Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

182 JOSEPH TORCHIA
3. Augustine’s Rejection of the Equality of Sins
While Augustine rejects the notion that earthly ills are
morally neutral, then, he also denies that they are absolutely
evil. Everything in our world (including ourselves) exhibits a
curious mixing of both good and evil. While created things are
fundamentally good, they also reveal varying degrees of an
imperfection that is ultimately rooted in their finitude and/or
fallenness. This was something that the Stoics could not appreciate.
From their perspective, good and evil (and by implication,
virtue and vice) must always be mutually exclusive moral categories.
For the Stoic sage, the practical upshot of such a position
was an indifference to the world at large, and the demotion of
many things that are part and parcel of human existence to a
morally inconsequential status.
As we have seen, the Stoics’ understanding of virtue as a
consistent inner disposition for living in accordance with nature
carried an important corollary: all virtues and vices are
equal in virtuousness or viciousness, respectively. In this sense,
the wise man possesses every virtue, while the fool possesses
none at all. Accordingly, the uncompromising mentality which
characterizes the Stoic distinction between virtue and vice
carried over into their understanding of the parameters of the
virtuous life.
Marcia Colish offers a succinct explanation for this key
aspect of Stoic moral theory:
The moral life is not a question of piecemeal effort or habituation
to the good. If the fool sees the light and chooses to shed
his vicious orientation, he can experience an instant conversion
to wisdom. Since the fool’s logos is not in harmony with nature,
nothing he does is good; since the sage’s logos is in conformity
with nature, everything he does will be good automatically. 40
The unacceptability of such a moral doctrine from the
standpoint of Christian morality is readily obvious. But what is
40 COLISH, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages,
Volume I, 44-45.