On The Problem Of Augustine 's

Evil is an inevitable problem in Christian theology, the great Godfather Augustine also couldn’t avoid it. Augustine looked for God through his spiritual experience, he explored evil problem through his personal survival experience.When he was a teenager, Augustine’s “wickedness except wickedness” made him consistently asking for where the “evil” came from, i.e., the problem of evil source. He was then attracted by Manichean religion at that time because he though Manichean religious doctrine could give the answer to the biggest problem in his heart. In Manichean theology good and evil are two opposite entities where evil has the property of substance as does good; man does wrong when he is governed by an evil substance that is out of control of man’s power, thus he is not in charge of his evil behaviors.Neoplatonism opened Auguestine’s mind in many aspects; Auguestine inherited the idea of “evil is lacking of good” from Plotino and regarded good as the only entity so that everything in the world comes from good. Evil is not a entity but the lacking of the existence of good.Free will is the ultimate cause for evil in the survival and life of human being. Augustine though that in the origin God created men whose mind and body are harmonic, later with the departure of the first man from God due to his pride there came the war between spirit and desire. The decent of Adam inherited the origin evil from him, and they always suffered the evil as the penalty since their paucity of will and recognition. In Augustine’s experience, man cannot take the correct choice based on their own will and it is only possible under God’s grace.