When you hear the term ‘evil’, most people nowadays think about serial killers, women trafficking, torture and other utter malicious things. Augustine in the middle ages had other thoughts on the subject. Augustine was a Christian and was inspired by the Neoplatonists and their dualism. This dualism prescribes that there would be two worlds; an immaterial and material one. The nous, the name they give to our intellect and reason, exists eternally and therefore in the immaterial world. Something that exists eternally undergoes no change and is not corrupted by any decay. Because everything we witness in our material world has a beginning and an ending, the nous can’t possibly exists in this world if it’s constant, therefore it must be immaterial.
All material beings experience causation. We as material beings witness causation by watching others give birth to new life and we ourselves are also a product of this causation. All physical things have causal dependence. However, immaterial things aren’t dependent on causation. The nous is the most perfect being with the most perfect and extensive properties anyone could imagine. In this we can clearly see how Augustine could swiftly dismiss the thought that Christianity and philosophy we’re contradictory to one another by creating an immaterial world with a perfect unitary and single entity that people could easily recognize as God. Our own soul then is an imperfect copy of the nous; the perfect being enters the material and instantly becomes corrupted. To retrieve it’s perfection, according to Augustine, we must practice philosophy and return to the nous.
But where then exists the ‘evil’ within Augustine’s philosophy? Because the immaterial world lacks nothing and is itself perfection, evil can only exist in te material world. It’s not a substance however, but a negative term we use to describe a shortage of perfection. Evil therefore is a human construct which has nothing to do with God and the perfect nous.
I, however, have to disagree with Augustine’s theory. Firstly, defining evil as a lack of something doesn’t seem right. When we experience a lack of something, we solve this by adding the thing it misses. However, in the case of evil we try to rid ourselves of it. We don’t solve evil by adding more evil to it. Some might dismiss this argument by saying Augustine sees evil as a lack of good. But how can evil be a human construct to a shortage of good when we don’t always know what good is? According to Augustine and neoplatonism, good is immaterial but accessible by retrieving it with philosophy after our soul lost the perfection of the nous due to the corruption of the material world it landed in. A toddler, however, doesn’t practice philosophy, but knows he’s not supposed to pull his moms hair. He starts to learn his first minimal morals that form the beginning of his conception of good and evil. If that’s true, can’t we then conclude that the conception of good is also a human construct? And that by learning what is good we can only learn the shortage of it, evil?
From Knights to computers 