EVIL ,Velangkannan D.

EVIL

Velangkannan D.

The traditional Augustinian theodicy in respect to moral evil asserts that God created man with no sin in him and set him in a world devoid of evil. But man willfully misused his God-given freedom and fell into sin. Some men will be redeemed by God's grace, and others will be condemned to eternal punishment .I all this, God's goodness and justice alike are manifested. Evil as privation of good: Evil as the privation, corruption, or perversion of something good 'Nothing evil exists in itself, but only as an evil aspect of some actual entity'. Thus ,everything that God has created is good ,and the phenomenon of evil occurs only when beings which are intrinsically good become corrupted and spoiled .Augustine expresses the same thought from another perspective when he equates being with goodness .God as the highest ,richest ,and ,most intensely real being ,is the supreme good ,and everything that he has brought into existence is ipso facto good. For this reason the corruption that we call evil can never be complete; for if a thing become so vitiated in nature that it ceases to exist, the evil which is parasitic upon it must also cease to exist.Hence, there can be no wholly evil being. How does this spoiling of God's initially good creation come about? Augustine's answer is that evil has entered into the universe through the culpable volitions of free creatures, angels and humans. Their sin consisted, not in choosing positive evil [for there is no positive evil to choose], but in turning away from the higher good, namely God, to a lower good. For when the will abandons what is above it is wicked .Augustine is saying that the origin of moral evil lies hidden within the mystery of human and angelic freedom. The diminution of the property of goodness is what's called evil. Good has substantial being; evil does not. It is like a moral hole, a nothingness that results when goodness is removed. Just as a shadow is no more than a "hole" in light, evil is a hole in goodness.