Evil and the Augustinian Tradition

This explores the family biography of the Augustinian tradition by looking at Augustine’s work and its development in the writings of Hannah Arendt and Reinhold Niebuhr. Mathewes argues that the Augustinian tradition offers us a powerful, though commonly misconstrued, proposal for understanding and responding to evil\'s challenges. The book casts light on Augustine, Niebuhr and Arendt, as well as on the problem of evil, the nature of tradition, and the role of theological and ethical discourse in contemporary thought.

• Focuses on the difficulties which evil and sin present in modernity and postmodernity • Charts the connections between ancient and modern thinkers • Addresses a broad field of conversation partners - includes discussions of Gothic culture, the Holocaust, and secular philosophy and psychoanalysis

Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction: reaching disagreement; Part I. Preliminaries: Evil and the Augustinian Tradition: 1. Modernity and evil; 2. The Augustinian tradition and its discontents; Part II. Genealogy: Remembering the Augustinian Tradition: 3. Sin as perversion: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Augustinian psychology; 4. Evil as privation: Hannah Arendt’s Augustinian ontology; Part III. The Challenge of the Augustinian Tradition to Evil: 5. Demythologising evil; Conclusion: realising incomprehension, discerning mystery; Works cited; Index.