confesses his sins, his unwillingness to acknowledge the One who is his creator, because the Confessions are not about Augustine but rather about the God who makes Augustine Augustine. Moreover, he makes clear that it is his inability to understand God that makes it impossible for him to understand rightly the nature of evil. He confesses that his
own specious reasoning induced me to give in to the sly arguments of fools who asked me what was the origin of evil, whether God was confined to the limits of a bodily shape, whether he had hair and nails, and whether men could be called just if they had more than one wife at the same time, or killed other men, or sacrificed living animals. My ignorance was so great that these questions troubled me, and while I thought I was approaching the truth, I was only departing the further from it. I did not know that evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains.20
The “fools” were the Manichees, a religious sect to which Augustine belonged for nine years, because he believed that they offered him a compelling account of the cosmos and, in particular, of evil. In her wonderful book Augustine on Evil, G. R. Evans suggests that what attracted Augustine to the Manichees was what he took to be the explanatory power of their position.21 According to the Manichees the world is constituted by a god who is supremely good and by an evil principle that is identified with materiality, and in particular, the body. Therefore the Manichees did not try to avoid the problem of evil, but rather they “explained” evil by finding a place for evil in the ontological character of the universe.22 Such an explanation appealed to Augustine because he had a passion to know the truth about his and the world’s existence. In short, the Manichees seemed to offer Augustine a “scientific” account of the way things are. Such an explanation appealed to Augustine, he confesses, because when he was at that stage of his life he was readier to believe that the universe was out of joint than that there was anything wrong with himself.23
Evans also suggests that the Manichees might have been attractive to Augustine because their position seemed to share some aspects of what Augustine had learned from his mother about Christianity. Christians, like the Manichees, claimed God is completely good and the human task is to seek that good. Accordingly the Manichean Psalm-Book seemed to echo the Christian desire for illumination gained through being freed from bodily desire. Augustine, who certainly knew about bodily desire, was attracted to the spiritual discipline of the Manichees because they offered him a discipline by which he could join the spiritual elite.24 No doubt one of the reasons the Manichees appealed to Augustine, a reason he suggests in the Confessions, is because they confirmed his high opinion of himself. The Manichees played to what Augustine was to learn was his deepest enemy—his pride—by providing him with knowledge befitting his intelligence. He was freed from the Manichees only when he was forced to conclude that “the very attempt to search for the cause of evil in the way he did was itself an evil thing.”25
That the Manichees seemed to provide Augustine with the best account of the cosmos is crucial to understand his break with them. Augustine tells us he often asked questions the his fellow Manichees could not answer, but they assured him when the great Manichean scholar Faustus came he would be able to answer Augustine’s worries. When Faustus came, however, though Augustine found him a man of “agreeable personality,” Augustine also discovered that Faustus “was quite uninformed about the subjects in which I had expected him to be an expert.”26 In particular Augustine thought the Manichean books were full of “tedious fictions about the sky and the stars, the sun and the moon” and their mathematical calculations simply did not square with what he had studied in other books.27
That the Manichean “science” proved to be false was one of the crucial reasons Augustine had for leaving the Manichees, but just as important was his discovery that his most fundamental mistake was assuming that God could be understood as part of the metaphysical furniture of the universe. Augustine confesses he “could not free himself from the thought that you (God) were some kind of bodily substance extended in space, either permeating the world or diffused in infinity beyond it.”28 It was by reading the Platonists that Augustine was freed of the presumption that metaphysically that which is a substance must have a body. Moreover it was the Platonists that helped him see that “all other things that are of a lower order than yourself, and I saw that they have not absolute being in themselves, nor are they entirely without being. They are real in so far as they have their being from you, but unreal in the sense that they are not what you are”29
It was from the Platonists, therefore, that Augustine began to imagine that evil is a privation, which means it is a mistake to try to understand how, as Evans puts it, “evil can have a bodily place in the universe”.30 For Augustine this meant that he was beginning to realize it is a mistake to ask from whence evil comes or where evil may be. Now Augustine understands for God
evil does not exist, and not only for you for the whole of your creation as well, because there is nothing outside it which could invade it and break down the order which you have imposed on it. Yet in separate parts of your creation there are some things which we think of as evil because they are at variance with other things. But there are other things again with which they are in accord, and they are good. In themselves, too, they are good. And all these things which are at variance with one another are in accord with the lower part of creation which we call the earth. The sky, which is cloudy and windy, suits the earth to which it belongs. So it would be wrong for me to wish that these earthly things did not exist, for even if I saw nothing but them, I might wish for something better, but still I ought to praise you for them alone. . . . And since this is so, I no longer wished for a better world, because I was thinking of the whole of creation and in the light of this clearer discernment I had come to see that though the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone.31
There can be no question of the significance of the Platonists for Augustine, but this passage in praise of God’s creation indicates that for Augustine Platonism was a way station on the way for Augustine to become a Christian. Augustine never left his Platonism behind though I think the assumption that he remained more Platonist than Christian is clearly wrong. He understood that he could not remain a Platonist because to be a Christian requires that you believe that all that is is as it is because it has been created. Augustine tells us that “by reading these books of the Platonists I had been prompted to look for truth as something incorporeal, and I ‘caught sight of your invisible nature, as it is known through your creatures,’”32 but what he could not find in the Platonist books was “the mien of the true love of God. They make no mention of the tears of confession or of the sacrifice that you will never disdain, a broken spirit, a heart that is humbled and contrite (Psalm 50:19), nor do they speak of the salvation of your people, the city adorned like a bride (Revelation 21:2), the foretaste of your spirit (II Corinthians 1:22), or the chalice of your redemption.”33
From Augustine’s perspective the Platonists, as helpful as they had been, did nothing for his besetting problem, which he came to understand was his pride. Through his encounter with the stories of Victorinus and Anthony, and how those stories led him to face the humiliation of the cross of Christ, Augustine was finally able to confess that evil was “not out there,” but rather resided in his will.34 Augustine confesses “I began to search for a means of gaining the strength I needed to enjoy you, but I could not find this means until I embraced the mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ, who is man, like them, (I Timothy 2:5) and also rules as God over all things, blessed for ever. (Romans 9:5) He it was who united with our flesh that food which I was too weak to take. For I was not humble enough to conceive of the humble Jesus Christ as my God, nor had I learnt what lesson his human weakness was meant to teach.”35 That lesson quite simply being that we are cured of our pride only through following the Word, the Truth, which surpasses even the highest parts of creation by becoming one of us.
The Confessions is Augustine’s testimony to God and God’s grace as necessary for the healing of his pride. We can only know our sin in the light of God’s grace.36 This means we cannot will our way out of our pride, but rather God’s grace can only be appropriated through recollection.37 Commentators on Augustine’s Confessions often find his descriptions