Augustinian Topics on Thought

Last summer, Pope John Paul II threw a figurative pail of cold water on the popular image of hell as a place of unending flame. His statement followed an article on the subject in La Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit magazine believed to have close ties to the Vatican. The article said that hell is not a place but a state of being in which a soul suffers from being deprived of God for all time.

As a war-torn world lurches to the 21st century, a sympathetic witness from the 4th century offers advice and comfort. This past February, during a six-day meeting that The New York Times called “a summit on the universe,” the world's leading cosmologists were told that their scenario of cosmic history Looked a great deal like one offered by another observer nearly 1,600 years earlier. Dr. Allan R. Sandage of the Carnegie Observatories, a protégé of Edwin Hubble, told a dinner audience, which included Stephen Hawking, that St. Augustine had anticipated their theory of an expanding universe.

Why do bad things happen? It's a question that sooner or later, almost every person asks. Or, in times of intense sorrow or anger, someone invariably says: “How could God let anything so terrible happen?” These and similar cries of anguish are different expressions of one essential question: If God is good, how did evil get into the world? St. Augustine spent much of his life wrestling with the question of how God, who is all goodness and perfection and who is all powerful, could have created the world and then allowed evil into it.