THERE ISN’T REALLY an “answer” for evil, according to Augustine; there is a response, a divine action-plan rooted in solidarity and compassion. That action, first and fundamentally, is grace. When the aged Augustine is reading back through his corpus to write his Retractations, he is jarred by what is so glaringly absent in his account of evil in On the Free Choice of the Will: grace. Grace is the light that floods the darkness in me, too. Grace is what flows from God’s response to our evil, the spillover effect of Jesus drinking up the cup of suffering and vanquishing evil.
