Augustine’s explanation on the origin of sin
The existence of evil has been one challenging matter to Christians from the beginning and there has been all sorts of ideas trying to explain how evil came to exist. Augustine was a member of a pagan cult before his conversion to Christianity. He belonged to the Manichean Religion and they viewed the world as a battle foundation between a perfect good creator and a perfect evil destroyer. He later examines various new philosophy ideas and through them he tries to explain the origin of evil. Augustine argues that evil came to exist in human’s souls through their corruption of the free will which was given to them by God. Wrong use of free is an action that can be traced back to the Adam and Eve original see that the human kind has inherited the just punishments of it.
Augustine technique to address the origin of evil is based on two premises both of them with a series of statements. In the first premises he constructs statements like; everything that was created by God is good, evil is not a good thing and therefore God did not create evil. And in the second he says that; God created all things, God didn’t create evil and therefore evil cannot be said to be a thing. This two premises comes to a conclusion of Augustine’s argument that evil cannot be said to have a positive nature but instead it should be viewed as the loss of good in something is what we refer to as evil.
So, according to Augustine evil doesn’t exist within God and God did not create evil but instead we can say that evil exists because of God’s creation. He explains evil as the act of falling away from goodness and the corruption of nature. He says that the absence of good in an action or something is what we call evil. He commends on his observation that evil is not something that can be chosen because there isn’t anything evil to choose from but rather one can choose to walk away from something good that is; walk from a greater good to an action of a lesser good.
The reason why Augustine says that evil wasn’t created by God is because God has a supreme power over everything and the fact that Himself is supremely good means that there is no way He can permit something evil to exist in among what He has created. And he explains evil as a lesser good because in the universe even what is seen as evil can be moderated and turn out earning the same admiration as the originally good thing.
In conclusion, Augustine’s arguments lands to the explanation that free will was the main cause of people doing evil. Because when will leaves behind what is above itself and turns to what is lower it become evil not for reason that it is evil but because the turning itself is wicked in its own. His argument rejects that evil can exist on itself. There is a good reason why God has allowed evil to exist despite Him being able to diminish its existence. It doesn’t contradict His goodness in any way. God is neither the creator of evil and nor is He its helpless victim. But He lets good and evil and co-exist because of the precise reason that he is good.
References
Lewin, David, Simon D. Podmore, and Duane Williams. “Organisation and content of this book.” Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy. Routledge, 2017. 13-13.