Is ‘evil’ a substance?

In his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo proposed a peculiar idea of sin: that sin did not exist as a separate substance but rather as a lack of goodness. In a word, sin was a nonexistence, something omitted rather than something existent. The proposal neatly dealt with the problem of evil’s mere presence in God’s world, as a nonexistence or a lack is not a created thing, being nothing, so that God cannot be accused of having created it, of having created sin. The problem of evil in general still remains (see here for more on that), but a section has been shaved away.

Now, Augustine was right in the main. The notion, as framed generally above, is necessitated by Scripture, a philosophical implication of Biblical theology. While Scripture does not put it in those terms- ‘existence’ and ‘substance’ are philosophical specialty terms, not quite native to the Jewish vocabulary- I have no doubt the various astute theologians of Scripture would agree with the idea in its essence. Yet, we have some Biblical language which makes this more difficult: the language of sin-as-dross, wherein sin seems a substance in itself being driven out.

How do I reconcile this language with my assertion?

For my text I take a verse from Isaiah 1: “I will smelt your dross as with lye and remove all your alloy…” (v25). The Lord, the Speaker here, declares therein that He will make Israel’s society righteous once more, with “judges as at the first and counsellors as at the beginning” (v26). The identification of ‘dross’ and ‘alloy’ in this verse with ‘sin’ is irresistible; at most, we can quibble as to whether ‘sin’ or some ‘sin’s works’ are the object of the analogy, a distinction without real difference, particularly for our purposes here.

Bluntly, this verse actually supports Augustine’s idea. Dross and alloy are substances, yes, but we cannot get so caught up with these trees as to miss the forest. When the smith rids his metal of dross and alloy, he does not care that the dross and the alloy keep in existence. The slag and waste he throws away, putting it in a proper place, and thereafter has no enmity towards it. Yet God clearly must have enmity towards sin; if dross and alloy were substance-sin, this lapse in enmity would seem to be an end to the analogy (as would be normal).

But consider: the smith has an inveterate hatred for the dross and the alloy so long as they are foes to his work. So long as they are in the metal, where they ought not to be, he calls these substances ‘dross’ and works to be rid of them, of the impurities afflicting his vocation. So long as they are tumbling around his feet, getting in the way of his passage, he calls them ‘trash.’ If he were to find this carbon or silicon or unwanted copper in the wild, though, in its own place, he would have no enmity towards them; they would be neither dross nor trash, not even an unwanted alloy.

The problem for the smith, then, is the disorder in a particular direction. He has no enmity towards the substances themselves; it is their presence athwart his way which rouses his ire, which earns them to be ‘dross.’ In other words, a lack of order which crosses his vocation’s goal is the problem, not the substances which are disordered. If it were merely the substance-called-dross which was the problem, the practice of beating the other substance would be strange, as it would have no fault; this problem would particularly arise in mankind, where the innocent-man would suffer for the sin-substance which was in or was part of him. He would be disciplined as a whole in order to remove that which was not his whole. An insoluble problem? Perhaps not, but difficult.

While Augustine was right in the main, at least in some parts of his life and voluminous writing (remarkably voluminous, to the point much still hasn’t been translated from Latin despite his fame), at least in some parts of those Augustine let his old Neoplatonism get the better of him and equated nonexistence with sin. While sin is nonexistent, only a certain type of nonexistence is sin. Just as with dross, the disorder or lack of sin is a particular sort of disorder and lack. As dross is a disorder or lack in the physical quality of the metal for the smith’s purposes, so sin is a disorder or lack in moral agency, the capacity to do righteousness.

The ’dross’ analogy, therefore, rather supports than countervails upon Augustine’s idea (albeit his idea with some refinements).

God bless.