One of the most controversial ideas of medieval Christians was confirming their belief that “God is all good, is all powerful, and created “everything” while evil persists in the world. If God was the source of everything in the world, then did he create evil too? Augustine approaches the question of evil, by defining evil as something that results when the human will is misguided—therefore, our will is the source of evil rather than God. This allows Augustine to still name God as the creator of all things and all goodness.
In order to proceed on to the question of “the source of evil,” we must first justify what evil is. Augustine states below that:
Since every being, so far as it is a being, is good, when we say that a faulty being is an evil being, we just seem to say that what is good is evil, and that nothing but what is good can be evil, seeing that every being is good, and that no evil can exist except in a being (Klima, 310).
Augustine realizes that the statement above depends on whether evil is a “thing” or not. If not a thing, that means evil was not created. Augustine approached this problem in a different way. According to Augustine, God is the absolute existence, and thus immutable despite his own immutability “things that He made He empowered to be, but not to be supremely like Himself” (Klima, 313). Consequently, since God is the source of all life and goodness, there cannot be such a thing as perfect evil since he does not empower it to be. Augustine realizes that evil is not a force that opposes goodness, but something that lacks goodness. Within nature goodness prevails in different degrees, “to some He communicated a more ample, to other a more limited existence, and thus arranged the natures of beings in ranks” (Klima, 315). The ...