Augustine on Suffering and Order: Punishment in Context

Augustine of Hippo argues that all suffering is the result of the punishment of sin. Misinterpretations of his meaning are common since isolated statements taken from his works do give misleading and contradictory impressions. This dissertation assembles a comprehensive account of Augustine’s understanding of the causes of suffering to show that these views are substantive and internally consistent. The argument of the dissertation proceeds by confronting and resolving the apparent problems with Augustine’s views on sin and punishment from within the broader framework of his anthropology and metaphysics. The chief difficulty is that Augustine gives two apparently irreconcilable accounts of suffering as punishment. In the first, suffering is viewed as self-inflicted because sin is inherently self-damaging. In the second, God inflicts suffering in response to sin. This dissertation argues that these views are united by Augustine’s concern with the theme of ‘order.’ The first account, it argues, is actually an expression of Augustine’s doctrine that evil is the privation of good; since good is for Augustine synonymous with order, we can then see why he views all affliction as the concrete experience of disorder brought about by sin. This context in turn allows us to see that, by invoking the notion of divinely inflicted punishment in both its retributive and remedial forms, Augustine wants to show that disorder itself is embraced by order, either because disorder itself must obey laws, or because what is disordered can be reordered. In either case, Augustine’s ideas of punishment may be seen as an expression of his conviction that order in the universe is unassailable. It is hoped that these observations contribute to a greater appreciation not only of Augustine’s theory of punishment, but also of the extent to which the theme of order is fundamental to his thought.Ph