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.
Themes
Freedom of the Will
Augustine’s text deals with the question of whether or not human beings possess the spiritual power of the will, whether or not this will is free, and what the implications are if humans have free will. The first objective Augustine sets out to achieve is to determine whether or not humans have free will, and then whether or not that is a good thing, and what powers the will has. Speaking with his interlocutor, Augustine starts at the very beginning by saying to Evodius, “first tell me whether you think you have a good will” (19).
The will, according to Augustine, is not free in all senses. It is not free to choose without rhyme or reason, or to perfect itself by choosing evil, or to act against its nature. True freedom is the potential and the opportunity to choose what is good, in accordance with the natural law written on the human heart. The natural law which is accessible to all human beings by their nature, participates in the eternal law, which is the divine truth itself: “genuine freedom is that possessed by those who are happy and cleave to the eternal law” (25). The will, then, is free when it acts in accord with its created and contingent nature by desiring and pursuing things that are truly good and beautiful.
As Augustine states, “Natures are natures because God made them so; they are flawed to the extent that they fall away from the design of their maker” (100). If, as Augustine believes, the human person is made to be good, and is in fact intrinsically good, as a created being willed into existence by God, then the human person needs the power to be good and to make good choices. The only way a person can make good choices is if they have a will that is free to pursue, discern, and choose good. If people had no free will, Augustine reasons, then no one could make judgments or be responsible for their actions. The freedom of the will preserves the most fundamental orientation of the human person: the natural desire for the good, which is God.
Humans’ Role in Evil and Suffering
Once Augustine has demonstrated that the human person has a will, and that this will is free, he raises a question that has plagued human philosophers for millennia: where do suffering, death, and evil come from? Augustine poses the question this way:
Now unless I am mistaken, our argument showed that we do evil by the free choice of the will. But I have a further question. 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).
By framing the question in this manner, Augustine touches on two central points. First, he asks if the gift of free will was appropriate, considering the fact that humans can use this power to do evil. If a free will allows one to do harm to others, then how could it be a good power? Second, he asks if this will also makes God the origin of evil, since it was God who created human beings with free will in the first place. Who could be blamed for shifting the responsibility for sin onto God if it was God who created humans capable of doing harm?
Augustine leads the reader through this logic but concludes that God is not the source of evil, because giving humans free will enables them to choose and carry out good actions, too. Augustine reaffirms the necessity of a free will: “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” (30). The free will, then, is a necessary condition for good human existence.
The will, as Augustine explains continues later in the text, is good in itself but is an intermediate good (not absolute) because it is capable of choosing two different types of good: on one hand, the will can choose what is truly and actually good; on the other, it is capable of choosing what is only good in a certain respect but may in fact be wicked in particular circumstances: “when the will turns away from the unchangeable and common good toward its own private good, or toward external or inferior things, it sins” (68). Temporal goods are good only in so far as they contribute to human flourishing and are used virtuously, but temporal goods can also be used in ways that are evil and harmful. When the will chooses good virtuously, then it does well; if it chooses that which is not good, then it sins. When humans choose to use temporal goods in harmful ways, that human activity—not God—is the source of evil.
God’s Goodness
One of the ways that Augustine demonstrates that the will is free, and that a free will is a good thing, is by showing that God is good. For Augustine, the fact that God is good is beyond question. He holds it to be true both by faith and by reason. Biblical scripture declares that God is good, and Augustine states that reason also tells us God must be good, because otherwise the very concept of God makes no sense. Augustine says: “The truest beginning of piety is to think as highly of God as possible; and doing so means that one must believe that he is omnipotent, and not changeable in the smallest respect; that he is the creator of all good things, but is himself more excellent than all of them” (3-4). Nothing greater than God can be imagined, making God the greatest good of all, one that transcends any earthly notion of goodness.
Augustine mentions that if one has the right concept of God, the logic he uses to argue that the human will is free could be sidestepped completely and taken on faith: “[I]f it is quite certain that God gave us free will, then we must admit that it ought to have been given, and in exactly the way that it was given; for God gave it, and his deeds are utterly beyond reproach” (31). Notice that Augustine says that if we were in doubt about whether or not the will is good, we should look to the giver of the gift. Since the will is given to humans by God, then it must be good, since everything that God does is “beyond reproach.” Belief in a good God precludes any of God’s gifts from being (or causing) evil. God’s intrinsic goodness is the cause of other good things in a way similar to how the intrinsic heat of the sun causes other things to be warm rather than cold.
In providing human beings with a free will, God chooses to bring a creature into the world that is capable of choosing for or against goodness. If this power to choose were not present, then the human would be no different than an automaton, or a computer program, that necessarily works in one way and deserves no praise or blame for its actions. A computer program that runs as its software directs it to is not worthy of praise; it is simply doing what it is designed to do. Similarly, a lion that kills and eats a gazelle is not worthy of condemnation for killing another animal; it is simply doing what it is naturally designed to do. Human beings, however, are given the ability to decide what is worthy of selection and action, and human choices and actions attract praise or blame according to whether they pursue good or evil.
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