Lecture Two: Evil: Aesthetic and Privative

Transcription

1 Lecture Two: Evil: Aesthetic and Privative The Augustinian Synthesis 1

2 St. Augustine ( CE) Augustine was born in 354 CE in Thagaste in what is now Algeria, and was educated in Thagaste, Madauros, and Carthage. Sometime around 370 he began a 16-year monogamous relationship with the mother of his son, Adeodatus (b. 372). He subsequently taught rhetoric in Thagaste and Carthage, and in 383 moved to Rome, where he found the soughtafter academically superior students combined with the same morally disappointing reluctance to pay their lecture fees, which led him apply for a professorship in Milan. There he sought an arranged marriage and separated from his long-time companion, but abruptly resigned his professorship in 386 claiming ill health, renounced his personal ambitions, and was baptized by Bishop Ambrose on Easter Sunday, 387. Thereafter he returned to north Africa where he spent the rest of his career as a priest, bishop and theologian. 2

3 Augustine and philosophy By his own account, he was a precocious and able student, much enamored of the Latin classics Virgil in particular. But at age nineteen, he happened upon Cicero's Hortensius (now lost except for fragments) and found himself suddenly imbued with a passion for philosophy. This was not for philosophy as often understood today i.e. an academic, largely argument-oriented conceptual discipline but rather as the Hellenistic pursuit of a wisdom that transcended and blurred the boundaries of what are now viewed as the separate spheres of philosophy, religion, and psychology. 3

4 Augustine and the problem of evil In particular, philosophy for Augustine was centered on what is sometimes misleadingly referred to as the problem of evil, including the questions of: 1. the nature of evil 2. where evil comes from 3. the reconciliation of two things: apparently unjustifiable suffering the goodness, benevolence, and omnipotence of God This problem of evil was not the sort of analytic, largely logical problem of theodicy that later came to preoccupy philosophers of religion. For Augustine, it was of a problem of a more general and visceral sort, ie., of concern with the issue of how to make sense of and live within a world that seemed so adversarial and fraught with danger, a world in which so much of what matters most to us is so easily lost. 4

5 The influence of Manichaeism In this sense, the wisdom that Augustine sought was a common denominator uniting: the conflicting views of the Hellenistic philosophical sects (e.g., the Epicureans, Stoics, Skeptics, and Neoplatonists) Christians of varying degrees of orthodoxy, including very unorthodox gnostic sects such as the Manicheans The Manicheans were followers of a Persian prophet named Mani (c CE), who insisted that good and evil, light and darkness, were decidedly real, constituent elements of the universe, at war with one another. 5

6 The influence of Manichaeism The Manicheans proposed a powerful, if somewhat mythical and philosophically awkward explanation of the problem of evil: there is a perpetual struggle between coeternal principles of Light and Darkness (good and evil, respectively) our souls are particles of Light which have become trapped in the Darkness of the physical world by means of sufficient insight and a sufficiently ascetic life, one could eventually, over the course of several lives, come to liberate the Light within from the surrounding Darkness by this means, one rejoins the larger Light of which the soul is but a fragmented and isolated part 6

7 Augustine s disenchantment with Manichaeism As he tells us in the Confessions, Augustine spent nine years as an auditor among the Manicheans. When he later wrote about this experience, he focused on three aspects of the faith: their implicit materialism (a widespread feature of Hellenistic thought, the Neoplatonists being a notable exception) their substantive dualism whereby Darkness, and hence, evil, is granted a co-eternal, substantial existence opposed to the Light their identification of the human soul as a fragmented particle of the Light This latter identification, he observed, not only serves to render the human soul divine, thereby obliterating the crucial distinction between creator and creature, but it also raises doubts about the extent to which the individual human soul can be held responsible for morally bad actions, responsibility instead being attributed to the body in which the soul (itself quasi material) is trapped. 7

8 The influence of Neo-Platonism But this nine-year episode was clearly ended in Milan in 384, when Augustine encountered some (unnamed) books of the Platonists and his philosophical outlook changed dramatically. There has been controversy regarding just which books of the Platonists Augustine encountered, but we know from his own account that they were translated by Marius Victorinus, and there is widespread agreement that they were texts by Plotinus and Porphyry, although there is again controversy regarding how much influence is to be attributed to each. These uncertainties notwithstanding, Augustine himself makes it clear that it was his encounter with the the books of the Platonists that made it possible for him to view both the Church and its scriptural tradition as having an intellectually satisfying and, indeed, resourceful content. 8

9 Plotinus on the nature of God For Plotinus, God is the source of all existence, of all oppositions and differences, of mind and body, form and matter; but God is himself devoid of all plurality and diversity, and absolutely one. God is thus the One who, in his infinity, contains everything he is the first, causeless cause from which everything is produced, from which everything emanates; for plurality always presupposes unity, and unity is thus prior to all being and beyond all being. God is such that everything we might say about him merely limits and thus distorts him e.g., we cannot attribute beauty, goodness, though or will to him, for such attributes are limitations and thus imperfections. 9

10 Plotinus on the nature of God But if we cannot say what God is, at least we can say what God is not: God is not being, for being is thinkable, and what is thinkable implies subject and object, and is therefore a limitation. God is not beauty, truth, goodness, consciousness, or will, for all of these things depend on him, and thus God is higher. God cannot be conceived as thinking, because this implies a thinker and a thought, and even a merely self-conscious being who merely thinks himself divides into subject and object. And finally, while the world proceeds from God, He did not create the world, for creation implies consciousness and will and thus, again, a limitation. 10

11 Neo-Platonism: Emanation and Transcendence Instead of being God s creation, therefore, the world for Plotinus was an emanation from God i.e., the inevitable overflow of his infinite power or actuality; in other words, God the cause does not pass over into, or lose itself in, its effect, and the effect does not limit the cause. This downward emanation is from the perfect to the imperfect e.g., the farther we are from the sun (the source of all light), the nearer we are to darkness (matter), and the farther we go down in the scale of being, the greater the imperfection, plurality, change, and separation. 11

12 Neo-Platonism: Emanation and Transcendence Every later stage is the necessary effect of the preceding one i.e., its copy, shadow, accident; but every later stage also strives to return to its source, and strives to return to this higher existence, and it is in this constant striving to return that it finds its purpose or goal. Evil, of course, is the dead end of this emanative process i.e., it is a lack, a privation, a non-entity, das Nichtige. As such, it reflects some extremely powerful psychological facts above all the fear of meaninglessness and of death. 12

13 Plato and the principle of plenitude Plotinus theory of emanation, as well as the somewhat different argument Augustine would draw from it, were both taken from Plato s Timaeus, which distinguished between: the world of pure, eternal ideas and the world of temporal, sensible things and then asked why the latter should exist at all. The answer was that being self-sufficient beyond any possibility of enhancement or diminution the former could not be envious of anything not itself, and its reality could be no impediment to the reality (in their own way) of beings other than itself. In fact, unless the Good was in some way productive of such beings, it would lack a positive element of perfection, being thus less complete than its own definition implied. 13

14 Plato and the principle of plenitude How many kinds of temporal and imperfect beings must this world contain? Plato s answer was all possible kinds. Briefly, the best soul (Demiurge) could begrudge existence to nothing that could conceivably possess existence, and also desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. All things here meant nothing less than the sensible counterparts of each of the Ideas. Because the created universe is an exhaustive replica of the World of Ideas, Plato argued that there can be only one creation, after which there is nothing left over in the model from which a second world might be fashioned. 14

15 Plato and the principle of plenitude But creation is too strong a word here, for a realm of dull, irrational and recalcitrant matter already existed. Guided by the idea of the Good, therefore, the Demiurge fashioned the world of things after the pattern of the world of ideas; but in doing so, the Demiurge was always limited and constrained by the principle of matter. Given the constraints of matter, that world remained and remains imperfect. Whatever is good, rational, and purposeful in this world is due to reason. Whatever is evil, irrational, and purposeless is ultimately traceable to matter. 15

16 Plato and the divisions of the human soul In the Phaedrus, Plato extended this metaphysical argument to a theory of the human soul, using a famous metaphor known as the myth of the charioteer. The chariot is driven by two horses, guided by a charioteer: the dark horse represents human appetites and desires the white horse stands for the spirited element of anger, pride, and self-assertion the charioteer himself, reins in hand, refers to the rational element, which affords direction and control to the other two elements. But the dark horse is particularly disruptive, dragging the chariot down from its true place in the heavens to the earth, breaking its wings and becoming entrapped in material bodies. Only through love (and after several thousand years and many reincarnations) does the soul re-grow its wings, rising again to its true place among the stars. 16

17 Augustine s Christian naturalism For Augustine as for Plotinus God is the ultimate of being and goodness. But for Augustine, there is no neo-platonic descent from the goodness of pure being to the evil of matter. On the contrary, the whole creation, including the material world, is good as it comes from the hand of God. Some goods are greater, of course, and some lesser; but, according to the principle of plenitude, it is good that there are beings of all kinds, forming a universe of wonderful complexity that reflects the Creator s goodness from many angles and in every possible shape and color. So Augustine rejects the anti-materialism of all his predecessors, laying the foundations for a Christian naturalism that rejoices in this world. 17

18 Two accounts of evil Augustine s first serious attempt to grapple with the problem of evil lies in the eleventh book of the City of God, whose purpose was to explain the Christian doctrine of Creation. But if Creation is effortlessly brought into being by a wholly good and omnipotent Creator, his readers could (and did) ask, what about the presence of evil? Augustine provided two answers, intending to make the presence of evil at least barely tolerable. 18

19 The aesthetic argument Augustine s first serious attempt to grapple with the problem of evil is in the eleventh book of the City of God, whose purpose is to explain the Christian doctrine of Creation. If Creation was effortlessly brought into being by a wholly good and omnipotent Creator, his readers could (and did) ask, what about the presence of evil? Augustine provides two answers, meant to make the presence of evil barely tolerable. 19

20 The aesthetic argument Evil amplifies the beauty and glory of Creation. The beauty of the universe is magnified by contrarieties. All evil is a counterpoint to good, setting off the glory of the Lord. Much of what we judge to be noble is recognizable because it struggles against evil. So perhaps evil is necessary for us to see the good and for its true goodness to be revealed. This aesthetic defense, however, presented Augustine with two problems. 20

21 The aesthetic argument: two difficulties First, It seems reasonable to say that God would never create wickedness unless God could put the wickedness to good use. Yet this idea involves God in directly using evil from the start. Second, Augustine seems to suggest that evil is a kind of counterpoint to good implies a latent dualism in Augustine s thought. These difficulties and especially the second troubled Augustine, for he was a vigorous non-dualist. 21

22 Evil as the privation of the good As we have seen, Book 11 of The City of God was thus committed to an account of Augustine provides his readers with an explication of the meaning of God s existence as Creator. Now, in Book 12, having thus taken account of the Creation, one can only ask: How is evil even possible? The answer lies in Augustine so-called privative theory of evil.. 22

23 Evil as the privation of the good He unpacks his answer through a discussion of the angelic fall because the fall of the angels is a way to study the origin of evil in almost laboratory conditions. Angelic agency is not immured in the muck of the material world; the less our view is clouded by the dirt of materiality in which the roots of our agency are anchored, the more clearly we see its roots. According to Augustine, evil is embedded within a framework of goodness. The existence of evil is intelligible only within God s larger framework of Creation: To have being is the singular characteristic of goodness. Therefore, when we say something is evil, we mean ultimately that the thing tends toward non-being, which is contrary to God. 23

24 Evil as the privation of the good The good angels accepted God s gift of creating them in gratitude, while the bad angels resented the conditions of the gift, and thereby resented their being itself. Thus the demons are, for Augustine, fundamentally fallen angels and therefore good. Evil is a vacuity where something should be. The evil will is opposed to both God and its own nature, and we can only properly talk about a nature being evil as a way of its testifying to the good form that it should have retained. We recognize evil only by contrast to good, and by recognizing fault as fault, we necessarily praise what the nature as created was meant to be. 24

25 Evil as the privation of the good Evil is also inescapably secondary because it is a failed nothing. Its nihilism always carries with it the pathos of a nothing that should have been a something or a somebody. The secondariness of evil is also ironic, because its whole self-understanding as rebellion is meant to express a longing for autonomy, for separation from God, and that is the one thing it can never achieve. Augustine is saying that for things to be less good than they ought to be, they must be able to vary in the degree to which they fulfill their cosmic destinies. This is a far cry from saying that creation is necessarily sinful. In this account, sin is the failure of creation to live up to the ideals that God has set for it. 25

26 Evil as the privation of the good Saint John s statement that the devil did not stand fast in the truth means, for Augustine, that wickedness is not natural. He says, The choice of evil is an impressive proof that the nature is good, because the chooser must choose evil as an act of rebellion against a context of absolute goodness. Rebellious agency is not an excess of action but a failure to follow through. God creates angels with a good will; the bad angels simply fail to accept all the goodness that God offers. This choice is actually a dissent. Thus devil is not evil by nature; by the choice or exercise of its own volitional existence, it fails to be good. For Augustine the devil sins from the beginning means that despite not being a part of Creation, evil is relentless and comprehensive. Nothing innocent remains in the rebellious soul. Furthermore, once begun, evil will never stop by itself. The devil is petulantly stubborn. 26

27 Evil as the privation of the good In Augustinian terms, evil is a mode of using otherwise good realities. The evil does not necessarily infect the instrument; the key is the use to which we put the instrument. Against what he takes to be Origen s argument, that selfhood itself and thus otherness from God is the metaphysically sufficient reality that constitutes evil, Augustine says the decision to turn to the self, not the self in itself, is the source of evil. One way of getting at the core explanation of evil is to ask what causes evil. To ask this question is to seek the cause of the very first evil will, the first fault of the fallen angels. Augustine concludes that the evil act had no actual material point. An end was in sight, the perverse end of radical autonomous separation from God, but this end cannot be understood except as derivative from the aim to reject the good that God had given. And what caused that rejecting aim to develop? What caused Satan, when offered life, to shrug? There is no cause. There is no efficient causality in this case, Augustine says, only a deficient causality. Origen (184/5 253/4) 27

28 The absurdity of evil For many other early Christian and pagan thinkers, such as the Christian Origen, evil is contained within cyclical structures that constrain it and make it an integral part of a larger system, not a radical rupture in Creation. Irenaeus proposed that evil was a necessary stage of painful separation from a loving God. In such accounts evil is part of a larger system that will be wholly reconciled back to God, only to begin the whole cycle of creation, fall, redemption, restoration, and return, ad infinitum. For Augustine, endless cycles or necessity for evil or separation fails to sustain the distinctiveness of good and evil and undercuts creatures attachment to the final moment of presumably consummated union in God. Such a view makes history both superficially frivolous and relentlessly despairing: Not only does nothing really matter, but what matters is the nothing the absent thing that is yet to come but never arrives, for the arrival of each new event simply pushes the thing yet to come one step into the future. The idea of perfect reconciliation is bought at the price of infinite indeterminacy. 28

29 The absurdity of evil Augustine struggles mightily against any veneer of dualism, either between God and some other malevolent force (as in Manicheism) or within God or God s plan, as in Origen. Augustine s account tries very hard to insist that God is wholly good and absolutely sovereign, and yet that evil is truly evil. Augustine feels compelled to affirm that evil is absurd, an inexplicable reality. For him the absurdity of evil is not an implication of his account that must be accepted, but one of its findings that should be expounded. For him, the emphasis on the absurdity of evil is not a limitation, but one of its central achievements. We are invited to see with new eyes not as fallen creatures for whom sin and evil are all-too-explicable [but] as God does, the truly absurd and pathetic nature of Creation s own revolt against the loving Creator who gave it being in the first place. 29

30 The fall of the rebel angels Recalling Augustine s aesthetic defense of evil in book 11 as a counterpoint to goodness, one might say that the rebel angels exist to show the full range of what creatures can do with the gifts God has given them. Thus God enables Satan and the rebellious angels to use their agency even so far as to try to refuse that agency by attempting to refuse their being altogether. In this way the whole account of the fall of the rebel angels that Augustine offers here, culminating in his depiction of their deficient causality, is not seen as a flaw in his overall account, but a positive and pedagogically fruitful explication of the actual nature of evil. 30

31 Augustine on evil: Questions Book 12 is about seeing evil as truly evil, to be befuddled by it, to see it as in itself annihilating of physical realities like one s own or other peoples lives and of rationality and intelligibility at all. Still, we may wonder whether some questions remain unanswered or not answered sufficientl Is the overall privationist account of evil adequate? Is Augustine trying to confuse us with his theodicy? Is the idea of evil s ex nihilo entrance into reality as absurd truly accurate? Behind all these questions is a basic existential one: Is this account of evil workable? We have a clue to how Augustine will answer that by the end of book 12, for Adam has come on the scene. Adam is not just one human; he is, in a way, all humans; all humanity s destiny is contained in his flesh. In Augustine s mind, what happens to Adam has consequences for the rest of the species. 31