Labored Knowledge:

Reflections on Hauerwas on Augustine on Evil

One of the stranger claims that Augustine defends over

the course of his theological career is that evil is a kind

of nothing, a privation, albeit a nothingness with a

peculiarly profound power to vex the human heart, will, and

mind. When I frame the mind’s question of evil—the question

of what evil is—and think in terms of Augustine’s privative

notion, I am reminded of the strange things that

Wittgenstein has to say about pain in the sections of the

Philosophical Investigations where he debunks a seductive illusion

of human separateness, a solipsist’s supposed self-

awareness. Can I know my own pain? Yes, of course I can, but

not in a way, if Wittgenstein has anything to say about it,

that makes my pain more knowable in principle than the pain

of others, which I would presumably have to infer from their

behavior. The postulate of essentially first-person

knowledge suggests that we are always veiled from one

another, while being, by the same token, so close to our own

skins that not even God can come between our minds and our

feelings. Wittgenstein is well aware that his efforts to

discredit such a postulate are likely to seem at first a

denial of the inner life and an endorsement of behaviorism.

“But you will surely admit,” his hypothetical interlocutor

interjects (PI 304), “that there is a difference between

pain-behavior accompanied by pain and pain-behavior without

any pain?” “Admit it?” Wittgenstein responds, “What cannot

difference could there be?” “And yet you again and again

reach the conclusion,” the interlocutor continues, “that the

sensation itself is a nothing.” “Not at all,” replies

Wittgenstein; “It is not a something, but not a nothing

either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve

just as well as a something about which nothing could be

said.”

When Augustine tells us that evil is not a something,

but a privation of the good, I don’t think we ought read him

to mean that the evil is an illusion or that the devil does

not exist. I think we ought to take a cue from Wittgenstein,

wonder whether we tend to define our inner lives too meanly,

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and look to Augustine, our interlocutor, to provoke us into

speaking responsibly about evil. I believe that what

Augustine has to offer us, under such a proviso, is less a

theory of evil than an inducement to confess. Augustine weds

his inner life to confession and his Confessions to a

confession of sin. In the second book of his Confessions, he

writes (2.1.1): “I want to call to mind my soul’s nastiness

and corruption, not because I love nastiness and corruption,

but so that I may love you, my God.” His words suggest a

startling alchemy: a recollected corruption, when confessed

to God, releases a forgotten love into consciousness—a love

of God, the source of goodness itself. The main inspiration

that Stanley takes from Augustine is that no responsible

discourse about evil can fail to be confessional and that

confessional discourse is a graced form of speaking, or one

that is informed by humanly unmasterable possibilities of

redemption.

I think that this is absolutely the right inspiration

to take from Augustine, but I also think it all too tempting

to dislodge his privative notion of evil from its

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confessional context and treat it as a theory of evil in its

own right. Augustine gives into this kind of temptation when

he connects the origination of an evil will to a deficient

cause and feels that he has given enough substance to the

idea of origination to be able to substantiate the idea of

original guilt—the sort that underwrites his terrible belief

in infant damnation. I am not, I should say, against

theories and explanations, even when the explanandum is

evil. My claim is rather that Augustine’s privative notion

of evil, when given theoretical weight, makes for an empty

explanation. Thinking that one has some explanation for

evil, when really one has none at all, is a corrupting

mistake and hence a temptation.

Stanley makes it abundantly clear in his essay that he

is dead set against the very idea of a science of evil.

Theodicists who assume that evil’s mystery can be resolved

from an ideal observer’s position, and medical scientists

who assume the same, though with less eschatology and more

research funding, are both roundly chastised by him for

their dangerous presumption. I see some presumption in both

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cases, less so, though, in the case of the theodicist. If we

are prepared to assume, along with a certain kind of medical

materialist, that evil is fundamentally a problem of psycho-

pharmacology, one that calls for a miracle drug or two, then

we presume to have already a knowledge of human well-being

that is not itself the product of pharmacological

manipulation; otherwise we would lack the wisdom for

administering our drugs well. Presumptuous medical

scientists, the ones that irk Stanley, presume that evil is

a disease; a more modest assumption would be that evil is

analogous to a disease. Evil, like disease, is a corruption

of health, but unlike most diseases, evil is bound up

tightly with a person’s self-perception. Mental illness is

the closest medical analogue we have to evil, but mental

illness is as hard to understand as evil is.

The theodicists of presumptuous intent lapse into a

facile identification of their own. Stanley thinks that they

confuse human and divine justice and end up measuring God’s

judgment against a human standard. When they do this, “you

can be sure,” he writes (p. 6), “that the god Christians now

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worship is not the God of Israel and Jesus Christ.” It is

not clear to me which Christian theodicists Stanley has in

mind; in any case I don’t think that he can fairly have all

of them in mind. Take Augustine, for instance. His doctrine

of the massa damnata, of the group of sinners left graceless

and hell-bound, inclines him to take up this question of

theodicy: why does God choose to redeem only an elect few,

while leaving most others to their own, self-defeating

devices? His answer, if we are inclined to call it that, is

to emphasize the disparity between a secret and sublime

divine justice, well beyond human reckoning, and a pathetic,

albeit familiar, human alternative. If there is a

presumption here, it is not that God’s justice is just like

human justice, only otherworldly, but that human justice

falls infinitely short of what a human being, gifted with

otherworldly illumination, would call justice. The danger of

this kind of presumption is, I think, obvious, but it has

one redeeming feature that the presumption of our medical

materialist does not: the theodicist believes that no human

perspective on evil is ever beyond divine revision.

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I will be trying to suggest what is redeeming about

that belief for much of the remainder of my reflection on

Stanley’s appropriation of Augustine. Although I have

alluded to Augustine’s unlovely interest in theodicy, I

agree with Stanley that confession is the better context for

speaking theologically about evil and also the context that

gives us our best Augustine. In making the switch from the

one context to the other, it is important not to insist too

unreservedly, however, on the nothingness of evil. If evil’s

privation is taken to be privation de re rather than

privation de dicto, as a feature of evil itself and not as a

feature of our talk about evil, then forgiveness is going to

be a very hard notion to credit. It is a hard enough notion

to credit as it is. Augustine’s confessional account of

evil, which aims at acknowledging forgiveness, is going to

call for some further precision in his notion of privation.

Before I say more about privation in a confessional

context, it will be good for you to have a quick synopsis of

Stanley’s argument. His essay falls into three sections: the

first discusses evil’s attraction, the second aims to use

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Augustine to call that attractiveness into question, and

last is a meditation on whether a confessional approach to

evil is enough of a response to a modernity that is, on the

one hand, fascinated by evil, and on the other, skeptical of

the good. Stanley finds in Augustine his hope for an

alternative to an ethics of horror. Perhaps we won’t as

moderns continue to have use Nazis and other genocidal

maniacs as our best incentive for uniting our splintered

moral communities into some semblance of a church catholic,

or a community universally opposed to barbarism. That hope

depends of course on the barbarism not becoming attractive;

hence Stanley’s otherwise anticlimactic title for his

concluding section: “Where Has This Gotten Us, or Why I Am

Not a Nazi.”

The general attractiveness of evil is bound to the

intelligibility of human action. I cannot say what a person

did, what I did, unless I can refer to some good, the

perception of which motivates my acting. “Our sins,” Stanley

reminds us (p. 22), “are done in the name of ‘great goods.’”

Suppose I were to try to imagine the matter otherwise: I sin

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for motives that seem to me to lack all concern for the good

and so act, not for a great good, but in the name of no good

at all. In that case I act in ways that call my own agency

into question, and I begin to resolve my personality into

some kind of terrible phenomenon, an unnatural disaster.

Augustine is keenly aware of this possibility in himself,

and he makes it his confessional imperative not to make the

attractiveness of sin for sin’s sake the bottom life of his

self-analysis.

Although Stanley will certainly have to be concerned

with the nature and force of that imperative if he wants to

enlist Augustine in a reformation of modern pieties, he

seems less worried in his essay about sin’s inherent

seduction and more concerned about the faith that repulsion

from evil motivates. Moderns, whether their self-

descriptions are secular or religiously invested, tend to

love God or the good just because they hate evil. Finding

this a lamentable and misguided predisposition, Stanley

faults Andrew Delbanco, a cultural critic he generally

admires, for linking American godlessness to a loss of

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belief in Satan, and he likewise faults Romeo Dallaire, a

French-Canadian Catholic and UN assistance force commander

in Rwanda, for embracing the kind of faith that shakes hands

with the devil. He cites these men not for being egregiously

bad theologians, but for being taken in by a commonly modern

theological turn.

If Stanley is right about the modern predisposition to

link faith to the negative sublime, to suffering and horror

beyond description, then the paradigmatic modern man of

faith is Dostoevsky’s literary creation, Ivan Karamazov. As

a modern intellectual, Ivan strives to keep his sense of

true and false free and clear of the unscientific notions of

good and evil. His calls his mindset Euclidean, and he means

by this a mind focused on the symmetries of cause and effect

and on nothing else: “I know only,” he tells his younger and

innocently pious brother Alyosha, “that there is suffering,

that none are to blame, that all things follow simply and

directly from one another, that everything flows and finds

its level.” But he adds in the same breath that he cannot

bring himself to consent to his mind’s discipline: “What do

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I care if none are to blame and that I know it—I need

retribution; otherwise I will destroy myself.” Ivan’s leap

of faith, into belief in the powers of evil, leaves him not

godless but disdainful of a god of forgiveness. Ivan was

born to interrupt the ordered world, and, if not, then to

die. He is the parody of a Christ figure.

Having prefaced his Augustinian account of evil’s

poverty with a critique of our modern fascination with

evil’s power (it apparently takes a devil to resurrect a

god), Stanley sets up his Augustine to take on an Ivan. Or

less agonistically put, his Augustine makes less of evil

than the imagination of an Ivan would make of it, and that

is all to the good. Supposedly. What then should we make of

all those terrible stories that Ivan tells his brother, of

children who are cruelly abused, tortured, and killed? The

particular stories may be set in a work of fiction, but the

victimization of children in our world is sadly no fiction.

We don’t have to imagine grotesque evil. We can simply

consult the historical record. In his book-length critique

of theodicy, entitled Theology and the Problem of Evil, Kenneth

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Surin makes reference to the Nuremberg testimony of a Polish

guard at Auschwitz, relating to the camp practice of

throwing live children into the crematorium furnace,

apparently in order to save on the cost of poison gas. Surin

writes of this practice (p. 147): “[It] can only prompt

penance and conversion; it cannot motivate a theodicy, even

one which takes the form of an atonement.”

I must admit that when I hear about cruelty and

indifference of such magnitude, I am at a loss for morals to

draw. I generally feel about such things the way that Ivan

was encouraging Alyosha to feel: I feel that someone ought

to be blamed and punished, made to suffer violently, that

God ought be unforgiving and retributive, or at least

suicidal—for what creator would want to continue to live in

the face of such miscreation? I don’t trust these feelings

of mine, however. I don’t trust them not because I believe

that evil may be, as it were, less evil than I imagine it to

be, but because I try not to presume upon my capacity to

face the suffering of others, which I have to assume is

quite limited. Among her aphorisms on evil, Simone Weil has

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this to say about the difficulty I have in mind (I quote

from Gravity and Grace):

The contemplation of human wretchedness uproots us

towards God, but it is only in others whom we love as

ourselves that we can contemplate it. We can neither

contemplate it in ourselves as such nor in others as

such.

Weil’s point about the connection of love to the

contemplation of suffering, which is a deeper point than I

can fathom here, certainly has to do with her sense of love

as a form of attention or recognition. “Belief in the

existence of other human beings as such,” she writes

elsewhere, “is love.” Apart from love, I am liable to attend

to suffering, if I attend to it at all, as an abstraction

from persons and therefore as either a test of my power to

rid my world of suffering or an impetus to feel resentful

over the power I imagine myself to lack. Neither reaction to

suffering is an evil in itself, but I for one would be wary

about too studied a study of suffering. The contemplation of

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human wretchedness, apart from love of neighbor, can be a

dangerous thing.

When Ivan recounts the story of a small, terrified boy

who is made to be the quarry of a hunt by a stupidly cruel

general, one gets the feeling that Ivan is not so invested

in that boy in particular. The child’s torment is for him

just another textbook case of adult depravity, and Ivan

invokes it not to show his love for an innocent, but to

share with his younger brother his hatred for those who

violate innocence. Ivan seems not to notice or to care that

his obsessive fascination with tortured and abused children

is itself working a kind of violence on Alyosha’s innocence.

The younger brother, still a boy in many ways, is getting

drawn into the dark passions of a retributive imagination.

Such an imagination has no memory for innocence past. Ivan

is clearly not thinking of his general as having once been a

child loved by God and by his parents; in fact, the thought

that the general may still be the object of someone’s love—

and in his case that someone would have to be more than

human—offends Ivan to the core. He refuses the possibility

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and bases his faith in retribution on the purity of an

enemy’s evil.

In its confessional context, Augustine’s privative

account of evil is his halting attempt over time to

recollect the love that his resentment over lost innocence,

his own, has caused him to forget. If he is successful at

this kind of remembering, he will have a story to tell of

his life; if not, he will remain a phenomenon of self-

consuming desire, a black hole of intelligibility. “It is

not accidental,” writes Stanley (p. 11), “that the only way

that Augustine has to display how he came to understand that

evil is nothing was by providing a narrative of how he

arrived at that judgment.” I agree with Stanley, but I want

to amplify and also qualify his insight. The reason why

Augustine has to speak of evil’s privation in terms of a

self-narrative is that evil loses substance only in the

context of being forgiven. Successful self-narration and

perfect forgiveness proceed from the same directive: to move

forward in time, we have to return to the grace of a

beginning and recall that our life’s possibilities were once

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held in trust for us. Perhaps they still are; only a broken

and contrite heart would know.

That was my amplification of Stanley’s insight. Now

comes my qualification. Augustine never fully tells the

story of how he came to judge evil to lack substance. His

failure to do this, and I use the word “failure” advisedly

here, has two basic causes, intimately related, but still

distinct. First, it can be damn hard to accept forgiveness.

Imagine that you are Ivan’s general the day after you wake

up to the gravity of your evils. You will not want to be

forgiven. The shame of having your life valued by beings

whom you have given no reason to value your life will be a

crucifying experience. It will be easier for you to make

yourself the object of your now unintelligible desires to

evacuate your world of company. But if Augustine is to be

our example of a confessing self, we don’t need to assume

the persona of a moral monster to know that confessing will

one day be hard and never adequate. We just need to

recognize that something in us would prefer to betray

innocence than to lose it. When we can admit without

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resentment that innocence must be lost—in that we lose both

our childhood and our children to time—then we touch upon

the second cause of the imperfection in Augustine’s self-

narration. He cannot complete the story of his life’s

goodness without denying to those who love him a future for

suggesting further revisions and renewals of that goodness.

And for Augustine it is through God that others love him and

he them, God being the love that is free of fear. Seeking to

end a story that God has begun is, in effect, to sin against

the incarnation, or, as Ivan puts it, to want to return

one’s ticket; the truth being resisted here is that we are

born to live lives perpetually open to love’s revision. That

openness is often hard and difficult labor, like a difficult

birth.

The alternative to such openness is to look to live

either in an insignificant world, hollowed of good and evil,

or in a pitched and polarized order, where the conjunction

of good and evil has been resolved into pure antithesis

(heaven and hell on earth). A person of Ivan’s refined

cynicism is likely to find my Augustinian talk of love and

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forgiveness distasteful, to say the least; if that person is

willing still to talk about good and evil, the drift of that

talk is going to be towards a polarized vision, a Manichean

fascination for antithesis. Take the case of Ivan himself.

On the evidence of those stories he tells, he might be

expected to draw an absolute distinction between those who

violate the innocent and those who seek to do violence to

those violate the innocent. Ivan is too shrewd a cynic,

however, to fall into simplistic self-righteousness. He

knows that the difference between the violence of the

avenger and the violence of the abuser is a difference in

degree, not in kind. Both kinds of violence ignore the

claims of innocence. Avengers are indifferent to whatever

there is of innocence still in those to be pained, and

abusers look to destroy the innocence of those they abuse.

Ivan’s Manichean vision is not a contrast of violence, but a

vision even more agonized than that. He pits the trusting

need of children for love and affection against the violent

mistrust of needy adults, and then he deems the difference

unforgivable. Adult need destroys the promise of childhood

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and makes it impossible for a person to grow up and still in

some way be the child he or she once was.

Ivan’s Manichean antithesis between childhood innocence

and adult sin shows up in his strictures against

forgiveness. Here he is near the end of his unholy sermon to

Alyosha, laying down the law of who can forgive and who

cannot:

I want to forgive, and I want to embrace; I don’t want

more suffering. But if the suffering of children goes

to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth,

then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not

worth such a price. I do not, finally, want the mother

to embrace the tormentor who let his dogs tear her son

to pieces! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive

him for herself, if she wants to, let her forgive the

tormentor her immeasurable maternal suffering; but she

has no right to forgive the tormentor, even if the

child himself were to forgive him! (Pevear and

Volokhonsky translation, p. 245)

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If I were to ever meet a mother as brutally bereaved of a

son as this mother was of hers, I certainly would not be

inclined to insist that she forgive her son’s tormentor. On

the other hand, I can’t imagine insisting on the contrary

either. Ivan apparently finds it acceptable that the son, if

miraculously resurrected, might find it in his heart to

forgive his killer. Such forgiveness would, I suspect,

express for Ivan the pathos of a child’s expectation: that a

cry for affection be met with affection, history

notwithstanding. The mother, Ivan concedes, is allowed to

forgive her son’s killer for the “immeasurable maternal

suffering” he has caused her, but not, he insists, for her

son’s suffering. In regard to that, a mother’s first and

foremost responsibility is to hate the one who has harmed

her child. It seems not to have occurred to Ivan that such

hatred may amount to the mother’s abandonment of her child

and a desecration of his memory. Or perhaps that possibility

does occur to him, and he just considers it part of the

pathos of adult responsibility: that a mother avenge a wrong

rather than tend to her child. In either case, I find Ivan’s

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disdain for a mother’s forgiveness of another mother’s son

to be more nihilistic than principled. It undoes a world of

original connections.

I have been invoking Dostoevsky’s Ivan, you will

recall, as a personification of modern faith in evil and,

insofar as modernity depends on this faith, a

personification of modernity itself. I am prepared to

suggest, on the strength of the personification, that it is

not relativism that is modernity’s big problem, but

Manichean morality. ‘Relativism,’ it seems to me, refers to

the indifference that two tribes have for one another just

before they begin to care that they are not on speaking

terms. Manichean morality takes hold of the situation when

the two sides to the disaffection begin to despair of ever

arriving at terms. It is possible to think that what is

needed here is an abstractly verifiable set of values, but

that is a thought, as Stanley suggests, that gives a great

deal of independent authority to relativism. Whether I think

I can move from a tribal to a universal language of morals

or whether I am convinced that the effort is hopeless, I am

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still assuming an integrity in my private language, the

language that is proper to me and my own, that I have never

had tested. Suppose that my tribe begins to splinter. At

what point can I reasonably say: here is where the

splintering ends and otherness of the world begins? Will the

self that looks to secure itself before it engages a world

finally be a tribe, a body, an essentially thinking thing,

or perhaps something wholly indefinable? Manichean logic,

which is the logic I have just adumbrated, is a logic of

perpetual retreat. It tells us only what we are not.

Stanley notes, quite rightly, that we will never get

Augustine on evil unless we also come to terms with his

rejection of Manichean science. I’m not convinced that

Augustine himself ever came to terms with his Manichean past

and what it meant to him—I’m almost convinced of the

contrary, in fact—but I will try, by way of a conclusion, to

begin to address this issue. Stanley likes especially what

Gill Evans has to say about Augustine’s disenchantment with

the Manichees in her book, Augustine on Evil. She associates

his disenchantment with his recognition not only that evil

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lacks an explanatory cause, but also that it is corrupting

to try to supply it with one.

Manichean luminaries were telling Augustine that evil

has a material cause—namely, matter. Since the Manichees

were materialists themselves, it is fair to wonder whether

their answer to Augustine offered him much illumination.

Surely it would have to be matter that is alien to a good

soul’s matter that counts as evil. The problem with this

qualification is that it is possible to experience the body

of any another human being, and even one’s own body, as

alien at times. In the standard story of Augustine’s

rejection of the Manichees, the Platonists now enter into

the picture. He reads some of their books, turns inward, and

discovers that God, the reality behind matter, is

immaterial. It has always puzzled me why some of Augustine

commentators have found that idea—that God is immaterial—to

be especially relevant to Augustine’s privative notion of

evil. It strikes me as an idea that is perfectly in keeping

with a Manichean logic of perpetual retreat. God is the

reality that is left over when one is finally done

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withdrawing from all the matter of one’s experience. At that

point what difference does it make whether one says that God

is material or immaterial? The exercise was to retreat from

creation, undo one’s birth, return to nothingness—perhaps to

be born again, but this time with security.

A closer reading of book VII of the Confessions suggests

that Augustine is being led into a spiritual exercise quite

different from the one I have just described. He is given a

vision of the perfect beauty of God’s material creation, and

he is given this vision from an unreal perspective. He calls

his place of viewing a regio dissimilitudinis, literally ‘a place

of unlikeness’ (Conf. 7.10.16). In this place he is unlike

what he is seeing, but what he is seeing is the created

order, of which he is presumably a part. So how has he

managed to lose his place in the order that gives him his

sense of place, of being like something? The first half of

book VII, the preface to his description of his interior

apocalypse, is Augustine’s description of his struggle to

resolve the mystery of evil. If we have been assuming that

Augustine’s departure from Manichean thinking will be marked

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by his willingness to track evil back to an autonomous,

albeit deficient, exercise of human will, then Augustine has

already departed from Manichean thinking. He can’t figure

out, for the life of him, why a good God would create a

being with the capacity for self-willed corruption.

Many commentators on Augustine—Stanley and Gill Evans

included—try to make a virtue out of Augustine’s

incomprehension. I understand the temptation to do this, but

I encourage resistance. Augustine’s appeal to the

unintelligibility of his sin is intimately connected to his

sense of his originality, his self-created distinctiveness.

Sin, after all, is what he does; God is the author of

everything else about him. If we buy into this Manichean

fiction of Augustine’s and make absolute the

unintelligibility of his sinful will, we consign him

eternally to that ‘place of unlikeness,’ where he is neither

with God nor with others. I call his fiction ‘Manichean’

because, to my mind, he hasn’t transcended Manichean

thinking at all. His God waits for him, incarnate, in the

material order of spirit; meanwhile he is busy defining

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himself in terms of his will to be elsewhere. Worse,

Augustine is so proprietary about that difference that he

would consider it an abdication of responsibility to give

God a share in defining it. In this he is like any human

being who finds it morally offensive and personally

humiliating to be forgiven.

The difference that Augustine misses in his book VII

persona but eventually comes to see is the difference

between divine and human forgiveness. Human beings forgive

one another reactively, in response to perceived hurts and

grievances. Divine forgiveness is given ahead of our

reactions. It frees us from having to be the selves we

already imagine ourselves to be. “I am other than what I

imagine myself to be,” writes Weil in an Augustinian moment;

“To know this is forgiveness.”

J. Wetzel

Department of Philosophy and Religion

Colgate University

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January of 2005

For the Conference at Duke University, January 27-29, 2005:

“Speak No Evil: Moral Judgment in the Modern Age.”

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