In addition, Augustine believed that all evil, moral and natural arose from the wrong choices of free and rational beings, as stated in Genesis 3 – The Fall. God gave humans, and angels, the ability to choose freely (to have free will), and as a consequence the possibility that they may disobey God was an option which Adam and Eve chose. To Augustine, sin occurs as the wilful rejection of God to some lesser good. Therefore when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they have sinned and deserved to be punished. Because the serpent (an angel according to Augustine) mislead Eve, ‘Cursed is the ground because of’ him. This was his explanation of natural and moral evil. They abused their free will and tried to become ‘lord of their own being’ by disobeying God. Moreover the rest of humanity, as descendents from Adam and Eve, shared their sin, they were ‘seminally present’ in Adam’s loins.
Furthermore, Augustine maintained that free will must be valuable enough for God to allow this ‘Privatio Boni’ to continue. He argued that your free will enables you to move toward God or away from Him, and that this decides what happens to you after your life has ended. As a result, his theodicy is a ‘soul-deciding’ one. In essence God provides you with the means to save yourself or to damn yourself. Also, Augustine believed that God sent Jesus to earth to save humanity from their sins. This, in his eyes, meant God must be righteous and just to provide this ‘second chance’ if one accepts Jesus as a savoir.
Lastly it is also worth noting that Augustine upheld that when the universe is viewed as the big picture (which we cannot, only God can), the contrast between good and the privation of it highlights the beauty of goodness. This aesthetic principle is an important part of his theodicy. Irenaeus developed the first known Christian theodicy attempting to explain the ‘Problem of Evil’: the seeming contradiction between the Christian God’s omnipotence, all-loving nature and the fact that there is evil and suffering in the world. He, as Augustine much later, interpreted certain parts of the Bible (Genesis 3) literally. His theodicy involves the idea that evil can be justified if one views the world as designed by God as an environment in which people, through their free choices can undergo spiritual growth which will ultimately lead them to God. It is therefore a theory of recapitulation.
Irenaeus based his theodicy on his understanding of Genesis 1:26 ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness’. By imagine he may have meant intelligence and personality. And ‘likeness’, for Irenaeus, meant the capacity for moral growth, to be able to grow into a relationship with god through ‘willing co-operation of human individuals’. In other words, Creation, according to Irenaeus, was embryonic and unfinished, but in essence good; ‘unless man had been joined to God, he could never become a partaker of incorruptibility’. He believed that God gave humans free will, as it the basis for virtue; virtuousness can only exist through the conscious choice of a free mind.
For Irenaeus, God’s omnipotence was limited, at least in part, by what is logically possible. God, as omnibenevolent, wants to make us virtuous and free co-creators (of our soul), but He can cannot give us this ‘ready-made’ as it were, as we would not be able to accept it. Irenaeus uses the analogy of a mother giving a child milk before gradually moving the child onto solids as it grows. Humanity, as the child, cannot cope with the perfection God intends for us. An example he used was the Fall of Man (Gen3) to demonstrate that we were simply not ready to accept God’s grace and goodness. Humanity was lead astray by the devil, but chose to eat forbidden fruit by their free will. In other words, all moral evil is a consequence of our misuse of our autonomous nature. Furthermore, the fall brought sin to humanity as a whole since everyone was ‘seminally present’ in Adam, thus we need God’s help in order to reach Him.
Natural evil, for Irenaeus, was the facilitation of the environment for ‘soul-making’, where we have the ability to move toward or away from the ‘likeness’ of God. Irenaeus uses the example of Jonah and the Whale, where Jonah was able to respond to his responsibilities and learn to accept God’s wishes through the spiritual growth being swallowed by the whale brought. This Irenaeus compares with all natural evil; suffering must be endured in order for us to develop toward God and His likeness. Without it, there would be no negative consequence of our actions.
Lastly, according to Irenaeus, Jesus was the second Adam, who makes this recapitulation possible. Jesus saves humanity from their sin as he, as the mediator, can link God to us, given that we accept him as our savoir.
In conclusion, Irenaeus’ theodicy accounts the existence of evil as a loving necessity to give humans the autonomous ability to appreciate and accept God’s ‘likeness’. God is justified in continuing moral and natural evil because in the end, when creation is finished, there will be no evil and everyone will enjoy God’s paradise.
Augustine defended God’s omnipotence and all-loving nature, by suggesting that evil, itself not a substance, is a consequence of his good desire for free will, or rather, our misuse of it. He added that, because God saw good in variety, some aspects of his creations were less perfect than others. Because God views the creation of the universe as a whole, only He can understand and comprehend this. This suggestion is echoed in the Story of Job – one should not question God’s intentions when one does not know the details.
