Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: reaching disagreement
- I PRELIMINARIES: EVIL AND THE AUGUSTINIAN TRADITION
- II GENEALOGY: REMEMBERING THE AUGUSTINIAN TRADITION
- III THE CHALLENGE OF THE AUGUSTINIAN TRADITION TO EVIL
- Conclusion: realizing incomprehension, discerning mystery
- Works cited
- Index
Introduction: reaching disagreement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: reaching disagreement
- I PRELIMINARIES: EVIL AND THE AUGUSTINIAN TRADITION
- II GENEALOGY: REMEMBERING THE AUGUSTINIAN TRADITION
- III THE CHALLENGE OF THE AUGUSTINIAN TRADITION TO EVIL
- Conclusion: realizing incomprehension, discerning mystery
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
Evil as such, which [allegory] cherished as enduring profundity, exists only in allegory, is nothing other than allegory, and means something different from what it is. It means precisely the nonexistence of what it presents. The absolute vices, as exemplified by tyrants and intriguers, are allegories. They are not real, and that which they represent, they possess only in the subjective view of melancholy; they are this view, which is destroyed by its own off-spring because they only signify its blindness. They point to the absolutely subjective pensiveness, to which alone they owe their existence. By its allegorical form evil as such reveals itself to be a subjective phenomenon.
Walter Benjamin 1977, 233SOME FACTS
Here are some facts:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and God saw that all was good, and so all is good. Among God's many creations was mankind, whom God gifted with freedom in order that they may love, both one another and God, as God loves them as well as God's self. The cost of this gift is risk; for a free being is by definition never wholly under another's control, and their actions can never be perfectly determined by another's will. In creating free beings in order to enter into relationships of love with them, God risked the possibility that they would resist that love. And so we have.
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- Evil and the Augustinian Tradition , pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001