Ricardo J. BELLEI and Délcio Marques BUZINARO
The free will and the evil in Saint Augustine
O livre-arbítrio e o mal em Santo Agostinho
Published in The Time and the Eternity in the Ancient and Medieval World
Keywords: Keywords: Free will, Moral evil, Sin, Supreme Good.
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2010_02_04.pdfSaint Augustine (354-340). One of the greatest exponents of the Christian philosophy is inserted in a reality where the Christianity has just become his official doctrine of the Roman Empire and still hasn’t got solid basis of his doctrines. A time of arising heresies. In some cases, the own saint himself had important role in the combat such as the Manichaeism and the pelagianismo. Against the Manichaeism which confirmed that the good (spirit) and the evil (something solid) were enemy eternal forces, that were in struggle – Augustine develops his system to solve the evil problem, fully unlinking Good, (the supreme God and creator of everything) from such reality and nothing that the blame of the evil presence in the world, thus, the moral evil or the sin. The physical evil would be, however, an unfolding of the sin.