The fact that the act had no point—that it was inexplicable and gratuitous—was precisely the point: if there had been a grand motive, a terrible compulsion, it might have seemed that there really was an independent force of evil in the world, as the Manichees said. But Augustine had renounced Manichaeism. An orthodox Catholic Christian, he now believed that in all the universe there was a single God, all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good. Evil, in such a scheme, could only be empty and derivative, a mere parody of the good.
