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Augustine grappled with many of the same ethical issues that concern us today. In The Enchiridion, basically his version of a “handbook of Christian living,” he tells how we can maintain a balanced outlook on the issues that affect our lives.

Can a mature saint distill the essentials of earthy Christian living into a simple handbook? Augustine certainly tried. At age 66, in the middle of writing The City of God, he wrote a manual on the Christian life called The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love. Of Augustine’s 93 major written works, this little enchiridion (Greek for “handbook”) displays his most integrated picture of down-to-earth life before God.

The impetus behind this handbook was a man named Laurentius. He had implored Augustine to write a short work on the proper worship of God, the meaning and fulfillment of the chief purpose of our lives, and the proper foundation of Christian faith. He had explicitly asked for a “handbook”: one to be carried in the hand, not left gathering dust on the shelf!

Just a year earlier, Augustine had restrained Laurentius’s brother, a Roman tribune, from being overzealous in fighting the Donatist heresy. In view of the various prevailing heresies and accompanying confusion, Laurentius wanted a brief positive description of Christian living that he could carry with him on his Christian walk.

Though small in size, The Enchiridion certainly deserves its position as a classic in Christian writing. Its basic theme stems from the cardinal Christian virtues of faith, hope and love. In 122 brief chapters, Augustine thoughtfully examines the needs of daily Christian living in the light of biblical truth and the Apostles’ Creed. The threads that bind this manual together are the central themes of Augustine’s own Christian philosophy: the hopelessness of evil, the triumph of good, the necessity of almsgiving, and the essential realism and skepticism of earthy Christian living.

Underlying this work is a consistent Christian optimism based on the sovereignty of God and an understanding of the radical dependency of evil upon the good that it perverts. Evil, writes Augustine, is finally a hopeless parasite: It does not exist in its own right, but only as a corruption of something good. He repeatedly claims that the vices of human life are “nothing but privations of natural good.” In fact, as long as something is in the process of being corrupted, we can be confident that it still has some good “of which it is being deprived.” Consequently, if corruption were complete in destroying all that is good in something, that thing and the corruption itself would disappear. So evil cannot last. In short, “nothing can be evil except something which is good,” in spite of the fact that good and evil are genuine contraries.

The paradox Augustine develops here is the venerable doctrine of Creation and Fall that so defines our lives. The creation is good, and our sovereign God continues to sustain and control it well. Actually, only because God’s creatures are good can sin corrupt and pervert them. This Augustinian claim makes sin especially reprehensible—for it is the corruption of God’s very handiwork—while it makes redemption all the more believable—for God remains sovereign. By God’s grace, we can seek what is good as the satisfaction of our real present needs, and as the restoration of our ultimate human “health.”

Understanding evil as the privation of good was one of the most important steps in Augustine’s conversion to Christ, and it remained a theme in many of his writings. A contemporary reemphasis on this doctrine could probably heighten our own awareness of the practical moral concerns of our own time. And by feeling less alienated from our needy world, we might become more actively involved in restoring what is good.

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