In Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, Charles Mathewes develops a broadly Augustinian response to the theoretical and practical challenges of evil, suffering, and tragic conflict, drawing on twentieth century thinkers Reinhold Niebuhr and Hannah Arendt as well as St. Augustine himself. Mathewes is to be commended for his wide-ranging engagement of contemporary thought on these issues, and for his attempt to apply the insights of the Augustinian tradition to contemporary discussions of evil.

Mathewes divides his book into three parts. In Part I, he first discusses the difficulty which modernity has in understanding and responding to evil, and then argues that modernity has this difficulty because of its commitment to a subjectivist account of human existence and agency (chapter one). As Mathewes sees it, the Augustinian view regarding the challenge of evil offers a ‘profound… interpretation of and response to evil’, and this is so ‘precisely because it so thoroughly resists subjectivism’ (66). He accordingly proceeds (chapter two) to summarize Augustine’s account of evil, an account developed in terms of privation and perversion. He also raises several objections to this account. Throughout the rest of the book, Mathewes attempts to develop an Augustinian position on evil which is adequate to the objections raised in chapter two.

He develops this position by turning, in Part II, to the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr and Hannah Arendt, whose approaches to evil can be seen as Augustinian. He addresses the objections to (or ‘concerns’ with) the Augustinian account by showing ‘how [Niebuhr and Arendt]… appropriated and developed themes culled from Augustine’s thought in ways that help us not only to quiet these concerns, but also to exhibit the real power and attractiveness of the Augustinian account’ (100). In chapter three he examines Niebuhr’s ‘Christian realist’ account of original sin, seeing it as a revision of Augustine’s treatment of sin as perversion. In chapter four he discusses Arendt’s notion of ‘the banality of evil’, showing how it illuminates Augustine’s doctrine of evil as the privation of goodness. In both chapters, Mathewes devotes considerable attention to criticizing Niebuhr and Arendt for subjectivist elements in their accounts, and then reconstructing those accounts with the help of more thoroughly Augustinian elements.

Finally, in Part III, Mathewes synthesizes Niebuhr’s and Arendt’s developments of the Augustinian tradition, in order to further elaborate an Augustinian answer to the challenge of evil, and to answer critics who see the Augustinian position as escapist and overly pessimistic (chapter five).

Before moving on to a criticism of Mathewes’ work, a few words about its context are in order. Speaking generally, contemporary analytic philosophers who have turned their attention to evil have focused on the logical problem of evil (e.g. J.L. Mackie and Alvin Plantinga) or the evidential problem of evil (e.g. William Rowe, Stephen Wykstra, and Peter van Inwagen). For his part, Mathewes prefers to speak not of the problem of evil, but of the challenge of evil, desiring thereby to register his opinion that the phrase ‘the problem of evil’ usually ‘encompasses only one sub-form of inquiry of the larger challenge’ (25, footnote 3). Whereas contemporary analytic treatments of the problem of evil focus on the logical and evidential relationships between various propositions concerning the existence of God and the existence of evil, Mathewes wants to turn also to questions of our practical response to evil.

Although Augustine devoted much thought to the issues raised by evil and suffering, few contemporary treatments of these issues draw extensively on his work. Mathewes therefore takes up the promising task of returning to Augustine’s insights, and the insights of thinkers in the Augustinian tradition, in order to show how they can help us better to understand and respond to evil.

While Mathewes’ overall project is worthwhile, his work suffers from several defects. First, his exegesis of Augustine’s own view on evil is flawed on at least two counts. Discussing evil actions, Mathewes writes, ‘evil action is in itself not action at all’ (79). Yet it is hard to see how some particular evil action, say shooting an innocent person during a robbery, is not an action. If shooting a target during target-practice is an action (and there is no reason to say it is not), then shooting a person during a robbery is as well. Augustine’s point seems rather to be that evil action, insofar as it is action, has being, but evil action, insofar as it is evil, does not have being. Perhaps by evil action ‘in itself’ Mathewes means evil action insofar as it is evil. In this case it would be accurate to say that evil action in itself does not have being, and therefore is not action. But Mathewes does not explain what he means by evil action ‘in itself’, and so, at the least, his phrasing here is liable to confuse the reader.

More importantly, though, Mathewes ascribes to Augustine the position that evil action is fundamentally inexplicable. He writes:

Mathewes is surely right that, for Augustine, evil action is irrational. But he seems to miss the mark in saying that evil action is inexplicable, on Augustine’s view. For one thing, Mathewes’ interpretation would saddle Augustine with the consequence that we are not responsible for our evil actions, or at least are less responsible for our evil actions than for our good actions. For to the extent that an evil action is ‘a causal hiccup’, the agent who does evil (who experiences such a hiccup) is not responsible for his evil action. Moreover, the claim that evil action is inexplicable is incompatible with the proposition that all characteristically human actions are done for the sake of some end, perceived as desirable in some way—a proposition Augustine endorses. [1] Augustine writes, for example, that ‘Nothing draws the will into action except some object that has been perceived.’ [2] Consider also:

This last quotation implies that, in sinning, sinners seek after changeable goods. Thus Augustine does not hold that voluntary evil actions are completely without motivation or explanation. An evil action is motivated, and can thus be explained in terms of, the changeable good(s) the agent seeks in performing the action. Evil actions are irrational, since they involve the seeking of a lesser good over a greater good, but they are not inexplicable.

Strangely, Mathewes seems to realize that on Augustine’s view all acts of will involve the seeking of some good. On page 137, for example, he mentions ‘Augustine’s insight that humans always act for some love, that sin is the consequence of our flawed pursuit of genuine goods’. [4] It is therefore very unclear why Mathewes writes, on page 78, that ‘our actions are normally elicited by our apprehension of some good which we seek to achieve. With evil action, however, this is not the case.’

Mathewes does provide some support for the interpretation he gives on page 78, however. He cites De civitate Dei, 12.7:

According to Augustine, then, a wrong choice does not have an efficient cause. It seems a short step to Mathewes’ conclusion: since wrong choices do not have efficient causes, they are fundamentally inexplicable, as much ‘causal hiccups’ as intentional acts.

It must be noted, however, that in the passage cited Augustine is speaking only of efficient causes, not of all causes. [6] Since, as we have seen, Augustine thinks voluntary actions are always performed in pursuit of some perceived good, it is clear that all actions have one or more final causes, for Augustine, even if they do not have efficient causes qua evil. And the presence of a final cause, something for the sake of which the action is performed, is sufficient to render a voluntary act explicable. To take a mundane example, consider a smoker who resolves to quit smoking, but then gives in and has a smoke at the end of a hard day. The smoker may be doing something irrational, but he is not doing something inexplicable. We know why our incontinent smoker gives in and smokes—he smokes because it feels pleasurable to him to do so. Our incontinent smoker has no good reason to smoke, but he does have a reason.

The premise that evil action is inexplicable plays an important role in Mathewes’ interpretation of the overall intention of Augustine’s writings on evil. Contends Mathewes:

If I am correct, then, in arguing that Mathewes has Augustine wrong on the inexplicability of evil, his larger point about Augustine’s fundamental purposes is also undermined.

A second weakness in Mathewes’ work concerns his treatment of subjectivism and the challenge of evil. Mathewes describes ‘subjectivism’ as ‘an account of human existence which gives priority to the human intellect, and/or the brute fact of human action, over against some mute and inert reality, material or otherwise’ (52). On the subjectivist picture, ‘priority in human existence rests on the subject – our believing and desiring are ultimately due to what we do, not what the world does to and through us’ (52). Subjectivist thinkers ‘speak of the mysterious roots of action wholly in terms of the subject, the “depths” of the soul and the “darkness” of its motives, ignoring the reason-generating role of the world in which the subject finds its place’ (52). Central to Mathewes’ overall argument is his claim that ‘modern thought cannot handle evil because of its essentially subjectivist tenor’ (52). Mathewes moves from this claim to the suggestion that we should turn to a non-subjectivist tradition of thought in order better to understand and respond to evil, and the observation that the Augustinian tradition is an ideal candidate.

Unfortunately, Mathewes’ argument for this claim [7] (54–5) is underdeveloped and rather opaque. He begins by noting that evil has both ‘interior and exterior aspects’; evil is both something we ourselves do, and something that resists or attacks us from the outside. Mathewes then makes an argument by cases. On the one hand, if a subjectivist account insists that ‘evil’s ultimate reality is located “within” the self,’ then that account is bound to not ‘take evil’s challenge to us seriously enough.’ But, on the other hand, if a subjectivist account insists that ‘evil’s reality is ultimately located “outside” the self,’ then that account ‘takes evil too seriously.’ As regards the former case, Mathewes writes:

This passage is puzzling in at least two respects. First, the account in question locates evil “‘within” the self.’ Most likely, Mathewes means by this that the account places evil within each individual self (or most individual selves). But if this is so, then it should not be hard to explain the ‘exteriority of evil’ – evil can be exterior to me (or to any given individual) because it can be present in any number of individuals other than me. Second, it is unclear how this account can at the same time be an account which ‘insists on our responsibility for all that befalls us,’ and be an account which is plagued by problems with holding ‘someone responsible for something they do’. No doubt Mathewes has a clear point in mind here, but he has not adequately explained it.

As regards the latter case, Mathewes argues that any account which locates evil outside the self ‘cannot acknowledge the genuinely internal character of evil, its real rootedness in our lives…’ (55). Mathewes seems right here, but one is left wondering why the subjectivist need accept Mathewes’ division of all subjectivist accounts into those that locate evil within the subject and those that locate evil outside the subject. Why cannot a subjectivist simply grant that evil can be both exterior and interior to a subject, without ceasing to be a subjectivist?

Despite my criticisms, Mathewes’ book remains a welcome application of Augustine’s thought on evil to contemporary discussions of the issue, as well as a useful resource for those interested in Niebuhr and Arendt.