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God's goodness and benevolence, according to the Augustinian theodicy, remain perfect and without responsibility for evil or suffering. Augustine of Hippo was the first to develop the theodicy. He rejected the idea that evil exists in itself, instead regarding it as a corruption of goodness, caused by humanity's abuse of free will.
De libero arbitrio voluntatis (On Free Choice of the Will), often shortened to De libero arbitrio, is a book by Augustine of Hippo which seeks to resolve the problem of evil in Christianity by asserting that free will is the cause of all suffering. The first of its three volumes was completed in 388; the second and third were written between ...
St Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) grappled with the problem of evil before and after his conversion. After converting to Christianity, he came to view God as a spiritual, not corporeal, Being who is sovereign over other lesser beings based on God having created all material reality ex nihilo .
In the same line of thinking, St. Augustine also defined evil as an absence of good, as did the theologian and monk Thomas Aquinas, who stated "a man is called bad insofar as he lacks a virtue, and an eye is called bad insofar as it lacks the power of sight." [11]: 37 Bad as an absence of good resurfaces in Hegel, Heidegger and Barth.
Augustine teaches substitutionary atonement. However, the specific interpretation differed as to what this suffering for sinners meant. The early Church Fathers, including Athanasius and Augustine, taught that through Christ's suffering in humanity's place, he overcame and liberated us from death and the devil.
As a work of one of the most influential Church Fathers, The City of God is a cornerstone of Western thought, expounding on many questions of theology, such as the suffering of the righteous, the existence of evil, the conflict between free will and divine omniscience, and the doctrine of original sin. [2] [3]
Augustine of Hippo (/ ɔː ˈ ɡ ʌ s t ɪ n / aw-GUST-in, US also / ˈ ɔː ɡ ə s t iː n / AW-gə-steen; [22] Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430), [23] also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa.
Augustine gave an argument for the theory in chapter 12 (paragraph 18) of book 7 of his Confessions: And it was made clear unto me that those things are good which yet are corrupted, which, neither were they supremely good, nor unless they were good, could be corrupted; because if supremely good, they were incorruptible, and if not good at all ...