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Deprived Good and Disordered Love

The Dark Age was the period where people settled an endpoint to their inquiry; before
that was the Ancient Period which was dominated by three intelligent, reflective Greeks namely
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Their aim was to answer every question man has in mind; who is
he, what is he, how he came to be, why he is here. These questions were but the few that had
frequently crossed the minds of these philosophers. It really turned out that they just could not
completely deduce as to how man was relevant to existence. True that they fervently proposed
and argued that man is a rational animal; and that man has a soul but these questions would beg
for a thousand more, then there came a group of philosophers who, by trying to put an end to the
endless inquiries, considered God as the endpoint of such questions. Fortunately, one of them
was Saint Augustine.
Saint Augustine was born in Thagaste, somewhere in North Africa. His mother was a
devout Catholic while his father was a pagan. The young Augustine was not actually much of a
believer. He doubted the veracity of the Catholic Church. He quite struggled on with the
connection between God and evil and why the latter even exists under the existence of the
Former. This question was particularly stated this way: Who made me? Did not my God, Who
is not only good itself? Whence then came I to will evil and nill good, so that I am justly
punished? Who set this in meseeing I was wholly formed by my most sweet God?1

When Saint Augustine was (he was then called Aurelius Augustinus). He was quite
naughty with his friends. They would steal fruit from a pear tree, although he claimed he could
1

Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans E.B. Pusey (New York: Old Chelsea Station, 2006), 105

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not remember he had eaten any of the pears at all but he just threw them at pigs. He and his
friends enjoyed the act of stealing and of throwing at creatures. They were attracted to sin, to
evil. His drive to do something evil was the very question that had been hovering over Saint
Augustines mind. He was then comfortable of the evil he had done because he knew not the
importance of doing what is good; he knew not the implications of it; he knew not what it means
to be attracted to sin, and in my opinion, he knew not even what evil was then.
Things had slowly gone uphill around when Saint Augustines friend died. He wept for a
very long time. It passed through his mind the idea of friendship that it perishes. He realized
that the friendship he had with his friend was only temporary. He, that time, came to think that
all those years he had spent doing evil, he had been missing something. Something so
unimaginable, something so soothing, soothing that gives him the ultimate satisfaction. No evil
he had committed could ever fill him up completely, could give him the complete sense of
pleasure. It is because evil did not give him anything, but it took everything away from him; his
supposed-to-be fruitful childhood; his supposed-to-be good discipline under his mothers
education, his supposed-to-be prosperous friendships. All of which had been taken away from
him and the very huge deceit was that he enjoyed every second evil plucked out an inch of his
life. Evil is deceitful, it buys your whole self with a false sense of pleasure, this very same
pleasure that has been giving us the illusion that we can get something good from it. But in
actuality, pleasure is temporary, the enjoyment is temporary, excitement over the theft of pear
fruits is just temporary, and fortunately, along with surreptitious hoarding of the being of man,
SO IS EVIL.
Yes. Evil is temporary. Evil is somewhat like a wolf eating out the farmland. Little by
little, the farmland will diminish until none will be left. But, seeds can always be planted again

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and it pays a lot of time and effort for the plant to grow large and abundant. But where does the
wolf come from? What is its nature? This was the question bugging all throughout the youngster
years of St. Augustine. Sometimes, he was convinced that if evil had come from God who
created everything, then God would, Himself, be evil. When he realized that something was
missing in his life, it was his purity, his chastity, etc. He lacked those things as soon as he began
doing wicked and lascivious actions. The wolf took away his plants of goodness when he was off
guard, when he did not guard himself strong enough. This happens when we abuse our free will.
The physical freedom of man entails his being able to do anything he wants to (e.g. walking,
talking, killing someone, rape, etc.). When evil is done, something good is taken away. When
murder is done, the preservation of life is taken away; when cheating during exam is done,
honesty is taken away. So evil is done, good is deprived. Evil always corresponds to the
deprivation of good.2 That was how St. Augustine realized how his life was a pack of
deprivations. It was as if his whole being was almost empty, he never realized until his farmland
became the vortex of soil erosion. He never realized until his whole being was already looking
for something good. God would not allows us to completely succumb to evil, He always offers
us a turning point in our life that makes us realize how much is taken away from us. This turning
point happened to St. Augustine. He dropped, he wept, cried and repented for whatever evil he
had done years before. It finally crossed his mind that his soul needed a refill. Though we
already know the nature of evil, we still have yet to know how evil could have manifested from
abuse of free will.
Deprived good, where does it come from? Free will? Maybe yes, though Saint Augustine
mentioned just a little about free will. He did mention about will. He even said because my will
2

At which I, in my ignorance, was much troubled, and departing from the truth, seemed to myself to be making
towards it; because as yet I know not that evil was nothing but a privation of good, until at last a thing ceases
altogether to be. ibid., 40

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was perverse, it changed to lust, and lust yielded to become habit, and habit not resisted became
necessity.3 So St. Augustines will was so perverse that it made him become wicked. How did
he get that kind of will to begin with? The answer is because his mind is material. He is human,
we are human. We think alike, we desire the material world. Our being an animal makes us
crave for the physicals. We LOVE things and its therefore a sad fact. It is when man loves
things more than he should that makes his act evil. In the case of St. Augustine, his love was
for flesh, thats why he became wicked. He did not resist having this kind of desire so it resulted
to full-blown necessity. Another thing that can cause an abuse of free will is when man
LOVES loves another more than he should. As Jesus mentioned, love others as you love
yourself (from Matthew 22:39), we are only limited to love another human being according to
how much we love ourselves. If we value another person more than we value ourselves, we are
in trouble, because we have committed evil. This is most common to men in relationships.
Sometimes, a man may fail to realize that he is way too in love with her and that annoys her so
much. This is right, the just right love is when one loves the other person as he loves himself.
Some people may even love themselves more than they love other people, and sometimes that
can be healthy or sometimes thats borderline narcissism. When we LOVE things more than
we should or we LOVE others more than we love ourselves, we have created a kind of love
that is disordered the DISORDERED LOVE. Through free will, we have the complete freedom
to love things and love people more than we should but that is the root of evil. Disordered love
leads to abuse of free will, abuse of free will leads to deprivation of good and deprivation of
good is itself evil.
But this is not the end of the thread. Just because we have committed evil does not mean
it is irreversible. We have lost the good, weve been deprived of good, but we can retrieve that
3

Saint Augustine, Confessions, Trans F.J. Sheed (Canada: Hackett Publishing Company, INC, 2006) , 148

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lost good. St. Augustine did the same thing and there, he died with peace without a single self
condemnation built by him. True he had once felt guilty of his own acts during his life. That was
when he realized how much good he has lost and how he should act to recover those losses. It
truly is possible, no matter how grave the act man has done or no matter how unforgivable it is.
Evil is just temporary and we have to work our way through getting the evil out of the way and
taking back what it has stolen from us.
We have to bring back our ways to God. This is what St. Augustine did. When he
realized that he was on the wrong way, he repented and asked God for forgiveness. But that did
not end there. Repentance and Forgiveness have to be earned, so he stopped doing his evil ways
for the reason that he no longer would not let evil steal his goodness. He put down his love for
flesh and his perversion dropped. He shifted his own free will to divine will and he made himself
a Saint.
All the while we have been doing evil things regardless of the degree of evilness. The
problem is we cant always know whether weve done such a thing hic et nunc. It always pays
some swallowing of pride to realize what has happened to our lives. The first step is realizing
that something has been missing then everything will just come in handy.

Bibliography
Saint Augustine. [401 AD] 2006. The Confessions. New York. Old Cheslsea Station
Saint Augustine [401 AD] 2006. The Confessions. Canada. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.