2.4 Medieval Transitions
2.4.1 Augustine and the Will
In the hierarchical model of reality, human beings have the ability to perceive the order of the universe through the disciplined use of reason. As we do that, morality demands that we live in conformity to that order. In this way, the intellect had priority over the will, because anyone who truly knew the right thing to do could almost certainly not fail to do it.39 Theologically we see this priority of the intellect over the will in Augustine’s account of the cause of creation. God eternally knew that creation was good and so God created. Platonically, the only other
37 Henry Chadwick, Augustine: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001): 91.
38 Dupré stresses Christian theological emphasis on creatio ex nihilo and the “free decision of God” to create (Religion, 30). On this basis, God becomes understood to transcend rather than to be immanent in nature, at least in ontological terms. Shannon states that “standing in critical contrast to the rational, ordered intelligible universe of the Greeks, was the Jewish view of creation, an essentially arbitrary intervention by God” (Ethical Theory, 30).
39 I am generalizing here for the sake of scope. We find elements of a divided will in Plato and notions of a developmental view of the soul in Aristotle. Both perspectives would provide explanations of how a person would do something other than what they knew to be good. However, such explanations are connected to corruptions of the natural order of things.
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explanation for a human action, other than the intellect, was that the person’s soul was being unjustly ruled by the passions rather than driven by reason. When the soul is in harmony with itself, it will inerrantly pursue the good as it knows the good. Justice will result.
That Platonic origin story of evil became increasingly insufficient as Christian theology ascended in the Roman Empire. If God is not an organic part of the structured and ordered cosmos, if God stands outside of that cosmos as its creator, then there is a sense that reason alone is insufficient to account for the moral order of the cosmos and of human society. Aristotle had posited four causes to explain the causal ordering of the universe. By the time we arrive at Augustine, we find him including the human will in the set of causes.40 But if our wills are part of the causal order of the cosmos, how can human beings be free? Augustine adopted a
compatibilist position on this issue.41 Taking up Cicero’s question regarding divine
foreknowledge, which Cicero posits as a binary choice between human liberty, on the one hand, and divine foreknowledge of events, on the other hand, Augustine answers that we still
experience our wills as wills despite the actuality of divine foreknowledge.42 We humans still do
40 According to Michael Frede, “Plato and Aristotle do not have a notion of a will, since for them a willing, a desire of reason, is a direct result of one’s cognitive state: once one sees something to be good, one wills it.” Michael Frede, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011): 93.
But in Augustine: “Now if there is for God a fixed order of all causes, it does not follow that nothing depends on our free choice. Our wills themselves are in the order of causes, which is, for God, fixed, and is contained in his
foreknowledge, since human acts of will are the cause of human activities.” Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, Henry Bettenson, trans. (New York: Penguin Books, 2003): 192. Justo Gonzalez notes that creation results from “a free decision on the part of God.” Justo L. Gonzalez, A History of Christian Thought: From Augustine to the Eve of the Reformation, vol. 2 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1987): 39. In that sense, the divine will is responsible for the cosmos and the human being. Étienne Gilson takes the next step when he notes that the human will is “a fragment of the universal order” in Augustine. Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint
Augustine, L. E. M. Lynch, trans. (Providence: Cluny, 2020): 203. The human will is most notably visible in Augustine’s hamartiology in which sin is understood to be a voluntary evil and becomes associated with the vitiation of the creation.
41 We should note here the Stoic influence on Augustine’s view of the will, particularly as the Stoic view was mediated by Cicero (Frede, Free Will, 91).
42 Augustine, The City of God, Marcus Dods, trans. (New York: Random House, 1950): 157.
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things because we actually want to do them. There are two important ramifications for this statement.
First, if human beings are doing things because we want to do them, then we are no longer doing things because we are driven by the intellect to do them. In this way, the human will seems to differ from the divine will. Even when we humans know what is right, we can choose something other.43 Chadwick explains that by virtue of being created out of nothing, there is a formlessness at the heart of matter. As the soul is attached to the body, the soul experiences the conflict in its will for the good.44 Of importance for this broader project and for our
evaluation of the emerging modern model premised on liberty, Augustine asserts “the impotence of sinful man to rescue himself by effort of will.”45On the basis of liberty or choice, the human person or the human society cannot ‘rescue’ itself; cannot ‘escape,’ as Emmanuel Levinas will later write.
Second, if we are doing what we will, even if it is what God has elected or predestined, then human beings remain free. This is his compatibilist solution.46 So long as human choice stems from the interior movement of the will, then even if an outside force is acting upon that internal will, the human being remains at liberty.
The alternative to Augustine’s position, which we find in Cicero, is problematic. If things happen solely due to a determined causal chain of events, then everything happens by necessity.
There is no free will in this model. Augustine indicates that in such a circumstance, there would
43 Shannon, Ethical Theory, 35.
44 Chadwick, Augustine, 41.
45 Ibid.
46 See Phillip Cary, “Augustinian Compatibilism and the Doctrine of Election,” Augustine and Philosophy, Phillip Cary, et al., eds. (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010).
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be no point in laws, because things would happen regardless of whether a law existed or not.
There would be no point in praise or punishment. There could be no meaningful sense of justice.
Free will is intimately and necessarily linked to any meaningful sense of morality. Without free will, there is no point in pretending to morality any longer. Notice the transition from reason being the source of morality in Plato to free will emerging as the source of morality in
Augustine. Freedom did not play a meaningful role in Plato’s anthropology nor in his political philosophy. The same cannot be said for Augustine, who was perhaps influenced by Stoicism on this point.47 Importantly, the intellect has now come into competition with the will.
The intellect and the will would remain in tension for some centuries to come. Much would depend on how scholars understood the term necessity. For the compatibilist Augustine, necessity was not a limitation so much as an acknowledgement of a nature. Therefore, when we say that it is necessary for God to be, it is not as though God has been deprived of something. It is not as though we have imposed a limit on God by taking away God’s ability not to be.48 There are some things that lessen us rather than strengthen us. The ability to do these things makes us lesser rather than more. The ability ‘not to be’ would decrease God’s power rather than increase it. And this leads us into the crux of what became Augustine’s great challenge. For God to be able to do evil would not make God more God, but less God. It would make God less powerful, less perfect, and less divine.
47 Augustine seems to accept the Stoic notion of ‘fate’ understood as “an inescapable order and connection between events.” John Sellars, Stoicism (New York: Routledge, 2014): 100. Sellars notes that the Stoics also held a doctrine of providence, which became an important component of Augustine’s own theology.
48 Although Jean-Luc Marion will certainly contest this claim in his God without Being. John Zizioulas may have concerns as well. This divergence of interpretations may indicate the role of values and interpretations in the ascription of virtues to the transcendent.
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Plato could account for evil without reference to wills or necessity. Evil could be understood as a product of ignorance or disharmony, which, in turn, was largely a function of distance from the eternal perfection of the Forms. How does Augustine account for evil if evil is prohibited to God? We know his answer. His origin story of evil centers on human free will. As a compatibilist, there is still a question of why God’s grace was insufficient to keep the human will from straying. That issue is beyond the scope of the current project.
Most importantly, what we find in Augustine is the injection of human free will in a way that makes up for God’s separation from the anthropo-cosmic synthesis that yet remains at the heart of the way Western thought imagines reality to fit together. God remains involved through the doctrine of providence, but the formal and organic connection with God is sundered. In its absence, human liberty arises to fill the vacuum. Augustine had introduced the notion of ordered love or ordered desire. The will, being associated with desire, gained a foothold relative to the intellect. That foothold would become a full-scale revolution during the Middle Ages.