CONSOLIDATION
St. Augustine on Choice, Sin, and the Divided Will
To understand the adaptation of ancient philosophical concepts to changed social and intellectual purposes, what Hans Blumenberg calls their “reoccupation,” one has to be mindful of how intricately that history is enmeshed with issues of translation. In the case of the will, translation holds particular significance because it is only by transposing and reconfiguring hekousion, boulēsis, eph’hemin, and prohairesis into classical Latin and early Christian culture that the notion of the will (voluntas) came into existence. Once established, it challenged thinkers from Augustine onward to clarify the will’s relationship to the intellect and reason. In significant measure, the lexical and cultural migration of concepts is itself a catalyst in philosophy’s ongoing appraisal of the human capacity for conceptualization. In tracing the transposition (and partial fusion) of the above Aristotelian concepts, Charles Kahn notes that, beginning with Cicero, voluntas translates boulēsis. Merging the Aristotelian notion of hekousion—viz., an action done voluntarily but not deliberately—with voluntarium, post-Ciceronian Latin construes an agent’s simple awareness of an act as a form of intentionality. The mere fact that a deed is accompanied by the agent’s consciousness of the action is taken as evidence of its standing in instrumental relation to an underlying aim. Summarizing Stoic doctrine in his pastoral retreat from politics, Cicero thus notes how “as soon as the semblance of any apparent good presents itself, nature of itself prompts [people] to secure it. Where this takes place in an equable and wise way the Stoics employ the term βούλησις for this sort of longing; we should employ the term wish [nos appellemus voluntatem].”1 The result is a somewhat elliptic conception of the will in that voluntas partially obscures the distinction between a voluntary and a deliberative action. Only in the second case does it make sense to impute to the agent an awareness of the distinction between means and ends, efficient and final causality. Though ostensibly justified by the exact parallel between velle and boulomai, the concurrent fusion of hekousion with voluntarium nonetheless gives rise to a conceptual asymmetry inasmuch as a link is established between willing and the strictly voluntary, “whereas nothing in Greek connects hekousion with boulēsis.”2 Willing, after all, does not signify a merely voluntary action such as reaching for an apple to still one’s hunger; rather, it denotes a choice deliberatively arrived at in consideration of an overarching good or end.
A second fusion involves the translation of Aristotle’s eph’hemin, which Aquinas will later render as “in our power” (in nostra potestate [ST, Ia Q 83 A 3]), yet which early Christian theology partially assimilates to the notion of “free choice” (liberum arbitrium). Beginning with the early Augustine, this strikingly new conception is closely entwined with the notion of “will” (voluntas). In contrasting Aristotle and Aquinas, Charles Kahn observes that where Aristotle had “analyzed the process of decision-making on the basis of three or four concepts that were only loosely related to one another: the voluntary, what is in our power or up to us, boulēsis, and prohairesis . . . in Aquinas all four concepts are defined by reference to voluntas, the will.”3 The result is the emergence of an entirely novel conception central to accounts of human flourishing—viz., freedom. This framework markedly differs from the Aristotelian model, in which “rational desire” (boulēsis) sets the end and judgment only affirms, as it were ex post facto, that end by means of explicit “assent” and then chooses means conducive to and commensurable with it. As remains to be seen, the agent’s relationship to the end is profoundly changed in Augustinian thought. Kahn also observes how Aristotle’s prohairesis is eventually absorbed into Aquinas’s notion of liberum arbitrium voluntatis, which consists “not in ‘freedom of the will,’ but in the exercise of ‘free choice’ by the will.” Aquinas’s term for the act proper wherein that free choice is realized—and the moral nature of the agent determined—is electio.4
Concurrently, the Stoic concept of “assent” (sunkatathesis) and its eventual appropriation by neo-Platonism’s postulate of an immaterial soul suggests that, in building on Aristotelian psychology, Hellenistic thought adds a crucial component to what would soon be articulated by Augustine as the idea of a responsible and divided will. For the concept of “assent” implies not merely an intellectual orientation toward a particular object or objective, such as is implied by Aristotelian boulēsis. Rather, in conceiving the mind-world relation as a function of “assent,” we are made to see that to aspire to something also implies one’s committing oneself to the value of the object or idea in question. To will is not simply to want but to “consent to” what we take to be the value of that thing or idea at which we aim. Stoic assent thus highlights, in ways eventually writ large in Augustine’s theory of the will, how the instant of “free choice” wherein the will becomes manifest both realizes an agent’s spiritual condition and discloses that condition as the focal point of her or his self-awareness. To will eo ipso means “revealing” the agent’s distinctive nature, an insight first given due weight by Epictetus, whose “use of prohairesis serves to expand the notion of consent into the broader notion of moral character and personal ‘commitment,’” and who thus moves decisively beyond the Platonic nous as a “principle of reason most fully expressed in theoretical knowledge.” Thus Kahn sees the Stoic notion of “assent” as part of a broader current moving toward the Augustinian model of introspective consciousness and, indeed, anticipating Aquinas, “who says [that] . . . ‘Consent belongs to the will.’”5 With good reason, Aquinas takes much pains to desynonymize assent and consent, primarily (one has to surmise) because he is drawing on Augustine’s conception far more than on that of his Hellenistic precursors. As he points out, to assent (assentire) “implies a certain distance from that to which assent is given.” It simply means “to feel toward something” (ad aliud sentire). By contrast, “consent (consentire) is ‘to feel with,’ and this implies a certain union to the object of consent. Hence the will, to which it belongs to tend to the thing itself, is more properly said to consent: whereas the intellect, whose act does not consist in a movement toward the thing, but rather the reverse . . . is more properly said to assent” (ST, Ia IIae Q 15 A 1). To the question of whether such consent belongs itself to the “higher faculty” or (as the objection would have it) whether it is solicited merely by a prospect of “delight” (delectatio), Aquinas responds by stressing that consent is by nature propositional, not affective. Its realization involves a “final decision” (finalis sententia). That which the will urges “to be done” (agendum) is conceived and ratified only by consent, and “consent to the act belongs to the higher reason (pertinet ad rationem superiorem)” (ST, Ia IIae Q 15 A 4).
Contrary to the modern notion of willing as sheer appetition, Stoic, Augustinian, and Thomist models of the will not only affirm its (subsequently obliterated) connections with Aristotelian “judgment,” but they also show—in ways that Aristotle himself had not yet worked out—how all prohairesis constitutes an act of assent. Beyond that, Aquinas (herein following Augustine) also emphasizes that to assent to a proposition goes well beyond a purely syllogistic, intellectual operation. It also implies “consent” or (to recall an alternative translation of prohairesis) a person’s “commitment” to the moral value that stands behind the proposition. Indeed, the linguistic “act” (sententia) enunciating such consent is the very substance of the will, which can only be grasped in actu, and never properly as a faculty among others. All assent thus draws not only on a logical matrix that decides on the formal correctness of what is asserted, but it also discloses what Robert Sokolowski calls the agent’s “veracity”—“the eros involved with rationality.” Aquinas here extends what Stoic grammar and logic were unable or unwilling to acknowledge: viz., that “when we enter into the space of reason, we do not float up into a kind of distilled detachment that places us beyond human involvement. There is an ethics to disclosure; we have to want to be logical for others and for ourselves, and this wanting can be cultivated in either a virtuous or vicious way.”6
It is as a result of the Stoic and neo-Platonic clarification of willing as propositional, as assent, and, ultimately, as consent to a supra-personal good that “voluntas and its cognates play a role in Latin thought and literature for which there is no parallel term in Classical or Hellenistic Greek.”7 The result of these closely related transpositions is the emergence of an entirely novel conception central to accounts of human flourishing: freedom. We recall how in Aristotle’s ethics it is “rational desire” (boulēsis) that sets the end, whereas judgment only affirms, as it were ex post facto, that end by means of explicit “assent” and then chooses means conducive to and commensurable with it. It is precisely the agent’s relationship to the end that is profoundly changed in Augustinian thought. Commenting on a remark by Cicero about the recently murdered Caesar (“what he wants is no great matter, but what he wants, he wants with a will [quidquid volet valde volet]”), subsequently rendered somewhat misleadingly as sphoda bouletai by Plutarch, Albrecht Dihle remarks on a palpable shift of terminology; whereas the Greek boulēmai entails an element of deliberation and planning, there is “a lack of psychological refinement in the Latin vocabulary” that may account for the “indiscriminate use of velle and voluntas for various kinds of impulse and intention [which] undeniably contributed to the voluntaristic potential in Roman thought.”8
Questions of will and free choice span the entirety of St. Augustine’s career. From his early Of Free Choice of Will (De Libero Arbitrio) to the Confessions, especially Book 8, to the middle books of De Trinitate and De Civitate Dei, to his late anti-Pelagian writings, in particular, Of Grace and Free Will, Augustine continues to ponder the theological, epistemological, and psychological dimensions of a concept whose centrality to philosophy he was among the first to argue. Yet unlike the neo-Platonists and Stoics before him, Augustine does not so much see himself developing his account of the will by engaging already extensive traditions of philosophical inquiry. To be sure, Roman law had made extensive use of the will (voluntas) as a legal concept; yet in so doing it had treated the will solely as a heuristic device “invented to grasp the intention which underlies words or formalized actions,” while remaining uncurious about its intrinsic ethical, anthropological, and psychological nature.9 Likewise, the Aristotelian psychological vocabulary of boulēsis, prohairesis, and hekousion only reaches Augustine in its substantially altered, Stoic inflection. Thus the principal sources for Augustine’s arguments and insights into the psychology of the human will and its perplexing entanglement with divine grace and (most vexingly) with predestination tend to be personal experience and scripture, above all the letters of St. Paul. Hannah Arendt’s somewhat breezy observation that Augustine was “the first man of thought to draw his deepest inspiration from Latin sources and experiences,” while true as far as it goes, warrants some clarification. For Augustine’s account of human agency pivots on his careful disengagement from Stoic and neo-Platonist philosophy.10
Yet instances of this rhetorically scrupulous swerve away from pagan thought, while abundant throughout his corpus, are not our principal concern here, and we shall limit ourselves to just one example: in closing Book 1 of the Confessions, Augustine recalls how he guarded “my wholeness, the imprint of that most hidden Oneness from which I took my being [vestigium secretissimae unitatis ex qua eram].” This remark (1.20.31) clearly echoes a late passage in Plotinus’s Sixth Ennead (6.9.11), though Augustine is quick to limit that debt by emphasizing, in the very next sentence, his guardianship over the quasi-Trinitarian architecture of his senses: “and by an inner sense I watched over the integrity of my senses [custodiebam interiore sensu integritatem sensuum meorum].” Though familiar with Porphyry’s and Marius Victorinus’s Plotinian accounts of esse/vivere/intellegere and with Platonism’s overall insistence on the primacy of thought over will, Augustine notably does “not use the Porphyrian triad, however modified, to explain the Trinitarian creed of his church.” In fact, he decisively breaks with the quintessential Platonic axiom that all intention arises from cognition and, as Dihle has shown, decisively “separate[s] will from both potential and achieved cognition.”11 In a similar vein, James Wetzel notes how for Augustine “the power of knowledge to motivate is not enough to determine action. We must choose to be motivated by rational rather than habitual desires, and if our choice fails to carry into action, we have not the triumph of appetite over reason, but a failure of will.” In sharp divergence from the Platonic tradition, then, Augustine’s way out of the dilemma of sin chosen and grace refused “is not through knowledge but through love.”12
More about that shortly; first, though, a basic matter of translation stands to be addressed. With regard to Augustine’s notion of the liberum arbitrium, it is best to translate it as “free choice.” The still widespread alternative rendering of that concept as “free will” (a notion Eleonore Stump retains for her discussion) is bound to create misunderstanding since the will itself is only disclosed in the choice actually made. As such, however, the will cannot be free in the modern, libertarian sense of a subject indifferently sampling some buffet of possible identities. Indeed, as the later Augustine was to argue with much force and to rich, if disconcerting, effect, the will—being wholly dependent for its realization on a notion of inscrutable divine grace—is inseparable from the idea of predestination which, beginning with Ad Simplicianum (A.D. 397), he developed with reference to Romans 9:11. Summing up the implications of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings, Stump thus observes that “a person can be morally responsible for a sinful act of will even when it was not possible for her not to will to sin.” Consequently, in Augustine’s view “free choice” and moral responsibility do not require “that an agent have the ability to do otherwise . . . A person who is unaided by grace cannot do otherwise than sin, and yet she is morally responsible for the sin she does.”13 From a theological perspective, the status of the Augustinian will coincides with the relation of the human individual toward grace and the “theological dynamite” of Augustine’s doctrine of predestination.14
Yet our present objective is not to take up the rich theological implications of the Augustinian will and its deeply vexing entanglement with grace. This is not to deny that the rather arbitrarily compartmentalized fashioning of “an ‘Augustine of philosophical interest’” preoccupied with “establish[ing] the mind’s self-relatedness” risks distorting the overall design and purposes of Augustine’s thought and occluding its ontological sources.15 Still, to remain true to this study’s overall intent the present discussion will have to limit itself to Augustine’s quasi-phenomenological account of how the will registers in the self, which is developed most fully in the Confessions and De Trinitate.16 Staying within this more confined anthropological matrix, we may begin by drawing out an internal contradiction at the heart of the modern, libertarian conception of the will “as the power of choice—the power to choose one’s own motives” and hence “conceptually distinct from desiring.” For to take that view is to argue simultaneously that we act “under some representation of the good” and yet frequently and “willfully refuse to act in accordance with what we judge to be best.” Inevitably, such a multiple-choice conception of the will renders us “unintelligible to ourselves, at least in so far as our refusal outruns our available motives.” On both theological and psychological grounds, Augustine’s rejection of the will qua multiple choice targets the Pelagians’ “reification of choice, not only because it gave them rather than God the last word on redemption, but because it amounted in essence to a denial of God’s power to transform human agents.” Moreover, what (following Étienne Gilson) James Wetzel calls a “Pelagian fiction” also proves epistemologically incoherent: “The theory of will as the power of choice, informed by but independent of desire, makes every action to some degree unintelligible, for if the theory were true, no action could ever be sufficiently explained by its motives.”17
Against this view, Augustine uncompromisingly insists on a “corrupted will” (mala voluntas) that is strictly the result of Adam and Eve’s Fall and cannot be causally explained as a product of contingent circumstances and wayward desires. While a fuller discussion of the will does not begin until Book 8 of the Confessions, a single, early reference to the adolescent Augustine’s emergent sexuality correlates the will with “the restlessness of youth” (inquieta indutum adulescentia) and a consequent fascination with the created body at the expense of the creator. He characterizes this state as being “drunk on the invisible wine of its own will, perverse as it is [de vino invisibili perversae atque inclinatae in ima voluntatis suae] and bent on lower things” (2.3.6). Crucially, this passage and its metonymic link with the young Augustine’s notorious theft of pears has been set up by an acknowledgment that “I had abandoned you, and was drifting wherever the tide of my own desire took me” (2.2.4), the main point being that a “perverted will” precedes the drama of contingent desires and temptations rather than being caused by them. Thus “sin is its own motive,” indeed insatiably so: it is “desire without end.”18 According to Augustine, who never wavers on this point, the disorder and division of the will must not be misconstrued as something externally obtruded but, rather, as the inescapable manifestation of inherited sin. In ways that Blaise Pascal and Coleridge would echo with similar intensity, Augustine’s will operates not only “prior to and independent of the act of intellectual cognition” but is also “fundamentally different from sensual and irrational emotion.”19 The point emerges forcefully in Augustine’s account of his theft of pears (Confessions, 2.4.9ff.), which he is careful not to attribute to any need or want but, instead, explains as manifesting “a love of rebellion itself” (sed defectum meum ipsum amavi). More than two millennia later, Coleridge echoes the central point: “a Sin is an Evil which has its ground or origin in the Agent, . . . Sin is Evil having an Origin. But inasmuch as it is evil, in God it cannot originate: and yet in some Spirit (i.e. in some supernatural power) it must. For in Nature there is no origin. Sin is therefore spiritual Evil: but the spiritual in Man is the Will . . . the corruption must have been self-originated” (AR, 266, 273). As Augustine was to put it in De Libero Arbitrio, “we sin by the will, not by necessity,” since any other position effectively vitiates the very idea of responsible choice and, ultimately, the very idea of human agency itself: “our will would not be a will if it were not in our power . . . just as no one sins unwillingly by his own thought, [nor] yields to the evil prompting of another unless his own will consents” (3.3, 10).
It is this startling and unprecedented view—of a corrupted and internally divided will deeply enmeshed with human cognition—that shows Augustine’s decisive break with both Stoic and Platonist thought, even as these models continue to inform his argument and conceptual inventory in important ways. As Augustine’s critique of Stoic moral theory in De Civitate Dei (esp. Book 19) makes clear, the Stoics’ ideal of apatheia presupposes a strictly external understanding of the main antagonist, viz., as the threatening “intrusion of phantasiai into the citadel of consciousness.” Stoicism thus restricts “the realm of the voluntary to what we can control, not what we want.” By contrast, Augustine views that particular fixation as a sign of “enduring unfreedom,” to which he opposes the notion of freedom as “the single-minded love of God.” Related to this is the fact, briefly hinted at above, that Stoicism’s defensive regimen concerning the senses and external contingency fails to identify its motivating source. The Stoics cannot explain “how we are moved to sin involuntarily, but [also] how we might even be moved to desire beatitude.”20 It is a problem that in due course would also vex Immanuel Kant, who, in good neo-Stoic fashion, is able to furnish a concise definition of the moral “ought” but—having peremptorily committed himself to an agnostic, value-neutral conception of Kritik—finds himself unable to determine why anyone ought to adopt the “ought” of his moral law. Clearly, Augustine no longer regards the senses or the emotions as the true antagonist of the intellect, which they had been for the Stoics; nor does he see curiositas resulting from a distorted appraisal of reality, as the followers of Plotinus had argued. Instead, as illustrated by the theft-of-pears episode in Book 2 of the Confessions, Augustine’s account of the will originates in and is guided by two metaphysical problems: the origin of evil and the nature of grace.
Recalling his transition from Manichean to Platonic thought early in Book 7, Augustine confronts the startling proposition “that free will was the reason why we commit evil [liberum voluntatis arbitrium causam esse ut male faceremus]” (7.3.5). It is here that we find Augustine making one of his most salient points about the will, viz., that willing is inseparable from knowing. Indeed, it is precisely by willing that self-awareness is raised from a latent apperceptive state to a fully explicit one:
What raised me up toward your light was the fact that I knew that I had a will just as much as I knew that I was alive. Thus, when I willed or did not will something, I was wholly certain that it was I and no one else who was willing it or not willing it; and I was now on the point of perceiving that therein lay the reason for my own sin. As for the evil I did against my will, I saw that I was suffering it rather than committing it, and adjudged it not so much my guilt as my punishment. (7.3.5)
In a striking reversal of Platonic doctrine, Augustine insists that what accounts for the sinful nature of an act is precisely the self’s total awareness of the act as something willed by oneself. Knowledge of the act and knowledge of the self prove inseparable in ways unprecedented in the moral literature of the Stoics and neo-Platonists. To illustrate the shift, one might turn to Plotinus’s late treatise (Ennead, 1.4) “On Well-Being,” where he deploys the mirror analogy to suggest that reflexive awareness of an activity does not produce but at most clarifies the object in question: logically, “there must be an activity prior to awareness,” just as in the event that the mirror “is not in the right state the object of which the [mirror] image would have been is all the same actually there.” Anticipating the exact same argument that Novalis would advance against Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s performative theory of self-creation in his 1794 Wissenschaftslehre, Plotinus regards consciousness not so much as thought but as an “after-thought” (nach/Denken): in the absence of conditions facilitating a mirror-like reflection of the self in actu, “intellectual activity takes place without a mind-picture.” Indeed, there are “a great many valuable activities, theoretical and practical, which we carry on both in our contemplative and active life, even when we are fully conscious, which do not make us aware of them.” Moreover, there is reason to suppose that act and awareness are ultimately mutually exclusive: “Conscious awareness, in fact, is likely to enfeeble the very activities of which there is consciousness.”21 If for Plotinus, “consciousness is thus more of a memory than a presence,” that view hints at a deep chasm separating act from awareness, such that “the more intense an activity is, the less it is conscious.”22
The contrast with Augustine’s moral psychology could hardly be greater. Particularly in the Confessions, self-awareness never involves the acquisition—timely or belated—of some unified object or focal point; rather, awareness of self for Augustine almost always amounts to awareness of an indelible conflict. Indeed, it consists of the vivid, present, and all-encompassing recognition of the self as constitutively divided rather than subject to occasional “conflicted” feelings. Stump’s distinction between first- and second-order desires helps us understand Augustine’s divided will and its oblique debt to the earlier, Aristotelian and Stoic antagonism between desire or impulse on the one hand, and deliberate choice or acts of assent on the other hand: “it is a commonplace of medieval philosophy that the higher faculties of human beings are characterized by reflexivity. The intellect can understand itself; the memory can remember itself and its acts; and the will can command itself, as well as other parts of the willer.”23 The principle of unconditional and unconditioned reflexivity, first introduced in De Libero Arbitrio (2.4), also constitutes a core premise of Plotinus, and its neo-Platonic version appears again in Ralph Cudworth’s discussion of “Freewill” and, very prominently, in the later Coleridge. Long before, Homer’s Odyssey had furnished a vivid example of the moral agent’s intrinsic self-awareness in the Sirens episode (12.197–257) where Odysseus, anticipating the overpowering force of his first-order desires (pleasure), takes measures to ensure that his second-order desires (survival) will prevail.
Displaying their author’s unique “mastery of the psychology of self-contradiction,” Augustine’s Confessions derive their narrative coherence from a metonymic progression toward the idea of a self whose inner phenomenology is shaped by a conflict between “my two wills, the old, carnal will, and the new, spiritual will [whose] discord rent my soul in pieces” (ita duae voluntates meae, una vetus, alia nova, illa carnalis, illa spiritalis, confligebant inter se atque discordando dissipabant animam meam [8.5.10]).24 To sharpen the main point, one might link Augustine’s metaphor for the divided will—viz., of domestic strife (“I stirred up a great quarrel in the house of my inner being” [8.8.19])—with a no less powerful and horrific moment conceived by one of modern literature’s most Augustinian temperaments. The pivotal chapter (27) of Leo Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata finds Pozdnyshev recalling how he murdered his wife, an act toward which both the narrative and his own will have been inexorably spiraling:
With my left hand I seized her hands. She disengaged herself. Then, without dropping my dagger, I seized her by the throat, forced her to the floor, and began to strangle her. With her two hands she clutched mine, tearing them from her throat, stifling. Then I struck her a blow with the dagger, in the left side, between the lower ribs. —When people say that they do not remember what they do in a fit of fury, they talk nonsense. It is false. I remember everything. —I did not lose my consciousness for a single moment. The more I lashed myself to fury, the clearer my mind became, and I could not help seeing what I did. I cannot say that I knew in advance what I would do, but at the moment when I acted, and it seems to me even a little before, I knew what I was doing, as if to make it possible to repent, and to be able to say later that I could have stopped. —I knew that I struck the blow between the ribs, and that the dagger entered. —At the second when I did it, I knew that I was performing a horrible act, such as I had never performed, an act that would have frightful consequences. My thought was as quick as lightning, and the deed followed immediately. The act, to my inner sense, had an extraordinary clearness. I perceived the resistance of the corset and then something else, and then the sinking of the knife into a soft substance. She clutched at the dagger with her hands, and cut herself with it, but could not restrain the blow.25
Re-enacting mankind’s inaugural trauma of original sin and, more specifically, Cain’s version of it, Tolstoy’s protagonist acknowledges what most modern philosophy—from Hobbes to Locke, Hume, Godwin, Bentham, and on to modern behaviorist and neuro-science accounts of the will as a type of radical and wholly enigmatic, external or internal compulsion—so strenuously seeks to deny: viz., that willing is profoundly enmeshed with self-awareness. As he recalls how, prior to his conversion, “my will was perverted, and became a lust; I obeyed my lust as a slave, and it became a habit [consuetudo]; I failed to resist my habit, and it became a need” (Confessions, 8.5.10), Augustine most definitely does not consider himself a victim of some extraneous or unconscious causality. Each of the steps that cumulatively yield the dystopic narrative of sinful habituation involves a micro-judgment undertaken with acute awareness that the object or action assented to constitute a step in the wrong direction. Consequently, the “chain” (catena) of interconnected links both defines the substance of his moral persona and distorts the ways in which it is rendered phenomenologically distinct by and for the self.26 Inner disorder is not obtruded on the will from without; it is its very essence.
Against the Manichean view that “these two minds belong to two Principles, one good, the other evil” (Confessions, 8.10.22), Augustine insists that such attempts at tracing the mind’s inner division back to some external and metaphysical cause is tantamount to an evasion of responsible agency and, thus, an instance of sin (“they themselves are truly evil, as long as they hold these evil opinions”); for “sin commits our identity and destiny to what must inevitably pass out of existence.”27
The mind orders the mind to will [imperat animus ut velit animus]; it is only one mind, but it does not do as ordered. Whence is this strange situation? And why is it so? I repeat: the mind that gives the order to will could not give the order if it did not will to do so; but it does not do what it orders. It does not will with its whole being, therefore it does not order with its whole being. The mind orders in so far as it wills, and its orders are not obeyed in so far as it does not will them; for it is the will and nothing else that gives the order that the will should exist [quoniam voluntas imperat ut sit voluntas, nec alia]. (8.9.21)
For quite some time, it has been a commonplace to credit Augustine with the “discovery” of inwardness. Hannah Arendt speaks of his “discovery of an inward life,” and Albrecht Dihle insists that Augustine’s conception of grace and the Trinity are only intelligible if “seen in the wider context of the change from the ontological to a psychological approach to religion and ethics which he initiated.”28 More recently Charles Taylor has argued how “Augustine shifts the focus from the field of objects known to the activity itself of knowing”; and he sees Augustine’s “fateful” conceptual innovation of a “first-person standpoint” characterized by a type of “radical reflexivity” such as “brings to the fore a kind of presence to oneself which is inseparable from one’s being the agent of one’s experience.” Of particular concern to Taylor is the hermetic, seemingly asocial, and epistemologically unverifiable model of the Augustinian self, which proves “asymmetrical” inasmuch as no outside observer can ever reconstitute this inner experience.29 While Augustine does indeed regard the division of the will as “a conflict, and not a dialogue,” there is no tension between mind and body, for only the will is inherently “minded.” In fact, the conflict and “exchange is entirely mental” and essential to the will since “a will that would be ‘entire’ without a counter-will, could no longer be a will properly speaking.”30
What defines the Augustinian will, then, is not the nature of its objects, let alone some hypostatized, external cause. Rather, it is the will’s agonistic operation—an inner theater of constant division, strife, and perplexity—which shows it to be inseparable from self-awareness. Alluding to the parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3–7) and the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), Augustine muses why it is that the soul “delights in finding or having returned to it the things that it loves more than if it had always held on to them” (Confessions, 8.3.7). What accounts for the peculiar appeal of the “wax and wane, repulsion and attraction” (8.3.8) that Goethe would later develop into a theory of life as polarity, that Freud would rediscover in little Hans’s fort/da game, and that Arnold Toynbee would identify as a pattern of “withdrawal and return” permeating much of Western narrative? Augustine’s answer, here intimated by a set of examples but not fully conceptualized, appears to be that by our very nature we prefer emergent or restored gifts and capacities over undifferentiated continuity. Phenomenologically speaking, both the reality of the will and human self-awareness hinge on the experience of difference, tension, alternation, or rupture—that is, on a “happening” of some kind.31
It is just this view of unrest and conflict as an indelible substratum of human personhood (and of inexpungable sin) that reveals the full extent of Augustine’s break with Greek thought, both Stoic and neo-Platonic. That break manifests itself in two fundamental ways. First, Augustine places unprecedented emphasis on self-awareness, albeit not in the sense of Stoic “self-possession” (autarkeia) but as the self’s indelible awareness of its defective moral vision and consequently, of its utter dependency on divine grace. Thus it is rather ironic that Augustine should so often be credited with having originated a modern, proto-Cartesian conception of “the self” in which agency and autonomy are construed as wholly interchangeable and as the terminus ad quem of a methodical quest for a metaphysically uncurious, “buffered self” (as Charles Taylor has recently dubbed it). The second break with pagan philosophy involves Augustine’s contention that sense perception and intellectual activity are not anchored in an impersonal order of being (cosmos). Instead, his psychology “seems to be self-sustaining, at least with regard to man’s intellectual activity . . . Both the raw material of cognition and the drive towards understanding can be found in the soul without an indispensable point of reference in the outside world.”32 Central to Augustine’s theory of the will, and decisively setting it apart from Stoicism, is the concept of “grace” unaccountably and freely bestowed by a personal God who, unlike Stoicism’s pantheist deity, constitutes an internally differentiated Trinity entwined with the human individual whom Augustine views as the imperfect imago of the creator God: “that supreme and most high being of which the human mind is the unequal image [impar imago], but the image nonetheless” (ADT, 10.4.19).33
While this is not the place to engage the apparent tension between free choice of will and grace—a topic whose exploration spans almost all of Augustine’s writings—a couple of basic aspects of that issue need to be kept in mind. First, and arising out of Augustine’s protracted disputes with Pelagius and his followers, there is the basic distinction between “enabling” and “cooperative” grace. Far from posing a challenge to freedom of will, enabling grace is generally accepted as its very condition of possibility. It is a “gift of power,” of the capacity to form judgments and to resolve and embark upon a specific course of action. Rather more problematic is Augustine’s insistence (against the Pelagians) that the gap between an intentional action and its successful execution cannot be closed by human means alone. Following at times violent confrontations with the Pelagians in the wake of Pope Zosimus’s decision to uphold their view that men have no need for cooperative grace, the Council of Carthage at the end of April A.D. 418 had anathemized that view.34 Comparing God to the eye without which we cannot see,35 Augustine insists that absent divine, cooperative grace the success of our endeavors—and indeed the integrity of the goal at which they are aimed—is not conceivable. The very conception or act of judgment whereby the will orients us as practical agents in a particular situation is for Augustine (and also for Jerome) impossible without God’s cooperative grace. Referencing Romans 8:28, the argument here is that not just the successful execution of a particular action but even the clarity of the intellect that had previously resolved upon it hinges on “God’s cooperation”—the Latin cooperantur here rendering the Greek συνεργεῖ ὁ θεὸς. Yet precisely this indispensable role of divine “synergy” threatens to undermine the basic notion of human freedom and self-determination.
The matter comes to a head eight years later in Augustine’s essay “On Grace and Free Choice.” Writing around Easter of A.D. 426, Augustine here defends himself against a certain construction put on his account of divine grace that he had set forth in a letter to the then bishop of Rome (and future Pope Sixtus III) in A.D. 418 when the Pelagian controversy had been at its peak. Against the misreading of that (subsequently disseminated) letter by the “rustic and less educated” monks at Hadrumetum, Augustine seeks to counter the impression that the enigmatic and absolute character of divine grace effectively corrupts or denies the possibility of free choice. As so often, Augustine turns to St. Paul as he tackles the question, in this case to 2 Corinthians 6:1 (“Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain”). “Why,” he asks, “does he beg them if they received grace in such a way that they lost their own will? [Utquid enim eos rogat, si gratiam sic susceperunt, ut propriam perderent voluntatem?].” Notably, in broaching the issue as a rhetorical question that implies the correct and only possible answer, Augustine minimizes his own intellectual agency—a point also evident when at the close of his essay he insists “that it is not so much I as it is the divine scripture itself which has spoken with you by the clearest testimonies of the truth.”36 Such a claim is no mere rhetorical conceit; rather it embodies what Augustine never tires to affirm—viz., that the human intellect’s engagement with the “gift” of God’s revelation in the medium of scripture constitutes prima facie evidence of the ways in which the human will and divine grace coexist.
Meanwhile, his reading of Paul carefully balances two points warranting affirmation: that the human will has its own, discrete psychological reality, and the soteriological fact of its unconditional dependence on divine grace. On the one hand, Paul’s insistence that “his grace has not been without effect in me” (gratia eius in me vacua non fuit [1 Cor. 15:10]) affirms that grace does not determine the nature of finite, human consciousness in the manner of a causal mechanism. Rather, grace is for consciousness, an intentionality at once distinct from consciousness and yet uniquely capable of focusing and elevating it. Hence, too, Paul affirms that “by the grace of God I am what I am [gratia autem Dei sum id quod sum],” thereby reinforcing the distinct reality and free agency of his empirical persona while remaining fully aware of its metaphysical source. Grace, as Augustine construes the passage in Paul’s letter, is itself the precondition for disclosing what is empirically and psychologically experienced as the sheer plenitude of human life, its distinctive and enduring character (ēthos) or self-identity as manifested by a narrative of past failings. Thus Paul had just acknowledged (1 Cor. 15:9) his previous role as “persecutor” of the church. Not only, then, are human agency and identity not incommensurable with divine grace, but in Augustine’s view they are positively unintelligible without it. Indeed, Augustine’s entire psychology hinges on this productive tension between grace and free choice. In his exchange with St. Jerome about this seemingly insoluble question, he acknowledges that the soul “is not a part of God. For if it were this, it would be utterly immutable and incorruptible . . . it would not become worse and make progress for the better.”37 Likewise, in De Civitate Dei Augustine also affirms that the image of God that we recognize in ourselves “is not equal to God” but, in fact, “is very far removed from Him, . . . it is not of the same substance as God.” Even so, it is “nearer to God in nature than anything else made by him [tamen qua Deo nihil sit in rebus ab eo factis natura propinquius, imaginem Dei]” (CD, 11.26).
In an idiom less emotionally and rhetorically charged than either his Confessions or his late writings against the Pelagians, Augustine’s De Trinitate integrates an understanding of the will into a comprehensive psychological theory whose logic bears retracing so as to guard against misunderstandings and internal tensions that befall modern faculty-psychology (e.g., in Kant). Augustine’s arguments here arise out of a critical discussion of the Delphic injunction to “know thyself” (gnothi seauton) which, Augustine maintains, ought not to be misconstrued as enjoining the mind to furnish some syllogistic self-definition. In fact, mind (mens) is intrinsically self-aware: “when it seeks to know itself, it already knows itself seeking” (ADT, 10.2.5). By definition, mind lives, for “it cannot be mind and not be alive . . . But it knows that it lives; therefore it knows its whole self. Finally, when the mind seeks to know itself it already knows that it is mind; otherwise, it would not know that it is seeking itself” (ADT, 10.2.6). Among the most original and compelling arguments in De Trinitate, Augustine’s critical engagement with the Delphic principle of self-knowledge takes that exhortation to mean that mind “should think about itself and live according to its nature” (secundum naturam suam vivat). In what amounts to a reorientation of the Stoic doctrine of assent, Augustine thus notes how the mind, so richly embedded in and engaged with the external world, has become perilously attached to things by converting them into images whose status, for Augustine no less than Plotinus, remains deeply ambivalent. “Image” (as eidos/imago) may certainly be appraised as the representation of an already secondary, ectypal, and imperfect world and, hence, as something deficient and potentially misleading—an “illusion” (eidolon).
Yet at the same time, Augustine is close enough to the Platonic tradition to recognize that the image is never merely determined by its putative referent but also points back to the source from which that referent—the ectypal world of created things-of-sense—derives its existence. In this latter sense, each image constitutes a trace of its archetype, a point strongly affirmed by the evident fact that the essence and seat of the image is in the human mind rather than in the three-dimensional world to which it ostensibly refers. “A ‘slide’ in the estimation of the image is therefore possible. It may be thought as having very little share in reality,” or even as dialectically revealing the ultimate enigma of the material world, a point forcefully made by Plotinus’s characterization of the ghostly nature of “matter” (ύλη) and still prominent in early patristic thought (Origen, Eusebius).38 Both dimensions of the image—as a form of reference and as trace of the divine, respectively—operate in Augustine’s work on the Trinity. Inasmuch as the mind’s commerce with the world involves an elaborate web of imagistic representations, it is forever at risk of becoming enslaved by its own projections. Having given “something of its own substance to their formation,” the mind risks becoming attached to its images “with the glue of care, [and] it drags them along with itself even when it returns after a fashion to thinking about itself [eisque curae glutino inhaeserit, attrahat secum etiam cum ad se cogitandam quodam modo redit]” (ADT, 10.2.7). As James Wetzel notes, “Augustine tends to redescribe problems of knowledge . . . as problems of will or agency, thereby making the appropriation of knowledge and not knowledge per se his explanandum.”39 By its very nature, mind is acquisitive and proprietary as it converts objects into images and,
in its destitution and distress . . . becomes excessively intent on its own actions, and the disturbing pleasures it culls from them; being greedy to acquire knowledge of all sorts from things outside itself, which it loves as known in a general way and feels can easily be lost unless it takes great care to hold onto them, it loses its carefree sense of security, and thinks of itself all the less the more secure it is in the sense that it cannot lose itself.40
This is a fine instance of how for Augustine epistemological and moral questions are essentially entwined; representation of the world by means of the “image” (imago) is prone to induce an acquisitive and proprietary state of mind, and the security of these virtual possessions tends to render mind oblivious of its strict metaphysical dependency on divine grace—a point nicely captured by the chiasmic construction that concludes the above passage.
Augustine’s basic view that the things with which we are engaged surreptitiously come to define our very being (“when the mind thinks of itself like that, it thinks like a body” [ADT, 10.3.8]) thus traces the epistemological sources of the divided will whose spiritual burden he had already explored in the Confessions. Rather than zeroing in on itself as the object of some eventual, clarifying proposition, the remedy involves instructing the mind in the (originally Stoic) art of developing distance vis-à-vis its own projections: “when it is bidden to know itself, it should not start looking for itself as though it had drawn off from itself, but should draw off what it has added to itself . . . Let the mind then not go looking for a look at itself as if it were absent, but rather take pains to tell itself apart as present. Let it not try to learn itself as if it did not know itself, but rather to discern itself from what it knows to be other [sed ab eo quod alterum novit dignoscat]” (ADT, 10.3.11–12). To do so is, at last, to “turn on to itself the interest of its will” (sed intentionem voluntatis . . . statuat in semetipsam).41 Thus, simply by grasping the nature of self-knowledge the mind has already fulfilled the injunction: “it is being commanded to do something which it automatically does the moment it understands the command.” The basic psychological schema—composed of memory, intelligence, and will—breaks down into different types of awareness, achieved by memoria and intellegere, and the agency proper, the will, which “is there for us to enjoy them or use them” (ADT, 10.3.12).
In Books 10–12 Augustine works out a homology between the internal relation of the senses, the faculty of the intellect, and the Trinity. Parsing memory, understanding, and will, Augustine construes the mind as structurally cognate with the relation of the divine persons. While “not three lives but one life, not three minds but one mind, . . . each of them is life and mind and being with reference to itself.” Augustine’s careful insistence on the co-presence of memoria, intelligentia, and voluntas (ADT, 10.4.18) constitutes a shrewd rhetorical move. Thus the more challenging aspects of Trinitarian theology are illustrated and affirmed by seemingly self-evident psychological realities, while at the same time suggesting that the structure of the mind in actu reflects a divine and providential arrangement. At least in part, Augustine’s reciprocal account, in which Trinitarian and psychological argumentation and evidence mutually sustain each other, has to be seen against a contentious history in which the volatile political divisions of late imperial Rome had become entangled with complex theological and social issues, such as the ongoing dispute over the understanding of the Trinity between the Councils of Nicaea (A.D. 325) and Constantinople (A.D. 381), the political and social status of pagan religions, and the widening gap between the Eastern and Western churches.42 In taking up the “relation” of the mind to itself, Augustine’s De Trinitate enters a debate that had barely quieted down following the defeat of Arianism at the Council of Constantinople whose resolutions he felt still required a great deal of analytic work. Crucially, De Trinitate seeks to clarify the strictly organic—not hierarchical—interaction of the mind’s psychological faculties which, consistent with Trinitarian thought, Augustine views as distinct manifestations of a single essence. Mind is defined by their inter-relation and, as such, “perceives its whole self and nothing else.” As he puts it, in the soul (anima) the different functions “are, so to say, all rolled up and have to be unrolled in order to be perceived and enumerated—substantially or being-wise, . . . and not as in a subject [essentialiter, non tanquam in subjecto], like color or shape in a body, or any other quality or quantity” (ADT, 9.1.5).
The relation of will to intellect and memory first established in the Confessions (10.11.18) is integrative by nature. Mind is not an aggregate of three discrete faculties, but “these three are one thing, and when they are complete they are equal” (ADT, 9.1.4). In characterizing the relation between mind, love, and knowledge (as well as the triad of memory, intelligence, and will), Augustine frequently stresses that the difference of these faculties is not substantive but functional: “thus mind is of course in itself, since it is called mind with reference to itself, though it is called knowing or known or knowable relative to its knowledge; also as loving and loved or lovable it is referred to the love it loves itself with” (ADT, 9.1.8). Moreover, the discrete functions always interpenetrate one another, such that “the mind loving is in love, and love is in the knowledge of the lover, and knowledge is in the mind knowing” (ADT, 9.1.8). This at once differential and integrative (Trinitarian) conception of mental functions—for which Augustine, wishing to avoid the undifferentiated collective omnes, fashions the somewhat idiosyncratic Latin tota vero in totis quemadmodum sint (“how they are all in all”)—is crucial to Augustine’s anthropology and psychology. For if each faculty were to be credited with operating independently of the others, not just as regards its function but doing so incommunicado, as it were, one might very well conclude that an act might be undertaken without full responsibility, that an act of will might occur without consciousness, etc. Against this disjunctive (skeptical) view, Augustine insists on the outright convertibility of mind and self-awareness:
nobody surely doubts, however, that he lives and remembers and understands and wills and thinks and knows and judges. At least, even if he doubts, he lives, if he doubts, he remembers why he is doubting, if he doubts, he understands he is doubting, if he doubts, he has a will to be certain, if he doubts, he thinks, if he doubts, he knows he does not know; if he doubts, he judges he ought not to give a hasty assent.43
Thus the most elemental operation of sight (e.g., of some thing outside ourselves) already reveals the presence of a “conscious intention” (animi intentio) inasmuch as we are not merely gazing at something but positively sustain our focus on the object in question. Even in a blind person “the desire to see remains intact” (ADT, 11.1.2). Behind every event or act stands the will to focus “attention” on the thing seen, a point that emerges clearly when, in the absence of the object in question, memory retrieves it. This it can only do because the initial vision had involved an act of “conscious attention” (acies animi). Indeed, already the very act of sight—by virtue of the agency of the will—transposes raw sensory data into an image or internal vision, and it is only the latter that can ever be retrieved by memory later on.
Though seemingly neutral in its engagement with an ambient world of sensory objects, every mental operation presupposes a will if it is to have any coherent and sustained orientation. Hinting how the psychology of perception is enmeshed with the hermeneutic of the human person and, ultimately, with the ontology of original sin, Augustine thus notes that “the will was already there before sight occurred [prius enim quam visio fieret, jam erat voluntas], and it applied the sense to the body to be formed from it by observing it.”44 Mind is dependent on the senses, and the quality of their interaction points to the agency of the will as the indispensable tertium quid. To be sure, this connection has to be established in somewhat oblique fashion since Augustine must take care not to indict the created, material world as intrinsically defective. Rather, the divided will is said to correlate to human life’s intrinsic split between the sensory and the intelligible:
By the very logic of our condition, according to which we have become mortal and carnal, it is easier and almost more familiar to deal with visible than with intelligible things, even though the former are outside and the latter inside us, the former sensed with the senses of the body and the latter understood with the mind, while we conscious selves are not perceptible by the senses, not bodies, that is, but only intelligible, because we are life [nosque ipsi animi non sensibiles simus, id est, corpora, sed intelligibiles, quoniam vita sumus]. (ADT, 11.1.1)
At first glance, we seem to have been returned to the world of Gnostic speculation or, perhaps, to its belated resurgence in William Blake’s Book of Urizen (1793), which depicts man’s creation as a kind of fall (“rent from Eternity”) into an embodied and confined “state of dismal woe” vividly depicted by the restriction of eternity to what can be apprehended by the senses, including the eyes—“two little orbs . . . fixed in two little caves” (CPP, 76). Traces of the Gnostics’ division between a demiurge responsible for the abject state of material creation and a redeemer God capable of restoring the fallen beings to a state of divine fullness (plēroma) seem to linger in Augustine’s argument.
Yet such a reading of Augustine and of his neo-Platonic precursors needs to be revised.45 To be sure, Augustine does regard the mind’s very dependence on the senses as prima facie evidence of inherited sin; yet this is not to say that sensory mediation is per se the cause of sin. Rather, our dependence on the senses is for Augustine the source of profound and abiding confusion, and only in an entirely mediate sense can such confusion be viewed as the proximate cause of sin. The argument in question begins with Augustine noting how, by dint of its perceptual habits, the self is liable to lose track of the distinction between an inner sense of “sight” (visio) furnishing the condition of possibility for perception and the contingent activation of that sensory apparatus by external appearances. His analysis here differs markedly from Aristotelian and Stoic epistemology (subsequently echoed by Aquinas), according to which the human being’s reliance on the senses constitutes a neutral anthropological fact and indeed a natural consequence of how finite and embodied beings have been created. Mounting a far more evaluative argument, Augustine not only demurs our habitual obliviousness of the distinction between the power of sight and its externally triggered activity, but he further distinguishes between the faculty in actu and the will that directs its attention: “the conscious intention [animi intentio] which holds our sense on the thing we are seeing and joins the two together not only differs in nature from that visible thing, since it is consciousness while that is body, but it also differs from the sense itself and the sight, since this intention belongs only to the consciousness [quoniam solius animi est haec intentio]” (ADT, 11.1.2). Since perception is not some merely reactive and occasional event but a form of intentionality, it cannot be understood as a value-neutral, “innocent” act but reveals the basic inclination of the will.
Augustine’s position was to be recovered by a strand of modern phenomenology. Extending arguments by Edmund Husserl, Robert Sokolowski thus argues that sensory perception is premised on what he calls “veracity . . . , an inclination that needs to be wanted.” Contrary to some “indifferent impulse,” the process of sensory perception reveals our pre-conceptual stance vis-à-vis the world. To be sure, Heidegger, and long before him Kant, had elaborated how rationality invariably originates in a pre-conceptual ground—some type of aesthetic “mood” or existential “attunement” (Stimmung). Yet for Augustine, such a position would seem precariously impersonal and adventitious—a function of shamanistic contingency rather than an elective commitment. Thus, he attributes our responsiveness to sensory perception to the inner disposition of our will, which either allows or denies phenomena to disclose themselves to us in their fullness. Likewise, “it is not the case that our reason gathers in various truths in an impersonal manner, and that our responsibility starts up only after such acquisitions have taken place.” Rather, “the very disclosure of things, the initial manifestation that makes the options available, depends on our responsiveness to the way things are.”46 Far from being some impersonal and universal mode of uptake or default of our being “thrust into the world” (Heidegger’s Geworfenheit), a person’s “responsiveness” even to seemingly elemental, sensory phenomena invariably presupposes, and potentially reveals, her or his spiritual condition or will; all perception always implies (and potentially reveals) something qualitative about both the percept and the perceiver.
Even at a basic epistemological level, the operation of the will is the necessary condition for the reality of the soul (anima) and the specific operation (actus) of the tripartite mind (mens): “the will, then, turns the attention here and there and back again to be formed, and once formed keeps it joined to the image in the memory [voluntas vero illa quae hac atque illac fert et refert aciem formandam, conjungitque formatam, si ad interiorem phantasiam tota confluxerit]” (ADT, 11.2.7). Imagination (phantasia), a key term for the Stoics and Plotinus, furnishes evidence that “the image of the visible thing is formed in our sense when we see it” (formari in sensu nostro imaginem rei visibilis [ADT, 11.1.3). Indeed, even in the absence of such a thing, we may reconstitute or contrive objects of possible experience (to use a Kantian phrase) “by increasing, diminishing, altering, and putting . . . together” memory images in entirely novel ways.47 There are, then, three building blocks of sensory experience: “that form of the body which is seen, and its image imprinted on the sense which is sight or formed sense [impressa ejus imago sensui quod est visio sensusve formatus], and the conscious will which applies the sense to the sensible thing and holds the sight on it”; and all are “compounded into a kind of unity” because “the will exerts such force in coupling the [other] two together” (ADT, 11.1.5). Echoing less the relaxed vision of Plotinus than the otherworldly stress of Porphyry, Augustine does indeed view the body as an antagonist of the spirit, albeit only insofar as the world of finite creation tends to distract the soul from its ideal upward trajectory.48 Yet even if Augustine may have missed or ignored some of its more flamboyant elements, Plotinus’s version of Platonism nonetheless appears to have furnished an important counterweight to Augustine’s more stridently dualist, Pauline views; by helping “to overcome the tendency to a sometimes positively frenzied dislike of this world and of the body, which seems to have curiously deep roots in the religion of the Incarnation.”49 As he was to observe later in De Civitate Dei,
we are pressed down by the corruptible body, . . . yet we know that the cause of our being pressed down is not the nature and substance of the body, but its corruption; and, knowing this, we do not wish to be divested of the body, but to be clothed with its immortality . . . Those who suppose that the ills of the soul derive from the body are in error, . . . for though this corruption of the flesh results in some incitements to sin and in sinful desires themselves, we still must not attribute to the flesh all the vices of a wicked life . . . It is not by having flesh . . . that man has become like the devil. Rather, it is by living according to his own self; that is, according to man [sed vivendo secundum se ipsum, hoc est secundum hominem, factus est homo similis diabolo]. (14.3)
An analogous, threefold relation of “memory and internal sight [internae visionis] and the will” (ADT, 11.2.6) obtains even when objects of sense are not present but only remembered. Mining the etymology of cogo (a contraction of coago = to coerce or bring together), Augustine thus sets forth a synthetic model of knowledge whereby discrete mental functions “are coagitated into a unity the result [of which] is called cogitation, or thought [quae tria cum in unum coguntur, ab ipso coactu cogitatio dicitur]” (ADT, 11.2.6). Augustine’s principal challenge now becomes to show that the will is neither the antecedent and superior source (“quasi-parent”) of cognition nor its belated “quasi-offspring.” For in the first case, the result would be a quintessentially modern theory of knowledge as sheer projection of a will denuded of all self-awareness—one whose variously mechanist, necessitarian, associationist, or pessimist form we find developed by Hobbes, Locke, Gassendi, Mandeville, Hartley, Godwin, Priestley, and Schopenhauer, among others. The obverse scenario involves an account that demotes the will to a secondary, epiphenomenal agency exclusively tasked with implementing what cognition has furnished, thereby returning us to the Socratic maxim that moral action naturally arises from cognition. In fact, Augustine insists, memory and intelligence only ever operate in relation with the will, such that “in every one of them you find these three; the thing stowed away in the memory even before it is thought about, and the thing that is produced in thought when it is looked at, and the will joining the two together” (ADT, 11.3.12). As the dynamic principle of the mind, the will is the agency of choice and commitment in that it alone directs and sustains our focus of attention and so creates a quasi-intentional state (acies animi). Consequently, the specific orientation of mind (mens) involves an evaluative commitment that defines the person’s “soul” (anima): “just as it is the will which fastens [conjungit] sense to body, so it is the will which fastens memory to sense and the thinking attention to memory” (ADT, 11.3.15). Likewise, it is the will that “leads the thinking attention where it pleases through the stores of memory in order to be formed, and prompts it to take something from here out of the things we remember, something else from there, in order to think things we do not remember” (ADT, 11.3.17).
Augustine’s psychology of willing thus stands in sharp contrast to modernity’s overwhelmingly non-cognitive and irrational concept of volition as some externally induced compulsion. Far from being one of several faculties seemingly enjoying free-agent status, Augustine’s will constitutes the enduring and all-pervading substratum of personhood. It defines the essence of the person, which is to say, discloses her or his unique (if invariably divided and conflicted) identity. As such, it must not be mistaken for a mere attribute or faculty of the mind or the “self”—that is, some generic capacity supporting or, as the case may be, obstructing the intellect’s conceptual labors. In fact, Augustine’s will is neither subsidiary nor opposed to the intellect; strictly speaking, it is not even a “concept” at all, certainly not in the way that “intellect” (mens) or “reason” (ratio) may be said to constitute such. Neither can voluntas be predicated of multiple selves but, being incommunicable, it only discloses itself in the evolving narrative of a life realized by a singular and necessarily unique person. Still, the disclosure of the will is inseparable from the person’s habits of deliberation, choice, and action as these take place within the intellect, a point frequently overlooked by modern hyper-Augustinian writers such as Luther who, in rather Manichean fashion, construe the will as an antagonist of reason forever chafing at the constraints that any enduring commitment to a rational order would allegedly impose on it. It is just this development that now stands to be traced.
1. Tusculan Disputations, 4.6.12.
2. Kahn, “Discovering the Will,” 241.
3. Ibid., 242.
4. Ibid., 241, 250.
5. Ibid., 253, 247.
6. Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person, 21, 66.
7. Kahn, “Discovering the Will,” 248. The role of Plotinus in this emergent tradition is rather more extensive than can be addressed within the confines of this argument. Undoubtedly central to discussions of the will is Ennead, 6.8. Kahn notes how “from the Neoplatonists Augustine gratefully accepted the notion of a purely intelligible, noncorporeal domain of reality, to which the human will belonged together with the intellect” (255); see also Dihle, Theory of Will, 123–130.
8. Dihle, Theory of Will, 133.
9. Ibid., 143.
10. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:85; likewise, Dihle notes that even as Seneca appears to intuit “that will should be grasped independently of both cognition and irrational impulse,” it was not until Augustine that philosophy was able to “develop the distinct notion of will” (Theory of Will, 134–135).
11. Dihle, Theory of Will, 124–125. The Platonic axiom is stated very clearly in the Hippias Minor, which arrives at this position by having examined two types of deficiency (in practical art and moral reasoning alike), viz., those arising from “involuntary” (ἀκούσίως) and “voluntary” (ἠκούσίως), respectively. Unsurprisingly, a vast body of critical literature has accumulated on the role of the will in Augustine’s thought; for introductory accounts, see Stump, “Augustine on Free Will,” Wetzel, “Snares of Truth,” and Dihle, Theory of Will, 123–144.
12. Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 3–4.
13. Stump, “Augustine on Free Will,” 131.
14. See Wetzel’s superb discussion of predestination and will in Augustine (“Snares of Truth”); quote from 123.
15. Hanby (Augustine and Modernity, 7) goes on to argue how “both the soul and the city ‘answer’ to each other by obeying the same dynamic of sin, dissolution and conversion, just one of many macrocosmic/microcosmic isomorphisms that complicate the meaning of Augustinian interiority” (10).
16. Stump, “Augustine on Free Will,’ 131; Stump offers a concise account of how, “in one treatise after another, Augustine grapples with the problem of making God the sole source of all goodness in the post-Fall human will without taking away from human beings control over the wills . . . In the end, Augustine makes it clear that he cannot solve this problem and that he knows it” (ibid., 139).
17. Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 7–8. Hanby concurs that “the Pelagian failure is . . . attributable to those stoic debts and the ontological baggage they bring. In employing a conception of self-hood and agency whose original ontological register was the immanentist and monist cosmology of the stoics, the Pelagian self will carry into Christian thought and practice the tensions intrinsic to this cosmology” (Augustine and Modernity, 92).
18. Wetzel, “Snares of Truth,” 132.
19. Dihle, Theory of Will, 127; see also Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:95.
20. Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, 98.
21. Plotinus, Ennead, 1.4.10. For a discussion of Novalis’s critique of the paradox of reflexivity in his Fichte-Studien, see Pfau, Romantic Moods, 45–63.
22. Hadot, Plotinus, 32–33. Speaking of “the secret of Plotinian gentleness,” Hadot observes how “there is no struggle against the self, no spiritual ‘combat’ in Plotinian asceticism” (95).
23. Stump, “Augustine on Free Will,” 126.
24. Wetzel, “Snares of Truth,” 130. The proof-text for Augustine’s divided will is Romans 7:15: “For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate, that I do” (quod enim operor non intellego non enim quod volo hoc ago sed quod odi illud facio).
25. Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata, 166–167.
26. As remains to be seen, in discussions of both Aquinas and Adam Smith below, “habit” in Augustine functions in markedly different ways. Overwhelmingly, he views habit as sinful, indeed as “the law of sin . . . by which mind is held fast and dragged along as punishment for slipping willingly into it” (Confessions, 8.5.12). Because for Augustine any instance in which the soul is acted upon by the body is inherently sinful, he cannot envision—as Aquinas in his account of habit (habitus) eventually does—the possibility of mind and spirit being strengthened by repeated, purposive acts of the body. On this topic, see Prendeville, “Idea of Habit.”
27. Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 67.
28. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:85; Dihle, Theory of Will, 132.
29. Sources, 130–131; extending Hauerwas’s and Matzko’s critique of Taylor’s account as one-sided and inattentive to the ways in which the self’s inner constitution becomes intelligible and justified only as part of a supra-personal narrative movement toward the City of God, Aers emphasizes how Augustine “reflects, characteristically, on the limits of our self-awareness.” Indeed, even the post-conversion Augustine is portrayed, in the Confessions (10.32.48), as an “enigma” (quaestio) to himself, and his self-reflexivity yields neither clarity nor certainty but lamentable darkness in which his obscure potentials are hidden” (Salvation and Sin, 8, 10). For a similar critique that reads Taylor as oblivious of “Augustine’s politics [as] a counter-interpretation of his [Taylor’s] account of the modern self,” see Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, 6–12 (quote from p. 10). Taylor has a point, nonetheless, in that the history of Lutheran and Cartesian modernity is inseparable from its often one-sided appropriation of Augustine’s understanding of selfhood as a divided inwardness.
30. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:95.
31. Hegel, herein also concurring with Augustine, connects this anthropological link between self-awareness and discontinuity to the phenomenology of inner-time consciousness, and he aptly defines time as “absolute unrest” (die absolute Unruhe) and “absolute self-division” (absolute Selbstzerissenheit [PS, 487/PG, 558]).
32. Dihle, Theory of Will, 125–126. C. Taylor’s initial suggestion that “Augustine gives us a Platonic understanding of the universe as an external realization of a rational order” (Sources, 128) seems rather at odds with his overall reading of Augustine’s “calling us within” (in interiore homine).
33. On Augustine’s “Stoic appropriation of Plato,” see Wetzel, who notes that “Stoic rather than Neoplatonic influence informed [Augustine’s] early views of virtue, autonomy, and the good life and disposed him to think Stoically about ethics throughout his career as a philosopher and theologian” (Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 10–11); for fuller accounts of Augustine’s inconsistent uses of and evolving relation to Stoicism, see Colish, Stoic Tradition, 142–238, and Verbeke, “Augustin et le Stoïcisme.” Hanby is right to question Taylor’s reading here, “which makes the trinitarian context” for Augustine’s psychology “appear incidental” (Augustine and Modernity, 9).
34. For more detailed accounts of Augustine’s conception of free will in relation to grace, see Kirwan, Augustine, 82–128; on the historical background of the controversy, see P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 340–366.
35. De Peccatorum Meritis, 2.4.4 (quoted in Kirwan, Augustine,108).
36. “Of Grace and Free Choice” (12; 20.41), in Answer to the Pelagians, 4.99.
37. Epistel 166.2.3 (as quoted in Teske, “Augustine’s Theory of Soul,” 118).
38. A. H. Armstrong, “Neoplatonic Valuations,” 42. See Plotinus, who puzzles over matter, concluding that it is “not soul or intellect or life or form or rational formative principle or limit—for it is unlimitedness—or power—for what does it make?—but, falling outside all these, it could not properly receive the title of being but would appropriately be called non-being . . . [or] truly not-being [μη όν]; it is a ghostly image [είδωλον και φάντασμα] of bulk . . . a phantom which does not remain and cannot go away either” (Ennead, 3.6.7); see also Eusebius’s letter to Constantia (of disputed authenticity), which echoes “the Origenian idea of an instrumental body added onto the soul as a result of sin” (Besançon, Forbidden Image, 120).
39. Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 14; see also Wetzel’s subsequent discussion of “Sin and Entropy” (ibid., 37–44).
40. ADT, 10.2.7: ideoque per egestatem ac difficultatem fit nimis intenta in actiones suas et inquietas delectationes quas per eas colligit; atque ita cupiditate acquirendi notitias ex iis quae foris sunt, quorum cognitum genus amat et sentit amitti posse, nisi impensa cura teneatur, perdit securitatem, tantoque se ipsam minus cogitat, quanto magis secura est quod se non possit amittere.
41. The inward focus is conveyed by the compound semetipsum (derived from the Greek ekenôsen).
42. For a concise overview, see MacCulloch, Christianity, 211–222; for detailed accounts, see Ayres, Nicea and its Legacy, 41–130, and Cassiday and Norris, eds., Cambridge History of Christianity, esp. the essays by Khaled Anatolios (“Discourse on the Trinity”), Alan Brown (“The Intellectual Debate between Christians and Pagans”), and Mark Edwards (“Synods and Councils”).
43. ADT, 10.3.14; having been misled by Cicero into thinking of Aristotle’s De Anima as a materialist account of mind, Augustine resists the notion, later adopted by Aquinas, that the soul is the form of the body (ADT, 10.3.15).
44. ADT, 11.3.9. A famous instance of the sense of sight being enslaved by a sinful will and, as such, continuing to enslave a person by sheer force of habit would be that of Augustine’s friend Alypius, mentioned in Confessions, caught up in voyeuristic thralldom to violent gladiatorial shows and eventually wounded in the soul by the act of sight (Confessions, 6.8.13). See also Augustine’s emphatic indictment of “carnal sight,” “bodily illusions,” “unreal bodies,” “empty shadows,” and other “illusions of mine” in Confessions, 3.6.10.
45. Often misattributed to Plotinus, the view of the natural (created) world as fallen, ectypal, and reprehensible is anything but neo-Platonic. For a nuanced discussion of Platonist thought and its tempering influence on Augustine, see Armstrong, “Neoplatonic Valuations.”
46. Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person, 93–94.
47. See ADT, 11.2.8. Notably, the terminology here shifts from the morally neutral imago to a concern with potential (self-)deception at the hands of “imaginative fancies” (imaginata phantasmata).
48. What Augustine read of Plotinus, and to what extent he received Plotinus’s teachings from Porphyry or Marius Victorinus also remains a matter of much debate; following O’Connell’s earlier work, Hilary Armstrong suggests that “Augustine missed just those elements in the thought of Plotinus which . . . are capable of stimulating the artistic imagination and inducing a positive attitude to the body and the sense world” (“Neoplatonic Valuations,” 39).
49. Ibid., 38.