The article examines the influence of apologetic literature that keeps continuity with the early Christian tradition in articulating the problem of good and evil in an anthropological view on the interpretation of the theodicy problem in the philosophy of Aurelius Augustine. He argued that the essential feature of original nature of a man was the absence of a deliberate motive for the good and the ability “to be in good". Thus human nature required improvement through overcoming evil. A comprehensive analysis of the theodicy in Augustine's philosophy allows concluding that, having inherited the ideas of Ambrose of Milan, he attached the key importance to the comprehension of self-perception and self-esteem of good and evil as the basis of spiritual experience. Augustine's concept serves as an example of the way Western European thought breaks ties with the early Christian tradition, and the philosophy of patristics is transformed into a medieval one, in which the problem of theodicy is the subject of logic and dialectics and is treated within the doctrine of being. In the Middle Ages the basic idea was an attempt to prove God's innocence in the existence of evil on the one hand, and the notion of man as a "vessel of abomination and sin" was established on the other hand, there was a negative attitude to everything that was related to his nature, a tendency to contrast the soul and the body.

Dyachenko Olga Nikolaevna, Candidate of Sciences (Philosophy), Associate Professor, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Kursk State University, 33, Radishcheva st., Kursk, 305000, Russian Federation, tel.: 8 (4712)702186, e-mail: dyachenkoolga13@yandex.ru

Dyachenko O. N. The Problem of Theodicy: Aurelius Augustine. The Bulletin of Irkutsk State University. Series Political Science and Religion Studies. 2018, vol. 25, pp. 55-62. https://doi.org/10.26516/2073-3380.2018.25.55 (in Russian)

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