ABSTRACT
Mali enim nulla natura est; sed amissio boni mali nomen accepit.1 Thus Augustine most epigrammatically sums up his view on what might best be called the ‘grammar’ of evil. Talking about evil is not like talking about things, about what makes the constituents of the world the sorts of things they are; it is talking about a process, about something that happens to the things that there are in the universe. Evil is not some kind of object-so we might render the phrase from the City of God-but we give the name of ‘evil’ to that process in which good is lost.
