Augustine and the Imperishable Truths of Pelagianism and Manicheism

Augustine of Hippo (Saint Augustine) is an enormously important influence in the history of the Christian religion, indeed so substantial and so influential were his contributions that it is common for writers and commentators to rank him third, behind Jesus and the Apostle Paul, in prominence in the development of the beliefs and the teachings of the Church. His autobiographical Confessions is a classic of considerable appeal even to those lacking religious commitments, and his thought on original sin and other essential doctrine are foundational in the shaping of Church theology, enduring to the present day. As imperishable as Confessions has proven, his greater work, his magnum opus, is City of God, written in response to the sacking of Rome in 410 A.D., and to the present day City of God stands as one of the greatest of apologetic works.

Today most people view the fall of Rome as but one example of several of its kind, significant yes, but civilizations come and go, even great ones. True enough, but it is difficult to overestimate just how cataclysmic was the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths (a Germanic tribe from the north), an event that shocked the ancient world, for Rome at is zenith reigned as a perdurable place and idea, of invincible strength and majesty, and its fall was almost unthinkable prior to the actual event. Yes, Rome for a time endured after its sacking, but when the gates opened a three-day rampaging ensued, the end of which saw the City in ruins, and the unthinkable became reality. A sense of the deep reverberations of this upheaval ring in the words of St. Jerome, when he lamented, in his commentary on Ezekiel, that “when the bright light of all the world was put out, or, rather, when the Roman Empire was decapitated, and, to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city.”

It cannot be justly claimed that there is one decisive cause for the fall of Rome, and today commentators cite such factors as a series of military losses, inflation, corruption, invasion by Barbarian tribes, overspending, military overexpansion, overreliance on slave labor, and division of the empire, but other causes are cited as well, such as environmental degradation  (destruction of farmland), civil wars, weakening of the legions through the need to hire foreign mercenaries, and the influence of Christianity, but naturally enough, at the time a single dominant influence was sought upon which to lay blame, and Christians and Christianity were accused by many as being corruptively decisive in Rome’s demise. Many pagans pointed out that the empire was secure when sacrifices had been allowed, but that not twenty years after  Emperor Theodosius in 391 banned sacrifices, the City lay in ruins.

Historians and other commentators are not in agreement that Christianity was a significant, let alone a leading, cause of the fall of Rome, one argument against blaming Christianity being the claim that the fall was already evident by the time Christianity was promoted and made the state religion by Theodosius in 395, and that yes there is a correlation between the rise of Christianity and the fall of Rome, but that correlation is not cause, and that whatever influence Christianity may have had on the fall, such influence was near nugatory in comparison to other factors. Those who argue that Christianity was a deleterious influence on the vitality of Rome and the Roman character tend to highlight such considerations as Christianity’s erosion of traditional values, such as through causing a shifting of emphasis away from the glory of Rome onto a sole deity, thereby sacrificing the welfare of Rome for anticipated rewards in the next, undermining the authority of the emperor. Also cited as a contributing factor to Rome’s descent was a loss of income attributable to the Church’s acquisition of resources to support its monks and nuns.

The merits of the argument that Christianity was a factor in the fall of Rome are not discussed here, but after the sacking of Rome the charge was make that the Pagan gods were incensed over the promotion of Christianity, and hence allowed the sacking of the City. Augustine wrote City of God in response to the fall of Rome, in defense of Christianity, to argue that rather than being the cause of the fall, that in truth Christianity preserved Rome from utter destruction, for moral degeneracy was the true cause of Rome’s decline, and to the extent that Christianity hindered the spread of moral decay did Christianity conserve and not ruin Rome. City of God is far too substantial and wide-ranging a work to summarize here, but perhaps the most salient legacy from Augustine’s great polemic is the idea that a human being can reside in either the City of God or the City of Man, and according to one’s choice, live in eternal glory or abide in the place where lusts and self-love rule, and ephemeral concerns cloud the mind to the joys of everlasting ones. If one chooses self-love, thereby elevating the self as one’s primary concern, then one inhabits the City of Man and necessarily is alienated from God, but if one chooses to honor and to love the divine, then one is taken away from the corrupting influence of self-love, and one enters the City of God.

As even this brief view of but certain of his contributions reveals, Augustine’s thoughts are formative in the beliefs and doctrines of the Catholic Church, and Augustine articulated what the Church understands as decisive refutations of two particularly powerful and influential heresies, one being Manicheism and the other being Pelagianism. Though deemed discredited and thereby dismissed officially by Church authorities, and though at least in the estimation of the Church, the decisive blow against these two formulations on the nature of the supernatural being delivered by Augustine, Manicheism and Pelagianism, it is suggested here, are not neutered religious heresies overcome and confined to the distant and darker past, of interest today only to scholars of varied kinds, but in truth are conceptualizations and expressions of fundamental psychogenic orientations, of how humans comprehend reality, compositional to or at least too ingrained in the human psyche to ever be wholly vanquished, however persuasively argued against by the formidable Augustine.

Pelagius was a monk, British born, present and teaching in Rome from 380 to 410 A.D., and during this time, his teachings gained support among many Christians, but in 418 the Council of Carthage condemned Pelagianism, and to the present day the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church judge Pelagianism a heretical theology. Pelagius could not accept the doctrine of original sin, as he rejected the belief that one can be corrupted by and is liable for the sins of another. Also, Pelagius believed, and this belief was robustly opposed by Augustine, that humans, through the agency of divine grace, possess the capacity to achieve perfection, capable of doing so through their own choices, by acts of their own free will. Augustine rebuffed the idea that humans could by their own free will do any such thing, for humans inherit, per Augustine, a depraved nature incorrigible by any human action, and therefore only by divine grace can a human soul become untethered from the innate bonds of sin, and not by any human agency, no matter how exemplary a life a human may lead. Indeed, Pelagius was an ascetic, and he taught that one must live a blameless life, thereby achieving a state of perfection, and doing so by one’s own free will, but for Augustine, regardless of how saintly one may be, perfection is foreclosed to humans by every avenue except one, that being the miraculous, transfiguring touch of divine grace.

For Pelagius, then, grace is manifest in our freedom and our ability to choose to act righteously, and therefore the potential for salvation resides within the human mind or soul, and this faculty is present due to divine grace. Hence, for Pelagius, humans are not bound by, are not inherently corrupted by, the act of Adam’s fall from grace, and therefore each human being is free to abide in sin or, in imitation of Christ, to live a pure life, and each person, Pelagius believed, must be judged by his or her choices and not prejudged due to the disobedience of the first humans. This belief, that humans are not born innately corrupted by original sin, has found increasing acceptance even within the Christian world, for what most impresses the ordinary human consciousness is the purity and the innocence of a newborn child. Yes, we should ever be aware that humans possess an animal nature, and hence are predisposed to selfish acts, to cruel acts, to assertion of oneself to the disadvantage of others, but the child appears to us not as a depraved being but as a being nearest to innocence as we ever approach. Most humans desire that the child, as the child grows and acquires ever greater freedom, and thus incurs ever more responsibility for his or her actions, should be judged by those actions and by his or her choices, and not by an inheritance the child is bound by no matter her conduct nor even her purity of heart, her willing only of the good. For Augustine, the best, the most virtuous and conscientious amongst us are as stained by original sin, and as in need of deliverance by grace, without which we are doomed, as those whose every thought is selfish, whose actions are cruel and unjust.

Human sensibility is offended by the idea of blaming the child for the transgressions of the parent, and with this view it is understandable that Pelagius could not accept the belief in original sin, and today, even though most people are well aware of the propensity of humans for bad acts, and recognize the human capacity for seemingly demonic evil, the doctrine of original sin for many is as unpalatable as Pelagius found it, and however questionable such a favorable view of human character may be, surveys suggest that the majority believe that humans are essentially good rather than fundamentally corrupted.

The beliefs of Pelagius, then, seem not to the average person today a condemnable heresy from the distant past, erroneous in their conception of human nature, but seem truthful and humane in refusing to accept that we are born guilty, and enter into this world not as innocent new beings but as possessed of a necessarily depraved nature, and that consequently nothing we do can alter our fate save divine intervention. The presupposition that all is hopeless without external deliverance offends our sense of justice, for we wish to believe that the choices we make, the acts we undertake, are sufficient unto themselves for attainment of a desired state or goal. Our sense of justice is not satisfied by the creed that no matter what we do the door must remain closed to us, held fast by our very natures, with passage to a blessed state made possible by no other act or means save divine grace. Narrow is the way, and saints and sinners alike may pass through, or forever be barred, should grace be withheld.

Innocence is the presumption of any ethical and honorable criminal justice system, and blameworthiness requires evidence and adjudication, not judgment of one’s innate nature. The essence of justice lies in judgment not of what one is, but of what one does, and therefore the prevailing sense of what justice consists of and represents has as a prerequisite the notion of free will. Those unfortunate souls compelled to an action, dispossessed of choice, typically are not judged blameworthy. The unwilling individual who somehow finds a gun forced into her hands and forced to pull the trigger is not thought to have committed a blameworthy act, regardless of the outcome of that act.

Pelagius in understanding human nature as not dyed with the stain of original sin that only divine grace can cleanse, must be seen as privileging human free will, and having free will and not born tainted, then for a human soul to be condemned that human being must commit condemnable acts, and the way to blessedness is not foreclosed save divine grace, but is revealed and is made open through the human will choosing a life of purity. For Pelagius, that a human being has the capacity to choose either course, and by choice to inhabit the City of God or to inhabit the City of Man, is the instance of divine grace. Opening the door and entering paradise is an act of volition, on the part of the person. Pelagius, then, believed that Jesus Christ established the immaculate example to follow, should one desire salvation, and was not the sacrificial lamb slaughtered to atone for otherwise indelible human sinfulness.

Pelagius was concerned not to absolve human beings of moral responsibility, for if irrespective of our actions, no matter how egregious our flouting of moral norms, all absolution requires is a confession of faith, then where lies the incentive to live an upright life? In the Christian view, all is rectified, with even the most debased amongst us purified, by the acceptance of grace, and by no human effort other than that acceptance, and no matter how praiseworthy, even saintly, the life one leads, are the doors of paradise opened. The conundrum is this:  Augustine in refutation of Pelagianism asserts the incurable depravity of human nature, yet moral responsibility requires a free will, and in what sense is the will understood as free if human nature is of such a quality that no human can extricate himself from sin, but must have divine intervention for deliverance? Yet if Pelagius is correct, and a human being can by choice enter into a state of impeccable goodness, what need then of grace? Yes, Pelagius believed that our ability to free ourselves from sin is the instance of grace, but this rather confined role for divine agency is far too paltry for one of Augustine’s understanding of the presence of and our dependence on the divine in our lives, and Pelagius’s viewpoint seems to privilege human agency, an elevation that must seem absurd when considered against the seeming incorrigible predilection of humans for wrongdoing. After all, we imagine Augustine reasoning, if by his own efforts he could not emancipate himself from sin, no doubt seeing himself and for good reason of a superior caliber, then what chance then have ordinary mortals to do so? Yet the lived experience of the normal human consciousness is that we do indeed have free will, and we can choose the better course over the worse, and in fact our legal system, and the whole of civil society, supposes that humans of average capacities can choose right over wrong or wrong over right, with justice requiring that they should be accountable for that choice.

Though rejected by the Church as a heresy, it seems evident that Pelagianism endures through today, for the belief that all human beings are born tainted through the Adamic fall from grace at the start of human history is unpalatable to many if not most people, and the common tendency is to see a child as embodying innocence, or the closest to innocence possible, and further, most people do seem to believe that however profoundly evil and depraved humans have shown themselves throughout history, that an individual human being can by free will elect to live an exemplary life, and even though a wholly pure life may be unattainable, human frailty does not seem to warrant Augustine’s assertion that after Adam’s fall, non posse non peccare – that is, humans are not able not to sin. Augustine assurance that human nature is constitutionally corrupt and unable on its own to liberate itself from a sinful existence was grounded in his own identity, for as a young man he had indulged in carnal pleasures, and he was persuaded that only an act of divine grace could transform his sinful nature, for he judged himself incapable of doing so, and by extension deemed that no human being can free himself or herself from a sinful state of being. For Augustine, humans require divine grace not to sin, but for Pelagius, humans by their own free will can choose not to sin, and to assert dependency on grace is to deny moral responsibility. The conflict between divine agency and human agency remains unresolved, but surely Pelagianism is unvanquished, for though officially judged a heretic, the views of Pelagius remain vital in the modern world.

Augustine also argued against what he understood as another threat to the correct conception of the divine and of its agency in the world, one that as well came to be condemned, substantially through the polemics of Augustine, as a heresy, but one that Augustine was an adherent of, it is believed, for almost ten years. This heresy is known as Manichaeism, and as with Pelagianism, though officially condemned by the Church, the Manichean view represents a conception of reality that is prevalent and vital even today. Manicheism was once a major religion, deriving its name from the teachings of Mani, a 3rd century prophet known as the “Apostle of Light”, who was born in Babylonia, and who as a young man believed himself to have received a divine command to preach his message throughout Persia and beyond, and who viewed himself as the last in a line of prophets that originated with Adam, and included Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus. Mani believed his mission was to convert the world, and to fulfill his mission he promoted extensive missionary efforts and endorsed translation of his works into other languages. Manicheism realized its zenith in the 4th century, but due to strong opposition by the Christian church and by the Roman state, its presence was much reduced in the 5th and 6th centuries, but was practiced in various areas of the world at later dates, including China in the 14th century.

Manicheism is a gnostic conception in that its metaphysical view is dualistic, seeing the world as divided into two realms, the spiritual and the material, with the material realm befouled and degrading to inhabit, and with knowledge of spiritual truths being necessary to extricate the human soul from a debased state in the material realm to one of purity and illumination in the spiritual kingdom. For Mani, our material existence is one of suffering and irremediable evil, and escape from this misery is enabled when the intelligence (nous) reveals that one’s true self is not located in the incarnation of a body in the material world but consists of a spiritual essence, or a soul, capable of transcending the physical and finding its true flowering and fulfilment in participation in the divine. Manicheism therefore holds that salvation comes through knowledge, specifically that essential knowledge obscured as a consequence or our inhabiting a material body in a corrupted material world, and redemption and liberation are realized when one is able by the insight of an internal and eternal light to see or perceive beyond the befogging veil of sense data inundation to the truth that we are spiritual essences trapped temporarily in physical bodies. Our true nature shares in the divine, and this sempiternal bond is accessible and transfiguring even though we are ensconced in the material realm.

For Mani, good and evil are equal and eternal powers, and whereas he holds the material as innately corrupted, it cannot be that Jesus took bodily form but must have remained spirit, and hence put forth a human appearance but in truth was not human. Whatever is physical is corrupted, and Jesus was not corrupted, and hence Jesus never took physical form. One of the great attractions of Manicheism for Augustine was precisely this conception of a dualistic reality and the necessarily corrupt state of the physical, for the understanding of the human predicament this view enables is that humans are divided as well, and therefore, for Augustine, his sensual indulgences could be attributed to, and confined to, his physical being, while that portion of himself that was divine remained uncorrupted by his continuation of hedonistic pursuits. If one can assign blame to one’s lower nature, and one conceives of that lower nature as ultimately sloughable at some future time, then one can indulge as one wishes without being afflicted – intolerably – by a guilty conscience. Augustine fully indulged his appetites in his youth, despite being raised a Christian, but perhaps those pleasures became sated when he found in them no enduring joy.

Augustine was possessed of a rigorous, analytical mind, and though an initial appeal of Manicheism to Augustine was his belief that Manicheism was based on reason rather than on faith, his eventual disenchantment with Manicheism was furthered through an encounter with Faustus, a main proponent of Manicheism, for Augustine is said to have interrogated Faustus on certain matters concerning Manichean doctrine on astrology and cosmology on which Augustine had developed perplexities or doubts, and was troubled that Faustus, despite his reported learnedness on Manicheism, and though eloquent, demonstrated knowledge that seemed comprised of little more than myths and a shallow understanding of science. Augustine did not then abandon Manicheism, but his doubts continued, and deepened, and eventually Augustine lost faith in Manicheism.

Augustine in his disillusionment with and ultimate rejection of Manicheism observed that the Manichean belief that material existence is under the dominion of evil contradicted the Book of Genesis, which states that God created all, and that God’s creation is good. There is no Biblical support for the belief that the world is evil and irredeemably so, and also Augustine perceived much beauty in the world, and how could beauty exist in an intrinsically evil place? Further, the Manichean view on the nature of reality is that existence is comprised of two equal and opposed realms, one that is the dominion of a wholly good god and one that is the dominion of a wholly evil god. Hence Manicheism is a polytheistic religion, while Christianity is uncompromising in its monotheistic belief, for there is one and only one god in Christianity. Manichean polytheism cannot be reconciled to Christian monotheism.

The Christian god is eternal and responsible for all creation, and how then could God create another god of coequal power? This cannot be possible, as the existence of such a being negates the omnipotence of the Christian god, and a god that is not omnipotent is not the Christian god. Augustine emphasized the inconsistencies of the Manichean view, for he asserted that if God is restricted in his realm of influence, and rules a kingdom that borders a kingdom of darkness, then God necessarily is imperfect, and imperfection is not an attribute of God. Further, per Augustine, how may it be that what is entirely spiritual may border what is entirely material?  

Augustine was a devotee of Manicheism for a number of years for several reasons, perhaps the foremost of which was his judgement that Manicheism seemed to solve the puzzle of how the world can be so saturated with evil, yet contain so much good as well. Can an omnipotent, supposedly good god be responsible for having created, and allowing to continue, so much evil causing so much suffering? What is to explain the fact that good people suffer great evil, apparently through no reason but evil luck, and bad people often are blessed with all the good things life can offer, not only suffering no punishing consequences for their transgressions but being rewarded for them? Why would a categorically good god with unlimited power allow the most innocent of human beings to be the victims of the worst evil, and suffer such grievous harm?

As strenuous and as consistent as any parent might be in instilling in a child the lesson that bad actions have bad consequences and good behavior is rewarded, by no later than adolescence most individuals of average mindfulness discern an absence of a correlation between one’s actions and one’s fortunes, and indeed, witness that often it is the case that transgression is rewarded, and goodness is punished, or at least is not the cause of earthly flourishing. By adulthood, few cling to the belief that the world is a just place wherein everyone receives according to merit, and this evident scarcity of justice in the world requires, in the judgment of many minds, compensation and consolation in the next, for the thought that just deserts is not an ultimate outcome offends deeply our sense of fairness, and the thought that the wicked prosper then pass into oblivion is intolerable to anyone who believes that justice must exist somewhere if the human experience is something more than that of a naked ape. As the primatologist Frans de Waal has revealed, even chimps possess a sense of fairness, and are quite able and willing to punish those who violate social rules, though chimps may punish only those that steal food from them personally, and do not engage in third-party punishment. We like to think we are far more humane and evolved than chimps, and indeed we can be, yet the lines from Richard III are enduring for a reason, for when Anne declares “No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity,” and Richard retorts “But I know none, and therefore am no beast,” Shakespeare is revealing, as ever, an obscured truth of human nature and the human condition.

Perhaps the starkest example of this unfortunate truth is presented in the testimonies of survivors of the death camps of Nazi Germany, for therein these harrowed souls speak the searing truth that the best amongst them died in the camps, that it was necessary in so desperate and degraded a condition that if one were to survive then one had to abandon moral compunctions and steal and lie and even plot that another would occupy one’s assigned stead when that placement meant certain death. In the camps, cunning not goodness correlated to survival, and a refusal to forsake moral norms reduced one’s chances to slight of ever seeing that day of liberation.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus formulated concisely and enduringly the conundrum of the coexistence of a good god and pervasive evil in what has become known as Epicurus’s Trilemma, sometimes presented as Epicurus’s Quadrilemma. In contemporary philosophy, the dilemma is known as LPE (the logical problem of evil). As a trilemma, the LPE can be formulated thusly: If God is incapable of preventing evil, then God is not omnipotent. If God is capable of preventing evil but chooses not to, then God is not all-good. If God is capable of preventing evil and is willing to prevent evil, then why does evil exist? As a quadrilemma, the addition is thus: by what justification is a being unable or unwilling to prevent evil called God?

Refutation of the LPE commonly involves the matter of free will, with proponents of this view suggesting that God created human beings with free will, and thus human are free to act or to not act according to desires and abilities, and were God to compel specific acts or to prevent others, then God would be denying humans their free will. Hence the argument is that God can be omnipotent and willing to prevent evil and yet not do so, for God cannot both prevent evil and allow human free will, and God’s inability to do so is not a matter of lacking omnipotence but of logical and definitional contradiction, for free will means the freedom to act or not act, and divine coercion negates free will.

The arguments against Epicurus’s dilemma of course can be, and often are, made more complex and nuanced than suggested in the prior paragraph, but regardless of how fine-grained or fine-tuned, the essence of such refutations is an incompatibility between human free will and divine intervention.

Though the argument from free will seems plausible and reasonable and even persuasive initially, and though the argument can be structured such that there is no logical contradiction established in postulating the co-existence of an omnipotent god and pervasive evil, on closer examination the argument is revealed as facile and not satisfactory to Epicurus’s dilemma.

Throughout human history, millions of children are born into lives of desperate misery from which they cannot escape, knowing despair and suffering until their end. Many such unfortunate souls never achieve that age that any reasonable person would accept as the minimal age necessary for a child to have developed sufficient awareness and wherewithal for concepts of free will and consequences flowing from acts freely chosen to make any sense at all. It can be countered that children suffer as no consequence of blameworthiness on their part, all the blame attributable to adults and their freely-selected choices, but this explanation for suffering is offensive and even odious to many people, for justice is outraged that the innocent should suffer for the actions of the guilty. And what of those born with congenital afflictions that ensure constant misery and early demise? In what reasonable sense are those predestined to suffer possessed of free will? Can we be satisfied with the explanation that the suffering of such unfortunate beings is an unavoidable consequence of and a necessary condition for the existence of free will, at least until science advances sufficiently that defects in nature are erased by human ingenuity? These questions deserve a satisfactory and a humane response. And what is the justification for the immeasurable evil of a child torn terrifyingly from the safety of family to be tortured without mercy then murdered in the most pitiless way, that child through no action of his own suffering a level of fear and pain we dare not imagine? That the human monster is exercising his free will, and that this is the best of all possible worlds? Pangloss is a derisible fiction, yes, but he would not be that if he did not speak a truth of some kind.

If the possibility for the existence of a free will entails unqualified exposure to suffering of every sort for the human being, this answer to the problem of evil addresses not the matter of the vast suffering endured by sentient creatures not possessed of free will. Would a wholly good and omnipotent god will that great numbers of sentient creatures be ravaged and tormented by parasites, or will that one creature should consume alive another, indifferent to the screams of agony as it does so? An organism hatches inside another living organism, to devour its host alive, from the inside – what could be the intent of an omnipotent god that created the circumstances for such nightmares, for such cruelty? Ah, nightmares and cruelty are human characterizations, having no applicability outside of human concerns – is that the right answer? Packs of predators prey on the youngest and most vulnerable, their victim surely suffering unspeakable terrors, its pains of no concern to its merciless assailants. One may answer that the concept of evil is a human construct nonexistent in the natural world, but a sensibility must be indurate indeed to witness such suffering and not see cruelty and wonder if an omnipotent god wills such acts, or could but does not prevent their occurrence.
Manicheism seems to offer a satisfactory answer to the problem of evil and injustice abundant in the world, even inherent in the world as structured, for an appeal to free will is less intuitive than the view that the world is bifurcated, ruled in equal measure by a good god and an evil god, and thus even though the Church condemned Manicheism as a heresy, doing so sometime after Augustine’s death but relying on Augustine’s writings as justification, the Manichean view of the world as divided equally, with evil as prevalent and as strong as good, corresponds to how many if not most people perceive and experience reality. Manicheism therefore endures if not in name in practice, however unrecognized as such, for Manicheism articulates fundamental human perceptions of how reality is structured. It is worthy of note that as a religion actively practiced, adherents to Manicheism are present in China today.

Augustine in his eventual dissatisfaction with and attack against Manicheism understood that one must accept, if Manicheism is correct, that we inhabit a polytheistic world and there is not one omnipotent god, a view, as discussed, wholly incongruent with the Christian worldview, or one must accept that god created an evil god, for if God is omnipotent and created all, and if there exists an evil supernatural being, then God is responsible for the existence of this being. If the latter is the case, then the problem of evil remains, for why would God create a being whose nature is absolutely evil? Hence for Augustine, Manicheism does not, contrary to what he had believed earlier, solve the problem of the coexistence of evil and a god that is omnipotent and benevolent, for attributing evil to the existence of another god, when God is the ultimate force in the universe, leaves unsolved the puzzle of why God wills that there should be evil in the world, which must be the case if he created that which is the source of evil. And if God did not create this evil being, then that being was always coexistent with God, and therefore God is not omnipotent.

Further, Augustine believed that the existence of evil equipotent to good absolves humankind of moral responsibility, for if there exists an evil god or evil force that can equally to God exert its will, then whenever one transgresses, all one need say, and persuasively so, is that “the devil made me do it,” for if one is equally impotent to a malevolent supernatural presence as one is to a benevolent one, the human will as nothing against the will of either, then moral responsibility is removed through an exculpatory calling forth and surrender to moral fatalism, for any egregious act can be deemed the consequence of being under the sway of external forces against which one is helpless.

The Manichean view that reality is divided into darkness and light, good and evil, with evil able to exert a power and an influence no less than that of good was the primary initial appeal of Manicheism to the young Augustine, for then Augustine could conceptualize his own being as a divided one, with that higher aspect of himself thereby absolved of moral responsibility for the libertine state of his lower being by attributing his continuation of carnal indulgences to the irresistible influence of the human body embedded in a realm ruled by an evil god. Through Manicheism Augustine was satisfied, for a time, that within one being the passions of flesh engrossing a body inhabiting an inherently corrupt material world can be reconciled with an essential divine spark in that being, and that through knowledge the obfuscation of the true self that is the consequence of the comingling of the material and the spiritual will be made evident, and thereby the soul will be enabled, through intelligence (nous) to perceive truth and to then transcend earthly bonds. Here we find the origin and the justification for Augustine’s famous appeal “Oh please God, make be chaste but not just yet!”

This view, that reality is comprised of both good and evil, and equally so, is a view prevalent today, and the conceptualization of the individual being as comprised of a material aspect and a spiritual aspect, endures. The Manichean view that the material world is inherently evil is not so palatable, for many people do see much beauty and great good in the world, and are appreciative of that beauty and what good prevails, yet this recognition of the good and the beautiful does not blind sensible people to the truth that suffering is pervasive, if not overwhelming, and seeming an inherent, ineradicable realty of existence. And truly, no few despairing souls do fall into abject despair, and then can perceive nothing but evil rampant and triumphant.

That a thoughtful mind of Augustine’s intellectual caliber could embrace Manicheism for several years is testimony to the intuitive and the explanatory power of the Manichean view. The complex mythology of Manicheism is not discussed here, for what is most significant and enduring is the Manichean metaphysic, and its conceiving of reality as divided equally into evil and good, for this metaphysical conception is congruent with how so many people perceive the world, a perception that informs, and is shaped by, their lived experience. In rejecting Manicheism, Augustine needed to explain and to justify just how it is that God is benevolent and all-powerful, and yet evil exists. Did God create evil, and does God allow and sustain evil, as seems He must, given its prevalence?

Augustine finally rejected the Manichean view of an inherently evil world as being unbiblical, doing so through Genesis 1:31, wherein “God saw every thing that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” God, then, did not create evil, and whereas there is evil in the world though at the beginning all that God created was good, then it must be the case that evil somehow entered into and flourished in the world after the creation, and therefore a defensible explanation must exist for why God is not responsible for evil. For Augustine, evil is explained as privatio boni, that is, as the privation of good. In this view, evil is not a thing itself, is not anything of substance, but rather, evil is the absence of good. Augustine offers the analogy of illness and health, for what is illness but the absence of health? In the everyday world, what is darkness but the absence of light? We are not well to the extent that our health is diminished, we are in darkness to the degree light is lacking, and we manifest evil proportionate to our failure to maximize the good.

The privation theory of evil did not originate with Augustine, and indeed goes back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle, but Augustine, along with Thomas Aquinas, is understood as having crafted the privation theory as it is most prevalently presented today. Under this view, evil is not anything that exists as a separate, identifiable thing, and evil was not caused to exist by God will at the creation of all things, but came after, as a consequence of human beings having free will, and choosing by their free will actions that are a turning away from the good, are other than what God desires. With this view, evil cannot exist except that humans choose to sin, and by doing so cause a privation of the good. For example, God intends selfless, solicitous relations amongst humans, and when an individual treats another as faultlessly as goodness requires and God desires, then evil is nonexistent, but the moment one treats another in any manner that diminishes the totality of goodness available in the relation, then evil is manifested, for evil is not a separate thing unto itself, but exists commensurate with the degree to which, by a willful act, good is denied. If in every situation the utmost potential for good present in that situation is reaped, then evil cannot enter the world.

The privation of evil explanation is appealing in its assurance that all existence is good, and evil therefore exists only to the extent that there is a privation of good, for if privation is the source of evil, then evil is initiated by human volition and not by God’s intent. Privation of good results from human agency, and therefore the existence of evil is not what God wills but is the creation of humans acting selfishly, and by free will manifesting evil through willful deprivation of the full allotment of the good. Attribution of the existence of evil to human free will rather than to God’s intent addresses moral evil, but not natural evil, this latter consisting of the suffering caused by such scourges as disease and natural disasters. An explanatory consensus is lacking on precisely how Augustine understood and explained natural evil, with one view being that Augustine believed that the fall of Adam corrupted not just the human condition but the natural world as well, thereby introducing suffering into an erstwhile paradisical existence for all creation. Another view holds that Augustine simply did not judge occurrences in the natural world as characterizable or classifiable as evil at all, that the world is as it is necessarily, for the world is a contingent place wherein decay and suffering and loss are inherent aspects of an existence that is other than divine.

Evil as the privation of good places the blame for evil on human free will, and hence rejects the Manichean view of evil as a distinct entity in the world, but for the reasons discussed, attributing all the evil in the world to free will engenders serious difficulties with reconciling this view with a omnipotent and benevolent deity, and the Manichean view of evil as a real presence in the world and not merely the manifestation of a deprivation of good aligns more fully with how the human sensibility experiences and interprets the world. We experience evil as active, not as a privation of good. How inadequate an answer it seems when confronted with instances of great suffering and cruelty, such as when a vile assailant tortures and murders the most innocent of beings, preying on the young and doing so without a scintilla of pity or remorse, or when genocide brings forth unimaginable, incalculable misery and suffering, to represent these acts as the manifestation of a failure to maximize the good. And how should the vast suffering in the non-human world be explained, that Adam’s fall is the cause? Why should non-human, sentient beings suffer for human transgressions? And if it is the case that their suffering, or the suffering caused by disease and natural disasters and the like, are not the consequence of human action but are simply the unavoidable realities of a world that is contingent, is it not legitimate to inquire if this world is the best of all possible worlds? Could it not be but otherwise?
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The thought and the writings of Augustine were adopted by the Church as providing the canonical justifications for declaring Pelagianism and Manicheism heresies, but as explored here, the ideas and the views presented in Pelagianism and in Manicheism are germane not merely to religious concerns and understandings, but are encompassing in scope, applicable to the secular and the nonsecular equally, for they express through particular conceptualizations what are primary constituents and tendencies of human cognition and sensibility, for we do perceive reality as composed of contrasts, good and evil being one of them, with evil real and active and not satisfactorily explainable as an absence of good, and we do feel it unjust that any be condemned at birth, judged tainted prior to any self-willed action, corrupted by the corruption of a forebear. Yes it is true that the terms Pelagianism and Manicheism are obscure to most folks today, and indeed unrecognizable and undefinable by most, but the essential content of both remains vital, for Pelagian and Manichean beliefs illuminate and articulate human proclivities, and are not dismissible as mere heresies of historical interest and no more. Pelagianism and Manicheism give expression to profound aspects of human nature, and how humans perceive reality and function in the world, and the totality of all religious doctrine, however well argued, is not able to overcome these truths.