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How, then, do I come to possess a will that can choose to do wrong and refuse to do good, thereby providing a just reason why I should be punished? Who put this will into me? Who sowed this seed of bitterness in me, when all that I am was made by my God, who is Sweetness itself? If it was the devil who put it there, who made the devil? If he was a good angel who became a devil because of his own wicked will, how did he come to possess the wicked will which made him a devil, when the Creator, who is entirely good, made him a good angel and nothing else? (Confessions 7.3)

The Catholic Church taught that evil was an individual’s choice, and this led Augustine to revisit that moment of ‘original sin’ in the Book of Genesis. He believed that it was a factual account of original sin, one that condemned the human race to everlasting perdition: we all live under these conditions and are part of a wider ‘divine’ plan. The snake (or demon) in the Garden of Eden tempted Adam and Eve to prefer themselves over God. For Augustine, this was ‘original sin’—the sin of pride. God allowed the snake to tempt them, to correct their terrible mistake. Demons then, are fallen angels, whom God allows to punish us as part of their own eternal punishment.

Now if God created demons and humans (as part of His “omnipotence” or all-powerfulness), and God knows every individual outcome (as part of His “omniscience” or all-knowingness), then how is anyone free to do anything other than what God planned?

Augustine believed in a type of free will that gives us freedom that is fairly well prescribed and pre-destined. Predestination and free will may seem contradictory. But in order to explain the existence of evil that was not caused directly by God, Augustine had to suppose that humans had freedom to act in ways that brought about sin and evil. So, in something of an awkward compromise, he envisioned humans as free agents who nonetheless live under major constraints—all imposed ultimately by Adam and Eve’s ‘original sin’.

Augustine knew quite a bit about sin and lack of satisfaction. He admits in his Confessions, “I muddied the stream of friendship with the filth of lewdness and clouded its waters with hell’s black river of lust” (3.1). Unlike The Stones, who seem to have reveled in the black river, Augustine struggled with his lust for other women for much of his life, keeping a mistress for several years while he was married: “In those days I lived with a woman, not my lawful wedded wife but a mistress whom I had chosen for no special reason but that my restless passions had alighted on her” (4.2). Because of this, Augustine was initially reluctant to be baptized into the faith. But once he had worked through his concept of evil, he decided that the sin he had been guilty of was pride: turning away from God.

Yet there was a bright side. As James Wetzel explains it, the more we ‘confess’ to God, the more we enter into a conversation with Him, and therefore become less likely to commit further sin. The act of confession itself is a good thing. But does that mean that if we didn’t sin, we would never talk to God? Quite a comfort for a sinner such as Augustine! It’s as if he figured that to reach God we must have enough free will to permit us to sin and, subsequently, to confess. For Augustine, therefore, evil is a necessary thing. It must exist.51 So you might want to have some courtesy and some respect.

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

Bulgakov’s masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, had to fight for its existence. Bulgakov started the novel in 1928 but never completed it, partly because Stalin pretty much banned all of Bulgakov’s books and plays. Bulgakov died in 1940 while still revising the final draft.

The first English translations appeared in 1967, and Marianne Faithfull get hold of one of them. She read the book in 1968 and passed it on to Mick, correctly thinking that the work’s glamorous portrayal of the Devil would appeal