Bishop Augustine thought he solved the problem of evil in Confessions.

Since he wrote that book he had to watch the sack of Rome.

He learnt since then. He had first had experience of how people could be forced into evil and then learn to enjoy it.

He’d delivered pastoral care to women who thought they were going to hell because they orgasmed while being raped by the very gothic soldiers that hours or minutes before had killed or crippled their husbands or fathers… Some of what he learned from that experience was making it’s way into” City of God”; No one is committing a sin if they do their best to be a good person and their body betrays them; even if the betrayal is … that.

He’d delivered pastoral care to men who’d been driven to cannibalism and made up demonic rituals in order to justify it during the gothic war. He did not let those stories into his “City of God” , because he truly didn’t know what a truly good priest would have done. Every instinct in him said that they were damned to hell and that there was nothing that could be done; but had he actually acted on those instincts it could have been a self fulfilling prophecy with them not  improving because they never see any reason to try.

He was burning lamp oil trying to write on the problem of evil. Lamp oil paid for by money given to the church so they could serve Jesus’s will with it. There were many poor and desperate people who Jesus would want helped. But some of those poor people weren’t even born yet, and a genuine solution to the problem of evil would help people  down the centuries as well as today. Still there probably was 1 or 2 people starving to death who could have eaten today had he not needed lamp oil.

Augustine hated the pain that caused him… but he didn’t dare stop caring, because he knew where that road could lead. Is it better to be a miserable man or a happy monster?

How could a good God allow evil? He argued in his Confessions that God didn’t. That everything was to the extent it existed good. The good man could praise God and serve his Neighbors; but even the “wicked” man could appreciate the beauty of God's creation and serve himself. Some men suffered and all men died… but the dead man were still good in that they could be food for the animals and plants. Everything that existed was good for some things. Even in the realm of pure secular logic pure evil was impossible, For if something existed which was pure evil, then it would be incorruptible as it could not in any way be made worse, and isn’t incorruptibility a virtue? So what was called evil must be simply a lack or a good that is unbalanced and thus “Corrupted” (I.e A ruler with justice but no kindness or vice versa).

Or so he told himself when he wrote his Confessions. Now that He’d seen how very very corrupted virtues could be, he found his previous work; unconvincing. But it wasn’t just this life experience changing his mind. His previous model had theoretical flaws.  Augustine believed in the Neoplatonist idea that the universe consisted of earth, around which rotated the moon and sun, beyond which the moving stars spun with a final layer of firmament on which the fixed stars existed as a sort of static backdrop. This suggests a  universe of fixed and finite size. God is of Infinite greatness. A finite container being filled from an unlimited source would be completely full and so there's no reason God could not completely fill the universe with good and give every person and object all the virtues one would hope for from them.

Perhaps the universe was of infinite size? Could an infinite water source fill an infinite bucket? Were there different classes of Infinity?

Augustine could not solve the problem . And so the lamp oil he burnt trying was wasted. Someone was starving and the world was no closer to being saved.

Salvator mundi salva nos!!!