 Augustine, as well as many scholastics and early moderns, rejected Matter Theory on religious grounds. God created matter, and so it cannot be bad in itself. Instead of reverting to pure Absence Theory, however, these monotheists developed the Privation Theory of Evil. This can be construed as Absence Theory plus the Aristotelian idea that goodness is relative to a thing’s kind. Individuals of different kinds have different ends dictated by their natures: as long as the dog achieves the ends set out by its nature, it counts as fully good of its canine kind, even if it essentially lacks the good-making capacities (or “realities”) of beings higher on the chain. (For more on Augustine’s version, see King 2019; on Aquinas, see Davies 2019).