Privatio boni

Milbank makes a couple of interesting points regarding the import of an Augustinian view of evil.

1) Augustine’s view assumes the goodness of matter, in fact the goodness of all being. This, Milbank claims, seems to excuse evil – it’s some lack, a weakness or finitude, that makes for evil. And he points to the lament in Romans 7 to suggest that Paul is even willing to exonerate the will: “where the will has failed to will what it should, then, for this traditional metaphysical perspective, it has failed to will in some measure and the will is held captive to something prior to the will: either, for the ancient Greeks, materiality as such; or else for Jews and Christians, certain perverse habits that hold our materiality and psychic passions in their grip.”

On Augustine’s account, then, sin is a dominating power rather than a substance or a distortion of substance as such. And this does fit remarkably well with at least some passages of Paul, where he personifies Sin and Death. It is not clear, however, that it does full justice to Paul. Is Romans 7 describing the sinful human condition as such, or the condition of those who love God but love Him under the constraints of Torah? I’m inclined to the latter view, in which case Paul’s defense of “good will” is not an ontological defense of the goodness of willing as such but of the goodness of the willing of those who delight after the law of God in the inner man.

2) In a lengthy footnote, Milbank mentions Dionysus, who while adopting the privatio view of evil also describes evil as “an inharmonious mingling of discordances,” which Milbank refers to as “an aesthetic aspect to privation.” This aesthetic dimension, Milbank says, reminds us that “evil as privation is not purely and simply nothing: as ‘substance’ it may be nothing, but in its effect of removal and deficiency it engenders a distorted positive act, even though, as positive, that act is not distorted.”