33 pages • 1 hour read
Transl. Thomas Williams, Augustine of HippoOn Free Choice Of The Will
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 395A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1 Summary
Augustine and his interlocutor begin their discussion with Evodius’s question “[I]sn’t God the cause of evil?” (1). In the course of their discussion, they determine that the answer depends on what precisely is meant by the word “evil.” On the one hand, God is perfectly good, and in that sense he cannot be the cause of evil because perfect goodness can only be the cause of more goodness. On the other hand, God’s goodness is also the cause of his perfect justice, and justice sometimes demands punishments, which “are certainly evils for those who suffer them” (1). Any human who does evil, however, is the cause of their own evildoing.
Once this is established, the interlocutors go on to consider knowledge and understanding, explaining that understanding is always and everywhere good, but that knowledge of good and evil does not necessarily cause one to act on behalf of good. The question at hand requires further analysis, so Evodius says to Augustine: “[P]lease explain to me what is the source of our evildoing” (3).
Augustine wants to make clear that God is not the cause of evil even though God is the cause of those who do evil, and that further a definition of evil will be necessary. He proceeds by narrating just how it is that we come to know what is evil. He argues that it not due to our own opinion or judgment that we come to this knowledge, but that “inordinate desire is what drives every kind of evildoing” (6).
In determining where evil comes from, Augustine distinguishes between the natural law that lies within the heart of each person and the temporal law that humans create in accord with right reason and the eternal law. “I think you also see,” continues Augustine, “that nothing is just and legitimate in the temporal law except that which human beings have derived from the eternal law” (11). This eternal law is contained within the divine intellect of God, and it orders the universe correctly.
A person is rightly ordered when they act in accord with eternal law, and the dignity of the person is even higher when they are aware of, and act upon, their knowledge of the same. This knowledge allows one to properly control excessive desires that may arise within the soul: “when reason, mind, or spirit controls the irrational impulses of the soul, a human being is ruled by the very thing that ought to rule according to the law that we have found to be eternal” (14-15). In this way, the person can act according to the eternal law because it is capable of virtue and cannot be made to serve irrational or inordinate desires that are the root cause of evil.
Summing up, Augustine proposes the following: “Just one possibility remains: only its own will and free choice can make the mind a companion of cupidity,” where cupidity is a synonym for “inordinate desire” (17). That is, ignorant and weak human beings choose to act on excessive desires, and it is through their choices that evil enters the world. Evodius questions whether humans have a will to begin with, since being the source of evil seems unbearable. Augustine answers, “surely you have already seen whether you will your own happiness” (19). Every person, that is, desires their own happiness; even the unwise and the unskilled desire happiness. “[W]hy should we hesitate,” says Augustine, “to affirm that, even if we have never been wise, it is by the will that we lead and deserve a praiseworthy and happy life, or a contemptible and unhappy one?” (22). Those who achieve this happy life are those who live by virtue and those who pursue those things which are eternal and unchanging; the pursuit of temporal goods and those things which deteriorate and decay can only lead to misery and loneliness. True freedom, says Augustine, is held by those who order their lives rightly in harmony with the eternal law of God’s goodness and justice.
Evil is the neglect of those things which are eternal, and the human person sins and does evil by their own free choice of the will. Summing up the first book, Evodius comes back to the question he poses at the very start: “Since, as we have found, free choice gives us the ability to sin, should it have been given to us by the one who created us? It would seem that we would not have sinned if we had lacked free choice, so there is still the danger that God might turn out to be the cause of our evil deeds” (27-28). This, Augustine acknowledges, is a formidable danger that requires prayer and piety to answer well.
Book 1 Analysis
In framing the book as a discussion on the cause of evil, Augustine sets up the work as a discussion on the interplay between human freedom and divine agency. This is a classic spiritual and philosophical problem that stretches back to antiquity: from the philosophers of ancient Greece to the poetic sentiments of the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible, human beings are always concerned with the problem of evil. For theists, the problem is especially troubling since the belief in an omnipotent and benevolent God would seem to be at odds with the reality of suffering and death. In other words, how could a good God allow bad things to happen, and since bad things happen, aren’t they somehow God’s fault?
This is how Evodius, Augustine’s dialogue partner, begins the discussion, asking if God is the cause of evil. Augustine accepts the question but reframes it from the very start by insisting that if we know that God is good—and he thinks that we know this to be true both through reason and through supernatural faith—then we must be able to solve the problem of evil in a way that preserves God’s goodness. He then responds by asking about God’s perfect justice, for if God is perfectly good then he must be perfectly just, which in certain instances would demand that judgment and punishment be meted out, which is a kind of evil for those who suffer this judgment. In this way, God can be said to be the cause of evil. The other kinds of evil, however, are what take up the rest of the discussion.
Evil is always caused by someone, so the source of this evil must be ascertained. If it is not caused by God, then it must be caused by human beings. The first step is to discover that evil is not something that is invented or decided upon by the individual; it is something that exists regardless of the subjective judgment of the person who chooses it. Augustine reminds us that a thing is not evil because the law forbids it, but rather the law forbids a thing because it is evil. In the case of human beings who do evil, it is inordinate desire that is always the cause of evil. Any sinful action is the result of a desire that is not properly ordered by the soul in accord with the natural law, which itself reflects the eternal law, present with the human soul on account of its being created in the image and likeness of God.
When the human person commits sin, they act in such a way that is excessive, not proportionate to the circumstances. Desiring sexual intimacy is a good desire when rightly ordered (i.e., within the context of marriage, says Augustine), but desiring sexual intimacy outside this context is sinful (i.e., adultery, sex work, sex outside of marriage, sexual assault, etc.). Desiring to eat and nourish oneself is a rightly ordered desire but desiring to be gluttonous or to steal food from the poor to satisfy oneself is not. Human beings are aware of right and wrong intuitively, unless they have darkened their intellects by sin, or are ignorant, and this instinctive knowledge of right and wrong reflects the makeup of the conscience within the soul. The natural law in the human heart participates in the eternal law that exists in the mind of God, which in turn governs the entire universe. When human beings act with right reason, in accord with their conscience, they are acting in such a way that they can rule their passions and their bodies virtuously. The rational soul is a protection against acting in an irrational or involuntary way.
God created human beings to be good, and to act in ways that are good, and so when sin and suffering and evil exist, they are brought into being by human beings who have not lived according to the natural law nor according to their conscience. Even these sinful actions, however, are the result of voluntary choices. The individual will is the source of evil acts. Evodius recoils at the thought of human beings as the source of all evil, and questions if it really must be the case that humans have free wills that they use to cause harm to the world. Augustine assures him that it must be so by asking whether he desires to be happy. Evodius agrees that it is something he cannot deny, and so sees that it is undeniable that humans have free will, since every person will always say that they desire to be happy, and that their choices are made with this specific end in mind.
Happiness is achieved, says Augustine, when humans make choices that align with the way the universe is ordered, and voluntarily choose goodness and virtue. Sin and suffering occur when humans make choices that directly contradict the natural order and go against virtue. Even those things which may be good in themselves in particular circumstances may not be good for the individual if they are pursued at the neglect of higher goods, especially at the expense of God himself. Money and power and security are not intrinsically evil things, for example, but when they are pursued at the expense of pursuing higher goods—God himself, for instance—they cause suffering. The unchecked and vicious pursuit of wealth and power are obvious sources of great evil in the world, especially for the one who pursues them inordinately.
Evodius sums up everything Augustine says by asking a very poignant existential question: if it is the case that the free will can make bad choices and be the source of evil and suffering, should God have created human beings with free will in the first place? Would it have been a better choice to create humans without the power to make free choices, because then they could not make choices that are sinful, or that cause the suffering and death of others? Augustine acknowledges that this is a good question and announces that he will answer it in the following book.
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