Augustine on the Goodness of All Things
W. J. Holly
In book seven, chapter twelve of The Confessions, Saint Augustine
produces an argument designed to show that a thing would cease altogether to
exist if it were deprived of all goodness.
And, from this, he infers that all things that exist are good, and that
evil is not a substance.
In brief form, his argument is
this:
The Incorruptible Argument:
1)
It is always better to be incorruptible than to be corruptible.
2)
All things which cannot be deprived of goodness are incorruptible; and,
all things which can be deprived of goodness are corruptible.
3)
If we take away all the goodness of a thing, it is then incorruptible,
since a thing cannot be deprived of goodness if it has none; but, having been
made incorruptible, it then would be better than it was before (see premise 1).
4)
But, since it is absurd to say that things could be made better by being
deprived of all their goodness, we must conclude that a thing deprived of all
goodness would cease to exist.
Augustine’s sentiment, then, seems
to be that an entity which continued to exist after being deprived of all its
goodness would be a conceptually impossible object. Like the “round square,” an object which has
been made better by losing all of its goodness would be a contradiction in
terms.
Before I criticize Augustine’s
argument, let me present two other arguments, the “black pan” argument and the
“incorrigible” argument, which I take to be parallel arguments, infected with
the same species of sophistry:
If, as a manufacturer of completely
black pans, I were to advertise “pans that cannot be blackened,” perhaps I
would not be guilty of false
advertising; but, certainly it would be misleading
advertising. And, if I were to argue
in the following manner, I would be guilty of the same brand of sophistry used
by Augustine: A pan that cannot be
blackened is better than a pan that can be blackened; but a pan that has been
completely blackened cannot be blackened, since it already is completely black,
and it therefore is better than it was when clean (and thus capable of being
blackened); but, since it is absurd to think that a thing could exist which had
been made better by being made worse, a completely blackened pan could not
exist.
It is interesting that Augustine
apparently did not notice that a mirror-image of his argument could be used to
show that a thing deprived of all evil (or of all defects, flaws, or
shortcomings) could not exist. Consider
this parallel “mirror-image” version of his argument:
The Incorrigible Argument:
1)
It is better to be corrigible than to be
incorrigible.
2)
An incorrigible thing is one that cannot be made
better.
3)
If we deprive a thing of all its evil qualities,
then it is incorrigible (by premise II), since a thing cannot be made better if
it no longer contains any evil (any defects or shortcomings); but, being
incorrigible, (by premise I) it now is worse than it was before it lost all its
defects and became perfect.
4)
But, since it is absurd to say that things are
made worse by being made as good as they possibly can be made (by depriving
them of all evil or defects), we must conclude that a thing deprived of all
evil would cease entirely to exist, being a logically impossible object. Thus, all things must be at least somewhat
evil, bad, or defective.
5)
Since God
is a being containing no evil, and since it would be impossible to improve God
(since He is Perfect in all aspects), therefore God is incorrigible (cannot
be improved or corrected). But, if God’s
being Perfect entails that He is incorrigible (worse than He would be if he
were not Perfect), then God is an impossible being and thus God does not
exist.
Since Augustine’s argument can “prove” there
is no God just as easily as it can “prove” that no completely Evil thing can
exist, Augustine (as a Christian) must reject “proofs” of this variety. And, indeed, such “proofs” do seem to have an
obvious flaw:
The “Incorrigibility” argument
(immediately above) fails because it has a false second premise. To say that a thing is incorrigible is to say
that it satisfies two conditions:
It is bad and it cannot be improved. The pardigm of incorrigibility is the person
who is bad and who is so completely set in his evil ways that it is
hopeless to try to correct his behavior.
On the other hand, a student whose behavior could not be corrected or
improved because he already was perfect would be a model student, not an
incorrigible. He would lack the first
requirement for being incorrigible, name, being bad.
Augustine’s
incorruptibility argument also fails because its second premise is false. To say that a thing is incorruptible is not
simply to say that it cannot be deprived of goodness. To say that a thing is incorruptible is to
say that it is both good and that it cannot be deprived of its
goodness. A public servant is
incorruptible if he is a good servant and one who cannot be induced to
become a bad one. If, however, he had become so dishonest and
corrupt that we no longer can imagine any further possible corruptions, we
certainly would not describe him as an incorruptible public servant, except as
a joke. Rather, we should say that he
was completely corrupted. And,
unfortunately, we well know that such public servants do not obligingly pop out
of existence.
To repeat, the second premise of
Augustine’s incorruptibility argument is false because an object deprived of
all its goodness would not meet this second requirement of incorruptibility,
that of being good. If, on the other
hand, my analysis of “incorruptible” is faulty – if an object need not contain
any goodness to be incorruptible – then premise number one, that it is better
to be incorruptible than to be incorruptible, is false. And, it would be shown to be false just by
the kind of object he imagines in premise three, an object that is called
incorruptible only on the grounds that it is so rotten that it cannot further
be corrupted. When we are thinking of
two clean pans, one of inferior metal which is easily blackened and one of
surgical stainless steel that cannot be blackened, we of course are ready to
admit that the pan that cannot be blackened is the superior pan. But, when we are thinking of two pans, one
which can be blackened because it is clean, and one that cannot be blackened
because it is already completely blackened, we are by no means so ready to
agree that the pan that cannot be blackened is better.
There are at least two different
motives Augustine could have had in presenting this shoddy piece of
reasoning. In the first place, he might
have seen it as a possible refutation of Manichaeism, the doctrine that there
are two opposing forces in the universe, one supremely Good and one supremely
Evil. But, we have seen, insofar as his
argument can be used to show that no completely Evil being can exist, a
parallel argument equally can be used to show that no completely Good thing can
exist, either. The second, more obvious
motive would be to avoid the Problem of Evil, the problem how evil could exist
in things created by the Omnipotent, Benevolent Christian God. But, as an answer to this latter problem,
several layers of sophistry seem to be involved.
Let us suppose that his argument is
sound, and that it shows not only that no completely evil thing can exist, but
that (since substances should be capable
of independent existence) evil is not a substance. It seems neither surprising nor edifying to
be told that evil is an attribute or a deprivation, not a substance. Who would have thought that a toothache, a
flat tire, death, taxes or the crookedness of a deformed leg were
substances? They are evils,
nevertheless, for all their not being
substances. Let us assume that floods
are simply situations in which moisture is excessive, and droughts are simply
situations in which sufficient moisture is absent; and, that just as sickness
is merely the absence of health, a toothache is simply the absence of the
absence of a toothache (double deprivation).
Still, it would seem a feeble excuse for a car salesman to say he sold
us a good car, pointing out that the absence of a functional engine was merely
a deprivation, not an evil substance.
Cold comfort. At best, the
“excuse” Augustine provides God is that He is guilty only of sins of omission,
not sins of commission. We still want to
know why He left out the things He left out, such as the absence of leprosy.
Augustine’s final sophistry is to
conclude that everything that exists is good.
He infers this from his conclusion that no completely evil thing could
exist. But, of course this conclusion
would only entitle him to say that everything that exists is at least somewhat
good. It is a shameless “fudge” leave
out the qualifying word “somewhat” here.
“Everything the Lord has made is at least somewhat good” need not
necessarily imply criticism. But, then,
neither is it the highest form of praise that one might wish to be able to
give.
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