Against the Manichees

Augustine spent nine years as a Manichaean Hearer and the rest of his life refuting Manichaeism, and the refutation gave him the deepest metaphysical structure of his thought: the answer to the problem that had driven him to the Manichees in the first place — the origin of evil. Against the dualist claim that evil is a substance, an eternal kingdom of Darkness opposed to the Light, Augustine argued that evil is no substance at all but the privation of good (privatio boni) — a defect, a wound, a turning-away — and that all that exists, precisely as it exists, is good, the creation of one good God. This file treats the anti-Manichaean works and the doctrines of evil, creation, and the will they established.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

The Problem That Made a Manichee

The young Augustine became a Manichee largely because of one question: unde malum — whence comes evil? (Confessions 7.5; trans. Chadwick 1991). He could not see how, if God is good and all-powerful and the maker of all, evil could exist; and Manichaeism offered a clean answer. Evil exists because there are two ultimate principles, not one: an eternal kingdom of Light (good) and an eternal kingdom of Darkness (evil), co-eternal and opposed, and the world and the human soul are the battleground of their mixture (see The Late-Roman African Church). On this view evil is a positive substance, a real and independent power; and — crucially for a man troubled by his own sins — the evil a person does is the work of the alien dark nature within him, not the responsibility of his true self (Confessions 5.10; Chadwick 1986, ch. 2). Manichaeism thus solved the problem of evil at the price of denying both the unity of God and the responsibility of the will.

Evil as the Privation of Good

Augustine’s liberation came through the “books of the Platonists,” which taught him to conceive of God as immaterial Being itself and of reality as a hierarchy of goods deriving from Him (Confessions 7.9–17; see The Restless Heart). From this he drew the answer that would govern all his later thought. Evil is not a substance. Everything that exists, insofar as it exists, is good, because it comes from God who is supremely good; even the corruptible things of the world are good in their measure (Confessions 7.12; Enchiridion 11–12; City of God 11.22). What, then, is evil? Evil is the corruption, defect, or privation of a good that ought to be there — privatio boni, the absence of a due good — as blindness is not a thing but the lack of sight, or disease the disorder of a healthy body (Enchiridion 11; City of God 11.22; Confessions 7.12; trans. Outler / NPNF). Evil has no nature of its own; it is parasitic on the good it spoils. A wholly evil thing could not exist at all, for it would have to lack being itself, which is good (Enchiridion 12–13).

This privatio boni account of evil is not original to Augustine — it is shared with the broader patristic tradition, both Greek and Latin, and is found in such Eastern Fathers as Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Dionysius the Areopagite, and later codified by John of Damascus (the convergence is real and is one of the points where Augustine stands within the common patristic mind rather than apart from it). For Augustine it was hard-won, the resolution of his deepest youthful torment, and it is the metaphysical foundation on which his theology of creation, of sin, and finally of grace is built.

The Goodness of Creation

The corollary of privatio boni is the goodness of all creation, which Augustine defended against the Manichaean contempt for the material world and the body. If evil is privation and all being is good, then matter is not evil, the body is not a prison of alien Darkness, and the God of the Old Testament who made the world and called it good (Genesis 1:31) is the one true God, not the inferior demiurge the Manichees despised (City of God 11.22–23; On Genesis Against the Manichees; Confessions 7.12–13). The created order is a graded hierarchy of real goods — some greater, some lesser, all good in their kind — and the apparent evils of nature (pain, death, the predation of beasts) are either privations or the disordering consequences of the Fall, not evidence of an evil creator (City of God 11.22; 12.4). Augustine’s robust affirmation of the goodness of the body and of creation, against every dualism, is among the most important and least contested of his legacies, and stands close to the Eastern theology of creation.

The anti-Manichaean works in which Augustine pressed these arguments span his whole career — among them On Genesis Against the Manichees (388/389), On True Religion (390), On the Two Souls (391), the public debate Against Fortunatus (392), Against the Epistle of Mani called “Fundamental” (396/397), On the Nature of the Good (399), and the great Against Faustus the Manichee (c. 400), his point-by-point reply to the Manichaean teacher whose failure to satisfy him had first broken the spell (Brown 2000, chs. 5, 11; the Retractationes catalogues these).

The Origin of Evil in the Will

If evil is not a substance and creation is good, the question returns: whence, then, does evil actually arise? Augustine’s answer locates the origin of moral evil not in matter and not in any evil nature but in the will (voluntas) of rational creatures — angels and men — who turn away from the higher, unchangeable Good (God) toward lower, changeable goods, loving them disorderly, “in defect” (City of God 12.6–8; On Free Choice of the Will / De Libero Arbitrio 2–3). Sin is this aversio a Deo et conversio ad creaturam — turning from God to the creature. And the cause of this evil will is not some further thing but a “deficient cause,” a defect, a turning of a good will away from the Good — Augustine even says that to seek the efficient cause of an evil will is like trying to see darkness or hear silence (City of God 12.7). Moral evil thus enters the world through the free turning of the created will, and man is genuinely responsible for it — exactly the responsibility the Manichees had denied.

This early Augustinian stress on the free will as the origin of evil — worked out in the anti-Manichaean De Libero Arbitrio — is important to hold in view, because the later Augustine of the anti-Pelagian controversy would qualify it heavily. The young Augustine, against the Manichees, defended the freedom of the will so vigorously that Pelagius would later quote De Libero Arbitrio in his own support; the older Augustine, against the Pelagians, would have to explain in the Retractationes how his earlier defense of free will was to be read in the light of his deepened doctrine of grace (Retractationes 1.9; see Against Pelagius). The movement from the anti-Manichaean stress on free will to the anti-Pelagian stress on grace is one of the central developments of his thought, and one of the chief points at which Eastern readers, who hold free will and grace together in a doctrine of synergy, find the later Augustine to have leaned too far (see Predestination and the Eastern Objection).

The Lasting Deposit

The anti-Manichaean Augustine left the Church a durable patrimony that is, on the whole, common ground East and West: evil as privation rather than substance; the unity and goodness of God against all dualism; the goodness of matter, the body, and creation; and the location of moral evil in the free turning of the rational will. These doctrines, hammered out against the dualism he had once embraced, are the foundation of everything that follows in Augustine, and they place him — at this level — squarely within the consensus of the Fathers. The divergence with the East opens not here, over evil and creation, but over what grace must do to heal a will so wounded — the question of the next section.

References

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions 7.5, 7.9–17 (the problem of evil and the Platonist resolution). Trans. Chadwick 1991.
Augustine of Hippo. Enchiridion 11–14 (evil as privation) and The City of God 11.22–23, 12.6–8 (the goodness of creation; the deficient cause of evil). NPNF I/2–3.
Augustine of Hippo. On Free Choice of the Will (De Libero Arbitrio) and Against Faustus the Manichee. NPNF I/4 and elsewhere.
Augustine of Hippo. Retractationes 1.9 (re-reading De Libero Arbitrio in light of the grace controversy).
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Chs. 5, 11.)
Chadwick, Henry. Augustine: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. (Chs. 2, 4.)