At the heart of Augustine’s Anti-Manichean writings was a Platonic argument against the metaphysical dualism of the Manichees. Good and evil cannot be equals. That would be a departure from monotheism. It is true that the question of the origin of evil belongs to the greatest of mysteries category. But in the spirit of interpreting the less clear in light of the more clear, surely there are some options that can be ruled out. Metaphysical dualism is one of them. And yet few were as clear-headed as Augustine in taking this step. Perhaps the clearest of these writings that drops hints of an explanation of this mystery was his treatise On Free Choice of the Will (397).

We can summarize the Augustinian rationale in the following way:

(1) God has indeed ordained all things: Isa. 45:7, Rom. 11:36, Eph. 1:11.

(2) God never creates, condones, or commits evil;

(3) God hates all sin;

(4) God created all things ex nihilo, that is, “out of nothing” — implying the intrinsic mutability in each.1

(5) God has the ability to withdraw his grace, by any degree, to any creature;

(6) Thus there are two ways in which God causes (or ordains): the one is efficiently, or direct creation; the other is permissively, or the withdrawal of a specific operation, such that a secondary cause is reduced in being by deprivation in that which it is already. 

(7) If God withdraws such grace from a creature with a nature ex nihilo, it has no ability to be anything other than the nature that it is, ad nihilo, or in other words “back toward nothing.”

(8) Evil is not a substance, but the deprivation of goodness or being;

(9) A being with free will is but one species of such a reality (Premises 5-6), and so, as grace is withdrawn, the nature of such a will chooses privation of being willingly, and that entirely of its own nature. 

(10) Therefore it follows that God ordained sin sinlessly, causing it without creating, committing, or condoning it, but rather willing its being for a time and a use.

God willed that this be so (see Rom. 8:20, 9:22-23). As with any text, so with any doctrine, we interpret the less clear in light of the more clear. Since it is clear that God ordains all things, we have to interpret God's relation to sin in light of his sovereignty over all things and his end to glorify himself in all things: even in his use of sin. Any alternative would no longer be monotheism, but an appeal to a duality, or more, in terms of First Causes

A Simple Analogy

I have always used the analogy of a light switch. When we turn a light switch to an “on” position and an “off” position, in both states we are equally causing the state of affairs of light and darkness. However, there is one crucial difference (and this follows from Premise 8). The energy of light (with the off command) is not replaced by a positive substance, but rather there is a withdrawal of substance. In the same way, when God decrees (not efficiently by creating a new thing, but permissively by withdrawal of operative grace, or being) that Lucifer or Adam fall, he need not create any evil principle in them, but it only requires his causal (sustaining) grace to be withdrawn to the precise extent required for their metaphysical deprivation to become moral depravity.

Objection 1. Evil is more than privation.

Reply to Objection 1. While evil and sin are more than privation, they are not less. The question is not what the whole nature of evil and sin are, but rather the question is that nature sufficient to explain how the origin of evil and sin may be not in an efficient sense, but in a privative sense. Once sin and evil are brought about, their natures are multi-faceted, and nothing about their privative origin logically negates all of that substantive and blameworthy devastation that they represent.

Objection 2. But how does it do real evil if it is not substance?

Reply to Objection 2. In that it has effects, as it is still upheld in being by God. So initially, think of rust to metal, moth holes to garments, and of course darkness to light. Now, morally speaking, when it is dark, the stubbing of our toes or the losing of our keys is quite real. That is a concise way to map out the whole of it.

Scriptural Clues

The Augustinian model is also agreeable to Scripture. Romans 8:20 is one place where the text drives us to God’s foreordaining the whole of the fall: ““For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope”—Hope? Could this be speaking of the serpent? Of course not! What hope! Could it be speaking of Adam and Eve? Again, not a chance. They knew nothing of what was to come. It is clearly speaking of God’s “strong causality” as academic philosophers will put such things. But there is another text that will paint a picture for us.

“I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the LORD, who does all these things” (Isaiah 45:7).

Admittedly, there is a difficulty on the surface of this text. It appears that there is an “equal and opposite” causality being spoken of with respect to light and darkness, good and evil. The issue turns on the grammar. The Hebrew words shalom and ra’a are used here in the second part of the parallelism. The latter is used 640 some times in the Old Testament, 275 very clearly meaning trouble or calamity. 

God will create “calamity” through Cyrus that he has brought up in the wider context. God is assuring his people that even the disaster that is about to befall them is not outside of his control. John Calvin and Alec Motyer’s commentaries reflect this position. Others will point to the fact that ra’a is the most dominant word for “evil,” so that calamity itself will not do. However, given the context, even this fits, as the Babylonians would commit evil in the process.

We must also remember that how Genesis 3:1 speaks of how “the serpent more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made.” The Bible itself does not seem as uncomfortable with God’s total sovereignty over evil, including at the very origin of evil. The oft-used phrase “author of evil,” while important, is too poorly assumed as to what it means or does not mean. Causality simply is a broader category than that of creating. It remains true that God “is not the author of evil”—if by that we mean that He neither creates nor commits nor condones evil. Whether to cause is to also imply any of these simply begs the question. It is a question that must be asked and not merely assumed.

Concluding Thoughts

It should also be pointed out that Augustine was not alone in these thoughts. While many Reformed theologians have struggled to either find the exact fault in this reasoning as much as they have to fully endorse it, William Perkins and Jonathan Edwards each gave some signal toward the same reasoning—as did a line in Calvin’s commentary on Genesis. Two generations before Augustine had said so, in his De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, Athanasius had written of the fall in this way:

“For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again.”2

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1. cf. Augustine, City of God, XII.8, where he says, “that the nature of God can never, nowhere, nowise be defective, and that natures made of nothing can.” Likewise the Westminster Confession of Faith had this connection between mutability and defectability in mind in saying that man was created “under a possibility of transgressing, being left to the liberty of their own will, which was subject unto change” (IV.2).

2. Athanasius, On the Incarnation (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 2002), 26.