Augustine on Evil
St. Augustine famously defined evil not as a physical substance, but as privatio boni, which translates to this:
What is the privation (or absence) of good?
St. Augustine
What is Manichaeism?
Gnosis
What is "knowledge?"
This French heresy rejected meat and any animal products produced through sexual reproduction.
What is Catharism
The process of restoring an old, worn-out boot heel... or a theory that suffering is just the grueling process of perfecting human character.
What is soul-making?
According to the Augustinian tradition, evil first entered a perfectly good creation through the misuse of this human and angelic faculty.
What is freewill?
Albert Einstein
What is Pantheism?
Dîke
What is Justice?
This heresy completely rejected the Old Testament, believing its deity was too violent to be the true Supreme God
What is Marcionism?
An ancient Greek epic or the justification of evil that co-exists alongside a good God.
What is Theodicy?
St. Augustine attributes our fallen nature to peccatum originale, or __________.
What is original sin?
Benjamin Franklin
What is Deism?
Sophia
What is wisdom?
This heresy rejected eating plants that may have retained trapped "divine light" bound up in their material form.
What is Manichaeism?
This could describe factories in a swampy, muddy marshland ... or members of the 10th-century Bulgarian heretical movement.
What are Bogomils?
In The City of God, Augustine partially attributes the origins of Man's Fall to the same origins of Solomon's fall, in that they both yielded to the "cajolery of ________."
What is women?
Simon Magus
What is Gnosticism?
Episteme
What is knowledge (especially logical knowledge)?
This early heresy rejected Christ's incarnation because Christ - as spirit - could not possibly encumber Himself to an "evil" material form.
What is Gnosticism?
Could describe a lawyer trying to defend Bill Clinton.
What is Free Will Defense?
In his Confessions, St. Augustine refused to eat this fruit, because he was convinced that it "wept when it was plucked, and the tree, its mother, shed milky tears."
What is a fig?
John
What is Protest Theodicy?
Apocatastasis
What is universal salvation (from Soul-making theodicy - literally "return to standing")?
This belief system rejects the venture of justifying suffering itself, as an insensitive pursuit.
What is Protest Theodicy?
Reverence of all kitchen pots ... or the belief that nature and the universe are equivocal with God.
What is Pantheism?