The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
16 Creation as the Unifying Prologue creation and the consequent parasitic nature of evil are connected. At Confessions 7.12.18, where he extols the intellectual strengths of Neoplatonism and recalls how it freed him from the crude and carnal bonds of Manichaeism, he weaves together the sole majesty of God, the goodness of creation, and the insubstantiality of evil:
Everything that exists is good, then; so evil, the source of which I was seeking, cannot be a substance, because if it were, it would be good. Either it would be an indestructible substance, and that would mean it was very good indeed, or it would be a substance liable to destruction—but then it would not be destructible unless it were good. I saw, then, for it was made clear to me, that you have made all good things, and that there are absolutely no substances that you have not made.49
Because all things come from God, it is clear that nothing is equal to God. Furthermore, only God's existence is supreme and therefore immutable; yet, to say that God alone is immune from destruction [corruptio] is by no means to conclude that all other existents are evil. On the contrary: because all things come from God, all things are good. Evil can no longer be understood as a separate rival but always as a corruption parasitically dependent upon an ontologically good substance.50
But from this nothingness, what does God create? Here Augustine invents the term formabilitas in order to describe the "ability to be formed" inhering in all creatures.51 This
49. conf. 7.12.18; Boulding, conf. 128–29: "Ergo quaecumque sunt, bona sunt, malumque illud, quod quaerebam unde esset, non est substantia, quia si substantia esset, bonum esset. Aut enim esset incorruptibilis substantia, magnum utique bonum, aut substantia corruptibilis esset, quae nisi bona esset, corrumpi non posset. Itaque uidi et manifestatum est mihi, quia omnia bona tu fecisti et prorsus nulla substantiae sunt, quas tu non fecisti"; CCL 27.104–05.
50. Against the possibility that some other first principle may have given rise to the fallen angels, this argument is developed at ciu. Dei 12.2 where Augustine's interpretation of Exod. 3:14 reveals God as supreme being while all other existents are beings, "some more," "some less": "Cum enim Deus summa essentia sit, hoc est summe sit, et ideo inmutabilis sit: rebus, quae ex nihilo creauit, esse dedit, sed non summe esse, sicut est ipse; aliis dedit esse amplius, aliis minus, atque ita naturas essentiarum gradibus ordinauit"; CCL 47.357.
51. Gn. litt. 5.5, but notice how the only usage of formabilitas given in Lewis and