The Evolution of Augustine’s Theodicy

From the Intimate Struggles of Confessions to the Cosmic Drama of The City of God

Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) wrestled with the problem of evil more persistently and profoundly than many thinkers in the Christian tradition. His theodicy, the effort to reconcile evil’s existence with God’s goodness and omnipotence, did not emerge fully formed but developed across decades of intellectual, spiritual, and personal upheaval. The Confessions (c. 397–400 CE) and The City of God (413–426 CE) stand as bookends to this journey. Written in the glow of recent conversion and early episcopal duty, the Confessions offers a deeply personal, autobiographical theodicy steeped in Neoplatonic philosophy and individual redemption. Composed amid the crumbling Roman world and Augustine’s seasoned pastoral leadership, The City of God expands the horizon into a vast historical and eschatological framework. Between these works lie formative experiences: growing ecclesiastical maturity, the painful repudiation of his longtime partner (mother of his son), and the death of that son, Adeodatus, at seventeen. This essay traces Augustine’s theodicy from youthful introspection to mature cosmic vision, evaluating how suffering and responsibility transformed a private justification of God into a public vindication of divine providence.

The Confessions is less systematic treatise than prayerful autobiography, a dialogue with God recounting Augustine’s path from Manichaean dualism to Catholic faith. Composed in his early forties shortly after becoming bishop of Hippo Regius, the work reflects a mind still digesting youthful crises. Central to its theodicy is the rejection of Manichaeism, which had held Augustine for nearly a decade and posited two coeternal principles (good and evil) locked in cosmic struggle. Neoplatonic readings in Milan (c. 384–386 CE) enabled him to redefine evil not as substance but as privatio boni, a privation or absence of good (Confessions 7.12.18). Evil possesses no independent reality; it is the will’s deflection from the supreme good, God, toward mutable, creaturely things (Confessions 7.16.22). The adolescent pear theft exemplifies this: the act was evil not because the fruit was corrupt but because the theft turned from divine order for the sake of rebellion and peer approval (Confessions 2.4.9–2.8.16).

Influences Augustine’s Understanding of Evil

In Augustine’s view, moral evil originates in free will’s misuse, a capacity belonging to rational creatures (humans and angels) who can choose between God and self. Suffering, in the Confessions, serves a pedagogical purpose. The death of Augustine’s unnamed friend in Thagaste plunges him into grief, yet the loss teaches detachment from earthly bonds. “You took him from this life,” Augustine later addresses God, “when he had scarcely completed one year in the friendship which had begun between us” (Confessions 4.4.7). Grief becomes a school of humility, redirecting the soul toward eternity.

Likewise, Augustine’s views his fifteen-year relationship with his common law spouse as an entanglement with lust, presenting it as bondage to inappropriate desire. The vow of continence in Milan’s garden marks grace’s triumph over sexual desire, underscoring the theodicy: evil yields not to human striving but to divine illumination (Confessions 8.12.29–30).

The Confessions remains resolutely individual and personal in scope. Cosmic or natural evils (earthquakes, plagues, innocent suffering) receive little attention. This helps Augustine to view theodicy as therapeutic, aimed at the soul’s ascent to God. Resolution, or wholeness arrives immediately through confession, repentance, and sacramental grace; the believer participates in redemption here and now. The tone is intimate, lyrical, even vulnerable as Augustine exposes his sins and celebrates God’s mercy.

Augustine’s Change Over Time

By the composition of The City of God in 413 CE, nearly two decades later, Augustine’s world and perspective had shifted dramatically. The sack of Rome by Alaric’s Visigoths in 410 CE stunned the Mediterranean, prompting pagan critics to blame Christians for forsaking the gods who had safeguarded Rome for centuries. Augustine, now in his late fifties and a veteran bishop, responded with a monumental apology that reframes theodicy on a grand scale. Evil is no longer merely the soul’s misdirection but a structural reality woven into history’s fabric. Augustine’s understanding of evil moves from an individualistic moral dilemma to a cosmic disorder plaguing history.

The work’s central metaphor is the tale of two cities: the earthly city, founded on self-love (amor sui) and destined for perdition, and the City of God, founded on love of God (amor Dei) and destined for eternal beatitude (City of God 14.28). These cities are spiritual rather than geographical, intermingled in the saeculum until final judgment separates them (City of God 1.35; 15.1). History becomes the theater of their conflict, governed by divine providence. In his view, this reality is a conflict between human pride’s self-governance and God’s divine will. Rome’s fall, far from disproving Christianity, exposes earthly glory’s fragility and pagan virtue’s moral rot (City of God 1–5).

Augustine retains the privation theory but embeds it within a biblical narrative. Evil begins with the free rebellion of rational creatures: first angels, then Adam and Eve (City of God 11–12). The Fall corrupts human nature and the created order, introducing mortality, sexual desire, and natural evils as penalties (City of God 13). Yet God’s sovereignty endures. The corruption introduced by human will is overridden by God’s command over reality. Augustine asserts that predestination ensures the elect’s salvation, harmonizing free will with divine foreknowledge (City of God 12.17–18). Suffering (personal or collective) serves providential ends: chastening the proud, testing the faithful, manifesting justice across history’s long arc.

Eschatology moves into an anchor for Augustine’s theodicy. Unlike the Confessions’ immediate cause and resolution of evil, Augustine changes to the concept that evil’s full justification awaits the end times. The resurrection of the body will restore creation, vindicating God’s goodness (City of God 22). Despite humanity’s infusion of corruption, God’s will pilots the result at the end times. Until then, Christians live as pilgrims in a corrupt reality, enduring the earthly city’s injustices with hope. The tone is polemical and systematic, addressing not only personal sin but empires’ fates.

Similarities and Differences in Augustine’s Problem of Evil Views

Continuities between the works are striking. Both affirm evil as non-substantive, a defect in the human will’s orientation. Both locate moral evil in creaturely choice, not divine causation. Both express a need to defend God’s goodness, permitting evil to elicit greater goods; humility, redemption, eternal fellowship. Both insist that grace, not human effort, overcomes evil.

Yet transformations abound. The Confessions is microcosmic and autobiographical; The City of God is macrocosmic and historical. The earlier work’s tone is intimate and lyrical; the later is apologetic and architectonic. Evil’s origin shifts from philosophical (Neoplatonic) to scriptural-historical (Genesis, angelic fall). Suffering moves from individual pedagogy to dualistic providential clash of cities. Resolution shifts from present grace to future judgment and resurrection. The Confessions emerges from personal crisis and conversion; The City of God responds to societal collapse and pagan critique of Christianity. The earlier work is optimistic about personal transformation through improved moral behavior; the latter is sober about evil’s persistence in the world despite humanity’s best efforts.

Augustine’s theodicy did not develop in isolation. Three experiences shaped its trajectory. First, ecclesiastical and intellectual maturity deepened his vision. Ordained priest in 391 CE and bishop in 395 CE, Augustine spent intervening years combating Manichaeism, Donatism, and later Pelagianism. Pastoral duties forced him to address suffering beyond his own psyche and moral dilemmas to schism, persecution, and believers’ doubts. Anti-Pelagian writings around 412 CE sharpened his doctrine of grace and predestination, evident in The City of God’s reconciliation of free will and divine election. Rome’s fall demanded public theodicy, shifting focus from introspection to apologetics.

Second, the abandonment of his concubine marred Augustine profoundly. The fifteen-year relationship with Adeodatus’ mother ended around 385 CE when Augustine dismissed her to pursue a socially advantageous marriage that never materialized (Confessions 6.15.25). The separation was agonizing: “My heart, which was deeply attached, was torn and wounded” (Confessions 6.15.25). In the Confessions, this appears as liberation from lust; in The City of God, sexual desire becomes a hereditary penalty of the Fall, transmitted through procreation (City of God 14.16–24). The “divorce” personalized evil’s tenacity, reinforcing privation theory (lust as absence of ordered love) while maturity tempered judgment into pastoral compassion for the earthly city’s disordered desires.

Third, Adeodatus’ death cut deeply. Born around 372 CE, the boy was a prodigy whose brilliance shines in the Confessions and the dialogue De Magistro. His death around 389–390 CE, shortly after Augustine’s conversion, is mentioned briefly: “You took him from this life… that I might learn to scorn earthly happiness” (Confessions 9.6.14). The restraint is striking—no prolonged lament, only sublimation into praise. Yet the loss reverberates. In The City of God, mortality is the universal human condition post-Fall (City of God 13), and resurrection promises restoration of what death severs (City of God 22.12–21). Adeodatus’ early death becomes a microcosm of cosmic injustice, resolved eschatologically. Maturity transforms raw grief into theological capital: suffering weans pilgrims from the earthly city, orienting them toward the heavenly.

Conclusion

Augustine’s evolution has produced a theodicy of remarkable resilience. Its realism acknowledges evil’s structural entrenchment in history, avoiding the Confessions’ occasional naivety about personal reform. Its hope lies in eschatological confidence, not escapism. Predestination, free will, and providence cohere without fatalism. Amid Rome’s ruins, Christians are equipped to endure as pilgrims. Yet tensions persist in the form of reality’s discord. Augustine defers justice to eternity and risks diminishing present consolation compared to the Confessions’ immediacy of personal and willful change. His emphasis on predestination language, gets sharpened by anti-Pelagian discourses, at times appears to undercut free will’s role in evil, a charge Augustine anticipates but does not fully dispel (City of God 12.9). Natural evils receive less attention than moral evils, leaving innocent suffering (e.g., infants) inadequately addressed until later works like De Libero Arbitrio and Contra Julianum.

Augustine’s theodicy evolves from the individual soul’s solitary ascent in the Confessions to the City of God’s pilgrimage through a fractured world. This trajectory is maturation, not rupture, forged in personal loss and public crisis. The rejection of his concubine taught him sexual desire’s depth; Adeodatus’ death revealed mortality’s sting; ecclesiastical battles honed his grasp of grace. The result comforts the bereaved, steadies the church amid empire’s fall, and points to resurrection. In Augustine’s own words, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessions 1.1.1). His life’s work demonstrates that even the darkest evils; personal betrayal, a son’s grave, a city’s ashes; serve, under providence, that ultimate rest.

Bibliography

Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Augustine. The City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. New York: Modern Library, 1993.