Saint Augustine dwells on the nature and origin of evil throughout his confessions. Morality is an inextricable part of religion and religious doctrine, but the issue seems to have a much greater weight for him beyond the teachings of the Church. The question of evil “depressed and suffocated” him, perplexed him, and led him to a series of thought experiments and spatial restructurings of the world around him (114). Saint Augustine restructured the world to find evil – mass or machination. For all the praise he later received for his abstract thinking, he was instinctively a concrete, spatial thinker. It was therefore the problem of the location of the evil, or, in the same way, its origin, which tormented him the most. "Why then do I have the power to will evil and reject good?... Why have I put this power in me and implanted this seed of bitterness in me, when all of me was created by my very God? Good ?" (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 Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Saint Augustine first constructs a spatial explanation of evil while exploring the sins of his instructors. These were, he said, men who considered the morality of their actions unimportant, but rather considered nothing shameful that could be spoken of with grace. Augustine, of course, disputes this, claiming that by behaving this way his teachers turned away from God. “To be far from the face [of God] is to be in the darkness of passion,” he explains (20). This statement is accessible: the metaphor between sin and darkness, and conversely between light and divine, is omnipresent in the Christian tradition. However, even though he makes this statement, he backs down by saying, “one does not move away from you or return to you by walking or by any movement in space” (20). It is therefore clear that the physicality involved in this relationship is only a metaphor for an emotional or spiritual position. Augustine, however, seems to have no other way of explaining this emotional distance, since even in the biblical story he cites as proof - that of the prodigal son - the sinful man took a physical and spiritual departure from his "father ". . Although he makes no literal reservations about this idea, Augustine does not seem entirely convinced by it, a tone underlined by the appeal found at the beginning of the following paragraph: "Look, Lord God, look with patience as you always do” (21). He has only just begun to explore this idea. The second of Saint Augustine's speculations on the nature of evil is much less spatial. It arises from a contemplation of one's youth and, perhaps for this reason, is not as universal a definition of sin or evil as the one that preceded it. Here Augustine says that his "sin was that [he] sought 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 confused the earthly with the divine. A misunderstanding of this division, and therefore a misunderstanding of the very nature of the divine, is a problem many times prefigured in Christian theology. In the Book of Job, for example, Job's friends claim to have fictitious knowledge of his misdeeds. Since Augustine's sin is a sin based on a fundamental misunderstanding, it is not surprising that hesays that this “plunged him into miseries, confusions and errors” (23). It is a sin that begets other sins. When the fundamentals of a belief system are flawed, all the resulting futilities reproduce those flaws, even if they are subtle. What's missing from this new paradigm of sin, however, is any kind of place for evil. Lacking a more precise definition of evil, these statements begin to suggest that anything that presents the appearance of being good but is not God is evil. Fortunately, Saint Augustine returns to this idea a few pages later, in the following chapter. Here he laments his state of confusion: “If only someone could have put some restraint on my disorder.” It would have wisely transformed the fleeting experiences of beauty into these baser things” (25). It is obvious that the evil is not in the things themselves, but Augustine displaced it. He designated as sin itself the disorder and confusion that he previously believed to be simply the basis of sin. This therefore presents us with a system in which good can only be recovered from the world through the “restraint” of religious conviction. Augustine's next idea begins to show increasing shades of complexity. The passage in which he describes it reads rather disjointedly, as if dealing with a vast network of ideas in extreme brevity. Although he introduces it at length, the first crucial premise he advances is the following: "Since in virtue I loved peace and in vice I hated discord, I found that in virtue it there is unity, in vice a sort 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 feels truth, beauty and rationality, but above all good. These are similar words and structured in the same way as those he uses to speak of the nature of God. Perhaps then, in this system, good deeds are done entirely in God: motivated from within, accomplished from within, and effective from within. Rather, since Augustine views good and evil as diametrically opposed, he asserts that all sinful acts can be characterized by "discord" or "division." In these same divisions, Augustine says, “there was a certain substance of irrational life and the nature of supreme evil” (67). For the first time, he attributes physical matter as well as random 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. Because he cannot explain evil, lending him both a medium of his own and a devious conscience with which to play his tricks allows him to effectively defy explanation. Meanwhile, his very fractured and inexplicable nature fits perfectly into the meta-system he has constructed, where good is unified and its opposite is not. To his credit, Augustine, at the time of writing, found this argument false, saying that "I did not know and had not learned that evil is not a substance, and that our spirit does not is not the supreme and immutable good either” (67). This is probably why he doesn't explain it further. Maybe he just doesn't feel the need, given that he's spending a lot of time on a related idea. From the beginning of the text, Saint Augustine suggests to God a variety of physical forms. Some of his suggestions have a nice quality of insight: "We cannot think that vessels full of you give you coherence, for even if they were broken you would not be divided," he says, in rebuttalthe idea that the earth itself is a container filled with divine liquid (4). At other times, Augustine assigns to God the role of engineer in the spatial world: he is called the "Creator", and in Him "are found the constant causes of inconstant things" (67, 7). Augustine would like to understand God on a physical level, but the three-dimensional realm has no patience with the contradictory statements typically used when discussing the divine: "Never new, never old," Augustine says of God, "always active, always moving ". rest” (5). When we talk about concrete spaces, there is little room for ambiguity, since they are full or empty, dark and hollow or blazing with a kind of divine light. Ultimately, St. Augustine condemns the idea of ​​imagining God as any physical form. Nevertheless, imagining the physicality of God occupies him throughout much of the Confessions, and the products of this thought correspond to yet another of his suggestions about the nature of good and evil. “When I wanted to think of my God,” Augustine explains, “I knew of no way to do so except as a physical mass. Nor did I think that there was anything that was not material. For the same reason , I also believed that evil was a kind of material substance. Specifically, he considered good and evil to be two "infinite" masses, although the evil mass was "rather smaller." subtle physical entities] diffused in space” (85) One could suppose that, intentionally or not, the ambient atmospheric morality would be absorbed by the general events. Presumably, the morality of a thing could therefore be judged by an instrument which. would measure the relative amounts of good and bad mass within it Saint Augustine recognizes how absurd these claims seem. He believes that the flaws in this and his other arguments arise from a faulty conceptualization of the nature of the relationship between. God and the universe. The universe he imagined, entirely impregnated by God, excluded the existence of evil, since all things impregnated and created by God, according to him, would be good. Neoplatonism leads St. Augustine to one of his last errant conceptualizations of good and evil. Here the incorruptible, the immune, and the immutable become synonymous with good and holy, while the corruptible, susceptible to injury, and mutable are inferior or evil. He arrives at 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, following Platonic logic more closely, “God” would 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 approach it. As for this justification and the more complex justification for his argument, Augustine glosses over it, saying: “I did not know why and 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, equating the heart with the pure and the mind with the sensible, succeeds only momentarily in banishing impure thoughts from his mind. Ultimately, he ignores the argument when it fails to provide a sufficient explanation of God's physical location (111). Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized article 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 unsolvable. Evil could have no place in a..