duced to "some books of the Platonists" (7.9.13). His exposure to the neo-platonic notions that existence is good and that evil is a privation, led him to see that even the corruptible world is good: It was obvious to me that things which are liable to corruption are good. If they were the supreme goods, or if they were not good at all, they could not be corrupted. For if they were supreme goods, they would be incorruptible. If there were no good in them, there would be nothing capable of being corrupted. . . . all things that are corrupted suffer privation of some good. If they were to be deprived of all good, they would not exist at all. . . . Accordingly, whatever things exist are good, and the evil into whose origins I was inquiring is not a substance, for if it were a substance, it would be good. . . . Hence I saw and it was made clear to me that you made all things good, and there are absolutely no substances which you did not make (7.12.18). "For [God]," he goes on to say, "evil does not exist at all" (7.13.19). It would seem, then, that evil is an illusion of sorts. This brings us to what we referred to above as his second approach to the problem of evil which endeavors to explain this illusion. In *De Ordine*, speaking with respect to those aspects of creation which, if not actually evil, are, nonetheless, disconcerting to human beings, Augustine remarks that what delights in a portion of place or time may be understood to be far less beautiful than the whole of which it is a portion. And furthermore, it is clear to a learned man that what displeases in a portion displeases for no other reason than because the whole, with which that portion harmonizes wonderfully, is not seen, but that, in the intelligible world, every part is as beautiful and perfect as the whole (328-9). Anticipating this conclusion at the beginning of that same work, he criticizes those who "think the whole universe is disarranged if something is displeasing...
