The History of Evil in the Medieval Age

450-1450 CE

Andrew Pinsent, Chad Meister, Charles Taliaferro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351138505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The second volume of The History of Evil explores the philosophy of evil in the long Middle Ages. Starting from the Augustinian theme of evil as a deprivation or perversion of what is good, this period saw the maturation of concepts of natural evil, of evil as sin involving the will, and of malicious agents aiming to increase evil in general and sin in particular. Comprising fifteen chapters, the contributions address key figures of the Christian Middle Ages or traditions sharing some similar cultural backgrounds, such as medieval Judaism and Islam. Other chapters examine contemporaneous developments in the Middle East, China, India and Japan. The volume concludes with an overview of contemporary transpositions of Dante, illustrating the remarkable cultural influence of medieval accounts of evil today.

This outstanding treatment of the history of evil at the crucial and determinative inception of its key concepts will appeal to those with particular interests in the ideas of evil and good.

1 Augustine

Erik M. Hanson

Introduction

Augustinus Aurelius (354–430 CE), Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo introduced to western thought one of the most influential accounts of the nature of evil.¹ For Augustine, evil is fundamentally a “privation of the good” (privatio boni), in which God’s creation is deprived of its intended goodness.² According to this account, humanity’s Edenic parents selected by their own free will (liberum arbitrium) an alternative to the good ordained by God, thereby removing themselves from God’s goodness and introducing evil into the human race. By this “original sin” (peccatum originale), they brought upon themselves and their descendants the penalty of “inherited sin” (peccatum hereditarium) and guilt, along with the inability to escape evil and a tendency to commit still more evil. Without God’s intervening grace, human beings would be subject without hope to judgment and damnation.

Evil was clearly an issue that occupied the entirety of Augustine’s adult life from the earliest days of his career after baptism (387 CE), to ordination (391 CE), and through his consecrated service as bishop (395–430 CE). His view of the nature of evil remained largely unchanged over the course of his career. However, any development in this account of evil's origin and persistence arose out of his ongoing dialectical engagement with scripture, and as an often-polemical response to the views and followers of both Mani (215–276 CE) and Pelagius (354–420 CE). Controversial even in his own time, Augustine’s existential, philosophical, and theological account of a special kind of hereditary affliction called “original sin” defined it as a universal, yet non-necessary, evil of the human race.

Manichaean and Neoplatonic influences

Augustine recounts in the Confessions (397 CE) how in his early twenties, although raised by a Christian mother, Monica (or Monnica), he was drawn to the books of the Persian mystic, Mani, and his account of the existence and nature of evil.³ He subsequently became a catechumen, or a “hearer” (auditor) within the otherwise obscure movement of Manichaeism.⁴

Manichaeism provided Augustine with an attractive and explanatory cosmogony that served as a basis for a rigorous spirituality. According to Mani’s Fundamental Epistle, the cosmos as a whole is based on two principles, good and the evil. The good principle dwells in a limitless realm of light as the “Father of Majesty” (Megethos).⁵ Below it lies the equal but opposed infinite realm of darkness ruled by the “King of Darkness.”⁶ The two realms might have coexisted without coming into conflict had not the King of Darkness attempted to invade the Kingdom of Light, creating an allegorical “wedge,” within the cosmos.⁷ By analogy, the human being is an immaterial soul trapped in a material body, similarly under the influence and duress of the Kingdom of Darkness, seeking liberation and reunification with the light.⁸

Augustine, however, ultimately came to doubt the scientific veracity and moral psychology of the Manichaean teachings and parted ways with the movement.⁹ He ultimately rejected their teachings after reading “some books by the Platonists [‘Neoplatonists’], translated from the Greek into Latin.”¹⁰

The best-known representative of the Neoplatonic tradition, Plotinus (204/5–270 CE) distinguished between the Good and the ontologically higher realm of pure being on the one hand, and that of the lower material world on the other.¹¹ In this account, matter (and materiality as such) is neither “a this or that,” nor as pure potentiality is it non-being. Rather, it is simply “non-Good.” The soul's entanglement with the material body, which Plotinus identified as an “evil thing,” becomes the source and cause of the evil that a person commits.¹² Yet for Plotinus, evil can only be passive and negative. It is no more than chaotic formlessness, failing to be any particular being or kind of being derived from Form. At times, evil may possess the appearance of material positivity, but only imitates it at best.¹³

Augustine subsequently adopted Plotinus’ account of evil in several notable respects, affirming, in particular, God as the good itself.¹⁴ Yet he parted ways with his Platonic predecessors. Although Neoplatonists recognized many levels of goodness in their ontological system, Augustine went further than them in affirming the real, albeit dependent, goodness of created things. Moreover, contrary to Manichaean teaching, he held that even the matter of the world is good.¹⁵ Following his conversion, Augustine incorporated a loose Platonic perspective into his Christian theology and philosophy, one that reflected the so-called great chain of being of Neoplatonism.¹⁶ This incorporation helped to promote the now-familiar paradigm of a distinction between a lower, material world of creation and a higher spiritual world over which the good (which, for Augustine, is equivalent to God) is supreme.¹⁷

Since Augustine denied that evil was part of the original creation, he had to argue that evil is not a positive force or substance per se but rather a non-essential property of something created originally good.¹⁸ All creation shares in natural, albeit mutable being, and for something to be evil is for it to suffer the privation of the perfect goodness given to it by God. Consequently, no creature, regardless of the lowliness of its estate, is purely evil.¹⁹ Instead, anything we identify as evil is only something that has been made ex nihilo, is capable of corruption, and has been deprived of its proper good by its own action or that of other created beings.²⁰

Augustine’s account of the nature of evil as the corruption of the good unequivocally demarcates his own position from that of Manichaeism and Neoplatonism. Evil is in the world (aka “natural evil,” e.g., disease, natural disasters) but neither its origin nor its nature should be identified with the world’s materiality. The material world cannot be fundamentally corrupt merely because it is material substance. And if God is pure being and the Good, then evil is not some equal and opposed counterpart, since evil is parasitical upon good, not vice versa.

Unfortunately, this description of evil as a privation or an absence of goodness, although straightforward when understood in terms of biological metaphors such as disease or decay, is harder to relate to those moral evils that result from the freely willed actions of created personal beings.

Original sin

For Augustine, moral evil in the world is a consequence of decisions made by personal, created beings. In the case of the human race, humanity’s Edenic parents, through their own free will (liberum arbitrium), introduced evil into the world through their disobedience to the divine command (cf. Genesis 3), seeking to make themselves like God. This original sin resulted in a privation and corruption of the human will, mind, and body, such that these Edenic parents and all subsequent generations suffered the punishment of disordered concupiscence (often shortened simply to “concupiscence”), ignorance, and death.

In the City of God, Augustine offers an extended account of the angelic fall that pre-figured this fall of humanity.²¹ He explains that God initially created the world at the same time that “the angels were created.”²² Created ex nihilo and in plentitude, the angels themselves were of a higher degree of being than the remainder of creation, and for this reason possessed a higher original goodness. Yet they were also created with mutable wills, at least at first, in regard to their obedience to God.²³ When one third of the angels (cf. Revelation 12:4) failed to remain in harmony with the will and love of God, and in pride (superbia) sought to make themselves like God, they were cast out of Heaven as punishment.

Although the initial conditions and natures of human beings are distinct from those of the angels, the motivation for sin is much the same. Augustine describes an account of this fall in his polemic against the Manichees, both in his earlier commentary on Genesis, and later in the City of God, presenting the Garden of Eden in idyllic terms.²⁴ Yet the first and defining act of human evil was not the overt act recorded in Genesis. Rather it was the premeditated and deliberate choice, arising out of a disordered and defiant will, to select the lower good of self-realization over the higher good of God. It was no less than the sin of pride.²⁵ Whereas creatures in possession of a free and transcendent agency are free to choose God and to align with his will, they can also reject this alignment and, in doing so, choose some defiant alternative to the good called “evil.”²⁶

Without using the term “original sin” explicitly, Augustine illustrates the conditions for Adam’s fall and its consequences in his early, explicitly anti-Manichaean works.²⁷ He does not introduce the term until 396 CE in a letter to Simplician.²⁸ Within it, he explains the punishment not only for Adam’s disobedience, but for that of the original and actual sins of the human race. Whereas the “former derives from the punishment for the original sin (peccatum originale),” the latter is derived “from the punishment for repeated sin”; again, “with the former we are born into this life, while the latter we augment over the course of our lives.”²⁹

For Augustine, the pun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Series introduction
• Introduction
• 1 Augustine
• 2 Boethius
• 3 Śan˙kara
• 4 Neo-Confucianism
• 5 Saadiah Gaon
• 6 Rāmānuja
• 7 Moses Maimonides
• 8 Anselm
• 9 Hildegard of Bingen
• 10 Demonology in Islam
• 11 Dōgen
• 12 Aquinas
• 13 Scotus
• 14 Fighting for God: Jihad and crusade
• 15 Dante’s portrayal of evil at the close of the Middle Ages and some contemporary transpositions
• Index