Tell me, pray, whether God be not the author of evil.
This is one of Augustine’s more famous works and rightfully so, I think, if only because of the collision of topics that it’s taken up with. The book is structured as a dialogue between Augustine and one of his friends, Evodius. It begins with one of the central questions of theodicy and it’s kind of bracing to read something from 1600 years ago that starts with a question about the source of evil and realize that we’re essentially still having this conversation. So, the question begins as to the source of “evil,” which in this context really means “suffering.” But that leads instantly to the question of the nature of “sin,” and I like the way Augustine recontextualizes and separates out “error” into a kind of separate category. Anyway, we’re off and into “free will,” which is, in Augustine’s worldview, and also in mine really, at the heart of why suffering exists. And, of course, that catapults us into the topic of God’s foreknowledge and well, what about predestination? WHAT ABOUT IT?! If you haven’t guessed this by now, this is pretty long for a treatise, well over a hundred closely set pages in my translation (which is by J.H.S. Burleigh and dates from the mid-1950s, fyi) and I feel like it is a bit longer than it needs to be and, particularly near the end it starts to lose steam and kind of just restate things that have already been discussed. Some scholars think this work is basically incomplete because, at a certain point in the last of the three books that make up this treatise, Evodius just shuts up and Augustine just goes on a monologue that lasts for pages and pages. Some people think that Augustine had essentially written the text as it appears here, but never got around to going back and structuring the last quarter or so of it into dialogue format. That could be, I don’t know; I do know that the dialogue format is refreshing and those sections of the book are more entertaining and engaging than the part where it’s just Augustine speaking directly to the reader. Prior to this, I hadn’t read an Augustinian dialogue before, but he uses the format well, I’d say. It is worth mentioning that this is an early work, falling right at the end of the approximately ten years between his conversion to Christianity and his ordination as a Bishop. I can see why some consider this his first or one of his first significant works. Just because of the ground it covers, it’s significant for sure and I found it to be, for the most part, entertaining, thought-provoking and engaging. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – structured as a dialogue between Augustine and a friend, this early work is significant for its range of heady topics; it’s entertaining and thoughtful as well, as usual. 3 ½ stars.