–3:24) – Adam finds himself having to choose between flesh and spirit (Gen. 3:6): his partner, the flesh of his flesh, has eaten fruit from the tree of knowledge; she offers him a taste of what his divine maker, the breath of his breath, has associated with death. Adam takes his taste, defies his God, and, by Augustine’s reckoning, condemns all of his descendants to a mortal life and a life lived out of interior conflict: from now on there will be no easy choice of spirit over flesh. At the beginning of Confessions 8, the book where Augustine details his time of anguish in a garden retreat, he tells us that while he loved the 1
Plotinus, the third-century Platonist whose writings were to revolutionize Augustine’s conception of God, famously identifies evil with matter (see esp. enn. 1.8, 2.4), but the Plotinian notion of materiality is one of consummate deprivation: not solid stuff or indeed any kind of subject, but a beckoning, formless nullity, foreign to goodness. For an illuminating entry into the intricacies of this notion, consult Gerson 1994: 191–98. For a clear statement in Augustine of the privatio thesis, see conf. 3.7.12.
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