St. Augustine on the Manichaeans
... did not create evil. In St. Augustine’s system this is because “evil is that which falls away from essence and tends to non-being” (pg. 66). So, evil is not a creation of God, but a perversion of that which he did create. St. Augustine then goes on to show that the Manichaeans would be wrong in claiming that evil is that which is harmful, or that evil is corruption. The one point that St. Augustine’s argument seems to weaken is at the end of the seventh chapter, when he says that “nothing is permitted to reach a state of non-being” (pg. 72). Is St. Augustine saying that due to evil, some thing could fall infinitely away from being without ever reaching non-being? He also says that the same thing cannot be good and evil, but can seem to be according to incompatibility. Here the language gets confusing—he takes the example of the scorpion and says that its poison is not evil to the scorpion. However, it would still seem to make sense to say that the scorpion’s poison is evil to a human, unless Augustine means to say that it is not inherently evil, it is just contrary to our nature. In chapters 13-15, St. Augustine attacks the Manichaeans’ view on eating certain foods. He says that their abstinence from certain types of foods is misplaced, because they are not abstaining from them “for the sake of frugality...