EL SINDICALISMO DEL TRABAJADOR CON LA ASOCIACIÓN PROFESIONAL DE PROFESIONALES.

Augustine, the bishop of Hippo (A.D. 354-430), was the greatest of the Latin fathers.¹ After espousing Manichaean philosophy for about ten years, Augustine became a Christian. He recognized that the Manichaean solution to the problem of evil, specifically the concept of the nature of God, is ―shocking and detestable profanity, that the wedge of darkness sunders not a region distinct and separate from God but the very nature of God.‖²Against Manichaeism, Augustine affirmed the goodness of God and His sovereignty over the universe. In reality, the God who is self-sufficient, infinite in goodness and beauty, eternal, immutable, omnipotent, omniscient, and a supreme being became the core of his explanation to the problem of evil.³

On the basis of this understanding of the nature of God, Augustine argued that God created the universe out of nothing.⁴ The omnipotent and the only perfect God created all things that need to be. Out of divine love and goodness, He deliberately called into existence every conceivable kind of being.⁵ He put all creation in rank according to their utility or order of nature. On the order of nature, Augustine stated that:

…those beings which exist, and which are not of God the Creator‘s essence, those which have life are ranked above those which have none; those that have the power of generation, or even of desiring, above those which want this faculty.

And, among things that have life, the sentient are higher than those which have no sensation, as animals are ranked above trees. And, among the sentient, the intelligent are above those that have no intelligence …above cattle. And among the intelligent, the immortal, such as angels, above the mortal, such as men.⁶

When it comes to the ranking according to utility, he indicated that there are varieties of standards of values so that at a given point individuals prefer some things that have no sensation to some sentient beings. Such preference is so strong that sometimes we

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wish to eradicate some things in the scale of being.⁷ Thus, each form of existence has its own place in the hierarchy of being.⁸ There is no level of the scale of being that is evil. All creation, from the highest to the lowest on the scale, is good. Therefore, he states, ―No nature, therefore, as far as it is nature, is evil; but to each nature there is no evil except to be diminished in respect of good.‖⁹ While the lower forms of existence, perceived in isolation, appear to be evil, they are necessary links in the scale of being.

The fragments perceived as a whole are harmonious, well-ordered, beautiful, and a perfect creation of God. They adequately and perfectly express the goodness of God‘s creation.¹⁰ However, all creatures are capable of being corrupted because they lack the immutability of the Creator.¹¹

Augustine notes that the harmonious and perfect world is infested with pain and suffering as a result of sin. Among all the conceivable creatures of God, he remarks, there are living beings endowed with the gift of free will. The world would not have been perfect without free will. Unfortunately, some of the free creatures went wrong in exercising their free will. The first misuse of the will is turning to the will itself instead of God; turning away from the mode of being that is proper to a creature in God‘s creative intention is sin. Sin is the origin of evil that began with angels and continued afterwards with human beings.¹² The will is one of the good creations of God, but became evil only as it desired something inferior, contends Augustine. That is, evil originated from a good substance, the act of turning away from something incorruptible to that which is mutable is the issue of sin.¹³ On the other hand, there is a motive which leads the rational being away from the Creator, and that is pride—

―craving for undue exaltation.‖¹⁴ This act of rational beings affected the entire creation.

In addition, Augustine indicates that

…nature could not have been depraved by vice had it not been made out of nothing. Consequently, that it is a nature, this is because it is made by God, but that it falls away from Him, this is because it is made out of nothing.¹⁵

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Hence, God is not the originator of evil.¹⁶ From his analysis of the misuse of the free will, Augustine attributed evils to sin and its consequences, both moral and natural, to the wrong choice of free rational beings, with the exception of evils that are considered as punishment for sin. ―Free will is the cause of our doing evil and that is why just judgment is the cause of our having to suffer from its consequence.‖¹⁷ In his view, God punishes sin in order to bring moral balance to the universe,¹⁸ death, which was the punishment for the first humans—Adam and Eve who first sinned—is now the natural consequence for their progeny. ¹⁹

Therefore, evil is not a substance.²⁰ It ―has no positive nature,‖ but is a defect of created good; ―the loss of good has received the name ‗evil.‘‖²¹ It is, therefore, a privation of good, a parasitic nonessential, the absence of good from a thing which can and ought naturally to possess it.²² ―It is an evil, solely because it corrupts the good. It is not nature, therefore, but vice, which is contrary to God. For that which is evil is contrary to the good.‖²³ Hence, evil and good are antithetic, but they co-exist. Good can exist without evil, but evil cannot exist without good.²⁴ Evil is connected with the created nature of the subject who has become evil—so that it would annihilate itself if it exterminates this nature. It arises from the fact that it does not derive its existence from itself or from the essence of God, but it is nothing.²⁵ As a result, Augustine argues that, evil has no efficient cause but only deficient cause as the will itself is defection from the Supreme Being.²⁶

Augustine mentions that God was not ignorant about what rational beings will do with their will. God foresaw that they will abandon Him for inferior substance, yet He did not deny them freedom, for He foreknew the good He can bring out of evil.²⁷

God would never have created any, I do not say angel, but even man, whose future wickedness He foreknew, unless He had equally known to what uses on behalf of the good He could turn him, thus embellishing the course of the ages, as it were an exquisite poem set off with antitheses.²⁸

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God allows all these evils in the world to demonstrate how He can make good use of them. In this context, many good will disappear without evil.²⁹ Augustine continues to insist ―What is evil, when it is rightly ordered and kept in its place, commends the good more eminently, since good things yield greater pleasure and praise when compared to the bad things.‖³⁰

Augustine argues that God‘s purpose for permitting evil is to bring good out of it; only by saving the justly condemned race according to His grace. Yet, he remarked that God overcomes sin and evil by predestining some to eternal life and condemning others to eternal destruction.³¹ ―Therefore they were elected before the foundation of the world with that predestination in which God foreknew what He Himself would do;

but they were elected out of the world with that calling whereby God fulfilled that which He predestined. . . . Those whom He predestined, called and justified, them He also glorified; assuredly to that end which has no end.‖³² Augustine‘s contention here with regard to the origin of evil is that God does not create evil. Nevertheless, he actualizes his purpose in spite of evil. He does not allow evil to compromise his plans for the world.