The problem of evil and the Platonist books
The last Manichaean conviction falls. Augustine finds the Platonic books — probably Plotinus and Porphyry in Latin translation — and encounters, for the first time, the idea that God might be immaterial. The problem of evil suddenly has a different shape.
Summary
Book 7 is the most philosophically concentrated chapter of the Confessions. Augustine has been intellectually free of Manichaeism for some time but has had no alternative framework. The problem of evil is what he needs to solve: if God is wholly good and the creator of everything, where does evil come from? The Manichaean answer — evil is matter, a competing ontological principle — has always felt wrong, but he has not had a better answer.
Then he encounters the Platonic books — he does not name the texts, but scholars have generally concluded they were the Enneads of Plotinus and the Isagoge of Porphyry, in the Latin translations of Marius Victorinus. In these books Augustine finds, for the first time in his reading life, the idea of a God who is not material, not located in space, not extended, not measurable. God is the ground of being itself — that from which all particular things take their being. This resolves the problem of evil: if God is the ground of being and being is good, then evil is not a substance but an absence, a deficiency of being and goodness. Things are evil insofar as they fall short of what they should fully be — not because a rival principle has corrupted them.
The discovery does not resolve everything. Augustine can now think God correctly; he cannot yet live accordingly. He still cannot give up what he has not been able to give up. Book 7 ends with Augustine in sight of the destination — able to see, from a distance, what the Christian life requires — and unable to take the step. The intellectual conversion is complete. The moral conversion has not yet occurred.
- Book 1The opening prayer, the paradox of calling on God, and the childhood years: infancy, the hated Greek, the loved Latin, the school...
- Book 2Adolescence in Thagaste, the first serious entanglements with desire, Monica's unheeded warnings — and the pear theft, which...
- Book 3Augustine at seventeen in Carthage: the theater's pleasurable grief, the shock of Cicero's Hortensius redirecting his ambition...
- Book 4Augustine teaching rhetoric in Thagaste, the dangerous years with the astrologers, and the death of a close unnamed friend...
- Book 5The long-awaited meeting with Faustus the Manichaean bishop, who is charming and admits he cannot answer Augustine's questions....
- Book 6Milan, Ambrose's sermons unlocking the scriptures, and the departure of the fifteen-year concubine — sent back to Africa by...
- Book 7The philosophical turning point. The Platonic books — probably Plotinus in Latin translation — give Augustine the concept of an...
- Book 8The conversion at Milan: the story of Antony, the garden, the weeping under the fig tree, the child's voice chanting tolle lege...
- Book 9Baptism by Ambrose at Easter 387. Monica and Augustine's shared vision at the window in Ostia. Nine days later, Monica's death....
- Book 10The autobiography ends; the philosophy begins. Augustine examines his memory and finds it vast beyond comprehension — a hall that...
- Book 11What is time? Augustine works through the question forced by Genesis — what was there before the beginning? — and gives the answer...
- Book 12A close reading of Genesis 1:1–2. What is the heaven of heavens? What is the formless earth? Augustine reads the creation...
- Book 13A theological reading of the six days of Genesis: light, waters, land, the luminaries — each read as a figure of the soul's...