How Did Augustine's Mission To Support The Power Of Evil

Augustine of Hippo, who lived from 354-430 A.D., was both a nonconformist and saint—one following the other. Growing up in the late Roman Empire, Augustine wrestled with evil in both its intellectual and experiential He sinned throughout his life and made it his mission to find the source for the problem of evil. Augustine was able to support the core of his argument by analyzing Genesis 3, which holds the Fall of Man. By understanding the power of evil in his own life, and the power of evil in the Bible, Augustine found that God is only good and that evil is distinctly a human privation caused by the Fall of Man.
Augustine argued that since God is the creator and is good, He can’t be responsible for the existence of evil in the world.
Augustine himself lived a life of sin, as he gave in to sexual desires and ignored the presence of God in his life. When he started at Carthage Augustine was obsessed with love and sex, and often “polluted the stream of friendship with [his] filthy desires and clouded its purity with hellish lusts” (43). He said that his sins “led him to abandon [God] and plunge into treacherous abysses, into depths of unbelief and a delusive allegiance to demons” (45). It was a dark time for Augustine. Augustine believed that an absence of God in his life was an absence of good, and therefore it was evil. When he was older, he turned his life towards goodness when he rejected his lust and chose God instead. Augustine realized that there could not be anything antagonistic to God, since he is the creator of all things. Lust and sin were a side effect of free will. Augustine mentions in Book VII that “When [he] wanted something, or did not want it, [he] was absolutely certain that no one else but [he] was wanting or not wanting it, and [he] was beginning to perceive that the root of [his] sin lay there” (118). Here, Augustine is able to prove his own sinfulness by showing how his free will allowed him to turn away from