St. Augustine: Response to Suffering, Essay Example

St. Augustine approaches suffering, and its presence as allowed by God, through a complex process of reasoning based on faith.  It has no place in creation, as far as he can ascertain, because all things are of God and consequently of good. After extensive investigation, Augustine affirms God as the supreme good, which is incorruptible; this being the case, that which is created by Him must also be of the greatest good. For Augustine, then, there remains the conundrum of evil or wickedness, which should not be in any form and which is the irrefutable source of suffering.  There can be no evil for or of God because He is apart from such a thing, yet there is suffering in humanity. Throughout Book VII, Augustine probes into this dilemma from all angles, and “suffers” anguish in the process.

What he ultimately determines is a rationale accounting for suffering and explaining why it is allowed by God.  The core lies in health, which in Augustinian terms translates to what may be called full sanity, or the sane recognition of the reality of God and His works. The healthy mind and spirit comprehends the harmony within all of the forms of good created by God, even as these reflect differing degrees of good.  It understands the definitive principle that God and His will are one and the same, and utterly expressive of good.  It is the unhealthy spirit that questions because it doubts, and this in itself is the source of wickedness.  Augustine assigns the blame for suffering on human free will alone, which chooses to disregard the truth of God and thus transforms itself into a grossly unhealthy state.  As the healthy palate is disgusted by good bread, the unhealthy mind, created by the human being unable to recognize God’s truth, is driven to wickedness by the doubt itself. God allows suffering, then, only in the sense that He permits humanity to have free will. Within this will lie the potentials to know or disavow the truth, and the latter course enables the evil that is the source of human suffering.  Augustine’s response to why God allows suffering in the world, then, would go to affirming that God endows mankind with will and freedom of appreciation, and it is humanity’s failure to properly see that creates suffering.  It is allowed by God because, ironically, God’s goodness created mankind in so expansive a way, and with the will to perceive – or fail to perceive – truth.

Works Cited

St. Augustine.  Confessions, Book VII.  2014, Web.  3 Nov. 2014.<http://www.ourladyswarriors.org/saints/augcon7.htm#chap7>