Evil and the Nature of Good
23
Jan
Augustine of Hippo was a wandering Manichean, with a bohemian life and full
of loves, he had a son, his mother Monica a fervent Christian asked for the conversion of the son, but Augustine judged the ignorant Christians too elaborate until he met Ambrose , who was the bishop of Hippo, who was an intellectual and had been mayor of Liguria and Emilia, who had the Mediolan capital, today Milan, later the people made him a bishop.
In the contact with Ambrose, Augustine becomes Christian and writes in this period The nature of the Good, where he contests the conception of Mani with respect to evil, and then the duality of principles that was based on the cosmological system of the manichean sect, is replaced by an ontology.
Augustine then worries about affirming that all nature is a good, since it proceeds from God and that evil, is not among created beings, but is constructed when not doing good.
Augustine knew Faust who was one of the great sages of the Manichean sect, but discovered that his knowledge was limited and restricted to Grammar, Cicero and something of Seneca.
In a more elaborate way, Augustine’s complete theory states that there is a corruption of the mode (modus), species (order), and order (ordo), which are ontological attributes of beings, and therefore there is no ontological evil, its philosophical-theological implications.
Augustine’s thinking on matter is not the dualism between spirit and matter, he says:
“He did not know that God is spirit and has no members endowed with length and breadth, nor is matter because matter is less in its part than in its whole. Even if matter were infinite, it would be smaller in some of its parts, limited by a certain space, than in its infinity! “(AGOSTINHO, 2006).
But what if evil happens how to react to it? Augustine clarifies this, in order to judge man with justice, conferring punishment or punishment upon him, the very social perception of evil, according to the actions or intentions of the practitioner, affirms: “[…] it is not unjust to give oneself to the perverse the power to harm one another, that the patience of the good may be proved, and the iniquity of the wicked be punished. ” 21 of his work “The nature of the good”.
Two contemporary works deal with these dilemmas: “The Fragility of Goodness,” by Martha Nussbaum and Paul Ricoeur’s “Symbolic of Evil,” evil is a philosophical question posed, not is therefore the Manichean question.
AUGUSTINE, Saint. Confessions. New York: Image Books, 1960 (Notes in Brazilian edition by Vozes Editor).
