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Seeing Darkness, Hearing Silence:

Augustine’s Account of Evil¹

The question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible. Therefore the “question of why” can always only be answered with the “that,” which burdens man completely.

The theological question does not arise about the origin of evil but about the real overcoming of evil on the Cross; it asks for the forgiveness of guilt, for the reconciliation of the fallen world.²

—DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

The Attraction of Evil

“After one of my many presentations following my return from Rwanda, a Canadian Forces padre asked me how, after all I had seen and experienced, I could still believe in God. I answered that I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know that the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God. Peux ce que veux. Allons-y.”³ Lt. General Romeo Dallaire, a French-Canadian Catholic who was the force commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, discovered the significance of his faith in Rwanda. Prior to Rwanda he was a conventional Catholic, but in Rwanda he found that without his Catholicism he could not comprehend the evil he saw there.

General Dallaire’s story of his attempt to contain the genocide in Rwanda is a sad and tragic tale. That he thinks he “shook hands with the devil” in Rwanda is understandable, but theologically a mistake. Christians do not believe in God because we think God is necessary if we are to comprehend the reality of evil. Rather the Christian belief in God requires that we do not believe in the reality of evil or the devil.⁴ Robert Jenson observes that Karl Barth, the theologian in modernity who is usually credited with restoring Christian “orthodoxy,” puzzled ordinary minds by saying the devil was a myth. Jenson notes that “Barth’s point was that not believing in the devil is the appropriate relation to the devil’s mode of existence. That the devil is a myth does not mean, in Barth’s thinking, that the devil does not exist; it means that he exists in a particular way, as the ordained object of denial.”⁵

That many, Christian and non-Christian alike, find the traditional Christian denial of the existence of evil unintelligible is but an indication of the pathos of Christianity in modernity. Many, like General Dallaire, think if Christianity is intelligible it is so because it helps us name what has gone wrong with our world. Christian and non-Christian now believe that even if we do not share a common belief in God we can at least agree about actions that are evil.⁶ Accordingly modern accounts of morality are determined by agreements about what constitutes inhumanity.⁷ But ironically just to the extent that Christians underwrite the high humanism that sustains the confidence that in spite of our differences we share common intuitions about evil makes the Christian faith in God unintelligible. One cannot help but be sympathetic to those like General Dallaire who have seen a violence beyond belief, but his very ability to be truthful about what he has seen is not because he has certainly seen the devil but because, as is clear from his book, he was sustained by the practice of morning prayer.

In a book entitled Naming the Silences: God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering, I argued that the question “Why does a good God allow bad things to happen to good people?” is not a question that those whose lives have been formed by the Psalms have any reason to ask.⁸ Suffering, even the suffering occasioned by the death of a child, does not constitute for Christians a theodical problem. In Theology and the Problem of Evil, Ken Surin rightly argues that theodicy is a peculiar modern development that unfortunately shapes how many now read the Psalms as well as the book of Job.⁹ The realism of the Psalms and the book of Job depends on the presumption that God is God and we are not. When Christians think theodical justifications are needed to justify the ways of God at the bar of a justice determined by us, you can be sure that the god Christians now worship is not the God of Israel and Jesus Christ.¹⁰

In Naming the Silences I suggested that the very presumption that a crisis of faith is created when “bad things happen to good people” indicates that the God whom Christians are alleged to believe has been confused with a god whose task is primarily to put us, that is, human beings, on the winning side of history. In sum, I argue that in modernity

a mechanistic metaphysic is combined with a sentimental account of God; in this way the pagan assumption that god or the gods are to be judged by how well it or they insure the successful outcome of human purposes is underwritten in the name of Christianity. It is assumed that the attributes of such a god or gods can be known and characterized abstractly. But the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the god that creates something called the “problem of evil”; rather, that problem is created by a god about which the most important facts seem to be that it exists and is morally perfect as well as all-powerful—that is, the kind of god that emperors need to legitimate the “necessity” of their rule.¹¹

In The Evils of Theodicy, Terrence Tilley suggests that those who engage in the theodical project “participate in the practice of legitimating the coercive and marginalizing ecclesio-political structure which is the heritage of Constantinian Christianity.”¹² Once Christianity had become the established religion of the empire, Christians had a stake in justifying that the way things are is the way things are meant to be. But that project has now decisively come to an end. So it is not God that is the subject of theodicy, but the human. That is why the crucial theodical question today is not “Why does a good god allow bad things to happen to good people?” but rather “Why has medicine not cured cancer?” Medicine has become the institution in modernity dedicated to saving the appearances; that is, we look to medicine to create a world in which we can entertain the illusion that it may be possible to get out of life alive.¹³ That is why one of the legitimating functions of modern states is to promise to provide the best medical care available.

If, as Tilley suggests, theodicy is a project of established orders, to turn to Augustine as the representative figure who taught Christians how to think about evil may seem strange. Augustine is often credited with providing the theological rationale for the development of Constantinian Christianity.¹⁴ However, I hope to show that Augustine’s understanding of the non-existence of evil not only is how Christians should think about evil, but also, in the world we currently inhabit, represents a challenge to those who would rule the world in the name of human “progress.” Such a rule—that is, rule in the name of securing a future free from suffering in the name of humanity—is a secular version of what Constantinianism was for Christians.¹⁵ Accordingly, Augustine’s understanding of evil cannot help but be a political challenge to secular forms of Constantinianisms.

Augustine on Evil

In the Enchiridion, a text Augustine wrote around 423 at the request of a layman, Laurentius, for a handbook that would sum up essential Christian teachings, Augustine provides his most considered judgment on evil. According to Augustine, there can be no evil

where there is no good. This leads us to the surprising conclusion: that since every being, in so far as it is a being, is good, if we then say that a defective thing is bad, it would seem to mean that we are saying that evil is good, that only what is good is ever evil and that there is no evil apart from something good. This is because every actual entity is good [omnis natura bonum est]. Nothing evil exists in itself, but only as an evil aspect of some actual entity. Therefore, there can be nothing evil except something is good. Absurd as this sounds, nevertheless the logical connections of the argument compel us to it as inevitable.¹⁶

In his Confessions, written soon after Augustine became a bishop (397), he anticipated this passage from the Enchiridion when he suggested that evil simply does not exist. He argues that:

we must conclude that if things are deprived of all good, they cease altogether to be; and this means that as long as they are, they are good. Therefore, whatever is, is good; and evil, the origin of which I was trying to find, is not a substance, because if it were a substance, it would be good. For either it would be an incorruptible substance of the supreme order of goodness, or it would be a corruptible substance which would not be corruptible unless it were good. So it became obvious to me that all that you have made is good, and that there are no substances whatsoever that were not made by you. And because you did not make them all equal, each single thing is good and collectively they are very good, for our God made his whole creation very good.¹⁷

I am convinced that Augustine has rightly said what any Christian should say about evil; that is, ontologically evil does not exist. Such a view, however, many find counter-intuitive. How can you say evil does not exist when, like General Dallaire, you have witnessed a genocide? I think Augustine has a very persuasive response to such a query, but to understand his response we need to appreciate how he came to his conclusion, a conclusion he says was forced on him by logic—that is, that evil is always parasitical on the good. I have no doubt that Augustine found himself driven to this conclusion by “logic,” but Augustine’s logic requires a narrative that takes the form of the story—namely, the “confession” of his sin. This means, I think, that you cannot understand Augustine’s account of evil without following his account in the Confessions of how he came through his involvement with the Manichees as well as the Platonists to the conclusion that evil is nothing.

It is not accidental that the only way Augustine has to display how he came to understand that evil is nothing was by providing a narrative of how he arrived at that judgment.¹⁸ That a narrative was required rightly suggests that to understand properly why evil does not exist requires a transformation of the self that takes the form of a story. Moreover, that a narrative is required for us rightly to understand the parasitical character of evil is not only true of our individual lives but is also required if we are to make sense of our collective existence as well as the cosmos. Christians believe the recognition of evil is possible because God never leaves us without hope. That is, hope makes possible the ability to take the next step necessary to discover that we are not condemned to live out our past. We discover that we are only able to name our sins on our way to being free from them. This means we are only able to give an account of our lives retrospectively.

By attending to Augustine’s Confessions retrospectively, I hope to show that his account of evil as privation is keyed to his understanding of Scripture and, in particular, how Scripture is only rightly read as prayer (worship). In other words, Augustine’s understanding of evil as privation is necessary to make sense of the Bible’s story of creation, fall, and redemption. All that he says about evil is disciplined by that theological project, which means for Augustine there is no freestanding “problem of evil,” but rather whatever Christians have to say about evil must reflect their convictions that we are creatures of a God who has created and redeemed.¹⁹

The Confessions is a complex prayer Augustine prays in an effort to discover how God has made his life possible. He unsparingly confesses his sins, his unwillingness to acknowledge the One who is his creator, because the Confessions are not about Augustine but rather about the God who makes Augustine Augustine. Moreover, he makes clear that it is his inability to understand God that makes it impossible for him to understand rightly the nature of evil. He confesses that his

own specious reasoning induced me to give in to the sly arguments of fools who asked me what was the origin of evil, whether God was confined to the limits of a bodily shape, whether he had hair and nails, and whether men could be called just if they had more than one wife at the same time, or killed other men, or sacrificed living animals. My ignorance was so great that these questions troubled me, and while I thought I was approaching the truth, I was only departing the further from it. I did not know that evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains.²⁰

The “fools” were the Manichees, a religious sect to which Augustine belonged for nine years, because he believed that they offered him a compelling account of the cosmos and, in particular, of evil. In her wonderful book Augustine on Evil, G. R. Evans suggests that what attracted Augustine to the Manichees was what he took to be the explanatory power of their position.²¹ According to the Manichees the world is constituted by a god who is supremely good and by an evil principle that is identified with materiality, and in particular, the body. Therefore the Manichees did not try to avoid the problem of evil, but rather they “explained” evil by finding a place for evil in the ontological character of the universe.²² Such an explanation appealed to Augustine because he had a passion to know the truth about his and the world’s existence. In short, the Manichees seemed to offer Augustine a “scientific” account of the way things are. Such an explanation appealed to Augustine, he confesses, because when he was at that stage of his life he was readier to believe that the universe was out of joint than that there was anything wrong with himself.²³

Evans also suggests that the Manichees might have been attractive to Augustine because their position seemed to share some aspects of what Augustine had learned from his mother about Christianity. Christians, like the Manichees, claimed God is completely good and the human task is to seek that good. Accordingly the Manichean Psalm-Book seemed to echo the Christian desire for illumination gained through being freed from bodily desire. Augustine, who certainly knew about bodily desire, was attracted to the spiritual discipline of the Manichees because they offered him a discipline by which he could join the spiritual elite.²⁴ No doubt one of the reasons the Manichees appealed to Augustine, a reason he suggests in the Confessions, is because they confirmed his high opinion of himself. The Manichees played to what Augustine was to learn was his deepest enemy—his pride—by providing him with knowledge befitting his intelligence. He was freed from the Manichees only when he was forced to conclude that “the very attempt to search for the cause of evil in the way he did was itself an evil thing.”²⁵

That the Manichees seemed to provide Augustine with the best account of the cosmos is crucial to understand his break with them. Augustine tells us he often asked questions the his fellow Manichees could not answer, but they assured him when the great Manichean scholar Faustus came he would be able to answer Augustine’s worries. When Faustus came, however, though Augustine found him a man of “agreeable personality,” Augustine also discovered that Faustus “was quite uninformed about the subjects in which I had expected him to be an expert.”²⁶ In particular Augustine thought the Manichean books were full of “tedious fictions about the sky and the stars, the sun and the moon” and their mathematical calculations simply did not square with what he had studied in other books.²⁷

That the Manichean “science” proved to be false was one of the crucial reasons Augustine had for leaving the Manichees, but just as important was his discovery that his most fundamental mistake was assuming that God could be understood as part of the metaphysical furniture of the universe. Augustine confesses he “could not free himself from the thought that you (God) were some kind of bodily substance extended in space, either permeating the world or diffused in infinity beyond it.”²⁸ It was by reading the Platonists that Augustine was freed of the presumption that metaphysically that which is a substance must have a body. Moreover it was the Platonists that helped him see that “all other things that are of a lower order than yourself, and I saw that they have not absolute being in themselves, nor are they entirely without being. They are real in so far as they have their being from you, but unreal in the sense that they are not what you are”²⁹

It was from the Platonists, therefore, that Augustine began to imagine that evil is a privation, which means it is a mistake to try to understand how, as Evans puts it, “evil can have a bodily place in the universe”.³⁰ For Augustine this meant that he was beginning to realize it is a mistake to ask from whence evil comes or where evil may be. Now Augustine understands for God

evil does not exist, and not only for you for the whole of your creation as well, because there is nothing outside it which could invade it and break down the order which you have imposed on it. Yet in separate parts of your creation there are some things which we think of as evil because they are at variance with other things. But there are other things again with which they are in accord, and they are good. In themselves, too, they are good. And all these things which are at variance with one another are in accord with the lower part of creation which we call the earth. The sky, which is cloudy and windy, suits the earth to which it belongs. So it would be wrong for me to wish that these earthly things did not exist, for even if I saw nothing but them, I might wish for something better, but still I ought to praise you for them alone. . . . And since this is so, I no longer wished for a better world, because I was thinking of the whole of creation and in the light of this clearer discernment I had come to see that though the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone.³¹

There can be no question of the significance of the Platonists for Augustine, but this passage in praise of God’s creation indicates that for Augustine Platonism was a way station on the way for Augustine to become a Christian. Augustine never left his Platonism behind though I think the assumption that he remained more Platonist than Christian is clearly wrong. He understood that he could not remain a Platonist because to be a Christian requires that you believe that all that is is as it is because it has been created. Augustine tells us that “by reading these books of the Platonists I had been prompted to look for truth as something incorporeal, and I ‘caught sight of your invisible nature, as it is known through your creatures,’”³² but what he could not find in the Platonist books was “the mien of the true love of God. They make no mention of the tears of confession or of the sacrifice that you will never disdain, a broken spirit, a heart that is humbled and contrite (Psalm 50:19), nor do they speak of the salvation of your people, the city adorned like a bride (Revelation 21:2), the foretaste of your spirit (II Corinthians 1:22), or the chalice of your redemption.”³³

From Augustine’s perspective the Platonists, as helpful as they had been, did nothing for his besetting problem, which he came to understand was his pride. Through his encounter with the stories of Victorinus and Anthony, and how those stories led him to face the humiliation of the cross of Christ, Augustine was finally able to confess that evil was “not out there,” but rather resided in his will.³⁴ Augustine confesses “I began to search for a means of gaining the strength I needed to enjoy you, but I could not find this means until I embraced the mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ, who is man, like them, (I Timothy 2:5) and also rules as God over all things, blessed for ever. (Romans 9:5) He it was who united with our flesh that food which I was too weak to take. For I was not humble enough to conceive of the humble Jesus Christ as my God, nor had I learnt what lesson his human weakness was meant to teach.”³⁵ That lesson quite simply being that we are cured of our pride only through following the Word, the Truth, which surpasses even the highest parts of creation by becoming one of us.

The Confessions is Augustine’s testimony to God and God’s grace as necessary for the healing of his pride. We can only know our sin in the light of God’s grace.³⁶ This means we cannot will our way out of our pride, but rather God’s grace can only be appropriated through recollection.³⁷ Commentators on Augustine’s Confessions often find his descriptions of being a sinner as a young child—that is, his greedy desire for his mother breast—to be exaggerated. Yet Augustine is not trying to make us think that even as a child he was the most sinful of sinners. To engage in that project would be another form of pride. Rather he is trying to help us see that the disorder that grips our most basic desires as well as our ability to reason, which is shaped by those desires, cannot help but lead to the destruction of ourselves and others. To appreciate a child’s disordered desire is part and parcel of Augustine’s rejection of the Manichees.

Augustine’s famous account of the stealing of the pears is his paradigmatic example of what it means to discover that we do not so much choose to sin but rather that we are sin. Crucial for Augustine is that he stole that for which he had no need. He and his friends threw the pears to the pigs. To be sure Augustine joined in this petty crime because he desired the good opinion of his friends, but that he did so is not a sufficient explanation for his sin.³⁸ He did what he did for no purpose other than his love of mischief. So acting, he sought to gain from the world what he learned he could only gain from loving the One alone worthy to be loved. In short he was trying to be more than he could be. Thus he confesses “all who desert you and set themselves up against you merely copy you in a perverse way: but by this very act of imitation they only show that you are the Creator of all nature and, consequently, that there is no place whatever where man may hide away from you.”³⁹

Evans notes that Augustine’s observations about his early boyhood sins are meant to help us see that one of the distinguishing marks of an evil action is its unprofitableness.⁴⁰ That seems just right to me and helps us understand why Augustine thought we have no ability to will our way out of sin. That we cannot will our way out of sin is because we seldom pursue sin to sin, but rather our sins our done in the name of “great goods.” We learn of the unprofitable character of sin only retrospectively. Indeed too often attempts to avoid sin rely on alternatives that are themselves sinful, but fail to be acknowledged as such only because they seem different than the sin we think we have clearly identified. For Augustine evil cannot be defeated by evil.⁴¹ Rather our only hope is that we are offered an alternative community and correlative way of life that make it possible for us to locate the extraordinary power of the evil we are and do in the name of the good. For all of its ambiguity, Augustine thought he had discovered that alternative community by being made a member of the church.⁴²

Where Has This Gotten Us or Why I Am Not a Nazi

I do not pretend that I have provided an adequate account Augustine’s understanding of evil, but hopefully my attempt to help us see how Augustine thought about these matters can help us gain some perspective on where we are today.⁴³ If Susan Neiman is right that “the problem of evil is the guiding force of modern thought” and that “nothing is easier than stating the problem of evil in nontheist terms” then we clearly have some indication that “modernity” names a development that stands at a great distance, and the distance is not best measured in centuries, from Augustine.⁴⁴ With all due respect to Neiman, I suspect she has no idea that Augustine’s understanding of evil was not “theistic” but Trinitarian.⁴⁵ Yet I fear that Neiman represents the kind of misunderstanding of Christianity in modernity most determinatively found among Christians.

However, from Neiman’s perspective, the Augustinian account of evil I have developed and hopefully defended in this paper cannot help but seem intellectually obscurantist if not dangerous. The problem quite simply is that the account I have provided is so Christian, so particularistic. Why should anyone who is not a Christian take it seriously? Moreover, appeals to particular traditions seem to reproduce the problem many assume is at the heart of the challenge facing us in modernity—that is, how to counter the violence perpetrated in the name of a god or tradition. In short, does not my vigorous defense of Augustine’s understanding of evil play into the hands of the most destructive form of politics in our time? I fear that I cannot provide the kind of answer many desire to such a question because such answers undercut the contribution Christians have to make.

It has been the sad fate of Christianity in our time to be that form of life that tries to “bind up the wounds” of our existence. As a result Christians have tried to offer explanations of evil that do not implicate God. As I suggested at the beginning of this essay, you can be sure that when Christians attempt to justify the ways of God before the bar of human experience they no longer believe in the God that animates the work of Augustine.⁴⁶ Even worse, I suspect that Christians today do not know what it would mean to believe in Augustine’s God precisely because we have no idea what practices are required to make our worship of the God of Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac, and Jesus Christ intelligible, not only to those who do not share our faith, but even to ourselves.

I need to be clear, however, that it would be a mistake to think the genocide in Rwanda is somehow better understood if we see what happened there as “sin.” That would make “sin” exactly what Augustine suggests sin cannot be—an explanation. To say “sin” explains nothing.⁴⁷ Rather sin is a confession that holds out the hope that even in the face of a terror like Rwanda redemption is possible. To say that there is hope suggests that evil cannot overwhelm the good that is God’s creation. Yet honesty demands that often we have nothing to say in the face of events like Rwanda. Nevertheless silence, at least the honest silence that can be a form of presence, can be a way not to let the darkness overwhelm us.⁴⁸ Indeed Christians believe that God would have his people be such a presence.

Silence, moreover, is required when the use of words like “sin” and “evil” are used, in Terry Eagleton’s words, “to shut down thought.”⁴⁹ Eagleton notes that the use of the word “evil” in the so-called war against terrorism really means:

Don’t look for a political explanation. It is a wonderfully timesaving device. If terrorists are simply Satanic, then you do not need to investigate what lies behind their atrocious acts of violence. You can ignore the plight of the Palestinian people, or of those Arabs who have suffered under squalid right-wing autocracies supported by the West for its own selfish, oil-hungry purposes. The word “evil” transfers the question from this mundane realm to a sinisterly metaphysical one. You cannot acknowledge that the terrible crimes which terrorists commit have a purpose behind them, since to ascribe purposes to such people is to recognize them as rational creatures, however desperately wrongheaded.⁵⁰

To describe enemies as evil ironically has the effect of creating the Manichean world that Augustine was intent on defeating.⁵¹ If Augustine teaches us anything, it is that the Christian confession of sin is a first-person activity. Christians, of course, think it important to be able to name our sins as well as to confess our sins to one another.⁵² We are obligated to reveal our sins so that we may have some hope of being freed from sin through the work of the Holy Spirit. Our ability to name our sins comes through our mutual responsibility we share with other Christians exemplified by lives such as Augustine’s.⁵³ By attending to lives like Augustine’s, Christians hope to be able to discover in what ways we are possessed by sin. If we attribute sin to another, we are able to do so because we have been enabled to recognize the power of sin in our own lives.⁵⁴

But what could such a confession mean when faced by a Rwanda? I think if we are thinking with Augustine it might mean that to be a Christian requires us to believe that even a Rwanda someday might be a memory capable of being healed.⁵⁵ What it would mean for such a memory to be healed I think would mean that a story can be told about such senseless killing that offers those killed as well as those that killed reconciliation.⁵⁶ I confess I cannot imagine what such a reconciliation might mean, but that is why God is God and I am not.

Which finally brings me back to politics. In the “Preface” to her important book, The Nazi Conscience, Claudia Koonz observes that we may find it repugnant to think that mass murderers understood themselves to be acting morally. But according to Koonz that is exactly what they did. She observes:

The popularizers of anti-semitism and the planners of genocide followed a coherent set of severe ethical maxims derived from broad philosophical concepts. As modern secularists, they denied the existence of either a divinely inspired moral law or an innate ethical imperative. Because they believed that concepts of virtue and vice had evolved according to the needs of particular ethnic communities, they denied the existence of universal moral values and instead promoted moral maxims they saw as appropriate to their Aryan community. Unlike the early twentieth-century moral philosophers who saw cultural relativism as an argument for tolerance, Nazi theorists drew the opposite conclusion. Assuming that cultural diversity breeds antagonism, they asserted the superiority of their own communitarian values above all others.⁵⁷

I suspect many will find my judgment that Augustine provides how Christians should think about evil far too close to what Koontz describes as the Nazi exaltation of their particular community’s values. We, that is, we who are modern, think the only way to defeat the kind of evil we associate with the Nazis is to have at our disposal a universal ethic, that is, an ethic on which all agree. Christians are often thought to represent such an ethic. However, Augustine thought that virtue and vice were correlative to a particular community. According to Augustine, God’s law is a law for anyone, but he also thought that law would differ from age to age and place to place. “What may be done at one time of day is not allowed at the next, and what may be done, or must be done, in one room is forbidden and punished in another. This does not mean that justice is erratic or variable, but that the times over which it presides are not always the same, for it is the nature of time to change.”⁵⁸ The variable character of ethics does not mean justice is arbitrary, but Augustine argued that for justice to be rightly understood requires the right worship of the true God.⁵⁹ Absent that worship, Augustine assumes that there can be no alternative to what we know as “relativism” or what James Edwards calls “normal nihilism.”⁶⁰

Does the loss of common worship mean, however, that there is no alternative, that there is no defense, against the “Nazi conscience”?⁶¹ I do not think such a conclusion follows, but such an alternative will depend on whether communities exist capable of discerning their own propensities for the evil so often done in the name of good.⁶² It would be tempting to put Christians on the side of those who advocate “universal moral values” as a bulwark against “relativism.” That strategy, however, fails to see that “relativism” is the creation of the assumption that “universal values” can be known apart from formation in a community capable of recognizing the evil it does in the name of those same “values.” Ironically, too often, as I suggested above, those who try to sustain accounts of morality in the language of universal rights or values are but secular versions of Constantinian Christians, pridefully assuming they know what is wrong with the world. That such is the case should not be surprising because the philosophical developments that gave original impetus to these now widespread political movements intended if possible to defeat or replace Christianity in the name of the human or, failing that, at least to render Christian convictions at best “private” having no role for the public discernment of evil or good.

But if we cannot rely on “universal values” does that not mean we live in a very dangerous world? That is exactly what it means. That world, moreover, has been made all the more dangerous by attempts to save the world from danger by appealing to “universal values” that result in justifications to coerce those who do not share what some consider universal. If Christians have any contribution to make for helping us survive the world as we know it, it is because God has “brought us low,” forcing humility on us by humiliation. Such humility hopefully might help Christians refrain from identifying or comforting themselves with the sentimentalities of reigning humanisms. Christians do not believe in the “human.” Christians believe in a God who requires we be able to recognize as well as confess our sins. Exactly because Christians are in lifelong training necessary to be a sinner, it is our hope that we might be able to discern the evil that so often is expressed in idealistic terms. So what Christians have to offer is not an explanation of evil, but rather a story, and a community formed by that story, that we believe saves us from the idols of the world. That I think is what Augustine might say today.⁶³