There is an enormous scholarly literature on Augustine's account of free will, and it is remarkable for the range of views it contains. Historians of philosophy read Augustine on free will so variously that it is sometimes difficult to believe they are reading the same texts. John Rist says: 'There is still no consensus of opinion on Augustine's view of each man's responsibility for his moral behaviour . . . There are those who attribute to Augustine the full-blown Calvinist position that each man has no say in his ultimate destiny . . . Other interpreters reject this view in varying degrees. They will not hold that for Augustine man's will is enslaved, or they would dispute about the sense in which it is enslaved and the sense in which it is free.'
Augustine's Doctrine of the Will
Augustine’s discussion of the will in On Free Choice of the Will stems from an inquisition into the problem of evil. Indeed, the dialogue opens with Evodius asking, “Tell me, please, whether God is not the cause of evil” (3). Much of the discussion, then, while dealing with an essential nature of human beings (are they determined or autonomous?) is also a defense of the benevolent nature of God. If human beings did not do evil themselves, but it was caused by God, then it would not make sense for God to punish or reward human beings for doing good or evil since they would not be the cause of their own actions. But God does reward and punish people, and all that God does is just, according to Christian doctrine, so God could not be rewarding or punishing essentially determined beings. We therefore must have free will.
That brief synopsis of his argument is indicative of the reasoning present throughout the treatise. Much of the premises that allow Augustine to come to the conclusions which he eventually does are premises about the perfection of God and the imperfection of humans. This is how Augustine fits free will into a Christian cosmology. In book three, Evonius asks if God’s foreknowledge (he is omniscient after all) is inconsistent with the notion of human autonomy. Augustine’s answer, of course, is no:
“For when [God] has foreknowledge of our will, it is going to be the will that he has foreknown . . . Therefore, the will is going to be a will because God has foreknowledge of it. Nor can it be a will if it is not in our power. Therefore, God also has knowledge of our power over it. So the power is not taken from me by His foreknowledge; but because of His foreknowledge, the power to will will more certainly be present in my, since God whose foreknowledge does not err, has foreknown that I shall have the power” .
Just because God knows what human beings will each eventually decide to do with their wills does not mean that their actions are predetermined. Augustine essentially rejects the probability argument against the compatibility of God and human autonomy that says since the probability of a person committing any action is 1 (which is true because God cannot be wrong in his foreknowledge), that person’s action is determined by forces outside of himself. Augustine astutely points out, indirectly, that God’s foreknowledge is simply knowledge of the fact that person S will decide to perform action A rather than B. Part of God’s foreknowledge is the knowledge that S decides to do A over B. At the point of the decision, S may weigh his options in any number of ways, but he is not determined to make one decision over the other. God just simply knows, in his infinite wisdom which is beyond human understanding, that S will pick A. He does not force S to pick A. S just, as a matter of fact, picks A, and God knows all facts. Now, this sure looks like determinism to someone who is committed to the probability argument, but it is not, since the human being making the choice could have chosen otherwise; it just happens to be a fact about the future world that he did not!
This reasoning allows Augustine to situate a model of human free will within a world with an omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent, and omnipresent God, but it again brings up the problem of evil. For if God is all knowing He absolutely knows when someone is going to do something horrible, and if He is all good then He surely does not want any suffering to enter into His world because of this horrible act, and if He is all powerful and always and everywhere present then there is surely nothing stopping him from stopping this horrible act, right? So how can evil ever come into the world? This returns us to Books I and II of his treatise.
In Book I, Augustine argues that evil does not come from God, but lust is the source of all evil, it being the motivation which provokes evil actions. Lust is an attribute of human imperfection, and so evil does not exist as a positive substance in the world created by God, but as a lack of perfection in human beings. Therefore, sin is not caused by God, but by the human will. Human beings sin “when [they are] turned away from divine things that are truly everlasting, toward things that change and are uncertain” . Augustine offers an illustration of this concept in his treatise called City of God. In the treatise, he placed human beings in a kind of middle state between the city of God and heaven, or the New Jerusalem, and the city of depravity and beasts, or Babylon. A person can choose to either turn towards the eternal city of God, a turn which Augustine calls conversion, or turn towards the temporal carnal pleasures of Babylon, a turn which Augustine calls perversion. He also offers a personal account of both of these kinds of turns in his Confessions, in which he tells of his sins of lust in Carthage and his eventual conversion after reading Paul’s letter to the Romans and learning from Ambrose to read the Bible figuratively or allegorically instead of literally.
Therefore, as Augustine concludes from reason and his own personal experience, “we commit evil through free choice of the will,” but it is then reasonable to “question whether free will…ought to have been given to us by Him who made us”. Thus, God is not the direct source of evil, since that role is given to lust, which is a characteristic produced by a lack of perfection, not the presence of some evil thing in the world. Further, lust is not a guaranteed cause of evil since it takes an act of the will to allow lust to direct one’s thoughts and actions, and so sin is done through humans’ execution of their free wills. But that means, seemingly, that God is an indirect cause of evil since he granted human beings with the very tool through which they are able to commit sin. This is not a fault of God’s though, as we see in Book II, since the free will is an intermediate good because even though it can be abused, without it one could not live rightly. Thus, the cost of having there be potential for humans to live wrongly is a necessary one if God’s omni-benevolence is to be upheld, for if He did not grant us free will, we would have been condemned to an existence in which it was impossible for us to live rightly, since without the will there is no intention, and, as Plato and Aristotle each maintained as Augustine does, intention is the seed of the goodness or badness of an act.
What are your thoughts? How does this compare to what the Bible has to say on determination and free will? Does Augustine have a Biblical understanding of will?
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