Augustine of Hippo

Background

Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo Regius in Roman North Africa, is the most influential theologian of the Western church. A former Manichee who had held that evil required a rival first principle, he converted in 386 and spent four decades producing the works that fixed the Western vocabulary for the Trinity, evil, grace, and history. The Confessions opens with his signature theme — "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee" (Augustine, Confessions I.1) — and his mature style is dialectical throughout: naming the strongest construals of the opposing view before answering them (Augustine, De Trin. I.1).

Positions held in this wiki

• The Logical Problem of Evil — the classical theodicy: evil is not a substance but a privation of good; the evil will has a cause "not efficient, but deficient," so that seeking its efficient cause is "as if some one sought to see darkness, or hear silence" (Augustine, City of God XII.7).
• The Evidential Problem of Evil — root of the greater-good tradition: God "would never permit the existence of anything evil among His works, if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil. For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?" (Augustine, Enchiridion ch. 11).
• Tawhid vs Trinity — De Trinitate supplies the Western psychological-analogy model and the grammar of one substance in three persons.
• Mormon Christology vs Nicene Orthodoxy — his creator/creature dilemma from John 1:3 ("all substance that is not God is creature; and all that is not creature is God," De Trin. I.6, as deployed in the article) and his critique of "those who frame their thoughts of God according to things corporeal" (Augustine, De Trin. I.1) do the anti-corporealist work against LDS theology.

Key works in our corpus

• Confessions — in corpus (Pusey translation). Autobiography-as-theology; Books XI–XIII treat time and creation.
• The City of God — in corpus (Dods translation). Books XI–XII carry the fall-of-the-angels analysis of evil, including the deficient-cause doctrine (XII.6–8) and history as "an exquisite poem set off with antitheses" (XI.18).
• On the Trinity — in corpus in full. (An earlier stub note that this file was chrome-only is obsolete.)
• Enchiridion — in corpus. The compact statement of privation and greater-good (chs. 10–13, 27, 96).
• De Genesi ad Litteram — not in corpus; needed for the non-literal-days hermeneutic invoked in Origin of the Universe.

Principal critics

• J. L. Mackie — the logical argument from evil is aimed squarely at the Augustinian claims that omnipotence and perfect goodness are compatible with permitted evil (The Logical Problem of Evil).
• David Hume — the Dialogues' Epicurean triad is the modern restatement of the problem Augustine answered with privation and free defection.
• Adolf von Harnack — treats the dogmatic edifice Augustine perfected as development away from the gospel.

See also

• Athanasius of Alexandria — the Eastern architect of the Nicene faith Augustine received.
• Thomas Aquinas — the scholastic systematizer of Augustine's theology.
• Alvin Plantinga — the free-will defense is the Augustinian free-will theme with lighter commitments.
• John Hick — built the rival "Irenaean" soul-making theodicy explicitly against the Augustinian type.