Why do we have floods and droughts, and why do animals kill and eat each other? Is it because of the fall? Augustine is sometimes assumed to have believed this. However, looking at what he said on the topic, it becomes clear that, for Augustine, these things are simply part of the goodness of creation. The only things that are ‘evil’ in creation are those harms that human beings experience through a distorted relationship with the good creation.

Introduction

Why does a supposedly loving and all-powerful God create a world in which creatures suffer horrendous evil?1

It is through this kind of question that the so-called ‘problem of evil’ is typically expressed.

A distinction is often made between ‘natural evil’ and ‘moral evil’, with the latter referring to evil that arises because of human agency. There are complexities involved in this distinction,2 but, as a working definition, I will include as ‘natural evil’ any kind of harm or suffering that does not have an obvious human cause. Potential candidates for ‘natural evil’ would therefore include: death, disease, animal violence and predation, and any kind of human or animal suffering caused by earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, lightning, and storms. Why do we live in a world in which death, disease, and disasters seem to be integral to the natural order? Are these an intended or inevitable part of God’s good creation?

Responses to the problem of evil might seek to limit God (e.g., ‘in power, knowledge or goodness’), or to downplay the evilness of the evil in question (e.g., by arguing that ‘every event serves a divine purpose’).3 Augustine, in contrast, was not known for responding to the problem of evil in this way. The problem of evil was central to his thinking; one Augustine scholar has gone so far as to claim that ‘his approach to solving the problem of evil shaped his whole theological vision’.4

Augustine, addressing God in his Confessions, says:

Hence I saw and it was made clear to me that you made all things good, and there are absolutely no substances which you did not make.5

Later in the Confessions, he writes, ‘Your creation has its being from the fullness of your goodness.’6 What, then, is evil? Evil, for Augustine, is a ‘corruption’ of something that is good, and ‘all things that are corrupted suffer privation of some good’.7 For Augustine, ‘Evil is merely a privation or perversion of something good’—privatio boni—‘and so lacks independent existence.’8 Hence the origin of evil was a question that troubled Augustine.9

Augustine’s understanding of moral evil was developed in his doctrines of the fall and original sin. But how did he approach the problem of natural evil? In particular, given the findings of modern science, is there room in his theology for death, disease, and disasters to have been in the world prior to the fall of humanity?

In what follows, I will sample some recent interpretations of Augustine in relation to the presence of natural evil in a good creation, before examining Augustine’s writings on the topic directly.

Recent Interpretations of Augustine on Natural Evil

John Hick has been a significant figure in recent treatments of the problem of evil. Contrasting an ‘Augustinian’ approach to theodicy with his favoured ‘Irenaean’ approach, Hick describes the former as follows:

The Augustinian approach, representing until fairly recently the majority report of the Christian mind, hinges upon the idea of the fall as the origin of moral evil, which has in turn brought about the almost universal carnage of nature.10

This type of theodicy, he continues, is ‘based on the fall from grace of free finite creatures—first angels and then human beings—and a consequent going wrong of the physical world’,11 and is described as ‘the idea that earthquake and flood, disease, decay, and death are consequences either of the human fall or of a prior fall of angelic beings who are now exerting an evil influence upon the earth’.12 Thus is can be seen that, for Hick, the Augustinian view of natural evil places its origin in the rebellious actions of free moral agents.

Hick’s understanding of Augustine has been critiqued recently by Stanley Rosenberg, in his discussion of Augustine’s thought about natural evil.13 As well as referring to the work of Hick quoted above, Rosenberg also engages with Hick’s influential book, Evil and the God of Love, presenting the following quote as representing Hick’s understanding of Augustine’s teaching concerning the ‘loss of order in nature’:14

In all such cases the evil state of affairs can plausibly be seen as the collapse of a good state of affairs, and as tending towards non-existence, at least in the relative sense of the dissolution of a previously established arrangement of life or matter.15

Rosenberg thus concludes that, for Hick,

In his reading of Augustine, all of nature is afflicted and disrupted by the fall of Adam and Eve, which imposed a penalty on all of the natural world, altering its course and structure. The physical world was perfect and without sources of pain and suffering before the pair broke the law. While Hick emphatically rejects this position …, he engages with it … as the specific directive of Augustine and strives to dismantle it.16

However, it is less than clear that Hick understood Augustine in this way. Throughout his work, Hick is more interested in what he terms the ‘Augustinian type of theodicy’, than in the thought of Augustine per se. Indeed, although Hick’s description of the ‘going wrong of the physical world’ is understood by Rosenberg to represent Hick’s ‘reading of Augustine’, it is described by Hick as ‘the Augustinian approach’, rather than as a representation of Augustine’s own views.17 Moreover, the discussion about ‘the collapse of a good state of affairs’ is found in a section of Hick’s book in which he is describing ‘The error that would result from construing the privatio boni doctrine as empirical rather than metaphysical in character’,18 and consequently seems to be more of a description of a possible misinterpretation of Augustine’s position. Whether Hick believed that his ‘Augustinian type of theodicy’ was advanced by Augustine is not immediately apparent. This is understandable, given Hick’s purposes in writing, but it does make it more challenging to discern Hick’s understanding of Augustine’s views on natural evil.

According to Hick, Augustine ‘felt it necessary to try to demonstrate the goodness of providence in respect of decay and death in the natural world, including in his purview the decay of plants as well as the death of sentient animals’, making reference to Book xii of Augustine’s The City of God.19 Hick takes Augustine’s treatment of animal pain in On the Free Choice of the Will as suggesting ‘that the vast mass of animal suffering is divinely arranged for our benefit’,20 while his treatment in The City of God is described by Hick as considering nature ‘as a great organism whose life involves ceaseless process and change’.21 But Hick concludes that Augustine’s approach ‘leaves unilluminated a large part of the mystery of animal pain, constituting a problem that apparently did not deeply move or concern Augustine’.22

In the end, Rosenberg’s conclusions are similar to those of Hick: ‘in Augustinian terms, it is wrong to describe violent physical and biological acts in nature as evil’.23 For Augustine, ‘neither animal violence nor physical cataclysms should be understood as forms of evil resulting from the fall’.24 This is argued with reference to many parts of Augustine’s works, some of which will be explored below. What then of human suffering as a consequence of these phenomena? According to Rosenberg, ‘Augustine thought that if Adam and Eve had continued in purity, a greater grace would have been gained, which would have preserved them against decay’.25

Lois Malcolm writes that, for Augustine, ‘Natural evils, such as diseases, are divinely ordained consequences of a primeval fall.’26 Whether this should be taken to refer to evils that affect humanity specifically, or whether this should include animal suffering, is something to be considered; so far the evidence seems to favour the former interpretation.

A significant study of the topic is Gillian Evans’s book, Augustine on Evil.27 She writes that, ‘For Augustine, “natural evils” are a question of very subordinate interest. … For him, there is no such thing as a “natural evil”’, because ‘All evil arises in the will.’28 Evans draws on Plato’s idea of motion being transmitted from one body to another in order to suggest how, for Augustine, ‘even the evil of an event such as an earthquake … is ultimately traceable to an act of will’.29 She continues:

It may be difficult to discover all the links in the chain, but then we should expect some of them to be hard to find, because evil shrouds things in darkness. It may indeed be easier to see how God incorporates evil events such as earthquakes into the natural order than to understand how a human or angelic sin may have caused it, but that again is what we should expect, for the divine ordering of things is clear, and the evil disordering of things is hidden.30

Thus it is suggested that fallen angels, for Augustine, have significant power to influence the world for ill.31

Two possibilities present themselves, as we approach Augustine’s works. One is that ‘natural evils’ are evil only when they affect human beings, humanity having been protected from being harmed by them prior to the fall. The other is that ‘natural evils’ are genuinely evil, having been brought into the world as a consequence of the fall of angels or humanity.

Three key questions therefore need to be addressed. First, is the suffering of animals within creation problematic for Augustine? Second, what role do fallen angels play in Augustine’s understanding of natural evil? Third, what special protection does Augustine see humanity as having enjoyed in prior to the fall? These will be considered in turn.

Augustine on Animal Suffering

In his early work, On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, Augustine initially cautioned against interpreting ‘in a purely literal, material sense’ the words in Genesis 1:30 concerning ‘every green plant’ being given to the animals, given that ‘we can see that lions and hawks and kites and eagles only feed on flesh, by preying on other animals’.32 However, in his Revisions he retracted this, while leaving open the possibility that carnivorous animals may have initially eaten flesh, at least until human beings had ‘earned the right’ to exercise full dominion over them:

It could have happened, after all, that carnivores would have been fed by human beings on the fruits of the earth, had human beings, in return for the obedience with which they might have served God without any wrongdoing, earned the right to have all beasts and birds serving them in every conceivable way.33

Later on in On Genesis he considers the existence of ‘pernicious’ animals, but his primary concern is with their effect on humanity; he seems uninterested in the suffering that animals might inflict on each other.34

This existence of harmful animals is considered further in The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Once again, his primary focus is on the effect such animals might have on humanity, and the role they might play in ‘training and perfecting us in virtue’. Considering the way Daniel was protected from the lions, and Paul from a poisonous snake, he writes that ‘it would have been quite possible for these creatures to do no harm when they were created, if no occasion had arisen for punishing vices and frightening people off them, or for testing virtue and making people perfect’.35

Augustine next addresses the following question:

Then why do beasts injure one another, though they neither have any sins, so that this kind of thing could be called punishment, nor by such trials do they gain at all in virtue?

His answer is as follows:

For the simple reason, of course, that some are the proper diet of others. Nor can we have any right to say, ‘There shouldn’t be some on which others feed.’ All things, you see, as long as they continue to be, have their own proper measures, numbers and destinies. So all things, properly considered, are worthy of acclaim; nor is it without some contribution in its own way to the temporal beauty of the world that they undergo change by passing from one thing into another. This may escape fools; those making progress have some glimmering of it; to the perfect it is as clear as daylight.36

He continues by explaining that ‘all such goings-on in the animal world provide us human beings with plenty of salutary admonitions’: by considering the trouble taken by animals ‘to safeguard their bodily, time-bound health and welfare’, we are exhorted to take similar trouble ‘over our spiritual, everlasting health and welfare’.37 Thus, for Augustine, animal predation is part of the goodness of creation.

Further insights are to be found in The City of God. Augustine reflects on the beauty and harmony of the created order, and the way in which creatures behave in ways that cause harm to their ‘perishable nature’, which would include animals attacking one another:

It is, however, ridiculous to condemn as vices the faults of beasts and trees and other mutable and mortal things which entirely lack intellect or sensation or life, even if those faults should corrupt their perishable nature. For these creatures, at their Creator’s will, have received a mode of existence which fits them, as they pass away and give place to others, to bring about the lowest form of beauty: the beauty of the seasons, which, in its own place, is a harmonious part of this world. … Accordingly, in those places where such things properly belong, some arise as others pass away, the less succumb to the greater, and the things that are overcome are transformed into the qualities of those that overcome; and this is the appointed order of transitory things.38

Such beauty is often difficult for us to perceive, whether because of our limited perspective, or because we tend to evaluate the worth of a creature ‘with respect to our comfort or discomfort’, rather than ‘with respect to their own nature’, by which ‘created things give glory to their Maker’.39 For certain creatures, this may involve them existing for a certain period of time only. ‘All natures,’ Augustine writes, ‘tend in the scheme of divine providence to that end which is embraced in the principle of the government of the universe; and even when the corruption of mutable and mortal things brings them to complete annihilation, it does not, merely by causing them not to be, prevent them from bringing about the effects proper to them.’40

But what is it that distinguishes human beings from other animals, such that Augustine is not concerned about animals experiencing pain? For Augustine, the answer lies in their lack of rationality:

When we read ‘Thou shalt not kill’, we are not to take this commandment as applying to plants, for these have no sensation. Nor does it apply to the non-rational animals which fly, swim, walk or crawl, for these do not share the use of reason with us.41

This reflects ‘the gradations which exist in the order of nature’. So, ‘among the sentient, the intelligent are placed above those which do not have intelligence: men, for example, are above cattle’.42

Similar statements are made in On the Free Choice of the Will. Augustine poses the question, ‘What evil have animals done to deserve to suffer such great distress?’43 He responds that ‘those who speak or think this way have an unbalanced assessment of things’ in assuming that, just as the heavenly bodies suffer no corruption, so it must also be for animals. Augustine even sees a positive purpose in the pain experienced by beasts, in demonstrating a ‘drive for unity’:

it would not be apparent, then, how great the drive for unity is in the lower animals of the Creation, if not for the pain of beasts. And if it were not apparent, we would be less aware than we need to be that they were all fashioned by the supreme and sublime and inexpressible unity of their Creator.44

Thus it seems clear that, for Augustine, animal suffering is not to be reckoned as evil. Rather, the cycle of life, death, and predation within the animal realm is part of the beauty and harmony of a good creation.

Augustine on Fallen Angels

Augustine considers angels to have been created on the first day of the creation week, along with the command, ‘Let there be light’, as ‘partakers of the eternal Light which is the immutable Wisdom of God’. Those angels who turn away from God are ‘deprived of their participation in the eternal Light’, which is an example of evil as the privation of the good.45

Based on John 8:44 (‘[The devil] was a murderer from the beginning’) and 1 John 3:8 (‘the devil has been sinning from the beginning’),46 Augustine traces the devil’s origin to the earliest moments of creation. However, based on his convictions about the goodness of the Creator, and the goodness of creation, he maintains that the devil was originally created without sin, but fell because of pride.47

Augustine sees the separation of the angels as having taken place on the first day of creation, even prior to the fall of the angels:

Now it does not seem to me an absurd interpretation of God’s works if we understand that the angels were created when that first light was made, and that the separation of the holy and the unclean angels was made when, as is said, ‘God divided the light from the darkness; and God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.’ For only He could make this division, Who could also foreknow before they fell that they would fall, and that, being deprived on the light of truth, they would remain in the darkness of pride. … for the future evil of the wicked angels—not a defect of their nature, but of their will—could not be hidden from Him or unknown to Him.48

Being consigned to the darkness so early on in creation’s history, it might be assumed that the fallen angels could exercise great harm on God’s creation. But as to the harm that the fallen angels might inflict on creation, Augustine sees them as being restrained by God’s power. Comparing the two companies of angels, Augustine writes:

The one is tranquil in the light of godliness, the other turbulent with dark desires; the one, at God’s command, brings merciful aid and just vengeance, but the other, in its pride, seethes with the desire to subdue and hurt. The one is the minister of God’s goodness to the utmost of its will, whereas the other is restrained by God’s power from the harm that it longs to do.49

Similarly, discussing ‘the vicissitudes of the temporal world’ and the affairs of humanity, Augustine writes that ‘even though the demons may have some power in these matters, they can do only as much as is permitted them by the mysterious dispensation of the Almighty’.50 At another point, Augustine writes that ‘At certain appointed and foreordained times, indeed, power has been granted to the demons, so that they may incite the men whom they possess to give vent to their enmity against the City of God.’51

Even leaving animal suffering to one side, there are still many apparent examples of natural evil, the origins of which have yet to be identified. In what has been discussed of Augustine’s understanding of fallen angels, at no point has it been suggested that the fallen angels might be responsible for the very existence of natural evil. Would such a notion be contrary to Augustine’s theology?

Given Augustine’s emphasis on the beauty and harmony of creation, with its various parts fitting together into an ordered whole, it seems that there is little room for fallen angels to play a significant role. Although he does allow that demons are able to do many things,52 it would still be difficult to imagine Augustine entertaining the suggestion that fundamental aspects of the world in which we live—plate tectonics, disease, storms—are a corruption of God’s good creation introduced by fallen angels. What, then, can be said about the origin of natural evil?

Augustine on Life before the Fall

We have seen how, in The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine suggested that it would have been ‘quite possible’ for ‘poisonous and dangerous animals’ to ‘do no harm when they were created’, given the examples of Daniel and the lions, and of Paul and the viper.53 Likewise, in discussing Paradise, and the commandment to ‘guard it’, Augustine considers the possibility that this refers to the threat of wild beasts. He asks, ‘Were wild beasts, after all, already raging against the man, which would not happen unless he sinned?’54 It is clear, again, that Augustine believed that the wild beasts would not pose a threat to humanity prior to the entrance of sin into the world. But would Augustine use the same approach when considering the potential harm that might be caused to human beings by other aspects of creation, such as earthquakes, diseases, and even death itself?

In The City of God, Augustine discusses the existence of ‘many things, such as fire, cold, wild beasts, and so forth, which are not compatible with, and which injure, the needy and frail mortality of our flesh, which now comes to us under just punishment’.55 Augustine thus links our being injured by these things with the ‘needy and frail mortality of our flesh’, a condition in which we find ourselves because of ‘just punishment’. Augustine, it seems, does not suggest that, prior to the fall, these things were absent from the world. Rather, he seems to be saying that something has changed in our human condition that makes us vulnerable to harm in a way that was not originally the case.

Augustine’s general approach to those things in the world that would appear threatening to us is explained as follows:

In this way, then, divine providence admonishes us not to condemn things thoughtlessly, but rather to inquire with diligence into the utility of things.56

This is because there are things in creation that appear harmful to us simply because they are not being put to a good use.

Thus, even poisons, which are harmful if used ill, become wholesome and curative when proper use is made of them; whereas, on the other hand, those things which delight us, such as food and drink and the sun’s light, are known to be harmful if used immoderately or inopportunely.57

We should search patiently for ‘utility’ of things in creation, ‘For there is nothing at all which is evil by nature, and “evil” is a name for nothing other than the absence of good.’58

What about the ‘groaning’ of creation in Romans 8:19–23? Augustine (contrary to many more recent interpreters) takes this to refer to humanity, and not to the nonhuman creation:

We should not think that this implies a sorrowing or sighing of trees and vegetables and stones and other suchlike creatures—for this is the error of the Manichees—nor should we think that the holy angels are subject to futility, nor that they will be freed from the slavery of death, since they are entirely without death. Rather and without any false interpretation we take ‘every creature’ to mean man himself.59

But, if the nonhuman creation has not been fundamentally affected by the fall, does this mean humanity would have suffered as a consequence of the potentially harmful aspects of the world that we experience today? Augustine’s views about the tree of life in Paradise suggests that he would have answered that human beings were originally protected from any kind of harm. Augustine says concerning Adam’s body, that,

protected as it was from the necessity of dying by the tree of life, and thus maintained in the flower of youth, it was beyond doubt an animal rather than a spiritual body. It would, however, not have died had not man, by offending, incurred the vengeance of which God had forewarned him. And though he was indeed not denied nourishment even outside Paradise, yet, being forbidden the tree of life, he was handed over to the wasting of time and old age, at least in respect of that life which, had he not sinned, he could have retained perpetually in Paradise, albeit only in an animal body until it should have been made spiritual as a reward for his obedience.60

Conclusions

The Augustine we have found through his writings is far from the ‘Augustinian’ who believes ‘that earthquake and flood, disease, decay, and death are consequences either of the human fall or of a prior fall of angelic beings’.61 Rather, for Augustine, the world in which we live is the good world that God created, except in two respects. First, as a punishment for sin, many features of the good creation are now functioning contrary to ‘proper use’ in such a way that they cause harm to humanity. Second, human beings have been deprived of the protection they enjoyed in Paradise through the tree of life.

For Augustine, ‘evil’ is a moral category, involving rational beings. In that case, ‘natural evil’ would only meaningfully refer to the harm that human beings experience through a distorted relationship with the good creation. Hence, for Augustine, there is nothing ‘evil’ about the suffering of non-rational creatures in the wild, or the violent processes at work in creation. For Augustine, decay and change are simply features of a creation that is ‘fundamentally contingent, limited, and different from God’.62 That such a creation is displeasing to us in many ways is itself part of creation’s goodness, in that it leads us to set our hearts on something more enduring, namely, God himself.

All biblical quotations are taken from the NRSV.

  1. S. A. Oliver, ‘Theodicy’, in New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic, ed. by Martin Davie and others, 2nd ed. (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 2016), pp. 897–900 (p. 897). ↩

  2. Ibid., p. 898. ↩

  3. B. R. Reichenbach, ‘Evil’, in New Dictionary of Theology, ed. by Davie and others, pp. 316–319 (p. 318). ↩

  4. Stanley P. Rosenberg, ‘Can Nature Be “Red in Tooth and Claw” in the Thought of Augustine?’, in Finding Ourselves after Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil, ed. by Stanley P. Rosenberg (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), pp. 226–243 (p. 228). ↩

  5. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), vii, 12, 18. ↩

  6. Ibid., xiii, 2, 2. ↩

  7. Ibid., vii, 12, 18. ↩

  8. Lois Malcolm, ‘Theodicy’, in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. by Ian A. McFarland and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 499–501 (p. 500). ↩

  9. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, vii, 5, 7. ↩

  10. John Hick, ‘An Irenaean Theodicy’, in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, ed. by Stephen T. Davis, New ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), pp. 38–72 (p. 39). ↩

  11. Ibid., p. 39. ↩

  12. Ibid., pp. 39–40. ↩

  13. Rosenberg, ‘Can Nature Be “Red in Tooth and Claw”’. ↩

  14. Ibid., p. 229. ↩

  15. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 55–56. ↩

  16. Rosenberg, ‘Can Nature Be “Red in Tooth and Claw”’, p. 229. ↩

  17. Hick, ‘An Irenaean Theodicy’, p. 39. ↩

  18. Hick, Evil and the God of Love, p. 55. ↩

  19. Ibid., pp. 12–13. ↩

  20. Ibid., p. 85. ↩

  21. Ibid., p. 86. ↩

  22. Ibid., p. 87. ↩

  23. Rosenberg, ‘Can Nature Be “Red in Tooth and Claw”’, p. 242. ↩

  24. Ibid., p. 243. ↩

  25. Ibid., p. 243. ↩

  26. Malcolm, ‘Theodicy’, p. 500. ↩

  27. G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). ↩

  28. Ibid., pp. 97–98. ↩

  29. Ibid., p. 98. ↩

  30. Ibid., p. 98. ↩

  31. Ibid., p. 101. ↩

  32. Augustine of Hippo, On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, in On Genesis, ed. by John E. Rotelle O.S.A., trans. by Edmund Hill O.P., The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century i/13 (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 2002), pp. 25–104 (i, 20, 31). ↩

  33. Autustine of Hippo, Revisions, i, 10, 2, included in On Genesis, p. 37. ↩

  34. Augustine of Hippo, On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, i, 16, 25–26. ↩

  35. Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, in On Genesis, pp. 155–506 (iii, 15, 24). ↩

  36. Ibid., iii, 16, 25. ↩

  37. Ibid., iii, 16, 25. ↩

  38. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. by R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), xii, 4. ↩

  39. Ibid., xii, 4. ↩

  40. Ibid., xii, 5. ↩

  41. Ibid., i, 20. ↩

  42. Ibid., xi, 16. ↩

  43. Augustine of Hippo, On the Free Choice of the Will, in On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. by Peter King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 3–126 (iii, 23, 69, 232). ↩

  44. Ibid., iii, 23, 69, 236. ↩

  45. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, xi, 9 . ↩

  46. Ibid., xi, 13–15. ↩

  47. Ibid., xi, 15. ↩

  48. Ibid., xi, 19 . ↩

  49. Ibid., xi, 33. ↩

  50. Ibid., ii, 23. ↩

  51. Ibid., x, 21. ↩

  52. Ibid., xxi, 6. ↩

  53. Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, iii, 15, 24. ↩

  54. Ibid., viii, 10, 21. ↩

  55. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, xi, 22. ↩

  56. Ibid., xi, 22. ↩

  57. Ibid., xi, 22. ↩

  58. Ibid., xi, 22. ↩

  59. Augustine of Hippo, Propositions from the Epistle to the Romans, in Augustine on Romans: Propositions from the Epistle to the Romans and Unfinished Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, trans. by Paula Fredriksen Landes (Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1982), pp. 3–51 (53). ↩

  60. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, xiii, 23. ↩

  61. Hick, ‘An Irenaean Theodicy’, pp. 39–40. ↩

  62. Rosenberg, ‘Can Nature Be “Red in Tooth and Claw”’, p. 242. ↩