Part 107

The metaphysical element in Augustine's doctrine of sin arose from his controversy with the Manicheans. Manes taught that sin was a substance. This Augustine denied. With him it was a maxim that " Omne esse bonum est." But if esse (being) is good, and if evil is the opposite of good, then evil must be the opposite of being, or nothing, i. e., the negation or privation of being. Thus he was led to adopt the language of the new Platonists and of Origen, who, by a different process, were brought to define evil as the negation of being, as Plotinus calls it, o-repv/o-is tov ovtos ; and Origen says, Tracra rj KCLKLa oiSev ecTTtv, and evil itself he says is iaTeprjo-- 6aL TOV ovros. In4hus making being good and the negation of being evil, Augustine seems to have made the same mistake which other philosophers have so often made, — of confounding physical and moral good. When God at tlie beginning declared all things, material and Immaterial, which He had made, to be very good. He simply declared them to be suited to the ends for which they were severally made. He did not Intend to teach us that moral goodness could be predicated of matter or of an irrational animal. In other cases the word good means agreeable, or adapted to give pleasure. In others again, it means morally right. To infer from the fact that everything which God made is good, or that every esse is honum, that therefore moral evil being the negation of good must be the negation of being, is as illogical as to argue that because honey Is good (in the sense of being agreeable to the taste) therefore worm- wood is bad, in the sense of being sinful. Although Augustine held the language of those philosophers who, both before and since, destroy the very nature of sin in making it mere limitation of being, yet he was very far from holding the same system. (1.) They made sin necessary, as arising from the very nature of a creature. He made It voluntary. (2.) They made it purely physical. He made it moral. With him it includes pollution and guilt. With them it included neither. (3.) With Augustine this negation was not merely passive, it was not the simple want of being, it was such privation as tended to destruction. (4.) Evil with Augustine, therefore, as was more fulh' and clearly taught by his followers, was not mere privation, nor simply defect. That a stone cannot Bee, involves the negation of the power of vision. But It is not