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 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 2 Summary
Continuing where they left off, Evodius and Augustine move into a discussion of why God would create human beings with free will if it is this power which allows them to do evil and sin. As Evodius summarizes: “If I understood Book One correctly, we have free choice of the will and we cannot sin without it” (29). Augustine agrees but proceeds to take the discussion in a different direction. While acknowledging that what Evodius has stated is correct, he flips the circumstances: “If human beings are good things, and they cannot do right unless they so will, then they ought to have a free will, without which they cannot do right. True, they can also use free will to sin, but we should not therefore believe that God gave them free will so that they would be able to sin” (30). So even though it is possible for sin to be the result of the free will, this was not the purpose for which they were created, since God is good and human beings were created to be similarly good.
To strengthen his assertion, Augustine asks Evodius if he is aware of his own existence. Evodius answers in the affirmative. Further, the two determine that they are both alive and that they are aware of these facts and thereby are also in possession of understanding, which is the superior reality over and above mere existence and life. The act of understanding is an act of the intellect, which is a power of the soul. This act of understanding and this power which enables it is crucially important: “whatever this thing is by which we perceive everything we know, it is an agent of reason. It takes whatever it comes into contact with and presents that to reason so that reason can delimit the things that are perceived and grasp them by knowledge” (36). Reason is the highest thing within the human person, and it is by reason that each individual comes to knowledge of the truth, which is a transcendent reality outside the person to which he can attain. Truth is universal, and it is a common good that can be shared and participated in by everyone.
One of these universal truths is the truth that all human beings, no matter what, seek to be happy, and that happiness is not something we merely fabricate but something that we discover. Happiness is, among other things, a result of grasping the truth about God and the world, and it is something that transcends our individual human minds. If it were inferior or equal to the human person, then judgment could be made “about” it, and not “in accordance” with it (54). This leads to the conclusion that it is also eternal and unchangeable, for it must be something by which the human person is measured, necessitating that it be a fixed constant. This truth is the cause of happiness: “what greater happiness can there be than to enjoy the unshakable, unchangeable, and most excellent truth?” (55).
Holding onto the truth is the cause and source of perfect freedom, for “the truth is God himself, who frees us from death, that is, from the state of sin” (57). When this truth is being enjoyed, it is something that can only be lost voluntarily, for the will is free to choose between various goods and to pursue them accordingly; losing truth and wisdom is only possible through a deliberate choice to pursue lesser goods. Temporal things, changeable things, material things—all of these can be taken from us against our will; however, those things which are eternal—love, goodness, truth, God himself—can never be taken away against our will. God, as Augustine puts it, is in fact “the happy life of the soul” (60), in much the same way that the soul is the life of the body. God gives the soul (and by extension the body) its very existence and further the perfection of its existence in happiness.
In the final section of Book 2, Augustine wants to make sure that their dialogue continues to stay on track. Evodius says: “Now let’s take a look at the third question and see whether it can be resolved: should free will be included among those good things? Once that has been shown, I will concede without hesitation that God gave it to us, and that he was right to do so” (64). The main objection is that a free will can be used to evil ends, that it can be misused, but Augustine immediately puts this to rest by reminding his interlocutor that just as things of the body can be put to wicked use, it is the same with the things of the soul, even if those things are themselves in fact good. The hands are good, but they can be used to murder; the free will is good, but it can be used to make an evil choice. Augustine puts the points on the argument by stating that “no one can live rightly” (66) without the power of the free will, for how could a person ever make a praiseworthy and virtuous choice without being free to do so? Everything that exists, he continues, is good by the very fact that it exists; it is only when those good things become defective in some way—which in the case of the human person is a freely willed choice—can they be called bad.
Book 2 Analysis
The second book is occupied with the reason that free will exists in human beings in the first place. Augustine gives the answer at the outset of the book, before spending the rest of the argument showing why his answer is both necessary and fitting. “If human beings are good things, and they cannot do right unless they so will,” says Augustine, “then they ought to have a free will, without which they cannot do right. True, they can also use free will to sin, but we should not therefore believe that God gave them free will so that they would be able to sin. The fact that human beings could not live rightly without it was sufficient reason for God to give it” (30). Having posited the existence of God, and the unavoidable attribute of divine goodness, it follows that the creatures which God brings into existence would be given the necessary means to perfect their own natures and be good in their own right.
If human beings did not have free will, they would never be able to be truly good since they would not have the power to make morally good choices. Just like a computer is incapable of moral choices—making the “correct” choice does not make it a “moral” choice—so human beings would be incapable of moral choice if they were simply programmed from the start to act in a particular way. A deterministic universe is one in which right and wrong do not exist. To declare actions right or wrong in such a universe would be akin to saying that the activity of gravity is immoral. With free will, however, comes the possibility of using it for the opposite purpose than it was created: moral freedom allows for virtue, and it allows for vice as well.
Moving forward with the conversation, Augustine argues that understanding is the highest rung on the ladder of being, which is composed of things that merely exist (minerals, elements, etc.), those things which exist and are also alive (cats, dogs, trees), and those things which exist and are also capable of understanding (human beings, angels). Human beings also are in possession of the various senses since they are embodied creatures, and these senses are ruled by reason and the soul. In addition to being the guiding force in the rule of the body and the passions, it is also by reason that we come to knowledge of the truth. The truth that we seek is knowledge of God and the world which first lies outside of our own experience, but slowly becomes more and more our own as we come to know more and more things. The sense through which we gain insight into the world detect external stimuli and though each individual person has their own senses of touch, sight, and the rest, they detect a reality that is outside of themselves, the objective character of the world around them, which is one. While each person has their own individual senses, they experience things which are united and common to all.
Each person has their own sense of sight, but the sunlight by which they see is common to all. It is the same with the intellect: each person has their own intellect and their own rational faculties, and yet the truth which they come to know is one and united outside of them and is common to all. Each person comes to know that 2+2=4 on their own, but it is a universal truth that is commonly available to all and is undiminished no matter how many people come to know that same truth. Another universal truth is that all human beings desire to be happy. They may disagree at times about what this happiness is, or where it is found, but the fact of the matter is that the desire for happiness is a universally acknowledged shared experience.
This is not a desire passed on by tradition or culturally conditioned but innate within the soul: “there is a notion of happiness stamped on our minds even before we are happy” (48). This notion of happiness is what guides the person in the quest for happiness and it is what we judge our experiences by; we do not change the definition of happiness to fit our experience, it is something universal, unchanging, and eternal. Similarly, human beings are always going to be most happy when they pursue things that are eternal and unchanging, things that cannot pass away (at least not easily), and in this way they are superior to the lower, temporal things. Love, friendship, truth, beauty, goodness, God, these things are eternal and unchanging, and are categorically to be preferred to money, power, or honor. When the human person loves and pursues those things which are eternal, that is when they are in possession of true freedom.
The will was created by God to desire good by nature, nobody ever desires anything but the good, even if they are mistaken in what sorts of things are actually good. Even the wicked do not stop desiring the good, they are simply mistaken about what is good. The murderer does not kill because he thinks it is completely evil and has no benefit whatsoever to himself or society, even the murderer has a motive for their actions which they perceive in their own mind to be good (public notoriety, revenge, vigilante justice, entertainment, etc.). When people are mistaken about the good, however, we say that they are enslaved to sin, as it has unjustly achieved power over them and holds them captive. True freedom is not the ability to make any choice at all, but the ability to choose that which is good and true. Ultimately, this goodness that we are designed to pursue is God in his very essence.
Taking the argument full circle, Augustine reminds Evodius that this is the reason for which they have been created and the reason they have been given free will. It is beyond dispute that some choose to use their power of free will towards evil ends, but that does not prove that the will is not good, nor does it prove that humans should not possess a free will in the first place. Just as the hemlock plant cannot be blamed for being used as a poison, even though it is good as a created thing, the free will can not be blamed in itself just because some choose to use it poorly or wickedly. Only when the will becomes defective in some way is it necessary to consider it evil, and even this can only occur by a voluntary choice.
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