Augustinian Evil in The Gospel According to the Son and The Castle in the Forest: A Case for Non-Dualism

Abstract

There is more resemblance between Norman Mailer and Saint Augustine than one might suspect at first blush. Both were intensely serious in their love of wisdom, sensitive to spirit and carnality in their being, unswerving in their belief in a Creator-God, and were faced with the same existential enigma: “whence is evil?” (Augustine 102). This question led both men to the same conclusion: if God is good and He created everything good, then evil must be an opposing force of similar if not equal power and of different origin. There were, as Augustine put it, “two substances” at work in the cosmos (112). Or, as Mailer has expounded in numerous interviews and works, God “is not all-powerful; He exists as a warring element in a divided universe.… It’s the only thing that explains to me the problem of evil” (Pontifications, 2). The question led Augustine to Manichaeism, the syncretist blend of Christian, Buddhist, and Persian philosophy named after its Persian founder Mani (c. 215-276) that proposes that our universe is animated by the opposing principles of Goodness (light, or God) and Evil (darkness, or the Devil). While Mailer did not count himself an adherent to Manichaeism per se, as Augustine did for nine years of his life, his self-styled religious beliefs can be described as Manichaean (and when his beliefs were labeled Manichaean in interviews, he never disputed the term).

A MAJOR NOVEL ON GOD AND THE DEVIL

And I sought “whence is evil.”

Augustine