Eighty-three Different Questions : a new translation.

6. On Evil

QUESTIONS 5-6 39 5. CAN AN ANIMAL WITHOUT REASON BE HAPPY? An animal which lacks reason lacks knowledge. But no animal which lacks knowledge can be happy. It therefore does not belong to animals lacking reason to be happy. 1 6. ON EVIL Everything which is, is either corporeal or incorporeal. The corporeal is embraced by sensible form,l and the incorporeal , by intelligible form. Accordingly everything which exists is not without some form. But where there is form there necessarily is measure,2 and measure is something good. Absolute evil, therefore, has no measure, for it lacks all good whatever. It thus does not exist, for it is embraced by no form, and the whole meaning of evil is derived from the privation of form. It does not follow from this that animals are therefore unhappy. Rather, Augustine's point is.that both happiness and unhappiness are possible only for rational beings, whereas nonrational beings are incapable of such states. The wordform translates the Latin term speci'es. For this translation and a study of the term species, see the extremely useful article ofW. Roche, "Measure, Number, and Weight in Saint Augustine," The New Scholasticism, 15 (1941), 350-76. Also, see below, Q. 46.2, for St. Augustine's own remarks on this term. 2 The word measure translates the Latin term modus, an Augustinian notion difficult to encompass in an equivalent English word. Roche, p. 353, remarks: "we may regard 'modus' on the side of the creature as equivalent to the principle of existence or subsistence of things, which is set off from their species and order as a separate principle. Or 'modus' may be regarded as qualitative to denote intrinsic limitation in virtue of which a being is determined to a form. This notion of 'modus' is equivalent to capacity for determination to a form, or it may be conceived as arising out of the comparison of forms, since every form as such is that which it is, and is distinct from all others." ...