But ironically just to the extent that Christians underwrite the high humanism that sustains the confidence that in spite of our differences we share common intuitions about evil makes the Christian faith in God unintelligible. One cannot help but be sympathetic to those like General Dallaire who have seen a violence beyond belief, but his very ability to be truthful about what he has seen is not because he has certainly seen the devil but because, as is clear from his book, he was sustained by the practice of morning prayer.
In a book entitled Naming the Silences: God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering, I argued that the question “Why does a good God allow bad things to happen to good people?” is not a question that those whose lives have been formed by the Psalms have any reason to ask.8 Suffering, even the suffering occasioned by the death of a child, does not constitute for Christians a theodical problem. In Theology and the Problem of Evil, Ken Surin rightly argues that theodicy is a peculiar modern development that unfortunately shapes how many now read the Psalms as well as the book of Job.9 The realism of the Psalms and the book of Job depends on the presumption that God is God and we are not. When Christians think theodical justifications are needed to justify the ways of God at the bar of a justice determined by us, you can be sure that the god Christians now worship is not the God of Israel and Jesus Christ.10
In Naming the Silences I suggested that the very presumption that a crisis of faith is created when “bad things happen to good people” indicates that the God whom Christians are alleged to believe has been confused with a god whose task is primarily to put us, that is, human beings, on the winning side of history. In sum, I argue that in modernity
a mechanistic metaphysic is combined with a sentimental account of God; in this way the pagan assumption that god or the gods are to be judged by how well it or they insure the successful outcome of human purposes is underwritten in the name of Christianity. It is assumed that the attributes of such a god or gods can be known and characterized abstractly. But the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the god that creates something called the “problem of evil”; rather, that problem is created by a god about which the most important facts seem to be that it exists and is morally perfect as well as all-powerful—that is, the kind of god that emperors need to legitimate the “necessity” of their rule.11
In The Evils of Theodicy, Terrence Tilley suggests that those who engage in the theodical project “participate in the practice of legitimating the coercive and marginalizing ecclesio-political structure which is the heritage of Constantinian Christianity.”12 Once Christianity had become the established religion of the empire, Christians had a stake in justifying that the way things are is the way things are meant to be. But that project has now decisively come to an end. So it is not God that is the subject of theodicy, but the human. That is why the crucial theodical question today is not “Why does a good god allow bad things to happen to good people?” but rather “Why has medicine not cured cancer?” Medicine has become the institution in modernity dedicated to saving the appearances; that is, we look to medicine to create a world in which we can entertain the illusion that it may be possible to get out of life alive.13 That is why one of the legitimating functions of modern states is to promise to provide the best medical care available.
If, as Tilley suggests, theodicy is a project of established orders, to turn to Augustine as the representative figure who taught Christians how to think about evil may seem strange. Augustine is often credited with providing the theological rationale for the development of Constantinian Christianity.14 However, I hope to show that Augustine’s understanding of the non-existence of evil not only is how Christians should think about evil, but also, in the world we currently inhabit, represents a challenge to those who would rule the world in the name of human “progress.” Such a rule—that is, rule in the name of securing a future free from suffering in the name of humanity—is a secular version of what Constantinianism was for Christians.15 Accordingly, Augustine’s understanding of evil cannot help but be a political challenge to secular forms of Constantinianisms.
Augustine on Evil
In the Enchiridion, a text Augustine wrote around 423 at the request of a layman, Laurentius, for a handbook that would sum up essential Christian teachings, Augustine provides his most considered judgment on evil. According to Augustine, there can be no evil
where there is no good. This leads us to the surprising conclusion: that since every being, in so far as it is a being, is good, if we then say that a defective thing is bad, it would seem to mean that we are saying that evil is good, that only what is good is ever evil and that there is no evil apart from something good. This is because every actual entity is good [omnis natura bonum est]. Nothing evil exists in itself, but only as an evil aspect of some actual entity. Therefore, there can be nothing evil except something is good. Absurd as this sounds, nevertheless the logical connections of the argument compel us to it as inevitable.16
In his Confessions, written soon after Augustine became a bishop (397), he anticipated this passage from the Enchiridion when he suggested that evil simply does not exist. He argues that:
we must conclude that if things are deprived of all good, they cease altogether to be; and this means that as long as they are, they are good. Therefore, whatever is, is good; and evil, the origin of which I was trying to find, is not a substance, because if it were a substance, it would be good. For either it would be an incorruptible substance of the supreme order of goodness, or it would be a corruptible substance which would not be corruptible unless it were good. So it became obvious to me that all that you have made is good, and that there are no substances whatsoever that were not made by you. And because you did not make them all equal, each single thing is good and collectively they are very good, for our God made his whole creation very good.17
I am convinced that Augustine has rightly said what any Christian should say about evil; that is, ontologically evil does not exist. Such a view, however, many find counter-intuitive. How can you say evil does not exist when, like General Dallaire, you have witnessed a genocide? I think Augustine has a very persuasive response to such a query, but to understand his response we need to appreciate how he came to his conclusion, a conclusion he says was forced on him by logic—that is, that evil is always parasitical on the good. I have no doubt that Augustine found himself driven to this conclusion by “logic,” but Augustine’s logic requires a narrative that takes the form of the story—namely, the “confession” of his sin. This means, I think, that you cannot understand Augustine’s account of evil without following his account in the Confessions of how he came through his involvement with the Manichees as well as the Platonists to the conclusion that evil is nothing.
It is not accidental that the only way Augustine has to display how he came to understand that evil is nothing was by providing a narrative of how he arrived at that judgment.18 That a narrative was required rightly suggests that to understand properly why evil does not exist requires a transformation of the self that takes the form of a story. Moreover, that a narrative is required for us rightly to understand the parasitical character of evil is not only true of our individual lives but is also required if we are to make sense of our collective existence as well as the cosmos. Christians believe the recognition of evil is possible because God never leaves us without hope. That is, hope makes possible the ability to take the next step necessary to discover that we are not condemned to live out our past. We discover that we are only able to name our sins on our way to being free from them. This means we are only able to give an account of our lives retrospectively.
By attending to Augustine’s Confessions retrospectively, I hope to show that his account of evil as privation is keyed to his understanding of Scripture and, in particular, how Scripture is only rightly read as prayer (worship). In other words, Augustine’s understanding of evil as privation is necessary to make sense of the Bible’s story of creation, fall, and redemption. All that he says about evil is disciplined by that theological project, which means for Augustine there is no freestanding “problem of evil,” but rather whatever Christians have to say about evil must reflect their convictions that we are creatures of a God who has created and redeemed.19
The Confessions is a complex prayer Augustine