82. Cf. Jo. eu. tr. 10.12 and en. Ps. 95.15. (continued)
64 Made to be Godly they were created to be. If created images are capable of advancing toward divinity, if human persons are made to the likeness (ad similitudinem) and are not the exact likeness itself, it follows that they can also retreat away from that divine union for which they have been made.
Having learned and rejected the tenets of Manichaeism, Augustine was aware that he had to hold the two attributes of God's goodness and omnipotence tightly together. Take one attribute away, the problem of evil was easily solved: God could be all good but weak in the face of a warring maliciousness, or indeed almighty yet just a little puckish and willingly complicit in bringing evil about. The Manichees's answer was of course the former: the good god was equally matched by the malevolent god and their eternal clashing gave way to this mixed world of good and evil in which we currently find ourselves. As he came to see that evil had no substantial nature and no efficient cause, Augustine came to see this position as untenable. Evil could only be explained as the absence of a good. By defining God as the summum bonum, he not only accounted for the world's beginnings, it also helped him understand the nature of evil—or, better, lack thereof.
In coming to stress God as absolute goodness, the former Manichee also came to see how evil could not be a warring equal.83 Unlike the way the Manichaean principle of light was threatened by the equal principle of darkness, the Christian creator is all good and, as such, has no foe. In fact, evil has absolutely no intelligibility apart from the good. Augustine can therefore set the Manichaean theodicy aright:
Through corruption, however, all things fall away from what they were, and that are forced not to remain; they are forced not to be. For to be means to remain. Therefore, that which is said to be in the highest and greatest way is said to be such by remaining in itself. For what is changed for the better is not changed because it remains but because
83. Cf. conf. 7.2.3.