are impious, but particularly the latter (1.1.1). His approach to a solution to this problem is three-pronged: 1) he holds that evil is a privation and cannot be properly said to exist at all; 2) he argues that the apparent imperfection of any part of creation disappears in light of the perfection of the whole; and 3) he argues that the origin of moral evil, together with that suffering which is construed as punishment for sin, is to be found in the free choice of the will of rational creatures. As a Manachee, Augustine believed that both God and the principle of evil were some sort of material substances, neither deriving its existence from the other. Evil, although somehow *smaller* than God, was, nevertheless, infinite and presented a real problem for God to overcome in the course of his cosmic existence. He describes his motives for believing such things as follows: piety (however bizarre some of my beliefs were) forbade me to believe that the good God had created an evil nature (*Confessions* 5.10.20). Even after Augustine had abandoned these "bizarre beliefs" of the Manachees and had, as a Christian, arrived at the notion of God as an immutable, spiritual substance, the existence of evil still troubled him for: Although I affirmed and firmly held divine immunity from pollution and change and the complete immutability of our God, the true God . . . yet I had no clear and explicit grasp of the cause of evil. Whatever it might be, I saw it had to be investigated, if I were to avoid being forced by this problem to believe the immutable God to be mutable. . . . I made my investigation without anxiety, certain that what the Manichees said was untrue. With all my mind I fled from them, because . . . I saw them to be full of malice, in that they thought it more acceptable to say your substance suffers evil than that their own substance actively does evil (7.3.5). He began to arrive at a solution to this difficulty after having been intro...
