Commentary

Abstract

This chapter offers commentary on books one and two of St. Augustine's On Order. In a series of short discussions, the penultimate of which ends badly, book one manages to convey several important teachings. The most important of these is that there is an order of things, a fact that can be affirmed simply by recognizing that nothing can happen without a cause. God is the Ultimate Orderer or Uncaused Causer responsible for this order. Moreover, God can arrange things in such a way that even evils which He did not cause are justly contained by order. Book one did not, however, fully answer two questions: the containment of evils by order and the commencement of evil. Book two, on the other hand, answers the first question more fully and offers guidelines for answering the second. Evils are contained in order precisely because a limit (modus) is placed on the amount of damage they can do, while their destructive qualities are co-opted by God (the summus modus) to have a just effect as punishments on the evil itself. Such is the case even though God Himself is in no way responsible for evil.