be exaggerated. Yet Augustine is not trying to make us think that even as a child he was the most sinful of sinners. To engage in that project would be another form of pride. Rather he is trying to help us see that the disorder that grips our most basic desires as well as our ability to reason, which is shaped by those desires, cannot help but lead to the destruction of ourselves and others. To appreciate a child’s disordered desire is part and parcel of Augustine’s rejection of the Manichees.
Augustine’s famous account of the stealing of the pears is his paradigmatic example of what it means to discover that we do not so much choose to sin but rather that we are sin. Crucial for Augustine is that he stole that for which he had no need. He and his friends threw the pears to the pigs. To be sure Augustine joined in this petty crime because he desired the good opinion of his friends, but that he did so is not a sufficient explanation for his sin.38 He did what he did for no purpose other than his love of mischief. So acting, he sought to gain from the world what he learned he could only gain from loving the One alone worthy to be loved. In short he was trying to be more than he could be. Thus he confesses “all who desert you and set themselves up against you merely copy you in a perverse way: but by this very act of imitation they only show that you are the Creator of all nature and, consequently, that there is no place whatever where man may hide away from you.”39
Evans notes that Augustine’s observations about his early boyhood sins are meant to help us see that one of the distinguishing marks of an evil action is its unprofitableness.40 That seems just right to me and helps us understand why Augustine thought we have no ability to will our way out of sin. That we cannot will our way out of sin is because we seldom pursue sin to sin, but rather our sins our done in the name of “great goods.” We learn of the unprofitable character of sin only retrospectively. Indeed too often attempts to avoid sin rely on alternatives that are themselves sinful, but fail to be acknowledged as such only because they seem different than the sin we think we have clearly identified. For Augustine evil cannot be defeated by evil.41 Rather our only hope is that we are offered an alternative community and correlative way of life that make it possible for us to locate the extraordinary power of the evil we are and do in the name of the good. For all of its ambiguity, Augustine thought he had discovered that alternative community by being made a member of the church.42
Where Has This Gotten Us or Why I Am Not a Nazi
I do not pretend that I have provided an adequate account Augustine’s understanding of evil, but hopefully my attempt to help us see how Augustine thought about these matters can help us gain some perspective on where we are today.43 If Susan Neiman is right that “the problem of evil is the guiding force of modern thought” and that “nothing is easier than stating the problem of evil in nontheist terms” then we clearly have some indication that “modernity” names a development that stands at a great distance, and the distance is not best measured in centuries, from Augustine.44 With all due respect to Neiman, I suspect she has no idea that Augustine’s understanding of evil was not “theistic” but Trinitarian.45 Yet I fear that Neiman represents the kind of misunderstanding of Christianity in modernity most determinatively found among Christians.
However, from Neiman’s perspective, the Augustinian account of evil I have developed and hopefully defended in this paper cannot help but seem intellectually obscurantist if not dangerous. The problem quite simply is that the account I have provided is so Christian, so particularistic. Why should anyone who is not a Christian take it seriously? Moreover, appeals to particular traditions seem to reproduce the problem many assume is at the heart of the challenge facing us in modernity—that is, how to counter the violence perpetrated in the name of a god or tradition. In short, does not my vigorous defense of Augustine’s understanding of evil play into the hands of the most destructive form of politics in our time? I fear that I cannot provide the kind of answer many desire to such a question because such answers undercut the contribution Christians have to make.
It has been the sad fate of Christianity in our time to be that form of life that tries to “bind up the wounds” of our existence. As a result Christians have tried to offer explanations of evil that do not implicate God. As I suggested at the beginning of this essay, you can be sure that when Christians attempt to justify the ways of God before the bar of human experience they no longer believe in the God that animates the work of Augustine.46 Even worse, I suspect that Christians today do not know what it would mean to believe in Augustine’s God precisely because we have no idea what practices are required to make our worship of the God of Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac, and Jesus Christ intelligible, not only to those who do not share our faith, but even to ourselves.
I need to be clear, however, that it would be a mistake to think the genocide in Rwanda is somehow better understood if we see what happened there as “sin.” That would make “sin” exactly what Augustine suggests sin cannot be—an explanation. To say “sin” explains nothing.47 Rather sin is a confession that holds out the hope that even in the face of a terror like Rwanda redemption is possible. To say that there is hope suggests that evil cannot overwhelm the good that is God’s creation. Yet honesty demands that often we have nothing to say in the face of events like Rwanda. Nevertheless silence, at least the honest silence that can be a form of presence, can be a way not to let the darkness overwhelm us.48 Indeed Christians believe that God would have his people be such a presence.
Silence, moreover, is required when the use of words like “sin” and “evil” are used, in Terry Eagleton’s words, “to shut down thought.”49 Eagleton notes that the use of the word “evil” in the so-called war against terrorism really means:
Don’t look for a political explanation. It is a wonderfully timesaving device. If terrorists are simply Satanic, then you do not need to investigate what lies behind their atrocious acts of violence. You can ignore the plight of the Palestinian people, or of those Arabs who have suffered under squalid right-wing autocracies supported by the West for its own selfish, oil-hungry purposes. The word “evil” transfers the question from this mundane realm to a sinisterly metaphysical one. You cannot acknowledge that the terrible crimes which terrorists commit have a purpose behind them, since to ascribe purposes to such people is to recognize them as rational creatures, however desperately wrongheaded.50
To describe enemies as evil ironically has the effect of creating the Manichean world that Augustine was intent on defeating.51 If Augustine teaches us anything, it is that the Christian confession of sin is a first-person activity. Christians, of course, think it important to be able to name our sins as well as to confess our sins to one another.52 We are obligated to reveal our sins so that we may have some hope of being freed from sin through the work of the Holy Spirit. Our ability to name our sins comes through our mutual responsibility we share with other Christians exemplified by lives such as Augustine’s.53 By attending to lives like Augustine’s, Christians hope to be able to discover in what ways we are possessed by sin. If we attribute sin to another, we are able to do so because we have been enabled to recognize the power of sin in our own lives.54
But what could such a confession mean when faced by a Rwanda? I think if we are thinking with Augustine it might mean that to be a Christian requires us to believe that even a Rwanda someday might be a memory capable of being healed.55 What it would mean for such a memory to be healed I think would mean that a story can be told about such senseless killing that offers those killed as well as those that killed reconciliation.56 I confess I cannot imagine what such a reconciliation might mean, but that is why God is God and I am not.
Which finally brings me back to politics. In the “Preface” to her important book, The Nazi Conscience, Claudia Koonz observes that we may find it repugnant to think that mass murderers understood themselves to be acting morally. But according to Koonz that is exactly what they did. She observes:
The popularizers of anti-semitism and the planners of genocide followed a coherent set of severe ethical maxims derived from broad philosophical concepts. As modern secularists, they denied the existence of either a divinely inspired moral law or an innate ethical imperative. Because they believed that concepts of virtue and vice had evolved according to the needs of particular ethnic communities,