The Absence of Good

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. GENESIS 1:31

For nine years one question kept Augustine among the Manichees, and it was not a foolish question. Whence is evil? If God is good and made all things, where did the evil in the world come from? The Manichees had an answer that looked honest. There are two powers, they said, one of light and one of darkness, locked in an age-long struggle. The good in you belongs to the light; the evil in you belongs to the darkness, and it is not really you. It was a tidy explanation. It spared God the blame for evil, and it spared Augustine the blame for his own. It took him years to see that it did both at a terrible price.

A question asked in an evil way

In Book VII of the Confessions Augustine describes his search with painful honesty. He sought whence evil came, he says, and sought in an evil way, and did not see the evil in his very search. He imagined the whole creation as a vast body, and God as a kind of boundless sea surrounding it, and he could not make the picture work. If God made all things good, was there some bad matter He could not master? Then He was not almighty. Had He no power to turn the whole to good? Then why create at all?

Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? GENESIS 18:25

What finally broke the deadlock was not a new argument about God but a new idea of what evil is. In Book III, looking back on his Manichaean days, he says that he did not yet know that evil was nothing but a privation of good. That phrase is the heart of his answer.

What evil is not

Augustine sets it out simply in the Enchiridion. “For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?” He takes an illustration from the body. When a wound is healed, the wound does not go and live somewhere else; it simply ceases to be. Disease is not a substance in its own right. It is the lack of health in a body that should be healthy. In the same way, evil is not a thing God made, or a rival power alongside Him. It is a spoiling, a lack, a falling-away from good in something that was made good.

For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving. 1 TIMOTHY 4:4

This has two consequences that are easy to miss. First, it means that evil is always a parasite. It cannot exist on its own; it can only exist in something good, which it damages. A lie depends on the good gift of speech; cruelty depends on the good gift of strength; even the fallen angels, Augustine says, were made good, and what is evil in them is what they have lost. Second, it means that God is not the author of evil. Everything He made is good. Evil enters when a creature made good but changeable turns away from the unchangeable Good who made it — first an angel, Augustine says, and then a man.

Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man. JAMES 1:13

Where evil begins

So the question whence is evil? leads back, in the end, to the will. Evil is not a place or a substance but a turning. The Manichees had placed the source of evil outside Augustine, in a dark power that overcame him. Augustine came to see that it was inside, in his own choosing. That was harder to accept, and far more hopeful. A man who is the victim of a dark power can only wait to be rescued. A man who has turned away can be turned back.

God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. 1 JOHN 1:5

There is great pastoral wisdom here. We are always tempted to locate our evil somewhere else — in our upbringing, our circumstances, our genes, the people who hurt us. All of these are real and they matter. But the Christian cannot finally say, it was not me. Augustine’s long escape from Manichaeism was, at its core, an escape into responsibility. And responsibility, strangely, was freedom.

Good out of evil

The privation account of evil does not mean that evil is unreal or small. A hole in the hull of a ship is a lack, but it can sink the ship. Augustine had watched friends die, had wept for his mother, and would die himself in a city under siege. He knew evil hurts. He never pretended otherwise, and no reader should use his idea to shrug at someone else’s pain.

What he did insist on was that evil does not have the last word, because God is greater than it. In one of the most important sentences of the Enchiridion he writes that God “judged it better to bring good out of evil, than not to permit any evil to exist.” God is so good and so powerful that He can take even the ruin creatures make and weave it into His purposes.

But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. GENESIS 50:20

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. ROMANS 8:28

The supreme proof is the cross, where the worst evil ever done became the salvation of the world. That does not explain every sorrow, and Augustine does not pretend it does. In the same chapter of Book VII he says that some things belong to the depth of God’s just judgment, and that no creature has the right to demand, What is this? Why that? There are questions we will not answer this side of heaven. But we know enough of God’s character to trust Him with the rest.

A caution and a hope

It must be said that Augustine’s account, however true, is not a complete answer to the problem of suffering, and it can sound cold if offered to someone in grief. It answers the philosopher’s question, where does evil come from? It does not answer the mourner’s question, why this, why me, why now? For that, Scripture gives us not an argument but a Person, who wept at a grave and then raised the dead, and a promise.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. REVELATION 21:4

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Where have you been locating the source of your own sin outside yourself? Name it, and take responsibility before God.

2. Thank God this week for three good things in creation you have treated as ordinary: food, light, the body, friendship.

3. Recall a time God brought good out of something evil in your life. Write it down as a testimony.

4. If you are suffering now, bring God the mourner’s question rather than the philosopher’s. Tell Him plainly what hurts.

5. When you sit with someone in grief this month, resist explaining. Be present, and pray.

A PRAYER

Lord, You made all things good, and You are light with no darkness at all.

I confess that the evil I have done came from my own turning away from You, and not from You.

Where I have suffered evil at the hands of others, heal me, and bring good out of what was meant for harm, as You did for Joseph.

Keep me trusting You in the questions I cannot answer, until the day You wipe away every tear. Amen.