Saint Augustine focuses on the nature and origin of evil in his Confessions. Morality is an inextricable part of religion and religious doctrine, but the issue seems to have greater weight for him beyond the teachings of the church. The question of evil "depresses and suffocates" him, leaves him perplexed and leads him to a series of thought experiments and spatial restructuring of the world around him (114). Saint Augustine restructured the world to find evil, mass or machination. Despite all the acclaim he later received for his abstract thinking, he was instinctively a concrete and spatial thinker. Therefore, the problem of the location of evil, or, analogously, its origin, troubled him most. “Why then do I have the power to will evil and reject good?…Why put this power in me and plant this seed of bitterness in me, when my whole self was created by my very kind God?” (114) These are questions common to many philosophers and theologians over the years. However, Augustine, who offers a series of answers throughout the first half of this work, finally arrives at an answer that satisfies him. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay St. Augustine first constructs a spatial explanation of evil as he explores the sins of his instructors. These, he says, were men who considered the morality of their actions irrelevant, but rather who considered nothing shameful that could be spoken of politely. Augustine, of course, disputes this, saying that by behaving in this way, his teachers turned away from God. “To be far from [God's] face is to be in the darkness of passion,” he explains (20). This statement is accessible: the metaphor between sin and darkness, and vice versa between light and the divine, is omnipresent in the Christian tradition. However, even when he makes this statement, he backs away, saying, “one does not move away from you or return to you by walking or by any movement through space” (20). Clearly, then, the physicality involved in this relationship is only a metaphor for an emotional or spiritual position. However, Augustine seems to have no other way to explain this emotional distance, since even in the biblical story he cites as proof - that of the prodigal son - the sinful man distanced himself both physically and spiritually from his "father". While Augustine makes no literal warning of this idea, he does not seem entirely convinced, a tone underlined by the plea found at the beginning of the next paragraph: “Look, Lord God, look patiently, as you always do” (21). ). He has just begun to explore this idea. The second of St. Augustine's speculations on the nature of evil is much less spatial. It arises from a contemplation of his youth and, perhaps for this reason, is hardly a universal definition of sin or evil like the one that preceded it. Here Augustine says that his "sin consisted in seeking pleasure, sublimity and truth not in God, but in his creatures, in himself and in other created beings" (22-3). The problem is simply that Augustine mistook the earthly for the divine. Misunderstanding this division, and therefore misunderstanding the very nature of the divine, is a problem prefigured many times in Christian theology. In the Book of Job, for example, Job's friends claim to have fictitious knowledge of his woes. Since Augustine's sin is based on a fundamental misunderstanding, it is not surprising that he claims that it "plunged him into miseries, confusions, and errors" (23). This is a sin that generates other sins. When the fundamental principles of a belief systemthey are imperfect, all the platitudes that follow replicate those flaws, even if subtly. What is missing in this new paradigm for sin, however, is some kind of place for evil. In the absence of a more specific definition of evil, these statements begin to suggest that anything that presents the appearance of being good but is not God is evil. Thankfully, St. Augustine returns to this idea a few pages later, in the next chapter. Here he laments his confused state: "If only someone could have imposed a restraint on my disorder. That would have transformed the fleeting experiences of beauty in these baser things for good" (25). Evidently, now, evil is not in things themselves, but Augustine has relocated it. He called sin itself the disorder and confusion that he had previously believed were simply the basis of sin. This, then, presents us with a system in which good can only be saved from the world through the "control" of religious belief. Augustine's next idea begins to show increasing shades of complexity. The passage in which he describes it reads rather disjointedly, as if he were dealing with a vast network of ideas with extreme brevity. Although he introduces it at length, the first crucial premise he puts forward is this: "Since in virtue I have loved peace and in vice I have hated discord, I have noticed that in virtue there is unity, in vice a kind of division" (67 ). Therefore, all virtuous acts will possess or create some sort of “unity,” identity, or harmony. In what he calls "unity", Saint Augustine perceives truth, beauty and rationality, but above all good. These are similar words, and similarly structured, to those he uses to talk about the nature of God. Perhaps, then, within this system, good deeds are committed entirely within God: motivated by internal, completed internally and effective internally. In contrast, because Augustine perceives good and evil as diametrically opposed, he states that all sinful acts can be characterized by “discord” or “division.” Precisely in these divisions, says Augustine, "there was a certain substance of irrational life and the nature of supreme evil" (67). For the first time he attributes a certain physical matter, as well as a casual consciousness, to the abstract idea of ​​evil. This can be read as an example of Augustine's growing frustration as a satisfactory solution to the problem eludes him. Since it cannot explain evil, lending it both a means of its own and a devious conscience with which to play its tricks allows it to effectively defy explanation. Meanwhile, his very fractured and inexplicable nature fits perfectly into the meta-system he has built, where good is unified and its opposite is not. To his credit, Augustine, at the time of writing, finds this argument false, saying that "I neither knew nor had I learned that evil is not a substance, nor is our mind the supreme and immutable good" (67). This is probably why he doesn't explain it further. Maybe he just doesn't feel the need, since he spends a lot of time on a related idea. From the beginning of the text, Saint Augustine suggests a variety of physical forms to God. Some of his suggestions have a nice insightful quality: "We cannot think that vessels full of you give you coherence, because even if they broke, you would not be divided," he says, to refute the idea that the earth itself is a vessel , full of the liquid of God (4). Other times Augustine assigns to God the role of engineer in the spatial world: he is called the "Maker", and in Him "are the constant causes of inconstant things" (67,7). Augustine would like to understand God on a physical level, but the three-dimensional realm does not tolerate the contradictory statements typically used when speaking of the divine: "Never new, neverold,” says Augustine of God, “always active, ever at rest” (5). When speaking in terms of concrete spaces, there is little room for ambiguity, for they are full or empty, dark and empty or fiery of a kind of divine light. Ultimately, St. Augustine condemns the idea of ​​imagining God as any kind of physical form. Nonetheless, imagining the physicality of God occupies much of the Confessions, and the products of this thought still correspond. to another of his suggestions on the nature of good and evil. “When I wanted to think about my God,” Augustine explains, “I knew there was no way to do it except as a physical mass. Nor did I think that there was anything that was not material. Specifically, he saw good and evil as two "infinite" masses, although the mass of evil was "rather smaller". These he saw as "subtle physical [entities] spread throughout space" (85). One might conjecture that, intentionally or unintentionally, ambient atmospheric morality would be absorbed into general events. Presumably, then, the morality of a thing could be judged by an instrument that would measure the relative quantities of good and bad mass within it. St. Augustine recognizes how absurd these statements sound. He believes that the flaws in this and his other arguments stem from a faulty conceptualization of the nature of the relationship between God and the universe. The universe he imagined, permeated entirely by God, precluded the existence of evil, since all things permeated and created by God, he intuited, would be good. Neoplatonism leads Saint Augustine to one of his last errant conceptualizations of good and evil. Here, the incorruptible, the immune, and the immutable become synonymous with the good and holy, while the corruptible, susceptible to harm, and changeable are inferior or evil. He comes to this conclusion by comparing God to man: if God is both totally good and totally incorruptible, then man, who is not totally good, must be to some extent corruptible. Interestingly, by following Platonic logic more closely, "God" would have become a concept relegated to the world of ideas, a spatial position that would have posed a serious challenge to Augustine, had he chosen to address it. As for this and the more intricate justification of his argument, Augustine moves on, saying, "I knew not why or how, [but] it was clear and certain to me" (111). After formulating it, he attempts to use this system of good and evil to purify himself and, by equating the heart with the pure and the mind with the susceptible, he only momentarily succeeds in banishing the impure thoughts from his mind. Ultimately, he ignores the argument when it fails to provide a sufficient explanation of God's physical location (111). Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Each of St. Augustine's hypotheses represented an intelligent approach to a problem that, it seemed, was ultimately without a solution. Evil could find no place in a world that was entirely God's. However, Augustine was finally able to abandon at least for a moment his intuitively spatial thinking, and it was this transgression of his nature that finally gave him the solution he was looking for. In that fateful moment, he grasped an idea that works perfectly in his paradigm: God is good, His creations are good, and only when good things are incongruous is there a need for the concept of evil. Here intuition seems to work in Augustine's favor: let's take the system in which it is good for a person to eat and it is good for a person to keep the property he has earned. These two goods become incongruous when, in order to eat, a person must take food from another person, who if..