Augustine’s Resolution to the Problem of Evil: A Theodicy of Good and Privation

Few questions in philosophy and theology have proven as persistently difficult as this one: if God is all-good and all-powerful, why does evil exist? This is the problem of evil, and it has challenged religious thinkers for millennia. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), one of the most influential philosophers in the Western tradition, tackled it with a response that was as theologically bold as it was philosophically rigorous. Rather than accepting evil as a rival force to God, or simply dismissing it as mysterious, Augustine redefined what evil actually is – and in doing so, built one of the most enduring theodicies in the history of philosophy.

The problem Augustine had to solve 🔗

The problem of evil can be stated in a tight logical sequence: God is omnipotent, omniscient, and supremely good; no such being would permit evil to exist; yet evil clearly exists in the world. This argument, if left unanswered, is devastating for any theistic worldview. It seems to force a choice – either God lacks the power to stop evil, lacks the will to stop it, or simply does not exist.

Augustine felt the force of this problem personally. In his early life, he was drawn to Manichaeism, a dualist religion that explained evil by positing two co-equal and eternal principles – one good, one evil – locked in cosmic conflict. It was an appealing answer because it took evil seriously as a real, substantial power. But as Augustine later recounted in his Confessions, exposure to Neo-Platonic philosophy transformed his thinking. He came to see that the Manichaean solution came at too high a price: it diminished God, reducing the divine to merely one of two competing powers rather than the sovereign source of all existence. The problem of evil, Augustine realized, had to be solved without conceding that evil has an independent, positive existence of its own.

Evil as privation: the core of Augustine’s theodicy 🔗

Augustine’s central move was a fundamental reconceptualization of evil’s nature. He argued that evil is not a substance, not a created thing, and not a force – it is a privation (privatio boni), meaning the absence or corruption of good. Evil, on this account, cannot exist on its own. It only exists as a deficiency within something that is, or ought to be, good.

His own words in City of God are unambiguous on this point: evil has no positive nature, but the loss of good is what receives the name “evil.” Augustine’s logic was precise. He first argued that everything God created is good, since God is the source of all being and all being participates in goodness. From this it follows that evil, not being good, was therefore not created by God. And if God created everything that exists, then evil – not having been created – must not be a “thing” in the ordinary sense at all.

This is not mere wordplay. The privation theory carries a precise metaphysical meaning. Disease in animals is the absence of health; vice in humans is the absence of virtue. When a disease is cured, it does not travel elsewhere – it simply ceases to exist. The illness was never a substance; it was a gap, a deficit in something that should have been whole. Evil, Augustine insisted, works in precisely the same way. It is parasitic – it cannot exist independently but only as a malfunction or corruption within something that was originally good.

Being, goodness, and the Neo-Platonic background 🔗

To fully appreciate why this argument works for Augustine, it helps to understand the philosophical tradition behind it. Augustine drew heavily on Neo-Platonism, particularly the thought of Plotinus, for whom being and goodness are inseparably linked. In this framework, to exist is to participate in goodness to some degree, and to fall away from goodness is to move toward non-being. Augustine’s identification of being with goodness is rooted in this tradition, where degrees of being and degrees of goodness correspond to one another.

God, as the ground of all being, is perfectly and infinitely good. Everything God brings into existence participates in that goodness, though in varying and finite degrees. Evil, then, is not a rival to God’s being – it is the refusal or diminishment of being. In the Augustinian tradition, evil enters only when some creature renounces its proper role in the divine order and ceases to be what it is meant to be. This is a crucial point: evil is not something God introduced or permitted as a positive feature of creation. It is, rather, what happens when good things go wrong.

The role of free will in moral evil 🔗

Explaining evil as privation answers the metaphysical question of what evil is, but it does not by itself explain how evil entered a world that was created entirely good. Here Augustine introduces the second pillar of his theodicy: free will.

The free will of humans is offered by the Augustinian theodicy as the continued reason for moral evil: people commit immoral acts when their will turns away from good. God created rational creatures – humans and angels – with genuine freedom of choice. This freedom is not a flaw in the design; it is a gift that makes authentic moral agency possible. A world of beings incapable of choosing evil would also be incapable of genuinely choosing good. Virtue performed under compulsion is not virtue at all.

Augustine developed this argument most carefully in his early work On Free Choice of the Will (De Libero Arbitrio). There he lays out a three-part case: every instance of moral evil stems from the voluntary choices of free agents; God does not override those choices because free will is a gift he respects; and a world that contains free will – even with its attendant possibility of evil – is better than a world without it. The implication is clear: God is not the author of moral evil. The misuse of freedom, not any deficiency in God’s creation, is the source of the disorder we experience.

Augustine understood the problem of evil as fundamentally a problem of the unruly will – not a matter of ignorance or insufficient education, but of the will’s capacity to turn away from reason, from God, and from the good. His own Confessions is, in part, an autobiographical record of this interior conflict, including his famous meditation on stealing pears as a youth – an act done, by his own admission, for no profit whatsoever, purely for the sake of transgression. It illustrated for him the perverse potential of a will unchained from the good.

The Fall and the origin of natural evil 🔗

Augustine extends the free will explanation to cover not just deliberate human wrongdoing but also the broader suffering and disorder present in the natural world. Drawing on the Genesis narrative, he argues that the Fall of Adam and Eve – the original act of disobedience in the Garden of Eden – introduced a fundamental disharmony into both human nature and creation as a whole. Natural evil, in this account, is a consequence of the disharmony of nature brought about by the Fall.

This means Augustine’s theodicy is not limited to explaining why people do bad things. It offers a unified framework in which both moral evil (sin, injustice, cruelty) and natural evil (disease, disaster, death) trace back to the same root cause: the voluntary turning of free creatures away from God. Evil is believed to be a just consequence of the fall of man, and God is accordingly not implicated as its cause or instigator.

The free will of angels matters here too. In Christian tradition, fallen angels – led by Lucifer, motivated by pride – turned against God before the human Fall, and their rebellion is understood as a further source of disorder in creation. Pride, Augustine notes, is a sin that needs no external cause or temptation. It arises from within, from the creature’s refusal to acknowledge its proper dependence on God. This is consistent with the privation theory: the first evil was not something introduced from outside, but a turning inward, a refusal of the good.

The principle of plenitude: evil as contrast, not design 🔗

Augustine also addresses a subtler question: even if evil is not itself created by God, does God not bear some responsibility for creating a world in which evil was possible – and foreseeable? His answer invokes what is sometimes called the principle of plenitude. God made a world in which true moral decision-making and the development of virtues is possible – a world populated by persons whose characters are shaped through genuine struggle and growth. The possibility of evil is the necessary condition for genuine goodness.

More than that, Augustine argues that evil, while not good in itself, can serve to highlight and enhance what is good. Contrast is part of the beauty and order of creation. Just as shadow gives depth to a painting, privations in the world contribute, within God’s providential ordering, to a larger good that transcends the individual instance of suffering. Augustine claimed that God’s creative self-expression – even including its necessary privations – points the human mind toward the existence and glory of God.

Lasting influence and key criticisms 🔗

Augustine’s theodicy became foundational to Western Christian thought. Thomas Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, closely followed Augustine’s framework, arguing that God is goodness itself and that evil’s existence can be entirely explained by the free choices of creatures. In the twentieth century, Alvin Plantinga’s celebrated Free Will Defense – which argues that God and evil are not logically incompatible – is, in important respects, a refined development of the Augustinian approach, though Plantinga limits his scope to logical rather than evidential arguments.

Yet the theodicy is not without significant challenges. Critics point out that describing atrocities – genocide, torture, child abuse – as mere “absences of good” risks trivializing the lived experience of victims. Such evils feel active and invasive, not like something simply missing. The philosopher Mark Ian has argued that mental illness in particular – often experienced as an overwhelming, consuming presence rather than a diminished state – resists the privation framework. For a theodicy to be credible, it must address not only logical coherence but the human experience of pain.

There is also the question of natural evil. The free will argument explains why humans do terrible things to one another. It is considerably harder to apply to earthquakes, childhood cancers, or famine. Critics such as Ingram and Streng have argued that the Augustinian theodicy fails to account for the existence of evil before the human Fall, most notably in the form of the serpent’s temptation itself. If the serpent (identified with a fallen angel) was already evil before Adam sinned, evil predates the Fall – complicating the neat causal story Augustine tells.

Finally, Augustine’s mature theology in City of God added the dimension of divine predestination, raising further questions about whether genuine human freedom is compatible with God’s foreknowledge and sovereign election. In City of God, Augustine reformulates his position by emphasizing divine predestination within a historical-philosophical framework in which God permits evil temporarily to fulfill a greater good. This evolution in his thought reflects both his intellectual honesty and the genuine difficulty of the problem.

Why Augustine’s answer still matters 🔗

Despite these criticisms, Augustine’s theodicy remains one of the most intellectually serious attempts to grapple with the problem of evil. Its central insight – that evil is not a thing but a privation, not created but incurred through the misuse of freedom – continues to shape philosophical theology. It shifts the question from “why did God make evil?” to “why do creatures turn away from good?”, and in doing so, places the moral weight of evil squarely on the shoulders of free creatures rather than on the Creator. Whether or not one finds the answer fully satisfying, the framework itself – being, goodness, privation, and free will – has set the terms of the debate for over fifteen centuries.

What do you think? If evil is genuinely the absence of good rather than a force in its own right, does that change how we should think about moral responsibility for harmful actions? And can a theodicy that makes logical sense of evil’s existence ever be enough – or does it also need to speak meaningfully to those who are actually suffering?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/
2. https://www.str.org/w/augustine-on-evil-1
3. https://acjol.org/index.php/ekpoma/article/download/909/897
4. https://digitalcommons.calvin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=religion_beets
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinian_theodicy
6. https://www.bookey.app/book/on-free-choice-of-the-will
7. https://www.hprweb.com/2012/08/the-will-in-augustines-confessions-the-law-of-the-mind-and-the-law-of-the-members/
8. https://peped.org/philosophicalinvestigations/handout-problem-evil/
9. https://philosophydungeon.weebly.com/scholar-augustine.html
10. https://divinityphilosophy.net/2021/04/16/critically-evaluate-st-augustines-attempt-to-resolve-the-logical-problem-of-evil-40/
11. https://criticaldebateshsgj.scholasticahq.com/article/150257-reconciling-omnipotence-and-pain-augustine-s-approach-to-the-problem-of-evil
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_God
13. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393358189_Augustine_on_God_Free_Will_and_Evil