Gareth B.

Matthews

Augustine and Plantinga

on the Problem of Evil

The debate between Alvin Plantinga and J.L. Mackie a quarter of a century ago
on the problem of evil seems to echo a debate between Augustine and his friend,
Evodius, a millennium and a half earlier. Since Augustine himself wrote the di-
alogue, De libero arbitrio (On Free Choice of the Will), in which the debate be-
tween him and Evodius is recorded, his debate may have been primarily, or even
solely, a debate within himself. In any case, let’s have a look at this earlier de-
bate first.
On Free Choice of the Will is a dialogue in three books between Augustine
and his interlocutor, Evodius. Evodius starts things off with this request of Au-
gustine: «Tell me, I ask you, whether God is not the cause [or author, auctor] of
evil» (1.1.1.1)1. Augustine responds by questioning whether Evodius means to
ask for the cause of the evil that is done or the evil that is suffered. «Both»,
replies Evodius.
Augustine then tries to assure Evodius that it cannot be God who causes evil,
for God is good and so does not do anything evil; moreover, God is just, and there-
fore does not allow unjust punishment (1.1.1.1-2). In fact, Augustine goes on to
claim, there is really no single cause of evil in the world. Each of us, he main-
tains, is the cause of our own evil doings, indeed, the originating cause of our
own evil doing, since each of us has free will as a gift from God.
Evodius is not satisfied. He thinks that, if free will is a gift from God, God
should have made that gift to be like justice. No one, he maintains, can use jus-
tice to do wrong and so produce evil. God should have given us free will in the
way he has given us justice. That is, God should have given us free will, Evodius
thinks, in a way that would allow us to do morally good things but would not al-
low us to do morally bad things.
Here is the way Augustine states his position:

1 Translations from Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will (De libero arbitrio) are my own.

«Quaestio», 6 (2006), 457-462 • 10.1484/J.QUAESTIO.1.100075

458 Gareth B. Matthews

«If a human being is something good, and cannot act with rectitude unless he wills to
do so, then he must have free will [liberam voluntatem], without which he cannot act
with moral rectitude [recte facere]. We must not believe that, just because sin is com-
mitted through free will, God gave it to us for this reason. It is a sufficient reason for
why he had to give free will to us that, without it, a human being could not live up-
rightly [recte non potest vivere]» (On Free Choice of the Will, 2.1.3.5).

Here is Evodius’s response:

«I concede now that God gave us free will. But doesn’t it seem to you, I ask you, if free
will is given for acting with moral rectitude, it ought not to have been possible to turn
it to sinning. Just as justice itself was given to a human being for living in a good way,
so no one can live in an evil way through his own justice» (2.2.4.8).

Much later on in Book II Augustine offers a summary of the discussion so far.

His summary makes clear that he has not forgotten Evodius’s point. He addresses
Evodius this way:

«You said it seemed to you that free choice of the will ought not to have been given be-
cause it is by free will that each one sins. To your assertion I replied that acting with
moral rectitude is not possible except by this same free choice of the will and I as-
serted that God gave it rather for this purpose [i.e., that there might be righteous ac-
tions]. You replied that free will should have been given to us in the way that justice
was given: No one can use justice except in the upright way» (2.18.47.179).

One might think that the answer to Evodius’s puzzle should be obvious. Jus-
tice is a virtue. The will is a power. It is incoherent to suppose that God could
have given us a virtue as a power. But, for Augustine and the medievals a virtue
is a power. Indeed the Latin word, virtus, is sometimes translated “virtue” and
sometimes as “power”. In any case, Augustine does not make this move.
So far as I can see, Augustine never really answers Evodius’s challenge in On
Free Choice of the Will, at least not directly. That is, Augustine never in that work
explains why God could not have given us free will in such a way that we could nev-
er have used it to produce evil. Instead, he tries to convince his readers that it is
we who are responsible for the use we make of our free will, not God. If we use it to
sin, then we are responsible for the sin that results, not God. Free choice of the will,
he maintains, is an intermediate good, not, like justice, an unqualified good. When
we use our free will to act rightly, then the result is something good. Indeed, it is
something that could not have been produced except by a genuinely free action.
When we use it to sin, however, the result is certainly something evil, but it is an
evil for which we are responsible, not God. Maddeningly, Augustine never direct-
ly addresses Evodius’s question as to whether God could have given us free will in
such a way that we could have used it only to act with moral rectitude.
 Augustine and Plantinga on the Problem of Evil 459

One could put the debate this way. In Augustine’s view, God is the creator of
free human agents and those human agents use their free wills to create evil. But
it does not follow that God creates evil. Augustine, in effect, insists that creation
is not a transitive relation. That is, from
(i) God created agents with free choice of the will
and (ii) Human agents through their free choice of the will created moral evil
this does not follow:
(iii) God created moral evil.
Evodius can agree that (iii) does not follow from (i) and (ii). But he still asks
why this could not have been true:
(iv) God created human agents and gave them free choice of the will in such
a way that it could not be used to create evil.
His idea is that if (iv) were true, then so would this be true:
(v) There is no evil.
But, of course, (v) is false.
Augustine might have argued that (iv) does not state a real possibility. That
is, Augustine might have argued that there is not, and could not be, any such
thing as a free will that could not be used to create evil. But he does not do that,
at least not in On Free Choice of the Will.
We can, however, find Evodius’s question addressed, if only somewhat
obliquely, in one of the last things Augustine wrote, the last book of The City of
God. I have this passage in mind, in which Augustine is discussing the perfect
freedom the blessed will enjoy in heaven:

«Now the fact that [the blessed in heaven] will be unable to delight in sin does not en-
tail that they will have no free will. In fact, the will will be the freer in that it is freed
from a delight in sin and immovably fixed in a delight in not sinning. The first free-
dom of will, given to man when he was created upright at the beginning, was an abil-
ity not to sin [potuit non peccare], combined with the possibility of sinning [potuit et
peccare]. But this last freedom will be more potent, for it will bring the impossibility of
sinning [peccare non poterit]; yet this also will be the result of God’s gift, not of some
inherent quality of nature. For to be a partaker of God is not the same thing as to be
God; the inability to sin belongs to God’s nature, while he who partakes of God’s na-
ture receives the impossibility of sinning as a gift from God.
Moreover the stages of the divine gift had to be preserved. Free will was given first,
with the ability not to sin; and the last gift was the inability to sin. The first freedom
was designed for acquiring merit [meritum]; the last was concerned with the reception
of a reward [praemium]. But because human nature sinned when it had the power to
sin it is set free by a more abundant gift of grace so that it may be brought to that con-
dition of liberty in which it is incapable of sin» (City of God, 22.30).

According to the view presented in this passage, it is, after all, quite possi-
ble for God to give his creatures free will without their having any possibility of
460 Gareth B. Matthews

sinning. But, if this is right, we may well want to know why God did not give
Adam and Eve, or their descendents, this perfect freedom of the will to choose
freely without any possibility of sinning.
One suggestion might be that, since the first kind of freedom, the kind that
brought with it only the ability not to sin, «was designed for acquiring merit»,
none of us would be able to do anything to merit eternal salvation if we had the
sort of free will that rules out any possibility of sinning. But that can’t be Au-
gustine’s view. According to him, nothing we do merits eternal salvation anyway;
if we do gain eternal salvation, it will be only through the grace of God. So we
must reject this first suggestion, as an interpretation of Augustine, anyway.
Here is a more promising suggestion. There would have been some goodness
and merit missing from creation if Adam and Eve and their descendents had had,
from the very start, the perfect freedom that cannot be used for sinning. After all,
as Augustine maintains, the blessed in heaven receive the impossibility of sin-
ning by partaking of God’s nature. But God is, by nature, eternally unable to sin.
In theological jargon, God is by nature eternally and immutably impeccable. The
human goodness added in creation arises from the righteousness of those agents
with the ability to sin who nevertheless freely choose not to sin. If Adam and Eve
had started out partaking in God’s perfect freedom, without the possibility of sin-
ning, they would not have added anything to the goodness and merit that was al-
ready in existence, namely, God’s goodness.
The distinction I am attributing to Augustine is one between (i) choosing
freely from a divinely impeccable nature not to sin and (ii) choosing freely not to
sin without having the benefit of such an impeccable nature. On Augustine’s
view the first case, the divine case, would certainly have more merit than any
number of cases of the second sort all put together, that is, than any number of
cases of fallible human beings who freely choose not to sin. Still, Augustine
could have thought that there being at least some cases of the second sort adds
merit to what there would have been, if the only agent who had freely chosen not
to sin had been God, who by nature is unable to sin.
Even if my suggestion is right, however, what I have said so far cannot be the
whole story. After all, in the passage I have quoted from City of God, 22.30, Au-
gustine pairs the idea of acquiring merit (meritum) with the idea of receiving the
reward (praemium) of eternal happiness. This pairing might suggest to a reader
that the elect earn their reward, which cannot be Augustine’s real view. How is
this passage to be understood?
We get a strong indication in Augustine’s On the Trinity (De trinitate), where
Augustine writes this:

«What else could have made [the mind] miserable under the omnipotent and good
 Augustine and Plantinga on the Problem of Evil 461

God, except its own sin and the justice of its own Lord? And what shall make [the mind]
happy, except its own merit and the reward of its Lord? But its merit is also a grace
from Him whose reward will also be its happiness. For it cannot give itself the justice
which it has lost and no longer has, because man received it when he was made, and
by sinning has certainly lost it. He receives justice, therefore, and on account of it he
may merit to receive happiness» (On the Trinity, 14.15.21).

Here we have the characteristic Augustine line that any good we do, we do
through the grace of God. So the merit we earn, we earn with the help of the grace
of God. Moreover, even though we could not earn that merit unaided by the grace
of God, we could, by our own will, refuse it. Here in Book XIV of the City of God,
Augustine makes clear that we have the power of refusal:

«Now man could not even trust in the help of God without God’s help; but this did not
mean that he did not have it in his power to withdraw from the benefits of divine grace
by self-pleasing. For just as it is not in our power to live in this physical frame with-
out the support of food, and yet it is in our power not to live in it at all (which is what
happens to suicides), so it was not in man’s power, even in paradise, to live a good life
without the help of God, yet it was in his power to live an evil life» (City of God, 14.27).

If all this is right as an interpretation of Augustine, then his response to the

Consistency Problem of Evil is not what we might think of as the standard Free
Will Defense. In particular, his mature view is not that God could not possibly
have made free moral agents who never sin. In fact, according to him, God’s gift
to the elect in heaven is precisely the kind of freedom of the will that carries with
it an inability to sin. His idea is rather that, if God had first given human beings
free will together with the inability to sin, He would not thereby have added the
possibility of there being any moral good besides His own. And the reason is that,
to give human beings free well with the inability to sin would require that they
partake in God’s own nature, which is, of course, eternally impeccable, and yet
perfectly free. But by first giving us human beings free will with the ability to
sin, as well as the ability not to sin, God provided for the possibility that there
would be some merit in addition to the goodness of His own impeccable nature.

In his classic article, Evil and Omnipotence, J.L. Mackie asked this probing
question:

«If God has made men such that in their free choices they sometimes prefer what is
good and sometimes what is evil, why could he not have made men such that they al-
ways freely choose the good»2.

2 J.L. MACKIE, Evil and Omnipotence, «Mind», 64 (1955), p. 209.

462 Gareth B. Matthews

Alvin Plantinga responded to Mackie’s challenge by developing the notion of

what he calls “transworld depravity”. Intuitively, the idea of transworld deprav-
ity is the idea that a person, say, Adam, who has such depravity, is such that there
is no possible world in which Adam is, as Plantinga puts it, “significantly free”,
and does good things but no evil things. With this notion in hand, Plantinga of-
fers this “Free-Will Defense” as a solution to the problem of evil Mackie had
posed:

«What is important about the idea of transworld depravity is that if a person suffers
from it, then it was not within God’s power to actualize any world in which that person
is significantly free but does no wrong – that is, a world in which he produces moral
good but no moral evil. But clearly it is possible that everybody suffers from transworld
depravity. If this possibility were actual, then God could not have created any of the
possible worlds that include the existence and significant freedom of just the persons
who do in fact exist, and also contain moral good but no moral evil. For to do so he
would have had to create persons who are significantly free but suffered from
transworld depravity. And the price for creating a world in which such persons pro-
duce moral good is creating one in which they also produce moral evil»3.

Since Mackie’s question is very much like Evodius’s question in Augustine’s

On Free Choice of the Will, we can think of Plantinga’s response to Mackie as, at
the same time, a response to Evodius. Thus to Evodius’s question, «Why could-
n’t God have given us free will they way he gave us justice, that is, in such a way
that we would always freely choose the good?», Plantinga answers: «It is possi-
ble that everyone suffers from transworld depravity, so that the price for creat-
ing a world in which such persons produce moral good is creating one in which
they also produce moral evil».
Augustine’s own response, in the City of God but not in On Free Choice of the
Will, is remarkably different. What he says in the City of God is, in effect, that,
although God could have given us the gift of free will without the ability to sin,
He could have done this only by letting us partake in the Divine nature. If he
had done that and, so to speak, allowed us to skip our earthly existence and go
immediately to heavenly bliss, a certain merit would have been lost. The merit
that would have been lost is that of our sometimes doing good things, with the
help of the grace of God, when we could also have done evil things instead.

3 A. PLANTINGA, The Nature of Necessity, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1974, pp. 186-187. See also A.

PLANTINGA, God and Other Minds, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1967, Chapter 6.