AUGUSTINE ON THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF EVIL J. Patout Burns ABSTRACT Augustine distinguished apparent evil, conflict and corruption among bodies from true evil, the selfiinitiated corruption of created spirits. Angels and humans fail to maintain the perfection of knowledge and love given by God and then turn to themselves as the focus of attention and appreciation. The original failures of both demons and humans were neither provoked nor persuaded by any outside bodily or spiritual force: each was an autonomous and selFinitiated sin of pride. This fundamental evil underlies and gives rise to every other sin among humans and angels. Evil was one of the major puzzles in the religious and intellectual life of Augustine of Hippo. The question of the nature of evil drove the inquiry into God and the human condition which led up to his conversion, and his early writings often focus on the question of the origin of evil. Although the major lines of his solution to both of these questions were established within a decade of his conversion, his thought continued to develop as he moved through the major controversies of his life as a proponent and defender of Christian faith. This study will be divided into three major parts of unequal length. In the first we shall attempt a synthetic exposition of Augustine's understand- ing of the nature of evil, using materials from the various works and controversies of his life. This exposition will be supplemented and illus- trated by the analysis, in the second part, of his attempts to discover the origin of evil in successive explanations of the fall of the angels and humans from the perfection in which they were originally created by God. In the third section, we shall show that Augustine considered pride not only the first but also the most fundamental sin, which underlies other sins. Our hypothesis is that pride, the spiritual creature’s love of self rather than God, is for Augustine the primary evil. 1. THE NATURE OF EVIL ‘Augustine's early experience of evil was treated in the Confessions. Although he devoted considerable attention to his infant self-will, his 910 The Journal of Religious Ethics boyhood laziness in school and competitiveness in games, and to the malicious prank which would later exemplify for him a social form of evil, his primary experience seems to have been the arousal, or rather onslaught, of sexual desire in adolescence (Conf. 1-2). This appetite over- whelmed his youth and constituted one of the major obstacles to his later becoming and living as a Christian. When he read Cicero’s Hortensius at age nineteen, he discovered a new good to which these fleshly desires were opposed. The treatise exhorted to the philosophic quest for wisdom, through which a human might rise above the waves of carnal desire and its satisfaction to enjoy a stable calm in possession of self and truth (3.4.7). The dualistic religion of Manicheism offered both an understanding of the origin and destiny of the world and an explanation of Augustine's experience of good and evil. It taught a cosmic conflict between the two eternally opposed forces, Light and Darkness. The turbulent Darkness attacked the peaceful realm of Light, captured a portion of it and mixed with it to form the world of living bodies. The continuing struggle between these two forces is evident in the human person: Light seeks purification and deliverance; Darkness strives to hold it fast through fleshly desires. The sexual desires are particularly insidious because generation disperses the Light among bodies, thereby preventing its concentration and escape into the heavens. Good and evil desires, then, arise from two opposed souls and wills within the human being. The religious person identifies with the Light, suffers but is not responsible for the evil desires and actions instigated by the soul of the Darkness which the soul of Light cannot control. Through a strict asceticism, the Manichean elect at- tempted to release the Light trapped in living bodies and finally to escape with it. Augustine embraced this explanation of his experience and lived within its framework for nearly a decade as a second-level Manichean adherent (Conf. 4.1.1, 7.2.3). Yet this theory of an original dualism failed to respond adequately to the questions which arose in Augustine's mind and in his discussions with an ever present, though changing, circle of friends. The principal difficulty arose from the passivity and even impotance of the Light, the good force in the Manichean system. In both the cosmos and the individual human being, the Light was unable to withstand or overcome the power of Darkness. This contradicted religious beliefs which Augustine never really abandoned: that God was all-powerful and exercised governance over the world. Yet Augustine himself could find no way to understand how the divine power and presence were not limited by the existence of evil in the world. He thought of good and evil in the Manichean manner, as different kinds of material being, as bodies which occupied and fought in space. Thus evil cither existed within a God, all-present as a kind of medium, or evil excluded the divine presence from the space it occupied, limiting it toAugustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil 11 another realm. Similarly, a God who was the all-powerful creator and ruler of the world would have the power and will to destroy evil root and branch, then replace it with @ good reality. The very existence of evil challenged the notion of an all-powerful and present God (Conf. 5.10.19-20, 7.1.2, 75.1). ‘Through his contact with Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, Augustine discovered that the Catholic church, in which he had been raised, taught that God is not a body spatially extended in the world (Conf 6.3.4). Evil, he was told, is an individual's bad choice or the punishment suffered for having made such a choice. In the Catholic view, then, evil is not an independent type of being bul either a certain kind of activity on the part of a creature or God's just ruling of its perpetrator (7.3.5). Yet he was not able ty understand this, Because he could not conceive of a nommaterial, nonspatial reality, he could not understand God's presence and gover- nance. Only later, through reading some of the treatises of the third- century philosopher Plotinus, was Augustine able to come to a new understanding of truth or wisdom and thus of evil (5.14.25, 7.5.7, 7.1. 1-2). A process of intellectual introspection, under the guidance of Platonic philosophy, enabled Augustine to perceive unchanging principles which govern the existence and operation of material beings. In these principles, he recognized Truth, an unchangeable, nonextended and nonspatial form of being which is everywhere present and operative, governing and reg- ulating both the changing human mind and bodily realities. The principles of meter which make poetry pleasing to the ear, like the proportions which make certain shapes pleasant to the eye, for example, are more real than the sounds and shapes whose structure they provide. Indeed, the princi- ples of art are more perfect than the mind and the senses which are guided by them in forming and recognizing beautiful verses and bodies. On the basis of their mode of existence and operation, he identified these princi- ples as a portion of the divine Truth which exists unchangeable and eternal and which governs or regulates all the operations of creatures (Conf. 7.10.16, 7.17.23; De div. quaest. 54). Through this insight into the reality of unchanging and unchangeable truth, Augustine reached an understanding of evil as the corruption of changeable being, through which it falls away trom the perfection estab- lished for its nature in the unchanging principles. Clearly, such corruption cannot exist in itself but occurs only in a nature which continues to exist, though in a reduced or limited manner. For if a changeable being were to be completely corrupted, it would simply cease to exist and its corruption would perish with it. Thus he concluded that the Manichean notion of evil as an independent kind of reality, powerfully opposed to the divine, was impossible. To the degree that a being does exist and act, its reality derives from God; to the extent that it fails in being and falls short in operation, it12 The Journal of Religious Ethics is evil. He perceived, moreover, that God is present to changeable beings not spatially but by governing their being and operation through the unchanging principles. The corruption which affects the beings can, then, neither contaminate the divine reality nor disrupt the truth through which God rules the world (Conf. 7.11.17-7.12.18; De lib. arb. 3.13.36-38; De div. quaest. 30). On the basis of this understanding of the divine governing of the material world, Augustine was able to develop an understanding of the order of generation and corruption in living bodies, the realm in which the Manichees located evil and its operations. First, he noted that the order of the universe requires a variety of kinds of beings, differing in their degrees of perfection. The moon does not shine with the splendor of the sun; the universe as a whole is more beautiful than it would be with two suns and no moon in the heavens (De lib. arb. 3.9.24-25). Second, the conflict between material bodies through which one corrupts and consumes an- other also follows the order of the world. As the beauty of a verse requires that each syllable give way to the next, so the birth and death of material beings serves the goodness and perfection of the world as a whole. Beings within the world may be contrary to one another, and thereby one may be “evil” for its victim; nothing, however, stands outside and attacks the order of the material world as a whole. Thus Augustine argued that true evil cannot be found within the material world taken as a whole. Each thing acts and is acted upon, corrupts and is corrupted, according to its proper nature and its role within the universal order (Conf, 4.13.20, 7.13.19-16.22; De lib. arb. 3.15.42-44, 3.23.69-70). Divine justice inte- grates rational spirits into the universal order according to their free exercise of love. True evil is to be found in the realm of rational beings, among spiritual entities which are immortal in their substance or essence but changeable and therefore corruptible in their mode of existence. In a spiritual creature, evil is the absence of the perfection or fullness of goodness and reality which the nature itself and the divine order demand. Thus it might be the loss of some quality once possessed or the failure to acquire, through negligence or refusal, some due and available attribute. Unlike the material world, which contains beings of varying natural strength and beauty, the realm of spiritual creatures is charactcrized by equality. Only the divine is naturally better and stronger than any created spirit. Moreover, every spiritual nature, no matter how corrupted, is natu- rally better and more powerful than any material being. Among spiritual beings, differences in strength are degrees of perfection or virtue. Thus Augustine argued that no spiritual being can corrupt the goodness of another. The aggressor, by the very intention to harm another, would lose the goodness and power of which it sought to deprive its intended victim;Augustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil 13 it would be weaker and could cause no harm to the other. All spiritual evil is, therefore, either voluntary self-corruption or divinely inflicted punish- ment of such evil (De lib. arb. 3.14.39-41). The spiritual creature which corrupts itself is disordered within its own being: it lacks that perfection and fullness of reality with which it was endowed or for which it was ordained by God. Its activity is likewise disordered, contrary to the principles of order established by God and perceptible by the rational mind. Both the corrupted being and its activity are, however, integrated into the order of the universe by divine gover nance. The action which springs from a sinful will is used by God to punish its author or another sinner, or to perfect the virtue and goodness of some other creature (De div. quaest. 53; De spir. et litt, 31.54). An example and application of this theory will clarify it. A servant's disobe- dience may be appropriately punished hy assigning him to clean out the household's latrine: the drain must be cleaned and the sinner deserves the dirty job. The devil's envious and thereby sinful will finds an appropriate object in the domination of the sinners who subject themselves to his rule. ‘The injustice of lord and slave are integrated into a just and ordered whole. The universe does not require the corruption of spiritual creatures lo attain its perfection but its order and beauty encompasses their being and action (De lib. arb. 1.1.1, 3.9.24-27, 3.10.29, 3.15.42-44; De div. quaest. 27). In order to understand the nature and origin of spiritual evil, we must further examine the perfection of the rational being which is corrupted. The changeable goodness of a created spirit consists in its knowledge in the mind and its love in the will. In his experience of unchanging truth, Augustine experienced the Light and the principles grasped through it as above his mind, ruling its operations as it governed the natures and Operations of material bodies. He concluded that the perfection of the mind is not inherent in it and under its control. Rather the mind operates under the continuing influence and guidance of the divine Word. He subsequently extended this explanation to the will’s loving good under the operation of the Holy Spirit. When the divine influence and operation are diminished or lost, the twin perfections of knowledge and love are cor- rupted. The deficiency in the mind and will results in operational failures, error and sin, This explanation will now be developed for both the intellect and the will. ‘The created intellect comes to an understanding, both of the divine reality and of the created world, through an interior illumination received from the Word of God, the eternal Truth. The minds of both humans and angels were originally endowed with this gift. They rejoiced in the con- tomplation of God and were to guide their participation in the governance of the world by the knowledge of creation which was given in God. This14 The Journal of Religious Ethics illumination is symbolized by the fountain which watered the whole of paradise. Because this kind of knowledge never becomes the “possession” of the created mind, it is maintained by submission to God, by focusing attention on the divine Light (De Gen. c. Man. 2.4,5-2.5.6; De lib. arb. 3.10.30, 3.11.32; De div. quaest. 46). If the mind turns its attention away from the unchangeable principles and relies on its senses to understand and its inherent power to judge, it immediately falls into the darkness of error and opinion. This corruption, then, is not simple ignorance but rather folly, a rejection of wisdom. The person turns away through direc- tion of attention, an act of will, which can be described according to its object as pride in reliance on one’s own ability or as curiosity in fascination with the exterior world. The mind which has been turned away does not completely lose the influence of the ine Light but suffers a weakness which is best de- scribed as a kind of forgetfulness. In its weakened state, it labors to discover truth in the exterior world. The person is regularly deceived by appearances and fails to understand the soul's spirituality and the way in which it ought to act. In some of his carly works, Augustine explained that ignorance was a corruption of the mind only when the individual had lost knowledge or negligently failed to acquire it. The discipline of the liberal arts, Platonic philosophy, and the Christian life were proposed as appro- priate means to lead the mind back from its fascination with matcrial bodies to the perception of the divine Truth within and above it (De lib. arb, 3.19.53, 3.22.64-65). Once he decided that the state of folly which afflicts all humans from birth is the just consequence and punishment of the sin which humans committed in or inherited from Adam, he held each individual responsible for error in judgment and consequent disorientation in choice and action. Thus, faith in the teaching of Christ and the guidance of the church, both divinely sanctioned admonitions through the senses to those who were weak in mind, became much more significant. The mind does not corrupt itself by turning way from the divine Light which is the source of its understanding. The spirit's corruption originates: in the will, in a failure of love. Indeed, Augustine insisted that no degree of wisdom or knowledge could prevent the failure of the will, just as no teaching or guidance could restore the perfection of love of good (De lib: arb. 3.24.72). Although Augustine came to recognize the dependence of the created mind upon the divine Word through the study of Platonism prior to his conversion, his understanding of the operation of the Holy Spirit in the created will developed somewhat later. Initially, he opposed the Man- ichean dualistic determinism with an assertion of the natural, even inalien- able, power to choose between good and evil, to turn to the eternal and unchanging which can bring happiness or to prefer the temporal andAugustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil 15 unstable whose inevitable loss causes misery (De lib. arb. 1.12.25- 1.16.34). Under the influence of the Pauline writings, he came to under- stand that the perfection of the will, like that of the intellect, derives from the creature's union with the divine rather than from any inherent power or from perfection acquired by its own effort. Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the divine Love, the creature is moved to love God as the highest and common good shared by all creatures. Self, other rational creatures, and material bodies are also loved for their goodness, all of them however in relation to the divine goodness whence they derive. The charity which the presence of the Spirit inspires in the created will also moves the person to love the actions which God commands through the interior illumination of the Word or the exterior admonition of Christ and the scripture. In that perfection or fullness of charity which is granted in final beatitude, the creature is made incapable of turning from the divine. in the lesser degree given in this life, charity inspires a desire and tendency which can continue or fail, at the creature's choice. The corruption of the will generally comes about through a turning from the higher to the lower good: from God to sclf, to another created spirit or to a bodily good, Augustine insisted that the object to which the person turns is not itself evil, rejecting the Manichcan notion of evil as a different type of being. The evil or corruption is in the turning itself. In his earliest works, under the influence of Platonism, Augustine described the corruption of the will as a preference for temporal, changing goods at- tained through the senses at the expense of the eternal, unchanging goods of the mind (De lib. arb. 1.4.10, 1.8.18, 1.15.32-33; De ver. rel. 3.3; De quan. an. 33,71), Soon, however, he climinated the influence of the mate- rial world in the created spirit’s fall from perfection, perhaps out of concern for the dualism of the Manichecs. He explained instead that the primary form of self-corruption is the love of self rather than of God. The creature fails in its love of the highest good and prefers its own goodness; the spirit loves it own power to understand and to rule; it seeks fulfillment and happiness through its own resources rather than by adhering to the divine gifts of truth and love (De Gen. ¢. Man. 2.14.20-2.15.22). Augustine explained that this sinful operation of the will is not the turning of a natural power to an object which is itself harmful to the spirit The sin is rather a defective operation, a failure to maintain that fullness of love inspired by the presence of the Spirit given in creation. The operation is evil because it is defective, because it fails to maintain a given level of perfection. Insofar as it is defective, it has no cause (De lib. arb. 2.20.54; De div. quaest. 21). The creature, however, is responsible for the failure. As a nondivine being, every creature is capable of change and of decline in being. In the created spirit, freedom means that the individual can main- tain the fullness of love given by God or initiate its own corruption. The16 The Journal of Religious Ethics decline from love of God can also be viewed as a love of self in which the creature rejects God and attempts to establish its perfection and happiness through its own power. In so doing, it deprives itself of participation in the divine love and falls further into the love of goods below itself. Despite the vehemence or persistence of a love or desire which is directed to the creature rather than the creator, Augustine insisted that this activity is defective. It arises not from the strength but from the weakness of a will which has rejected and lost the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In the spiritual realm, as in the material, the divine governance orders defective beings and operations into a just and integrated whole. The punishment of self-corruption follows necessarily and immediately upon the defective willing. The disordered activities which flow from such willing are directed by God to the punishment, correction or perfection of the other spirits affected by them. The human spirit cannot be corrupted by another creature against its consent; through the body it can be affected by the actions of other humans and of angels or demons. Thus Augustine insisted that the malicious dominion which the demons exer- cise over humans is used by God to punish the sins of both (De lib. arb. 3.10.29-31; De div. quaest. 27). The same may be said of the tyranny of empires over subjected peoples and of masters over slaves (De civ. Dei 19.12,15). God even uses the malice of sinners to exercise and develop the virtue of saints, Sinful action can neither disturb the order of the world nor harm an innocent victim. The evil spirit harms itself, renders itself unable to love or seek the good which would bring happiness and fulfillment. Finally, of course, God brings the universe to fulfillment by gathering the good into eternal happiness and confining the sinners in unending punish- ment. (De civ. Dei 21.12). ‘Thus Augustine explained that evil is a corruption of the good. Destruc- tion and suffering in the material world, which so troubled the Manichees, he viewed as appropriate for the natures of the beings involved and following the just and beautiful order in the whole. True evil must be located in the spiritual world: specifically it is the failure to maintain the love of the highest good in which each spirit was created. That defect corrupts its goodness, leaving the will weak and the mind confused. Even the defective and disordered activity of these corrupted spirits is ordered into a unified, just and beautiful whole. IL THE ORIGIN OF EVIL IN THE PRIDE OF THE DEMONS AND HUMANS The narrative of the Confessions and the writings of the period imine- diately after his conversion indicate that Augustine had indeed reached anAugustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil 17 understanding of the nature of evil. None of these writings, however, presents or even claims to present an answer to the more perplexing question: the origin of that evil. In the essays and commentaries written within the decade after his conversion to Catholic Christianity, par- ticularly On Genesis against the Manichees and On Free Will, he strug- gled to understand how evil might have arisen in rational natures which had been created good by God. The extended inquiry which runs through the three books of On Free Will, composed in stages over a number of years, and the developments or changes in that analysis, already noted above, offer clear evidence that he was still struggling with this issue in the years after his conversion. In this second section, we shall follow Augustine’s attempts to compre- hend the outbreak of evil among the creatures, the initial sins of angels and humans. In early writings, he emphasized the similarity of the angelic and human natures and accounted for the difference in consequences and punishment of their sins through the circumstances of their sinning: the demons sinned spontaneously but humans had been tempted. When he returned to consider the initial sins some twenty years later, in his Literal Commentary on Genesis and The City of God, the sins themselves were presented as nearly identical, spontaneous outbreaks of evil. The sin of the demons, chronologically prior, will be considered first in our analysis. We shall then pass to the analysis of the outbreak of sin among humans. In the third book of On Free Will, Augustine attempted to deal with the origin of evil in the rational creature, He insisted that a true cause cannot be found prior to the evil willing, something other than an evil will. which gives rise to sin, Eventually, his questioning led him to consider the occasions or conditions which influence the operation of free choice and provide some understanding of its evil decision. He showed that the error and carnal desire which influence contemporary humans were con- sequences of some prior sin for which the individual may or may not be responsible. Even when a person cannot control the environment or conditions in which decisions were made, Augustine insisted, the person remains responsible for the decision itself. After briefly referring to the biblical account of the human sin, in which a choice was made between the divine command and the suggestion of the devil, he considered the sin of the demons themselves. ‘The demons were created as angels, endowed with the contemplation of the divine through the illumination of the Word. In their environment of choice were to be found not only the Blessed Trinity but, necessarily, their own minds and the material world whose governance had been committed to them. These rational spirits should have loved the divine more than themselves; indeed they should have despised their own goodness in comparison to that of God. The demons sinned by delighting in their own18 The Journal of Religious Ethics power, by loving their own goodness and preferring it to the divine. Their sin was pride, the love of their own lower good more than the higher, divine good (De lib. arb. 3.25.75-76; Der ver. rel. 13.26). In an earlier section of the same treatise, Augustine had explained that because the demons sinned through their own initiative, without being tempted or persuaded by anyone else, they cannot repent and be saved through the intervention of another. Hence they are eternally fixed in their self-love (De lib. arb. 3.10.29-31). This understanding of the sin of the demons did not change significantly in Augustine's later writings. More than twenty years later in his Literal Commentary on Genesis, he insisted that the initial sin of the demons could not have been envy of the happiness of humanity, as some others had explained.' Envy, which is the hatred of the happiness of another, cannot precede but only follow the love of one’s own good and power, the sin of pride (De Gen. ad litt. 11.14). In a slightly later discussion in The City of God Augustine simply asserted that through pride some of the angels turned from God to them- selves and thereby separated themselves from the others who maintained their love for God. This discussion moreover, shows evidence of the concerns of the Pelagian controversy: the nature of created freedom and the power of a creature to make itself better, to acquire a perfection which is not the gift of God. Augustine offered a fuller explanation of the casuality involved. Kirst he explained that the angels who remained faithful had not added to their goodness by the exercise of a natural power of choice. They had rather continued in that loving of God with which they had been endowed in creation. The demons sinned by failing to guard and maintain this love. Thus the sin was more a slipping than a turning away: they failed to continue in the operation which the Holy Spirit inspired in them. Their love and desire, thus corrupted and weakened, then attained only a lower good, the self (De civ, Dei 12.6.9). Augustine did not repeat the earlier explanation that the demons were fixed in evil because they had sinned spontaneously. Indeed in the contem- porary explanation, human sin was also spontaneous. He seems instead to have thought in terms of the analysis of sin and grace which undergird his theory of the gratuity of election and grace among humans. The angels loved God more than themselves by cooperating with the operation of the Holy Spirit, not by a natural and inalienable power. Once they had aban- doned the influence of the Spirit, they were weak and could love only themselves or lower goods. Their original goodness could be restored only through a totally unmerited divine intervention. Their continuance in sin, like that of humans, results from a divine decision which orders the universe by manifesting justice in their punishment rather than mercy in their restoration (De civ. Dei 22.1).Augustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil 19 The original sin of humans received more extended attention than that of the demons. As has been noted, the question of the outbreak of sin in the human will runs through the successive books of On Free Will. The early discussion of the sin of the demons is prefaced, and even required, by attempts to deal with human sin. Augustine's first commentary on the opening chapters of the book of Genesis, directed against the Manichean misinterpretation of the narrative of creation and fall, provided the first occasion for a explanation of the sin of humanity. In On Free Will, Augustine distinguished human sinning in response to temptation from the spontaneous rebellion of the demons. He s himself from the tradition, however, by insisting that the temptati not related to the bodily condition of humanity. Ambrose, like his contem- porary Gregory of Nyssa, had followed the traditional Platonic explana- tion that the appetites and passions of the earthly body are inimical to the life of the mind. In an interpretation adapted from Philo, the first-century Jewish exegete Ambrose explained that sin arose through humanity's failure to exclude or control the noxious influence of passion. Perhaps because of his concern to exclude the Manichean dualism, Augustine refused to admit a conflict between mind and body appetite in the original world order.? He insisted that this division arises from and punishes a sin of the spirit. In On Genesis against the Manichees, Augustine followed an alle gorical interpretation of the text similar to that which Ambrose borrowed from Philo. Adam symbolized the mind, Eve the sense faculty of the soul, and the serpent the demon. Paradise signified the happy state of the spirit, watered by the interior fountain of divine Truth. He assigned no clement in the allegory to symbolize the experience of bodily appetite or passion, the traditional meaning of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Instead, he insisted that the human mind was tempted through the suggestion of the demon, introduced into the mind through its natural companion and helpmate in good action, the sense faculty. The demon had already fallen through selflove and was envious of the uncorrupted and happy condition of the human spirit. This fallen angel suggested that humans should also reject the guidance of the eternal principles established in the Word of God and rely upon their own power of discernment. He tempted humans to prefer their own power and goodness to that of God. That suggestion aroused an appetitive response, a delight, in the sense faculty. The mind, however, had the capacity to reject the notion and its attraction, to follow the divine command, and to adhere to the divine Truth by which it was. illumined. Instead, the human spirit followed the suggestion of the devil: the mind turned from God to self. Thus humans attempted to attain divine autonomy, to possess their happiness as only God can, independently of any other nature (De Gen. c. Man. 2.14.20-2.15.22).20 ‘The Journal of Religious Ethics Augustine was at pains in this treatise and in the parallel analysis in On Free Will to show that the sin of humanity did not arise because of any original opposition between body and spirit or mind and sense. Through the allegorical interpretation of Adam and Eve as parts of the soul, he insisted that the power of sensation is a faculty of the soul derived from mind and perfectly suited to its proper operation and activity. All opposi- tion between body and soul or between mind and sense derives from the initial sin of spiritual pride. The spirit’s difficulty in attaining clear under- standing of what ought to be done, symbolized by Adam’s labor on earth, and its difficulty in acting on that knowledge, symbolized by Eve's pain in childbirth, are consequences of its rebellion against God (De Gen. c. Man. 2.4,5-2.5.6; 2.18.28-2.21.31). Al that point, Augustine explained that humans have the opportunity to regain beatitude by consenting to the persuasion of Christ because they sinned through the suggestion of the demons rather than spontaneously. The punishment of their sin, the mortality of the body through which the spirit is weighed down and even placed at the mercy of the beasts, was intended to humble the spirit and prepare it to accept God's mercy (De lib. arb., 3.10.29-31). Unlike his explanation of the sin of the demons, Augustine's under standing of the initial sin of humanity changed in his later writings. In his Literal Commentary on Genesis, Augustine chose to avoid the allegorical interpretation of the creation and fall which he had preferred two decades carlicr in On Genesis against the Manichees. He took Adam and Eve as individuals who were tempted by Satan using the snake as a medium. In his analysis of the temptation itself, however, he noted that the devil's suggestion could not have been plausible to minds which were still spit itual, enjoying the guidance of the divine Truth with which they were originally endowed. He surmised that before she was tempted by the demon, Eve had already sinned, through pride. God allowed the devil to tempt her to an open transgression in order to manifest and correct that first, hidden sin. The deception would show the inadequacy of human power when deprived of divine guidance and might move Eve to humility (De Gen. ad litt., 11.5, 11.27, 11.30)? If Adam had not already sinned like Eve by pride, he could not have been seduced by Satan's insinuation of jealousy on God’s part. Augustine advanced the opinion that he might have violated God's command out of a false sense of loyalty to Eve (11.42).4 Pride was evident, however, in Adam's refusal to accept respon- sibility for his sin (11.35). The explanation of an original sin of pride prior to the transgression of the divine command was carried further in The City of God where Au- gustine dropped the distinction between the sins of Adam and of Eve. He repeated the explanation of the Genesis commentary that Adam sinnedAugustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil 21 knowingly and willingly out of a desire to retain his companionship with Eve (De civ. Dei, 14.11). He then undertook a fuller analysis which uncovered the earlier sins of pride at the base of both Eve's believing the devil's lie and Adam’s preferring his wife's will to God’s command. Prior to their temptation by the devil, Adam and Eve had each sinned secretly and untempted through pride or self-love. The purpose of the divine prohibi- tion of eating from the tree was to occasion an indisputable and indefensi- ble sin which would manifest the prior, hidden sin of pride and lead thereby to its correction (De civ. Dei 14.13). Augustine remarked that the underlying pride was even more evident in the pair's attempt to excuse their transgression (14.4). The earlier distinction between the spontaneous sin of the demons and humanity's fall to temptation was eliminated in these later works of Au- gustine. Both humans and demons sinned spontaneously through pride. God bestows an unearned mercy upon those humans whom he rescues from the sinful condition into which all fell in Adam and Eve. The first step in this process is, according to Paul, the revelation of the law through which the sinner is convicted of guilt, forced to acknowledge the inability to do the just and commanded good works. and thereby made ready to respond in humility to the divine offer of grace. The command given in Paradise has the same function as the law proclaimed on Sinai: to manifest and correct a prior sin of pride. In his successive considerations of the initial sins of angels and of humans, Augustine argued that the created spirit corrupts itself by falling away from full love, failing to cooperate with the love of God which is the Holy Spirit. It destroys the pristine goodness with which God had en- dowed it and loves its own goodness more than the divine source whence it is received and by which it is preserved. Failing in the love of God, the spirit sins by self-love or pride, the outbreak of evil in the world. From this failure follow confusion and error in the mind and disorder in bodily affections and operations. We turn now to Augustine’s consideration of the subsequent sins of demons and humans. We shall discover that pride is the fundamental sin. the one which underlies other sins and unike them has no salvific function, IIL. PRIDE IN THE SINNING OF DEMONS AND HUMANS The continued sinning of the demons receives litile attention in Au- gustine’s writings; his attention focused instead on human sinning and on the ways in which it is forgiven and overcome in Christ. In his commen- taries on Genesis, he noted the envy in which the demons tempted22 The Journal of Religious Ethics humanity to sin, attributing it to the prior sin of pride. In his discussion of astrology and pagan religion, he discerned the operations of the demons, leading humanity astray. The devils’ desire to be worshipped in the place of the true God indicates an extension of the pride in which they first fell away from God. Perhaps the most striking of Augustine’s reflections on human sinning is to be found in the second book of his Confessions, in which he re- counted and examined the stealing of pears from a neighbor's tree by a group of companions. He went to considerable lengths to show that the deed was neither prompted by nor satisfied bodily appetite. As motives, he identified a perverse desire to act with autonomy or impunity and a kind of society in evil through which the companions did together what none would have done alone. In the narrative of the stages of his conversion in books seven and eight of the Confessions, Augustine found another evidence of pride in his insistence on reasoned proof or understanding and unwillingness to give himself up to faith. Only when the weight of his carnal habits pulled him down from the joy of Platonic contemplation of Truth would he turn to the church for guidance in a life which would free him of the power of lust. Still unable to conquer that lust, he had finally to abandon his own power and give himself over to the help of God in Christ (Conf. 7.18.24). In cach of his major controversies, Augustine discovered pride as the driving force which had driven his adversaries into a misunderstanding and perversion of Christian truth. The Pauline letters which had proven decisive in his own conversion provided the earliest and latest insights into the ways of pride. In his first writings on Paul, Augustine remarked a number of man- ifestations of pride or self-reliance. God gave the written law so that humans would be brought to face their inability to fulfill the directives which were recognized as truc and just. Thereby they were to be drawn back from pride and brought to seek God's help through Christ. Pride, however, reacted in quite different ways to the law. The Israelites judged that it had been given to them for their merits, in which they had proven themselves superior to other peoples. In some the divine commands provoked an even greater desire to sin, in rebellion against the prohibition. Others attempted to fulfill the commands by their own power and thus to justify themselves before God. In his later controversy with Pelagius, Augustine would recall and extend this indictment of human pride (Exp. ep. ad Gal. 24.14, 25.9-10; Prop. ad Rom. 13-18, 32.1, 60, 64; Ad Simpl. 1.1.5, 1.1.14; De bon. vid. 16.20; De pecc. mer. 2.19.33). ‘Although he was generally sympathetic to the Manichees because of their inability to perceive the true nature of evil, Augustine asserted that the entire Manichean dualistic doctrine was based upon pride. TheyAugustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil 23 claimed that the divine Light is powerless before the onslaught of evil, that it is contaminated and suffers in the material world. This blasphemous theory was constructed to absolve human beings of responsibility for their evil desires and actions (C. Faust. 22.22). Moreover, they claimed to have proven and established all this through human reason, ridiculing Christian submission to the authority of Christ (Conf. 6.5.7). The Donatist Christian Church separated itself from Catholic unity and claimed to be the only inheritance of Christ out of all the world. In Augustine's analysis, the Donatists located the foundation of their church’s sanctity, not in God's gift and fidelity, but in the innocence and purity of their church’s bishops. Pride claims the power to sanctify and refuses to acknowledge that God’s power cannot be thrwarted by human failure, that the fulfillment of Christ's kingdom does not rest upon human achievement. In exalting their own purity and despising the Catholics for allowing sinners in their communion, the Donatists attempted to justify themselves and gloried in their own goodness. Yet it was precisely this pride, Augustine argued, which Paul had sought to suppress when he ordered the excommunication of the degenerate from the Corinthian com- munity: Paul feared that others would glorify themselves by comparing their goodness to his evil (C. litt. Petil. 1,6,7, 2.101.233, 3.27.32, 3.36.42; C. ep. Parm. 3.2.5). In the Christian perfectionism of Pelagius, Augustine detected a most dangerous form of pride. Pelagius claimed that God had endowed human nature with an inalienable capacity to choose and perform good. The law given by God clearly demonstrated what humans could accomplish: the Creator knew the power of the nature he made; the Judge would not command the impossible. God’s grace forgives sins or provides incentives which facilitate or encourage the good will and action which humans have the natural power to accomplish. This grace, moreover, is given to those who deserve or carn it. To Augustine’s mind this doctrine was an utter perversion of the Pauline teaching on the purpose of the law, on the necessity and the gratuity of grace. It fell into the greatest of evils: self righteousness. The Pelagians claimed for themselves the very gifts of God by which they had managed to fulfill some provision of the law. As we shall see below, Augustine insisted on an understanding of grace which totally excluded human pride (De spir. et litt. 7.11, 9.15, 10.17). Even the Platonist philosophers whose writings had been of such assistance to Augustine in his breaking free of Manichcism were found guilty of a pride which ruined their achievements. Augustine noted their rejection of the incarnation, the humility and humiliation of the divine Truth undertaken for the sake of those who would not attain an intellec- tual vision of God. In contrast, the knowledge of God which the phi- losophers had achieved had led them, nat to glorify God, but to pride in24 The Journal of Religious Ethics their accomplishment (Conf,, 7.20.26; De spir. et litt., 12.19, 13.22). Even their asceticism was perverted by pride: they despised the body created by God, with its appetites and emotions (De civ. Dei, 14.5). Their self-control led them to demonic glorying in the complacency of their minds. Far better to feel joy and fear before God, to feel pain at one’s present condition, and to feel desire for the salvation of the neighbor, argued Augustine, than this self-centered and self-satisfied impassibility (De civ. Dei 14.9). Similarly, in his consideration of the achievements of the Romans and their empire, Augustine found the desire for glory and the lust for domina- tion to be the driving forces of Roman society. Indeed, every human empire aspires to exercise a control over peoples which mimics the divine ordering of the universe (De div. Dei 19.12). For Augustine, then, pride is the root form of evil, separating the self from God and playing itself out in claims to moral self-sufficiency, to religious superiority and to political domination. Consequently, if the power of evil is to be broken, pride is the principal obstacle to be over- come; and Augustine's mature exposition of the relation between divine grace and human freedom, during the controversy with Pelagius and his supporters, concentrates on just this point. The written law is imposed by God in order to dissolve a person's sense of self-reliance. Conversion, through which a person believes in Christ and receives the assistance of the Holy Spirit, is a divine operation, given without prior merits and itself involving no meritorius human cooperation. Of course, the person who has received grace must also cooperate with this divine assistance in living the Christian life. But perseverance in willing and cnacting the good until the end of one’s life, through which one attains eternal beatitude, is still to be attributed to a divine operation which sustains and supports human cooperation. Thus the saints will glorify God for their salvation and will claim neither initiative nor even autonomous cooperation for themselves.* From the time of his conversion through his late works, Augustine found the counter to pride in the humility of Christ in the incarnation. More than any of the works of Christ's life and ministry, the very taking of humanity by the Word of God itself reversed the pretensions of human sin, It demonstrated the divine humility which is at once the antithesis to and the remedy for the human selfassertion which divides persons from God and sets them against each other. In his passion, Christ even used the demon’s pride and desire for domination to gain victory where Adam had suffered defeat (Exp. ep. ad Gal. 24.5-10; Conf, 7.18.24). Correspondingly, in his developing understanding of the church, Augustine emphasized the unity of mutual love and forgiveness which overcomes the elitism and division characteristic of pride in its religious and its political manifesta tions.Augustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil 25 Augustine's influence is often associated, of course, with lust or con- cupiscence as the more obvious evil or disorder in human beings; and certainly, in Augustine's view, lust plays a central role in the life of humanity after the original sin, a role no less significant than that of pride. Augustine insisted, however, that the division between “flesh” and “spirit” is itself the result of the prior sin of pride (Conf 2.2.2; 7.7.11; 8.5.10; 8.10.22). The revolt of the flesh and its unruly desires is to be understood as a punishment of the mind for its own revolt against God, a disorder both brought upon the mind by itself and imposed upon the mind by God.° Furthermore this disorder in the self can, under the influence of grace, serve as a corrective for the pride of the spirit.? The continuing division within human power, which is represented in the Pauline language of the conflict between spirit and flesh, demonstrates the impossibility of self-sufficiency even after God's grace has been received. On the one hand, then, concupiscence can be construed as a sort of sacrament of sin, itself evil and symbolic of deeper evil from which it results and for which it serves as punishment; and, on the other hand, it can, in an unexpected way, take on salvific significance under grace as a means of overcoming that deeper evil. No such construction is possible in the case of pride. While divine grace may use the derivative evil of concupiscence to uproot the founda- tional disorder, pride itself has no role in the Augustinian scheme of return to God. It is a fundamental failure of love, and it has no redemptive function. Divine governance intcgrates pride into the world order as its own punishment; yet, in itself, pride serves only to measure the distance of the creature’s fall into an imagined independence and away from the Truth which is the Good common to all. CONCLUSION, The problem of the nature and origin of evil was one of the driving forces in Augustine’s intellectual life. The solution proposed by the Man- ichees led only to contradictions. Through the preaching of Ambrose, he began to consider again the teaching of the Christianity in which he had been raised. The Platonic philosophical tradition, available to him through Plotinus, had been exploited by Christian theologians to develop a notion of evil as the absence of being and a view of sin as a turn of the will from the higher to the lower good, specifically to the satisfaction of carnal life. Because of his earlier experience with Manicheism and through his reflec- tions on the writings of Paul, Augustine focused on Plotinus’ notion of self- assertion. Through successive reflections on scripture, on his own experi- ence, and on the conflicts which afflicted Christianity at the time, he26 The Journal of Religious Ethics developed the doctrine that pride is the original and most fundamental sin, the root of all the evil which humanity perpetrates and suffers. In opposi- tion to this evil, he built his understanding of the work of Christ, both incarnation and death, and the operation of the Holy Spirit, in election to grace and glory. Those who humble themselves with Christ will be raised to eternal peace and glory; those who exalt themselves with Satan will be cast down into eternal discord and frustration. NOTES 1. This was an explanation offered, for example, by Ambrose in On Paradise and by Gregory of Nyssa in On the Making of Man and The Address on Religious Instruction. 2. In De lib. arb. 3.10.29-30 and 3.25.74, Augustine can even be read as asserting that humans were created like angels in a heavenly rather (han an earthly condition. See the whole section, 3.9.25-3.12.35. 3. Indeed, the devil might have been allowed to tempt Eve interiorly as he did Judas, because she had already sinned by pride. 4, That loyalty must not, however, be interpreted as carnal desire. Augustine rejected as foolish the idea that Adam and Eve sinned sexually (De Gen. ad litt. 11.41). He considered the statement of I Tim. 2:13-14 to mean that Adam, unlike Eve, was not seduced. 5. The priority of the divine initiative, the efficacy of the grace of conversion, and the necessity and gratuity of the gift of charity are all well explained in On the Grace of Christ. The doctrine of God's action in perseverance is explained in On Grace and Free Will and On the Gift of Perseverance. A summary statement may be found in De civ. Dei 22.30. 6. Among many other instances, see De civ. Det 14.15. 7. This was Augustine's interpretation of Romans 7 during the last two dec- ades of his life. REFERENCES Augustine Ad Simpl, Ad Simplicianum de diversis quaestionibus (To Simplician: On Various Questions). Conf. Confessiones [Confessions]. C. ep. Parm. Contra epistulam parmeniani (Against Parmenian's Letter]. C. Faust Contra Faustum Manichaeum [Against Faustus the Man- ichaean| C. litt, Petil, Contra litteras Petiliani Against the Writings of Petilian). De bon. vid. De bono viduitatis [The Good of Widowhood). De civ. Dei De civitate Dei {The City of God]. De div. quaest. De diversis quaestionibus 83 (On 83 Different Questions}.De Gen. ad litt. Augustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil 27 De Genesi ad litteram {Literal Commentary on Genesis). De Gen. c. Man. De Genesi contra Manichaeos [On Genesis against the Man- De lib. arb. De pece. mer. De quan. an De spir. et Litt. De ver. rel, Exp. ep. ad Gal Prop. ad Rom. ichaeans}. De libero arbitrio |On Free Will|. De peccatorum meritis et remissione [The Merits and Remis- sion of Si De quantitate animi (The Greatness of the Soul}. De spiritu et littera [The Spirit of the Letter|. De vera religione (On True Religion|. Expositio epitulae ad Galatas [Exposition of the Epistle to the Galatians}. Expositio quarundam propositionum ex epistula ad Romanos [Exposition of Propositions from the Epistle to the Romans].