It must have been a rare late fall day when it was still warm enough to hold class outside. I remember Dr. Corduan holding class out-of-doors and it had to be fall because the topic was Augustine of Hippo. That also meant that this would have been the first course in philosophy I had ever taken.
The problem before Augustine (and before us) was the origin of evil. In particular, whether God could have created evil. The dilemma is obvious. If God created evil that God cannot be all good, if God did not create evil, then something else did and so good and evil are co-eternal with diametrically opposed principals.
What follows is one of the dangers of the Socratic method. After some give and take, some wise guy said: "I've always thought that evil wasn't really a something, but the lack of a good thing." After kindly thanking the wise guy for stealing his thunder, Dr. Corduan continued to elaborate on the theory of evil as privation. Strictly speaking this was quite true. Until that moment, I hadn't given the subject any thought whatsoever. So, in as long as I had given it any thought whatsoever, I had thought of evil in terms of a privation of good. I cannot say why phrased my opinion with far more gravitas that it deserved. Harry Frankfurt might have some ideas, however. I've said elsewhere that the Ontological Argument was what turned me on to philosophy, but my cheeky comment that fall should have been a good indication of my proclivities.
Roughly, Augustine's idea was this, to the extent that a good thing that lacks something that proper to it, or has something that is not proper to its particular essence (privation proper), or there is some disorder among the good thing (concupiscence) that thing has, that thing is no longer good. One might also add that to the extent that good things are out of proper relation with each other, they are more liable to suffer from privation or concupiscence and that evil can be the result of being in an environment that is outside one's functional parameters (finite beings cannot--by definition--be expected to be well adapted to every situation).
Augustine is generally credited (or blamed) for this particular insight, but one can find elements of it as far back as Aristotle and his golden mean and both are often misunderstood. Aristotle did not mean that virtues were some sort of mid-point between extreme pairs of vices but that virtues were held in harmony with each other and that any inbalance between them would lead to vicious characteristics. What one can see even in Aristotle, however, is that vices do not stand on their own. Instead they are corruptions of virtues. This does make vices any less real or somehow illusory.
Augustine has been accused of making evil somehow illusory, but his theory implies nothing of the sort. What it did was to avoid the dilemma of the origin of evil by stating that evil has no independent ontological status (evil is not a created thing and so neither God nor anyone else could create it, nor is evil an uncrated principal opposed to good) and show how given its status how evil might be possible.
So, does Augustine's theory that evil has no independent status from good show how evil can exist given what I've said about Being? Perhaps, but I don't think the theory gives a full enough explanation. What we don't have is how it might be that a disorder in Being is possible, but I will have think about that a bit more before making another entry.
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