Rowan Williams, Augustine, and the Insubstantiality of Evil

Last updated on: July 26, 2017 at 8:09 pm by Taylor S. Brown

Rowan Williams, Augustine, and the Insubstantiality of Evil 2017-07-26T20:09:56-06:00 Taylor S. Brown

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I have been working my way through Rowan Williams’ treatment of Augustine, On Augustine (Bloomsbury, 2016) as of late. Williams is one of my favorite theologians and, in my estimation, one of the most important theological minds of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Williams, an Anglican and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, is known for his academic work in theology as a whole. Indeed, one need only look up the list academic articles and books he has published to see just how prolific an author Williams has been. That being said, Williams is also a churchman and so can deftly move back and forth between the realms of theology for the academy and for the laity. His book On Augustine proves to be an example of this. Throughout the book, Williams interacts with several major themes in Augustine’s thought, and many of the major interpreters of Augustine. All throughout, Williams manages to act as a kind of guide or translator between the Latin-traced references of Augustinian scholarship and the readership of the book.

Rowan Williams On Augustine

With that intro out of the way, I wanted to focus in on a segment of the book’s fifth chapter, “Insubstantial Evil.” In this chapter, Williams looks at Augustine’s understanding of evil as a privation of the good. In layman’s terms this means that evil has no positive existence in and of itself. Rather, evil is a like a corrupting parasite, twisting and and distorting God’s good creation toward misconceived ends. Evil turns persons, who were created to be good, inward on themselves. I will quote Williams at length here:

Time and again, Augustine writes of learning to ‘see’ afresh; when in [Confessions] VII.xiii, he acknowledges to God that tibi omnino non est malum— ‘for you, evil is just not there at all’—he goes on at once to say that the same must be true of creation as a whole. There simply is not any such thing as evil; not just because it doesn’t exist from ‘God’s point of view,’ but because it cannot exist for all the reasons that Augustine is in process of elaborating. If there is no evil [as a thing that has positive existence in itself] in the eyes of God, that is not because God is in a position to make judgement subject to which qualities can be ascribed, not a substantia. There is no thing for God to see. Of course, God is aware of the states of affairs we call evil; but unlike us, God is not tempted to short-circuit the argument and ascribe to evil a substantive life it does not and cannot have. (pp.82-83)

Again, none of this is to say that evil is not real. Evil is all too real. But it is wrong, at least from a Christian perspective, to say that evil has an equal form of existence alongside the good. Such a dualism does not exist within orthodox Christian thought. Rather, evil is real in its insubstantiality. It is real as a wasting disease is real; feeding on and distorting that which is is good and exists in itself. Understanding evil as a privation of the good is, following Augustine, one of the first steps to grasping an orthodox Christian view of the cosmos and what it means to live in a fallen world.

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