A Thesis

St. Augustine of Hippo, the early Bishop of the Roman Catholic Church wrote in his City of God that, “some have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously at pleasure, so as to produce the effect of singing”, and reports personal knowledge of “a man who was accustomed to sweat whenever he wished” (City of God, XIV, xxiv). According to the Doctor, it was the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, the Original Sin, which has impaired man’s ability to control his own body, and thus only a select few are so “gifted”. In short, prior to the infamous ancestral sin it was natural for all men to be able to act in this way, and what was natural for all men is no longer an attainable act for many of them. Augustine’s major theological counterpart St. Thomas Aquinas defines evil in a related, though not wholly similar way in his Summa Theologica, repeating the teaching of Augustine a century earlier, known as the doctrine of “privatio boni”. The Angelic doctor say, "For evil is the absence of the good, which is natural and due to a thing. (Summa, II-I, Q.75, art.1)." Some have seen the doctrine as elaborate theological squirming when the seemingly contradictory doctrines of a God who can do all things but cannot sin, a Good God who created an evil world, a human free will and all-knowing God. The problem of the three O’s as it has been dubbed, namely ‘omnipotence’, ‘omnibenevolence’ and ‘omniscience’, has posed problems for theological abstraction for centuries. Yet, a proper understanding of the nature of evil resolves these mystifying paradoxes.