Researched by the Ignaria Editorial Team · Published 2026-04-20
The early Church's answer to evil's origin was forged in direct confrontation with Manichaean dualism, which posited evil as a co-eternal substance rivaling the good God. Augustine — who had been a Manichaean for nine years before his conversion — dismantled this view from the inside: all of nature is good because its Creator is supremely good; evil is not a substance but the diminution of good, a privation of what should be present. Origen had already laid the groundwork: darkness cannot "overtake" light because darkness has no positive being of its own. Pseudo-Dionysius extended the argument into systematic form, showing that evil's apparent "causes" are not principles or powers but failures of proportion, weakness, and lack. The anti-dualist consensus on this question is one of the most unified in all of patristic theology.
What the primary sources show
"All of nature, therefore, is good, since the Creator of all nature is supremely good. But nature is not supremely and immutably good as is the Creator of it. Thus the good in created things can be diminished and augmented. For good to be diminished is evil; still, however much it is diminished, something must remain of its original nature as long as it exists at all" — the foundational statement of the privation theory: evil is not a rival substance but a deficit in what God made good.
"The many causes of the Evil, certainly those productive of things evil, are not principles and powers, but want of power, and want of strength, and a mixing of things dissimilar without proportion" — evil has no causal power of its own, only the absence and disorder of what good things should possess.