Comparing God And Evil In Saint Augustine's Manichee Teachings

Medieval philosophers built arguments and ideas based on the assumptions that God must be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. But are God and evil truly physical beings? This was the question that faced Saint Augustine as he entered Milan in the late fourth century. Under the Manichee, Augustine was taught to imagine God as a physical mass. Catholics in Milan, however, taught that God was a spiritual presence. If God is a being with a physical mass, this puts his omnipresence and omnipotence into question. Augustine’s breakthrough occurs when he ceases to imagine God and evil as bodies. A breakthrough which is only possible when he is able to rise above the Manichee teachings. Augustine ceases to imagine God and evil as bodies by questioning how God can be contained within humans, finding the connection between god and existence, and discovering the …show more content…
The Manichee teachings controlled how he imagined God and evil for much of his life. He was only able to rise above their beliefs through lessons by Catholics in Milan and a growing distrust of the Manichee themselves. He recalled lectures in Carthage which affronted the Manichee, but found their response to the lectures lacking. Augustine states that, “they did not so easily produce their response before the public but did so in private. They asserted that the scriptures of the New Testament had been tampered by persons unknown… they were incapable of producing any uncorrupted copies”. Augustine begins to lose trust in a religious group that appears to be lead by dissent rather than faith. In Milan, Ambrose the bishop took Augustine under his wing and his orations gave him freedom from the limitations of the Manichee. From here on out, Augustine’s confessions take on a new light, with God as being itself and Saint Augustine as a follower with a new understanding of his place in a world of