ST.

AUGUSTINE OF
HIPPO
(354-430CE)
St. Augustine was bishop of Hippo, in North Africa,
and his writings established the intellectual
foundations of Christianity in the West. He was born
in Thagaste, a town forty-five miles south of Hippo
in the Roman province of Numidia, which is now
Algeria. His father, Patricius, was a pagan, and his
mother, Monica, a Christian. In his late teens he
went to Carthage for further study, and through his
reading of Cicero, he became enthused about philosophy. He became a teacher of
rhetoric in Carthage and later in Rome and Milan. Augustine was a restless seeker
rather than a systematic thinker, and after a brief flirtation with the dualistic
philosophy of Manichaeanism, he immersed himself in the Neoplatonic philosophy
of Plotinus. His whole life may be characterized as an intellectual and moral struggle
with the problem of evil, a struggle that he worked out through synthesizing the
ideas of the Neoplatonists with Christianity. He upheld the teachings of the Bible,
but he realized that maintaining them in the intellectual and political climate of his
age required a broad liberal education.

In his struggle against evil, Augustine believed in a hierarchy of being in which God
was the Supreme Being on whom all other beings, that is, all other links in the great
chain of being, were totally dependent. All beings were good because they tended
back toward their creator who had made them from nothing. Humans, however,
possess free will, and can only tend back to God by an act of the will. Man's refusal
to turn to God is, in this way of thinking, nonbeing, or evil, so although the whole of
creation is good, evil comes into the world through man's rejection of the good, the
true, and the beautiful, that is, God. The ultimate purpose of education, then, is
turning toward God, and Augustine thought the way to God was to look into oneself.
It is here one finds an essential distinction Augustine makes between knowing about
something (cogitare), and understanding (scire). One can know about oneself, but it
is through understanding the mystery of oneself that one can come to understand
the mystery of God. Thus the restless pursuit of God is always a pursuit of a goal
that recedes from the seeker. As humans are mysteries to themselves, God is
understood as wholly mysterious.

ETHICAL TEACHING OF
ST. AUGUSTINE

Submitted by: Dailo,Nerille Jan A.

BSA

ST. AUGUSTINE (354-430CE)

Augustine fashioned a philosophical framework for Christian thought that was essentially
Platonic THE ABSENCE THEORY OF EVIL He also saw in Platonic and Neoplatonic
doctrines the solution to the problem of evil. This problem can be expressed in a very simple
question: HOW COULD EVIL HAVE ARISEN IN A WORLD CREATED BY A PERPECTLY
GOOD GOD?
--HOW COULD EVIL HAVE ARISEN IN A WORLD CREATED BY A PERPECTLY GOOD
GOD?
- One solution to this problem that Augustine considered was that evil is the result of
creative force other than God, a force of darkness. But isnt it there supposed to be just one
and only one creator?

For Plato, the FORM OF THE GOOD was the source of all reality, and from this principle it
follows that all that is real is good. Thus given Platos principle, EVIL IS NOT REAL.
Because evil is not something, it was not created by God. This theory of evil is plausible
enough as long as you are thinking of certain physical evil. However the absence theory
of evil does not plausibly explain MORAL EVIL, the evil that is the wrong doing of man.
HOW DID ST. AGUSUTINE ACCOUNT FOR MORAL EVIL?
-His explanation of moral evil was a variation of another idea of Platos, the idea that a
person never knowingly does wrong, that evil actions are the result of ignorance of the
good, of misdirected education, Augustine added a new twist to this idea. Moral evil, he
said, is not exactly a case of misdirected education but instead, a case of misdirected love.
. NATURAL LAW
-For St. Augustine, natural law governs all morality and human behavior must conform to it.
Augustinian natural law is the eternal law of God as it is written in the heart of man and
woman and is apprehended by them in their conscience; and the eternal law is the reason
and will of GOD Thus, the ultimate source of all good is God and God alone is

intrinsically GOOD. Our overriding moral imperative is therefore to love God. The
individual virtues are simply different aspects of the love of GOD.
7. For Augustine, although there is nothing wrong with loving things other than God, you
must not love them as if they were good in themselves for only God is intrinsically good.
To love things other than God as if they were inherently good is disordered love: it is to turn
away from God, and moral evil consists in just this disordered love.
8. HAPPINESS Happiness consists in having all you want and wanting not evil. In
any event, the only conceivable way to have all you want and to want no evil, is to make
God the supreme object of your love. For Augustine, MORAL EVIL arises when man
turns away from God. Thus, God, is not the creator or moral evil; it is we who create evil.
But does it not then follow that we can create good? No, because God is the source of
all that is good. We can do good only through GOD.