When last we left Smith's excellent book on Augustine,1 we were talking about friendship. There's all sorts of wonderful chapters in this volume: mothers, story, justice, fathers, death. But today we're going to think and talk about the chapter on Justice, which Smith leads off with the question behind the question: "what do I want when I want to change the world?"
And as much as this is a chapter about justice, it's also a discussion of evil. Smith begins with a discussion of the atheism of those who come to unbelief through the suffering and injustice of the universe, with a quote from no less than Ta-Nehisi Coates, ‘“I would like to believe in God,” Ta-Nehisi Coates admits. “I simply can’t.”’ (p.177). In a world of injustice, and personal suffering, in which God didn’t show up, Coates finds God impossible.
Smith turns for Coates to Camus
This was the atheism of Albert Camus. We might even call it an Augustinian atheism, a regrettable conclusion reached after a long journey through what Camus called “the blood-stained face of history.” p.178
Maybe this is why I like Camus, because his atheism, his existentialism, is a negative print of Augustinian Christianity. Camus is infinitely close to a form of Christian faith, and yet finds he cannot believe. When I think back on Le Peste, the heroic figure cast in that novel is of the ordinary person doing the most ordinary things in the face of overwhelming evil, forever losing. Evil is, on this analysis, an irreducible surd.
After his talk at the monastery, a priest who was an ex-revolutionary stood during a time of discussion and confronted Camus: “I have found grace, and you, Mr. Camus, I’m telling you in all modesty that you have not.” Olivier Todd, his biographer, recounts: “Camus’s only response was to smile. . . . But he said a little later, ‘I am your Augustine before his conversion. I am debating the problem of evil, and I am not getting past it.’” pp. 178-179
The question of evil is an intractable one. Where does it come from? Why is there evil? I think those are great questions to ask. I also think they are devilishly hard to answer. And I have two comforts in this. Firstly, I do think Christianity provides a better means for wrestling with this question than any other philosophy. Secondly, I think we ought to suspicious of any system of thought that wraps it all up in a nice rational package, ties a bow on top, and says, "there, makes sense, doesn't it?"
Augustine wrestles with the question of evil all his life. He makes some headway, even. He's caught, Smith writes, in the tension between the goodness of God's creation, and the corrosion of evil within it, and within us. And the tension admits no easy answers:
Augustine is not trying to “make sense” of evil. To make sense of it, to have an explanation for it, to be able to identify the cause would mean that it has a place in the world. But then it isn’t evil. Evil is what ought not to be, the disorder of creation, the violation we protest. p. 181
If evil has a cause according to nature, then it's natural, and can no longer be evil. Evil is, qua evil, inexplicable.
Smith is likable even when he's complaining about Augustine's defects: "That said, I wish there was more lament in Augustine” (p. 184). He's right, there is not much lament in Augustine, and at times way too much explanation. On lament in particular, Augustine thinks that the only things Christians are allowed to lament is sin; he reduces all the lament of the Scriptures to this category, and so super-spiritualises us out of the ordinary sufferings and the extraordinary injustices of life.
Augustine the preacher, like any good preacher, doesn't offer up rationales and explanations for evil though. He offers up the one good answer the Scriptures give. That God's response to evil isn't explanation, but expiation. It's the cross, the victory of Jesus over evil and all its powers, that forms God's answer to evil. The inexplicable evil is met with the ineffable grace of divine love.
Which leads Smith and Augustine back to the question of justice, of involvement in the world, of human response to evil and wickedness. Grace fuels it every step of the way. And gives it a double conviction: the rightness of responding in love to set wrongs right, even while we acknowledge the partial victories, the impossible odds, but the ultimate triumph of God's justice beyond justice, when all the world is set aright.
This post is part of an ongoing slow-reading James K.A. Smith’s On the Road with Saint Augustine, in case you needed some orientation to this post.