Augustine made an immense contribution to Christian tradition. In Book 7 of the Confessions, he talks of how philosophy is related to theology and faith. With regard to Platonist teachings about God and evil, Augustine acknowledges that Platonists helped him know the relationship existing between God and the finite creation as much as understanding evil. According to him there is a relation between God and man and not evil. Evil exits because it was created by God. But then the truth about all these is that when individuals do good things they serve their role in the functioning of the idea God had in the creation of evil.
Augustine acknowledges that evil is the most notorious problem in Christianity. The problem lies in the God who created the world having let evil manifest. But he goes on to maintain that evil comes as a result of privation of good. Humans create evil by misperceiving God’s creation in totality (Gorman 229). The misperception creates a disharmony where there is supposed to be harmony and, therefore, evil comes into play. Evil is part and parcel of God’s creation and hence, human beings have to live with it.
He realized that the image he had about God was not the problem but the imagination he had after perceiving the image. Imagination only brings about images that may be extended into space and time. Augustine realized that God did not fit into that but rather gives the power for an understanding of who he is to all humans. In all this the relation between God and man goes back to creation but the question is why God created the evil that exists in the universe.
Work Cited
Gorman, Michael (2005): “Augustine's Use of Neoplatonism in Confessions VII: A Response to Peter King,”Modern Schoolman: A Quarterly Journal of Philosophy vol. 82, no. 3 (March2005), pp. 227–233.
