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Here Augustine suggests a different test for why you might consider the Bible as a guide: Does it provide guidance you couldn’t get elsewhere?
And inscribed in the upper left corner are Augustine’s own words: “My heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Everyone is looking for rest, which is just another way of saying we’re looking for an identity, a story that gives us the kind of gifted swagger of being known, named, and offered a map home.
The hard-won atheism I have in mind, the atheism that is understandable and for which I have much sympathy, is an atheism forged in suffering. Rather than an arrogance that imagines it has outgrown belief, such an atheism is an inability to believe born of an empathy for those trod underfoot by the machinations of an inexplicable menace.
It is the begrudging conclusion of cosmic loneliness arising from the experience of injustice.
This is not the sherry-sipping philosophical conclusion of a Bertrand Russell who has coolly assessed the evidence and lack thereof.
Camus evinces a sincerity that is disarming (“the world needs real dialogue”) and emphasizes a point of solidarity: “I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.”
“Camus’s only response was to smile. . . . But he said a little later, ‘I am your Augustine before his conversion. I am debating the problem of evil, and I am not getting past it.’”7 Albert Camus: Augustine sans grace.
“Is this darkness in you, too?”
Augustine is not trying to “make sense” of evil. To make sense of it, to have an explanation for it, to be able to identify the cause would mean that it has a place in the world. But then it isn’t evil.
If I’m naturally compelled to disorder, how can I be blamed for it?14 Exactly! replies Augustine. Which is precisely why this choice is not natural. It is voluntary, and thereby inexplicable.
“Hence either the will is the first cause of sinning, or no sin is the first cause of sinning.”
Twenty-five years later, in City of God, Augustine reemphasizes this point: “If you try to find the efficient cause for this evil choice, there is none to be found.”18 Instead, Augustine sees darkness.
But if you say evil is natural, then it’s no longer evil. It’s the way things are, the way things are supposed to be. You can’t protest what is natural; you can’t lament what is meant to be. The price to pay for explaining evil is to give up naming and opposing it.
When we try to extinguish the dark mystery of evil with the light of explanation, we simultaneously dim the radiance of beauty that befalls us unbidden.
The Confessions are a long lament of the devil inside.
“In the last book he ever wrote,” Brown reminds us, “Augustine will quote a passage from Cicero that, perhaps, betrays the hurt of this loss: ‘Surely what Cicero says comes straight from the heart of all fathers, when he wrote: You are the only man of all men whom I would wish to surpass me in all things.’”25 An aged father musing on the untimely death of a child is not the way it’s supposed to be.
God condescends to inhabit and absorb the mess we’ve made of the world.
We shall overcome because of what the Son has undergone in our stead. This isn’t an answer to evil; it is a response. Hope is found not in intellectual mastery but in divine solidarity.
God doesn’t give us an answer; he gives us himself.
Why would Augustine undertake to advocate for mercy and leniency for the unrepentant, who haven’t promised correction? “It is easy and natural to hate evil persons because they are evil,” Augustine replies, “but it is rare and holy to love those same persons because they are human beings.”
And so, out of love for the human race we are compelled to intercede on behalf of the guilty lest they end this life through punishment.”
Augustine would constantly plead for authorities to not exercise the death penalty. He would plead for leniency and sometimes clemency in criminal cases, recognizing the principalities and powers that compel and constrain both criminals and victims.
“Augustine frequently drew from his church’s treasury in order to purchase the freedom of slaves. Moreover, on one occasion, while he was absent from Hippo, some members of his congregation stormed a ship and freed over 100 slaves held captive there.”
He was also an active supporter of the right of sanctuary in the late Roman Empire, which was to stand with debtors and take the side of those ground under by economic inequality.
The hard, good work of politics is a way to love your neighbor in a tragic, fallen world. If politics is the art of the possible, it can also be a prudential way to secure justice, beat back evil, and mitigate the effects of the Fall.
“The need for purpose and community, for mission, is human,” Coates later notes. Agreed. But then this move: “It’s embedded in our politics, which are not simply fights over health coverage, tax credits, and farm subsidies but parcel to the search for meaning. It is that search that bedeviled the eight years of power.”
The naturalization—and idolization—of politics generates its own injustices.
Evil is not a puzzle to be solved but an incursion to be beaten back.
