St. Thomas on the Concept of Evil

Hence, in order to hear Augustine's view, one must look at least before long at the concept of evil within the Manichaean morality and within Zoroastrianism, from which Mani derived his beliefs ab come in the nature of evil.

Zarathushtra Spitama proposed, in the seventh atomic number 6 B.C., one of the world's first great theological syntheses:

(1) that reality consists of an sodding(a) war between the principles of nigh and evil,

(2) that the human soul is both(prenominal) the prize to be won by this war and the theatre upon which this war is fought,

(3) that the duty of human beings is to choose to be on the side of good, which will ultimately prevail.

The good is embodied in the god Ahura Mazda, which means "the good lord"; the name laterwardward wore megabucks to the form Ormuzd. Evil is embodied in the lifetime Angra Mainyu, which means "the evil spirit"; this name later wore d have to Ahriman. The two were conceived as being almost mate and reversion; everything about Angra Mainyu is a dark, distorted parody of Ahura Mazda's characteristics--and this is apparently the fountain of the later Christian concept of Satan as the " emulator of God."

Zoroastrianism was not, however, ultimately dualistic; it was, in fact, history's first great monotheistic religion. A central belief was that, although the war would last for ages, ultimately Ahura Mazda would prevail, and the forces of Angra Mainyu would be either destroyed or redeemed. (One

Manichaeism, in contrast, was absolutely and ultimately dualistic. Mani (crucified by a Persian emperor about A.D. 275) took the Zoroastrian concept of contend eldritch principles and defined them as absolutely equal and opposite, never able to overcome one another. He also shared ordinary reality in half, defining tout ensemble that is spiritual and abstract as being on the side of the good, all that is physical (especially sexuality) as being on the side of evil.

McDermott, Timothy. St. doubting Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation. Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1989.

can suck in an ultimate source for some Christian beliefs, such as that in the Last Judgment, in these Zoroastrianism concepts.

) The Parsis of India were the last enclave of Zoroastrianism, having fled there after the onslaught of militant Islam. The beliefs of recent Parsi immigrants to America, where their faith community is developing very rapidly (they were not allowed to proselytize in India and were in danger of dying out), show that their concepts are no more dualistic than those of any other monotheistic religion.

Augustine's solution, arrived at after a great deal of thought and writing, was to deny that good and evil are either equal or opposite. To cite that they are equal and opposite is to say, in a moderne metaphor, that good equals +1, that evil equals -1, and that added together they cancel out and equal zero. Augustine said instead that good equals +1 (or, better, plus infinity), just evil equals zero, is merely the deprivation of all that is good, and is incapable of canceling out an iota of what is good. Furthermore, the good, being infinite, contains all its own opposites and therefore cannot be opposed; evil may attempt to oppose it scarcely always fails, and can only withdraw from the good into its own nothingness.

Now the absence of causality suffices to explain simple negation. tho sin, or any real evil, is the absence, not of good merely, exclusively of good which
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