Free Will, Evil, and Saint Augustine

Evil was “a problem deeply troubling” to Augustine.¹ This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows something about Augustine. Unlike Plato, who held that the purpose of knowledge is the contemplation of Eternal Ideas, Augustine held that one of the primary reasons why we should actively pursue knowledge in this life is to make sense of our experience of this world. Our experience of this world includes the experience of evil. This experience is deeply troubling to us all.²

The trouble that we have with evil is not just emotional. Evil does not just horrify us, or shock us, although it certainly does and should do both of these things. Being impassive to evil seems itself to be evil. Neither the Ottoman soldier—who could coldly report detailed accounts of the Armenian death marches to the Ottoman Minister of the Interior—nor the Nazi officer—who could impassively watch the countless horrors that were being inflicted upon the victims of the Third Reich—were what we would readily call good people. Pontius Pilate is no one’s hero.

Nor does evil just cause us to feel pain when we ourselves are its victims, although again, it most certainly does and should do so. A person who does not suffer from that evil to which he is subjected is either inhuman or in denial, super-human or insane. The abused abductee who does not acknowledge that he is being abused by his abductors, and who does not feel the pain that should result from that abuse, suffers from what psychologists consider to be a form of localized insanity: the Stockholm syndrome or some variant thereof.³ Repressing pain is positively harmful. It too seems to be evil.⁴

Evil is also, and perhaps even primarily, intellectually troubling. As the very shock that we feel when we witness it (or are subjected to it) indicates, evil makes no intellectual sense to us.⁵ Does murdering a million and a half Armenians really make intellectual sense? The Armenian Genocide took place in 1915, during World War I. At that time, the Ottoman Empire, which had entered the war in order to maintain its territorial integrity, was fighting a three front battle against the Russians to the north, the English to the south, and the French to the west. Did it really make sense for the leaders of that empire not just to commit troops that could have been used on those fronts, rather than massacring its own citizens? Did it really make sense for the leaders of that empire also to kill able bodied male citizens who would have fought on those fronts? Obviously not. In retrospect, it is positively insane. So too in general is evil.

It is for all of these reasons that evil has haunted philosophers for over two thousand years. Every great thinker from Plato to Aquinas, from Ockham to Kant grappled with evil. The problem has not gone away. Hanna Arendt claimed that after the Holocaust evil would be the most significant of all philosophical problems. “The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe,”⁶ she claimed. In truth, evil has always been the great problem.

There is a lot to be said about evil. Two thousand four hundred years of philosophical inquiry make for a massive amount of thought; untold numbers of theories and debates, sub-problems and disagreement. In their discussions of evil, philosophers have complained about the difficulty of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of a good and omnipotent God. Some have claimed that evil is proof positive of the non-existence of God. Some have claimed that evil is proof positive of the essential wickedness of human beings. Some have claimed that evil is proof positive of the lack of any sort of finality in the universe. Some have claimed that evil is proof positive of the absurdity of human understanding. In this essay I want, with the help of Augustine, to concentrate on the root of that cluster of problems that come under the...