Human nature, even in sinners, is superior to the beasts. For it is the nature of man that is from God, not the wickedness in which he implicates himself by an evil use of free will. Nevertheless, if he did not possess free will, he would not have the same excellence in nature.
—AUGUSTINE, The Literal Meaning of Genesis
If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.
—SPINOZA, The Ethics
We have come to the middle, to the pivot, to the turning point.1 Up till now my aim has been to pick out some salient examples of ethics on the ground, so to speak. In the first chapter I surveyed the history of moral education in the United States in order to identify our pervasive cultural and historical assumptions about why people are ethical and how to get them to be ethical. That view was that human beings have free will. Free will is the belief that each of us (unless we are children beneath the “age of reason” or mentally incompetent) has enough independence from history, context, culture, group, present situation, and even biology to enable us, uniquely as a species, to be the originators (in some sense and to some meaningful degree) of our actions, choosing them freely and hence being individually responsible for them. That claim is the standard reason given for why we deserve praise for good actions and blame for bad ones. Then in Chapter 2 I picked out exemplary cases of both astonishing evil and saintly goodness, mostly transpiring during the Nazi Holocaust, with the hope of bringing into clearer view what needs to be explained: how and why some people, ordinary people, committed astonishingly evil actions and others good (sometimes extraordinarily good) actions. And why did it seem so unpredictable on the face of it, from people’s pre-Nazi normal lives, who would be in which camp? Why did so many people engage in evil, and why did others, fewer but still a significant number, engage in acts of exceeding humanity, endangering themselves in rescuing social pariahs? I raised the question of whether there were common factors that led some people toward doing good and others toward doing harm and even murder, then in the next chapter took up that question more systematically by turning to survey and explore the group processes that had emerged and become keenly visible in the Holocaust, and similar evidence. The preliminary answer seemed to be that in the cases of both perpetration and rescue, what came into focus as significant causal factors were social processes of group identity and the authoritative interpretation of situations, the relation to the larger society, group attitudes toward the legitimacy of the dominant authority, and the like, rather than the expected differences in individual character or in the rational free choice of some individuals to act according to moral principles or chosen virtues, and of others not to or to fail to. So at that point I turned to explore what is known from the research on the psychology (and especially the social psychology) of good and evil. I continued to survey the results of experiments whose aim had been to explore rigorously and systematically various conditions that were hypothesized to induce and produce, or at least influence, either good or bad actions from unwary volunteers.
At this juncture, the reader ought to be keenly aware that we are confronting a conflict or at least an unresolved tension: on one hand, the basic assumptions in our society about why we are moral and become moral turn on the standard belief that each of us has free will and ought to exercise our independent moral judgment in all situations and make the right choices, freely making the decisions that we consciously and rationally discern to be in accordance with moral principles and rules or to conform to the virtues of courage, kindness, prudence, fairness, and the like. On the other hand, we have the amassed evidence of how normal people actually behaved in the morally crucial but also extreme situations of the Holocaust and Abu Ghraib prison, for example, and also in the morally significant but not extreme situations of the psych lab, the boardroom, and similar places. In all these situations we were confronted with the fact that freely willed—that is, decisive, independent, rationally thought out, and fully aware—action taken on principle or for virtue’s sake, originating with and within ourselves alone, was astoundingly rare, if not altogether glaringly absent. So the standard explanation seems to fail to explain the facts on the ground, accounting neither for moral failure nor, perhaps more remarkably, on the whole, for moral good. We can dismiss, perhaps all too easily, the former failure of explanation: after all, it may be that we ought not to expect people to choose the good and do the right thing most of the time. So our moral failures may be due to the nature and magnitude of moral weakness, weakness of the will, what the philosophers call akrasia, namely, knowing the good but doing the bad. If akrasia is the problem, then free will is off the hook, because these immoral folks could simply have had a failure of will—a view that still holds that they ought to have used the free will they had.2 For the moment, let’s grant this possibility to the free willers. Yet if they’re right, the free will theory ought to account for people’s motives and actions when they actually do do good—the Holocaust rescuers, for example. But that doesn’t seem to be the case at all, for individual freely willed action on principle, taken as the result of rational deliberation about the facts of the case or, alternatively, to enact a chosen virtue, did not appear to explain the evidence I amassed about why those who rescued did so, nor did it predict or explain the behavior of good Samaritans and all the rest.3
Current scientific evidence is now pointing in the direction that a human capacity—let alone a separate faculty or, in contemporary lingo, a discrete brain module—for conscious free will is not borne out by the neurosciences. Instead, it now appears that determinism—not reductively material causation but a determinism that includes consciousness—holds sway in the neurobiology of the brain.4 This means that beliefs and culture, biography and history, social position and location, current situation, and all the rest are causal factors in our actions as much as genetic and other biological factors are. Yet none of these causes and contexts is freely willed—we cannot shed any of them at will. Instead, together they produce us: they produce our thinking and motivation, that is, our actions. And there is no sense in which we stand above them as the “originating cause” of our actions. They are not mere influences upon us, something that is easily dispensed with.
Before we go into the philosophical discussions that address the implications of causal determinism for the possibility of moral freedom and the validity of moral valuations, I want to define some terms and make some distinctions here briefly. There is a vast literature on the topic, and I cannot attempt to do it justice. What I want to do here is to present some of the basic terms and issues of the philosophical debate and then expose some underlying assumptions of the entire enterprise as culturally provincially Western and emergent from barely secularized Latin theological tradition and origins. My aim will be to show that the current debate—which is based on the unexamined presupposition that its terms are universal in that all people by virtue of their humanity hold certain assumptions about their actions and moral nature—in fact and instead takes place within a narrow cultural framework and set of presuppositions. I argue that the assumptions we hold about how and why we are moral, which set the terms of the debate, are merely those of the Latin West. They appeal to deep yet implicit cultural narratives about human nature and about how humans fit into the universe and into the natural world. Setting the belief in free will in its cultural place allows other ways of defining the problem of the psychology of moral agency to enter the picture from different cultural worlds. This chapter exposes the Western Latin provincialism of our philosophical and widespread cultural anthropology, exposing the ongoing hold of a theological story that has been secularized, but barely. The next chapter builds on this one by setting forth a historical and available alternative cultural view of why we are ethical, why we are not, and how we can become more ethical and get others to become so, too. The alternative ethical vision, Spinoza’s, harks back to the Greek classical notion of the human person, a notion that was jettisoned by early Latin Christianity but was taken up and developed by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish philosophers in the eastern Mediterranean world.
“‘Free Will’ is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. . . . Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility” and reward or punishment, praise or blame.5 That is how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines free will and its hold on contemporary philosophers. The classical problem of free will involves contradictory claims, and so it poses a logical dilemma. For in the West, people’s standard assumptions include the belief that people can act other than the way they in fact do and also the belief that all events are caused. So here is the problem: people believe both that things could not have been different (because they were caused to be the way they are) and also that they could have been different (because human beings have free will).6
In order to make our beliefs logically consistent, philosophers turn to strategies that either reject one or more of these claims or redefine and refine the meaning of one or both. These strategies have produced a standard range of different positions that set the terms of the debate. The field is divided into two camps: incompatibilists and compatibilists. Incompatibilists hold that a belief in free will and a belief in the causal determination of all events cannot be reconciled. Compatibilists believe that free will and causal determinism can be reconciled. Within these two broad categories there are different variants. Incompatibilists can be agnostics, in the sense that they do not take a stand on whether determinism or free will is true. They can be libertarians, arguing that free will is true and determinism false because the universe is indeterministic, or because “human agents are the cause of freely willed actions” but “are not themselves caused.” Or they can be hard determinists who deny free will, which is to say, they deny that people can do anything different from what they do.7
Philosophers who are compatibilists regard free will and determinism as compatible notions. They argue from a variety of perspectives that one can consistently hold both that all actions have causes that result necessarily in those actions and also that people have the freedom to choose their actions. Compatibilism, in one of its versions, is presently the most widely held position among philosophers.8 That is now beginning to change, however, in the light of the findings of the new brain sciences.
Classical compatibilists deny that believing that all actions are causally determined means no one could act differently.9 They argue that even though all actions are causally determined, there is still real choice among alternatives.10 Other compatibilists, however, argue that determinism does seem to pose a threat to the possibility of real alternatives and choices, for if determinism is true only one future is possible. So these compatibilists argue that an ability to choose from alternative courses of action is not necessary for freedom. Instead what is necessary is that one is the source of one’s actions.11 To be the source of one’s actions means that human beings are not determined by webs of relations, biology, psychology, context, and the like, but somehow by some internal will beyond or beneath all these. Nevertheless this model, too, is problematic, for “no compatibilist . . . can deny the truth of the . . . premise . . . [that i]f determinism is true, no one is the ultimate source of her actions.”12 That is because, as determinists, compatibilists believe that all the internal and external causes that make up a person in fact do determine how she acts. The compatibilist must come up with an account of agency that both is causally deterministic yet also can accommodate either real alternative choices or some form of substantial self-origination of one’s own actions.13
Accounts of free will or choice rely upon the mind being a different sort of thing and a different kind of cause from the body. We in the West see ourselves as harboring a deep divide, and it underlies the claim of free will. “The [standard] notion [is] that ‘actions’ and ‘events’ are two exclusive categories,” the philosopher Joe Keith Green remarks. What this amounts to is that the standard philosophical notion of reasons (for actions) presupposes that those reasons are only mental: we choose mental reasons and then direct the body to act. Those mental reasons are not considered to be in webs of beliefs and culture that we merely adopt, but are instead freely chosen through reason alone as worthy of being acted upon. Events, however, unlike actions, do not come about in this way. They are within contextual causal nexuses rather than chosen from alternatives or fully originated in mental acts via rational considerations (reasons). Compatibilists believe that actions are contextually determined events, yet they also mentally and freely originate in an individual’s reasons. They are both events and actions (in this sense), and the two explanations can be reconciled.14
Freedom of choice among alternatives (or, alternatively, being the mental originator and source of one’s actions) is regarded by compatibilists as well as by free will advocates as being necessary for moral responsibility, for ascribing praise and blame, and for determining degrees of culpability, punishment, and reward. Taking the person out of context—out of influences, appropriations, natural inheritance, and social belonging—seems so natural and obvious as the basis for holding people morally responsible that almost limitless philosophical ink has been spilled on the problem. Yet why does it feel so natural to us to embrace a division between the mental and the physical and to identify the mental with will, and especially with free will? It is a particular Western cultural inheritance, with a history that can be traced from its beginning to the present. For it is a barely secularized version of an Augustinian theological conception of the universe, a conception that still dominates our culture and which we take for granted.
So we have a situation in which an almost universal belief has been dogmatically held by the general public and also embraced historically and still widely by philosophers, yet at the same time has been called into question by the social and natural sciences and even by a lot of the facts on the ground for the past eighty years or so. This cries out for explanation. Why this depth of adherence to a notion of free will as the sine qua non of moral action and responsibility? What are the origins of the concept, and what accounts for its ongoing appeal? These are the questions of this chapter.
Our standard ideas about moral action and moral responsibility are so strong, so ubiquitous, that our minds are all but closed to alternative construals of what it takes to be ethical. So we need to expose in detail what the standard presuppositions about free will are, why we have them, and why we are stuck in them. Why have the research of Milgram and Zimbardo, the fact of the Holocaust, the concept of groupthink, and all the rest failed to make inroads into our thinking about moral agency?
There is a cultural depth to the problem of ethics in the Western world. The concept of free will is rooted in a pervasive and ancient Latin Christian theological anthropology that has been secularized mostly only on the surface, for our basic Western understanding of moral psychology is embedded deeply within us. What this means is that Western beliefs to this day assume things about human nature that arose as part of the Augustinian theological story. Even though most of us perhaps do not embrace that story literally anymore, or instead reserve that belief for a religious context, there are ideas about human nature implicit in the Augustinian version of the Christian story that continue to have a deep hold on us. These beliefs particularly influence our understanding of moral agency—how and why we act ethically and why we often don’t. We’ll now turn to the history of how we got to the point at which free will seems to be the only game in town. My major claim is that we in the West are still wedded, if largely beneath our awareness, to a normative Augustinian Christian theological conception of what it means to be human, what it means to be moral, what the human place in the universe is, and what our relation to nature is. While that conception has undergone significant secularization, it still retains its basic outlines, for the secularization is more window dressing than real, and so it serves to disguise—and, paradoxically, to reinforce—rather than transform the basic underlying religious claims about human nature.
I am certain that Augustine respected the human will (he practically invented the concept).
—JAMES WETZEL
All the awe, all the sweetness, all the sense of a divine presence brought close to humankind that [the pagan Greek Hellenistic philosopher] Plotinus had seen in the cosmos, Augustine now saw in the perfectly tempered union of human and divine in one single human being, in Christ.
—PETER BROWN
There was a moment of invention, of creating a clear and new conception of human nature from disparate strands. This is what the powerful and powerfully influential fourth- and fifth-century theologian Augustine accomplished. The Augustinian conception of human nature took such powerful hold on the imagination that subsequent wrestling with human nature in the Christian West, in both theology and philosophy, has largely been a footnote to Augustine. Later theologians and philosophers periodically returned directly to Augustinian writings—in both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, for example—in response to the pressing problems of their own age, for both inspiration and legitimacy. Earlier, Augustine had been invoked in the thirteenth century to determine how far rebellious Aristotelian-leaning thinkers would be allowed to depart from his conception of free will; in that era, free will was formalized, radicalized, clarified, and nuanced by his advocates, and invoked in attenuated form by opponents. Even now the standard Western philosophical and general cultural beliefs about our moral capacity, on the whole, remain a footnote to Augustine.
Augustine redefined what it means to be human, what it means to be moral, and what the human role in the cosmos is. He made two fateful moves that mark a profound shift from the classical Greek worldview to the one that became commonplace in the West. The first move was to elevate free will to a cosmic principle, to the quintessential nature of God. The second was to carry this through to human nature as well, redefining the human mind in terms of will rather than rational understanding. The overall ideal of human striving, the terms of the relationship between the human person and God and between people (albeit manifested more in the breach than in the fulfillment), was now to hinge on voluntary choice rather than on the quest for knowledge.
The great scholar of late antiquity Peter Brown, at the end of his biography of Augustine—a biography that has now become a classic—proposes that Augustine produced a profound shift away from the culture of the ancient world: “Seen against the wider background of the classical philosophical tradition, Augustine’s magnificent preoccupation with the problem of the human person and his fascination with the working of the will represented a decisive change in emphasis.” Brown further points out that Augustine has been called the “inventor of our modern notion of will.” Augustine deflected the locus of human striving for meaning and purpose away from the philosophic and scientific search for the human place in nature and the cosmos and toward a concern for the individual will. His achievement was a “shift from cosmos to will,” “a turn[ing] away from the cosmos,” Brown says. The notion of free will and the intensity of focus upon it were, in a sense, shorthand for what Brown calls the “mighty displacement of an entire religious sensibility.” Moreover, “this displacement of attention from the cosmos to the saving work of God, through Christ, was the most hotly contested of [Augustine’s] many doctrines,” Brown points out.15 He concludes that Augustine’s “intervention proved decisive for the emergence of a distinctive notion of the individual in Western culture.”
What got left behind was the classical Greek reverence for nature, the sense of the magnificence of a natural world in which humans were at home and via which the glow of the divine could be glimpsed and some sparks of it captured through intellectual understanding. Peter Brown grasps in a nutshell the overall transformation initiated and instituted by Augustine:
[Augustine] allowed the Platonic sense of the majesty of the cosmos to grow pale. Lost in the narrow and ever fascinating labyrinth of his preoccupation with the human will . . . Augustine turned his back on the mundus, on the magical beauty associated with the material universe in later Platonism. . . . Augustine would never look up at the stars and gaze at the world around him with the shudder of religious awe that fell upon Plotinus, when he exclaimed . . . “All the place is holy” (as Oedipus had exclaimed at Colonus, and as Jacob had done at Bethel). . . . Augustine pointedly refused to share this enthusiasm. . . . Something was lost, in Western Christendom, by this trenchant and seemingly commonsensical judgement.
Brown even laments that “if Augustine was the ‘first modern man,’ then it is a ‘modernity’ bought at a heavy price.” For that price was the “dislodg[ing of] the self, somewhat abruptly and without regard to the consequences, from the embrace of a God-filled universe.”16
By attributing to the human mind (and hence the human person) the character of voluntary self-control and self-origination, Augustine turned away from a Greek classical conception of the mind (and hence human nature) as characterized by its cognitive capacities of critical thinking and insight, theoretical contemplation, natural discovery, and logical deduction and argument. Augustine’s fateful turn reoriented Western Latin culture away from the Platonic intellectualist conception of human moral nature as either clear-sighted or confused and benighted (and in either case within the natural order) and toward the idea of a human person as fundamentally moral or immoral, responsible or irresponsible, obedient or sinful through choice of action rather than through understanding and character.17 In the Platonic tradition, by contrast, the body’s corruption was responsible for the mind being morally clouded; hence moral ignorance—not active sin but the Greek hamartia, “missing the mark”—was the result of the problems inherent in embodiment. Aristotle’s view was a nuance on the Platonic: his was an account of moral action as stemming from moral character. In this theory, early socialization shaped desire, enabling a person to have the capacity for moral discernment and understanding, as well as deliberative reasoning. Augustine, in contrast, explicitly rejected the body as the source of ignorance or error, neither of which, in any case, could in his view ever account for sin. He regarded that view as pagan and said, “Those who suppose the ills of the soul derive from the body are in error.” Augustine in The City of God takes on Virgil’s moral Platonism, pointedly remarking, “Our faith . . . is something very different. For the corruption of the body, which presseth down the soul, was not the cause of the first sin, but its punishment; nor was it corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful, but the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible.”18 So it is not the body that is the source of the moral problem. Desire, Augustine further remarked, is not even possible without the soul, for it is not a merely bodily phenomenon. It takes a soul to have desires.19 The hardly controllable and disease-prone body, common to all humanity after Adam’s fall, is the divine punishment for sin, not the origin of sin, he insists. Souls are therefore not naturally better or worse due to their bodies, but instead, Augustine rhetorically asks: “For on what basis are souls good or better, or on the other hand not good or less good, except by their manner of life adopted by the free choice of the will . . . ?”20
The upshot of Augustine’s reduction of all internal mental operations—thoughts, emotions, feelings, judgments, learning—to acts of will is a new theory of moral psychology. This new theory amounted to nothing less than a shift in worldview—in the conception of the human person and of the universe that human beings inhabit and, hence, in the conception of moral agency—initiating a decisive break with the past by focusing on the freedom of the will and a concomitant demotion of nature. It is this worldview that we have inherited.
I want to elaborate here for a moment on the first crucial move that Augustine introduced to produce an overall reorientation in worldview. And I want to define more precisely his new conception of what it means for the human person to be a moral subject. The first move I want to call attention to is what in theological language is referred to as an emphasis on the divine will over the divine wisdom. Augustine does not hold the complete “reduction of the divine wisdom to the divine will,” yet he tends in that direction. It will be Descartes who “out-Augustines” Augustine, so to speak, and reduces all cognition to will, in both God and the human mind. The divine wisdom, in the theological tradition, refers to God’s knowledge: not the knowledge of the universe so much as the knowledge that God puts into the universe, namely, the regularities produced by independent forces of nature initially created and set in motion by God. So what is at stake here in the theological debate is God as the creator of a universe that embodies natural laws, laws that are thought to be the content of God’s mind (an assimilation of Platonic forms to Abrahamic religious sensibilities); or, alternatively, a God who creates the universe more by fiat than by science, so to speak.21 The latter is a God whose wisdom is subordinated to the divine will.
If God’s wisdom is emphasized, then God is considered to be the source of a natural necessity that plays out, but at the same time God is also in some sense subsequently limited in action and intervention by that natural order, or the naturalness of that order, in action and intervention. The shift from divine wisdom to divine will marks a move away from an ancient classical conception of nature and cosmos as redolent with the divine and exemplars of divine presence, and toward a different Christian view, one focused on the Incarnation. The historian Stephen Menn pinpoints the shift from the classical ancient to the Augustinian Christian worldview:
The Incarnation [for Augustine] presupposes that God has a will, which is not reducible to God’s knowledge [i.e., wisdom] . . . . For the Platonists, [by contrast,] God rules in accordance with the nature of things:. . . there is therefore no need for him to choose what he should send where. But it is not at all in accord with the nature of the recipient that Nous [the divine mind] itself should descend into a human body: this requires a will in God. . . .
Augustine thinks that the Platonists’ rejection (or incomprehension) of such a will in God, and of the Incarnation, arises from their presumption. . . . For Augustine, it is this crucial difference between Christians and Platonists that requires something like theology, and not simply scripture on the one hand and allegorizing philosophy on the other: where Incarnation and, more fundamentally, will, are central notions of this theology.22
The divine will has overtaken the divine wisdom.23
The key to understanding Augustine’s fateful move from divine wisdom to divine will is to see the move in terms of the role of miracles versus the role of natural causal processes. Augustine has elevated the importance of God’s miraculous power over God’s power as the source of the causal regularities of nature. For miracles represent the breaking through of a personal divine will into the regularities of the forces of natural lawful necessity. A miracle is the momentary (or not so momentary) purposeful suspension of the laws of nature. If there are no laws and forces of nature, then everything is a miracle, an unfathomable divine decision in any given moment. For example, on this view, that the flame was lit when the match was struck would be a divine free choice that could go the other way next time and needs divine intervention in each instance. (A minority sect of Muslim theologians, the Ash‘arites, were famous for holding this position.) But the plain meaning of many passages of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is that there is a nature, created by God, that functions independently of any direct divine intervention but which nevertheless can be suspended by God for some purposeful intervention—for example, to save someone or a group from danger or death. In the biblical cases of divine intervention we have the God of history or will more than the God of nature or wisdom. Augustine is in a sense making the God of history a more central description of divine power than is the description of God as the wisdom and power behind nature. When Augustine takes the Garden of Eden as historically and literally true, he has opted for the God of history over the God of nature.
The second fateful move that Augustine makes is that the human mind is will more than thought. In his Confessions, Augustine reveals that he discovered the centrality and significance of free will through looking inward. His introspective gaze revealed to him that at his core was a free will. He realized that he himself alone was responsible for his choices, and so he was responsible for himself—and that was because he had a free will, a will that fully originated his actions, both the good and the bad. That free will was at the core of what it means to be human and to be capable of acting morally or immorally. In a passage presaging Descartes’s cogito (reminiscent of Descartes’s “I think [meaning, I have inner mental experience], therefore I am”) Augustine writes:
I was brought up into your light by the fact that I knew myself both to have a will and to be alive. Therefore when I willed or did not will something, I was utterly certain that none other than myself was willing or not willing. There lay the cause of my sins I was now coming to recognize.
I inquired what wickedness is; and I did not find a substance but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance, you O God, towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life . . . and swelling with external matter.24
The interior mental realm, all that is included within one’s subjectivity, is essentially voluntary. Will is not just one psychic faculty among others— sensation and imagination and daydreaming, for example—but instead is the very character of the inner life itself. Descartes will later follow and extend Augustine’s claim, arguing that even truth is a kind of volition rather than a basically cognitive insight and understanding.
The mind, the soul, is fundamentally voluntary rather than cognitive, in analogy to the divine will subordinating the divine wisdom. Human reason is subsumed within the voluntary character of the mind. Whereas in the Greek classical philosophical tradition the human soul was quintessentially characterized by its rationality, meaning its intellectual capacity to acquire knowledge and understanding, for Augustine the rationality of the soul is subordinated to, and to a significant extent swallowed up by, its will. Bonnie Kent, the foremost authority on the will in the history of Christianity, points out that “Augustine . . . did not see the will as a rational or intellectual appetite; for him the will was the entire soul as active.”25 We can discern Augustine’s swallowing up of reason in will obliquely in his comments on various biblical passages. When he speaks of human reason he frequently goes on to explain that what he means by reason is the voluntary choice of good action. The following passage from The Literal Meaning of Genesis is a good example of his conflation of human reason with good will:
God is the unchangeable Good; man . . . is indeed a good, but not unchangeable Good as God is. A changeable good . . . becomes a greater good when it adheres to the unchangeable Good, loving and serving Him with a rational and free response of the will. . . .
[A] rational creature is no small good, even a creature that is led to avoid evil by a consideration of evildoers. This class of good creatures would surely not exist if God had converted all evil wills to good.26
It is the voluntary, good will that Augustine also refers to by the Pauline phrase “law of the mind.” In describing Adam and Eve before the Fall, Augustine uses that phrase to refer to the (easy) control of desire by the will. He opposes that law to the Pauline “law of sin in the members.” So mind and sin are opposites here: mind means “good free choice of action,” whereas its opposite, sin, means “bad free choice of action.” When Augustine uses mind, he most often means will.
Augustine even goes so far as to identify all of the capacities of the mind with the will, not just the intellectual ones. In the entire cosmos—in God, in the angels, and in human beings—all the capacities of the soul come down to the will. Even the emotions, for Augustine, turn out to be the effects, rather than the causes or motivations, of the will. He reduces all emotions to acts of (good or bad) will: “What is important here is the quality of a man’s will. For if the will is perverse, the emotions will be perverse; but if it is righteous, the emotions will be not only blameless, but praiseworthy. The will is engaged in all of them; indeed, they are all no more than acts of the will.”27
So emotions, as acts of will or the effects of acts of will, turn out to be voluntary choices rather than character states.28 That the human soul is at bottom a giver or withholder of consent, that is, a will, renders every human person an individual moral actor of a very particular stripe. Augustine does not hesitate to state explicitly the larger claim he is making: the human mind, because it is a voluntary will, is culpable. Because we have—or are—a will that freely chooses, we can be praised and blamed for our decisions and actions. Human nature is essentially about being morally good or bad according to actions freely taken. Gone is the classical Greek notion of human beings as rational animals whose degree of ignorance or wisdom shapes their desires, purposes, emotions, and character.
In [the universe] is found a double activity of Providence, the natural and the voluntary.
—AUGUSTINE, The Literal Meaning of Genesis
When we look at the universe as a whole, Augustine says, we find God’s divine action pervading it in two ways. There are two cosmic principles that govern the universe: one is nature (the natural) and the other is free will (the voluntary). Both are cosmic systems and forces. Each displays God’s ongoing involvement and participation. Both are expressions of the divine providence, of God’s care for the world. God has not set them up and withdrawn, Augustine insists. Instead, “the natural working of Providence can be seen in God’s hidden governance of the world, by which He gives growth to trees and plants; the voluntary working of His providence can be observed in the deeds of angels and men.” Augustine’s illustrations of the natural working of divine providence are just what we would expect:
The heavenly bodies above and the earthly bodies below follow an established order: the stars and other heavenly bodies shine, night follows day and day follows night, earth firmly established is washed and encircled by waters, air moves above all around, trees and animals are generated and born, develop, grow old, and die; and so it is with everything else in nature that comes about by an interior, natural movement.
The divine wisdom or truth working in nature, Augustine elaborates, introduces numerical form into bodies, and hence material processes can be described in mathematical terms and in terms of regularities.29 Augustine describes the arena of the voluntary working of providence, on the other hand, as learning, agriculture and animal husbandry, political governance, and the arts, not only on earth but also “in the heavenly society.”
The same cosmic dualism holds within the human person: Augustine goes on to say that “in man himself the same twofold power of Providence is at work,” for the body is in the domain of “natural” providence, whereas the soul is within the domain of “voluntary” providence. “First, there is the natural work of Providence in respect of the body, that is the movement by which it comes into being, develops, and grows old.” Second, he says, “there is the voluntary working of Providence in so far as provision is made for his food, his clothing, and his well-being.” Even within the human soul—and not just between soul and body—there is a division between its natural dimensions and its voluntary ones; Augustine informs us that “by nature [the soul] is provided that it lives and has sensation; by voluntary action [however] it is provided that it acquires knowledge and lives in harmony.”30 That is to say, the soul has within it natural functions that animate the body and make it sensate, and it also has voluntary functions that inform its mental and social capacities.
The human body is under the sway of nature, yet it is freely directed by the human mind. Human free will commands the human body.
The soul which commands the movement [of a part of the body] remains unmoved in space. . . . The soul is not a corporeal substance and does not fill the body in space as water does a skin bottle or a sponge, but in a mysterious way by its incorporeal command it is united to the body, which it vivifies, and by this command it rules the body through an influence, not a corporeal mass.31
The human mind, too, is permeated with divine wisdom. Unlike mere matter, however, the mind can turn away from God’s wisdom through the exercise of its own free will. That is why our freedom, Augustine emphasizes, is the source of moral evil.
This dual divine system of care, the natural and the voluntary, is carried out by angels, and angels (like human beings but more effectively) act voluntarily, that is, by free choice.32 The good angels choose only the good, Augustine tells us, yet there are also bad angels, who fell because of their free choice of evil. The fallen angels no longer occupy the heaven of heavens but instead reside in everlasting torment.
That Augustine conceives the voluntary as one of the two principles that divide the cosmos—nature being the other—means the freedom that characterizes divine action (and which is the basis of its goodness) entails that God, humans, and angels are all undetermined. They differ in that they are better or worse, higher or lower exemplifiers of that voluntary ontological principle and realm. The human person is of the voluntary cosmic order, but is not a very good or lofty occupant of that order. In fact, the human person is the lowest of the three types of being in that order, namely, God, angel, and human. So it is hardly surprising that human beings, unlike God and the good angels, often fail to freely choose the good. Doing wrong does not mean that they fail to use their free will, however, Augustine insists, and consequently become naturally determined by the body. Rather, they use their free will badly and freely choose to follow bodily desires that the soul makes present to them, for it is only the soul that makes desires present and not the body itself, Augustine insists.
The divine cosmic rule of the voluntary is expressed in the goodness of the free gift of divine grace on God’s part, and at best by the freely chosen obedience of the human will, enabled by grace—or at worst by the freely chosen rejection of or rebellion against that grace. That the human soul is a direct divine creation of God’s will and, as will, is in the divine image—it is not part of the divine substance itself but rather a divine creation, Augustine insists—makes it a “little will” to God’s great will. Hence human beings can use the will to do evil as well as good, but they cannot be other than will. The voluntariness of the human soul or mind, unlike the human body, introduces a rupture in the universe and precludes any role for nature as intermediary in the human-divine relation. The human person relates to God via free self-creation, turning toward good in obedience or toward evil in rebellion. The divine will freely offers grace to mitigate the worst effects of human free will (in principle for all via the Incarnation but in practice for some via predestination and baptism).
It is “God by the twofold working of His providence [who] is over all creatures, that is, over natures that they have existence, and over wills that they may do nothing without either His command or His permission.”33 In describing the two orders of creation, Augustine maintains that God has direct ongoing supremacy even over the fixed natural order:
God has established in the temporal order fixed laws governing the production of kinds of being and qualities of being and bringing them forth from a hidden state into full view, but His will is supreme over all. By His power He has given numbers to His creation, but He has not bound His power by these numbers. For His Spirit “moved over” the world that was to be made in such a way that He still moves over the world that is made, not by a material space relationship but by the excellence of His power.34
So Augustine insists that the natural causal system does not limit God’s power, nor does it introduce any necessity into the freedom of God’s will.
Nature is not fully nature in the normal sense of necessary, rule-bound processes and forces playing out without direct divine intervention, according to Augustine, for nature, expressive of divine wisdom, can be overridden by the power of divine will. The human will, along with the wills of the angels and God’s will, is not of the natural order at all. The human will, like the divine will, is not subject to “internal natural wisdom,” to use theological language, which is to say that it is not subject to a necessary natural order of causes. The will is of a different causal stripe; it is of the voluntary causal cosmic order. The human will is like God’s historical fiat, and like God’s absolute freedom, the human will is in principle capable of transcending the (quasi-) necessity of natural processes, internal and external. It is in that sense that Augustine designates the human will, like God’s will, as free.
The human will, along with the divine wills (of angels and God), belongs to a different order than the natural order; it belongs to the miraculous order. Human mind and God are connected as the same kind of thing (that is, they are connected ontologically); they are also directly connected via a relationship. The relationship of God and humanity bypasses nature (body and material world) but joins human will to divine will. It is a free choice of the human person, as potentially spiritual, to willfully master the natural body and material world through voluntary obedience to God’s will. The human will belongs to God’s personal order of direct action, so to speak, rather than the indirect divine order of the laws and forces of material nature.
In the biblical account of God’s creation of Adam, which Augustine takes to be historical fact, God directly breathes life (the soul) into Adam’s natural material and earthly body. The human soul, unlike the body, is a direct divine gift of spirit, that is, of the will. So in the end, the divine wisdom (which refers to the lawfulness of nature) is subordinated to the divine will, God’s willful fiat. Nevertheless, nature is generally and for most purposes an apt description of the material realm. So Augustine generally distinguishes the divine wisdom from the divine will, the former being the source of the operation of nature-matter, in contrast with the operation of unpredictable and denatured, fully self-originated and self-originative choices. Of course the natural necessity of even material processes can always be disrupted by the divine will; more than that, it carries on carrying on due only to some kind of direct willful intervention of angels at God’s command. So given the two cosmic orders, the voluntary (the spiritual) can overrun the natural (the material), in both human and divine.
The natural and the moral, like the body and the soul, are antonyms, types of being set in ontological opposition. They are opposite types of being. The soul or mind’s freedom from being determined by natural constitution is just what enables it to be a moral subject in the Augustinian conception. The will is free in respect to nature. Nor does any social shaping have a necessary determining effect on freedom of action. Freedom from nature is at the origin of our moral capacity for Augustine. Even when Adam sins, his punishment is not that the soul or mind becomes natural but rather that it becomes a less good or effective soul—for soul and will it remains. It is only the body that is (in any degree) “natural.” Augustine makes the point in his early work De Libero Arbitrio: “Because we have no doubt that the soul’s motion is culpable we must absolutely deny that it is natural.”35 And in the late work The City of God he still holds, “Where the will becomes evil, this evil would not arise in it if the will itself were unwilling; and its defects are therefore justly punished, because they are not necessary, but voluntary. For the defections of the will are not toward evil things, but are themselves evil.”36
That the human mind was created “in the image of God” means for Augustine that its quintessential character is its free will, and hence it has no determination or shaping that it cannot resist if it wills to do so. The relation of the human soul to God is will to will. The human person’s burden is to turn the human will toward God so as to make the human will conform to the divine will. For Augustine, the ideal relation of the human to the divine is the free obedience and subordination of the human will to the divine will. Augustine repeats often that the human good will in practice is to be expressed as an undetermined choice to turn to God in absolute obedience to God’s will. Numerous passages could be cited to illustrate the point, but the following will suffice:
This account [of the Garden of Eden] was written . . . to remind [the human person] how important it is to recognize God as his Lord, that is, to be obedient under His rule rather than to live uncontrolled and abuse his freedom. . . .
When man does not depart from God, by this very fact, since God is present to him, he is justified, illuminated, and made happy, and God is cultivating and guarding him while he is obedient and subject to God’s commands. . . .
Finally, nothing else is sought by the sinner except to be free of the sovereignty of God when he does a deed that is sinful only in so far as God forbids it.37
Because the human-divine relation is both of like to like and also of direct conformity of will to will, the human person is disconnected from nature and body. Both the soul and God are different in kind from nature, which is the arena of material processes alone. So for Augustine nature is not the primary intermediary between the human and the divine, as it had been for the ancients. For the classical mind, in contrast to Augustine, to come to know lawful nature was to come to know a part of God’s mind and thereby to unite the human mind with some dimension of cosmic reason.
What I want to point to particularly here is that the subordination of wisdom (knowledge and understanding) to will in both divine and human minds results in the introduction of a notion of the individual human as a God-like inventor of his or her actions and self. Or perhaps this was the purpose all along, since we saw that Augustine proposed that it was “because we have no doubt that the soul’s motion is culpable we must absolutely deny that it is natural.”38 Thus actions are self-created and the self’s self-invention enables their fundamental character to be either good or evil. So the human person, who is the soul—which is identified with free will, as it is self-governing by the voluntary ontological cosmic principle—is completely blameworthy or praiseworthy, and never a product of necessary natural forces either internal or external. While the body and all material processes have some degree of automaticity and determination by external forces and as a result are to a large degree left to a working out of inherent natures and laws of nature that can be expressed mathematically, Augustine’s notion of mind is precisely the opposite of body and nature. Mind, by definition, is that which is neither natural nor necessary. Nature alone is the arena of necessity, and nature is exclusively the material or bodily. So all mental capacities are non-natural and non-necessary—and hence voluntary and culpable. Here is the birth of the modern moral subject—and for that matter, of the modern conception of the natural arena as confined to material and material processes, which are deemed the only ones amenable to scientific causal inquiry. Henceforth “natural” causes are confined to the strictly material. The modern Western person is a theological invention and has a miraculous character that is based on Augustine’s deliberate yanking of mind out of nature. We in the West are still struggling with this Augustinian turn in the notion of the human person; we still labor under it as if there were no other way to understand human moral capacity and agency—and, concomitantly, nature as its opposite or inverse.
Augustine’s commitment to the utter individual moral culpability of the human being, enabled and guaranteed by the divine gift of the freedom of the human will, never wavered. In running the ontological division between nature and will through the universe as a whole and as a bifurcation within the human person in particular—an assimilation of dualist Platonism to a Christian theology of salvation—Augustine projected upon the human being the grandiose ideal and severe moral expectations worthy only of a god and capable of execution only by a divine-like, miraculous will and person who transcends nature and nurture. This grandiosity and severe moralism prevail, untempered by theological mitigating notions of divine grace, in the secularizations of the Augustinian notion—for example, in Descartes’s moral psychology and even in Kant’s. Even the many contemporary philosophers who have modified the Augustinian notion of the self to include some limitations to human self-invention by natural determination, social and contextual situatedness, and the like, nevertheless continue to assign moral responsibility to a circumscribed core of the human person to which they believe that freedom of will can still be attributed. So the Augustinian conception of the foundations of the human moral capacity in a divine-like freedom from nature and social constitution still largely prevails.
[Adam and Eve’s] nature was changed for the worse in proportion to the magnitude of their sin, so that what arose as a punishment in the first human being who sinned also follows as a natural consequence in the rest who are born of them. . . . [T]hat conjugal pair received the divine sentence of its own damnation.
—AUGUSTINE, City of God Against the Pagans
We can uncover Augustine’s beliefs about human nature in more detail by investigating his writings on the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve loomed large in Augustine’s thought, and he wrote about them throughout his lifetime, developing his account in a number of ways but also sticking to his main grasp of human uniqueness, God’s relation to humanity, and the divine origin and operation of the cosmos. The Garden of Eden story is a wonderful blank screen upon which many theologians and philosophers have projected their own conceptions and theories, so it will serve us well here. Maimonides and Spinoza also use it for purposes similar to Augustine’s—but they arrive at entirely different, and largely diametrically opposite, conclusions about human beings, God, and the cosmos. In the next chapter we will find that even so modern a philosopher as Kant follows a long history of Christian philosophers who have used the Garden to put forward a philosophical and theological anthropology, and he weighs in on the Augustinian side. Descartes seems to have eschewed the opportunity to retell the story of Adam and Eve at any length (referring to it only briefly in Principles of Philosophy, III, article 45) while still embracing, and to some extent reviving and even radicalizing, an Augustinian conception of both man and world—minus the explicit theology. What appears to me remarkable is the stability of the Augustinian conception of the human person, once articulated and established, across millennia.
Augustine wrote two separate books on the interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The first he wrote soon after his repudiation of cosmic dualist Manichaeism, a commitment he had held for nine years before his embrace of Catholic Christianity in 387 C.E. It was in a work titled De Genesi Adversus Manicheos, which he wrote to challenge the Manichaean dogma of a god of evil and a god of good and also the Manichaean rejection of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), that Augustine first addressed the Garden and Adam’s disobedience. He struggled with the problem of the origin of evil and had embraced the Manichaean solution of a “kingdom of darkness” and a “kingdom of light” until he worked out a solution that preserved both God’s omnipotence and all-goodness while still accounting for the reality of evil and sin.39 That solution to the problem of evil enabled Augustine to relinquish Manichaean ontological and cosmic dualism without having to attribute evil to God. This first work on Genesis relied on metaphor and allegory to accomplish the reconciliation of a good and all-powerful God with the existence of evil. It had a contemplative focus, as did Augustine’s life at that time.40 When Augustine took up the issue again, however, a few years later, he was writing at a time when he had returned to an active life. This new work he called De Genesi ad Litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis), and it is an important source of his interpretation of the Garden of Eden, as are the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of The Confessions and also the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth chapters of his late great work, The City of God Against the Pagans.
In The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine emphasizes that the Garden of Eden account is historical—it is literally true. It happened. In his view, the historicity of the text did not vitiate its metaphorical meaning; rather, Augustine now felt that he could offer and maintain a literal approach to the text along with more symbolic meanings. One of the burdens of interpretation that arise for anyone who is committed to the (more or less) literal meaning and historicity of the text is to reconcile what appear on the surface to be two conflicting accounts. For Genesis puts back-to-back in its first few chapters two different accounts of the creation of the universe and also two accounts of the divine creation of the first two human beings. The first chapter of Genesis recounts the creation of the world in six days, beginning with the creation of light on the first day. Prior to that the text says, “The earth was unformed and void, with darkness covering the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water.” As many may recall, subsequent days detail the creation of the sky, of dry land and vegetation, the moon and stars and the sun, sea creatures and birds, terrestrial beasts, and finally man. “God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
The second creation story follows in the second chapter of Genesis. Here creation seemingly transpires in a different order. Man is created before vegetation and from the dust of the earth, and God is said to have given him life by breathing into his nostrils. It is then that God is said to have planted a garden in Eden, only then planting all trees, and putting the man there. The famous account of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib follows, giving Adam a “helpmeet” (or “helper,” as the Jewish Publication Society now translates it). But first God created all the wild beasts and birds from the earth as potential companions for Adam (each species of which Adam names), and they are all judged lacking as worthy companions. As Adam had named the beasts, he now names the woman. Earlier (Genesis 2:16–17) God was depicted as having issued the famous command when He put the man in the garden to tend it:
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat; but as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.”
There are numerous other differences between the two accounts, though we need not concern ourselves with most of them here. Our concern will be only with what Augustine makes of the discrepancy per se and his strategy for reconciling the two texts. Genesis 2 becomes roughly the historical implementation of what Augustine proposes is the ahistorical or atemporal plan of Genesis 1. For he insists that only with the bringing into being of actual things does time begin. So the “days” of creation of Genesis 1 are not temporal days but represent an order of ontological priority or value.41 Augustine’s strategy enables him to maintain that in some sense creation was complete at the end of the sixth day (as the Bible says), while, at the same time, what has been set is yet to be worked out in time through the direct intervention of God—and, most important, through the divine intervention that punishes Adam’s sin by a degradation of human nature and even of nature writ large. Nature is set as natural processes through the divine wisdom, but Adam’s sin engages God’s direct punitive action to intervene and change human nature and even nature itself.
In his interpretation of Adam’s Fall, Augustine brings home with extraordinary force the implications of writing the will (both human and divine) into the very structure of the universe as a cosmic voluntary principle, rather than confining the voluntary to an intrapsychic human capacity. Augustine argues that Adam sinned voluntarily, by an act of free will. His perverted use and abuse of human freedom led God to introduce a rupture into the very cosmos. For Adam’s sin resulted in a divine punishment that took the form of a degradation of human nature, and so of nature itself. Augustine writes that from Adam’s “evil use of free will there arose the whole series of calamities by which the human race is led by a succession of miseries from its depraved origin, as from a corrupt root.”42 It was not that the tree of knowledge of good and evil was itself harmful or that the eating of its fruit was a sin in and of itself. On the contrary, Augustine says that everything God put in the Garden of Eden was good. What was sinful was only the disobedient free act of the human will itself. Adam and Eve’s disobedience of the divine commandment was a “betrayal [that] occur[red] as an act of free will.”43 Augustine proposes that “the man was forbidden to touch that tree, which was not evil, so that the observance of the command in itself would be a good for him and its violation an evil.”44 Because the divine providential goodness consists in its dual principles, the natural and the voluntary, the voluntary cannot preclude the possibility of its abuse. For “the providence of God rules and administers the whole creation, both natures and wills: natures in order to give them existence, wills so that those that are good may not be without merit, and those that are evil may not go unpunished.”45 The moralization of the cosmos is at the heart of the divine plan. The cosmos would be less perfect, in Augustine’s view, if it were not structured to express the divine moral import, not only as reward and punishment in a heaven and hell but, most important, by endowing human souls (and those of the angels) with a special ability, “free will,” which makes divine moral reward and punishment just.46
Augustine held that the will is an inherent human capacity and humans’ superiority to animals lies in their possession of a free will. “Human nature, even in sinners is superior to the [nature of] beasts,” he insists.47 The misuse of that freedom in doing evil, therefore, redounds to the human person alone, and not to God’s creation, which is all good. So “those who have chosen evil have willingly and culpably corrupted a praiseworthy nature.”48 This claim is at the heart of Augustine’s answer to the problem of evil: since evil is in the exercise of the psychic capacity of the person who commits the action, it does not devolve upon God, who is all good. Augustine reminds the reader that the human person “is separated from God not by a distance in space but [only] by a turning away of his will.”49 And good, too, works via the will, for to be worthy of its name, “our love for Him [must be] freely given.”50 Human beings originate their actions via will not only before the Fall but after it as well. Even though the first human beings’ free choice could result—and did result—in sin and a divine punishment that was a degradation of human nature, nevertheless, if human beings “did not possess free will, [they] would not have the same excellence in nature,” Augustine says.51 Human nature is still superior to that of animals even though that nature is not as perfect as it once was.
Writing late in his life in The City of God, Augustine says insistently and with complete clarity that good and evil originate in the will: “No one suffers punishment for faults of nature, but for vices of the will; for even the vice which has come to seem natural because strengthened by habit or because it has taken an undue hold derives its origin from the will.”52 Augustine rejects the idea that God’s foreknowledge that Adam and Eve would sin undoes the evil character of the action of their wills, for “the evil will was theirs, not His.” After all, God “made them in such a way as to leave it in their power to perform some deed, even if they should deliberately choose evil.” They alone freely acted and hence “their evil will comes from themselves; their nature, which is good, and their punishment, which is just, come from God.”53 Augustine muses, “Why, then, would God not allow a man to be tempted, although He foreknew that he would yield?” The answer is this: “For the man would do the deed by his own free will, and thus incur guilt, and he would have to undergo punishment according to God’s justice to be restored to right order.”54
God punishes Adam and Eve with a change for the worse in their nature. The degradation of Adam and Eve’s nature is also transmitted to all their descendants, to all humankind. In the biblical text (Genesis 2:17) the divine command to Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil ended with the warning that “as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.” Yet the actual punishment at the end of the story does not include their immediate death. Augustine begins by addressing this discrepancy: “Although the bodies of our first parents were natural bodies,” he writes, “we should not suppose that they were ‘dead’ before they sinned—I mean necessarily destined for death.” Their bodies “would have received an angelic form and heavenly quality,” transforming their natural bodies in good time if they had not sinned, he says. In proposing that Adam and Eve had natural bodies, Augustine means that their bodies were not the angelic spiritual bodies of the good angels in the heaven of heavens, but were instead bodies in a real corporeal sense. He even speculates that had Adam and Eve not sinned, they would nevertheless have had sex in the Garden of Eden and produced offspring.55 But they would not have died, and the number of human beings born would have been of a stable and controlled number that would fill the earth but not overfill it. So death enters the world as a result of and punishment for sin.
It is not only death in the usual sense that is the result of Adam’s Fall. Augustine portrays Adam and Eve’s (and humanity’s inherited) punishment as a kind of death within life.56 The divine punishment is that the human body has been transformed into a kind of maimed body, a body inherently sick and harboring its own illness, deterioration, and death. “What, indeed, is this life from our birth, even from our conception, but the beginning of a sickness by which we must die?” he asks.57 Augustine goes on to write that Adam and Eve’s punishment was that their “bodies contracted, as it were, the deadly disease of death, and this changed the gift by which they had ruled the body so perfectly.” The “gift” is a reference to free will. In punishment God changed the nature of their bodies from one that was completely and easily controllable “by the law of the mind” to a body whose “law” was at war with the law of the mind. Augustine (quoting and interpreting Paul) characterizes this other “law” as the “law of sin in the members.” The divine punishment is that the body, in Augustine’s view, became unruly, much harder to control by the will. He asks rhetorically, “What punishment could have been more deserved than that the body, made to serve the soul, should not be willing to obey every command of the soul, just as the soul herself refused to serve her Lord.”58 The will is not entirely disabled in its control of the post-Fall body, but it has much more difficulty in doing so. Nevertheless, it is still held morally responsible for human actions.
One of the two characteristics that figure again and again in Augustine’s representation of the fallenness of the human body in its post-Edenic condition is the uncontrollability of male sexual erection and its dependence on the capriciousness of desire.59 Adam and Eve, if they had not sinned, would have had sex in the Garden of Eden, but without desire, Augustine insists, and Adam would have moved his penis for impregnation in the way that one moves a hand or a foot. Second, human fallenness is evident in the deterioration of the body in aging and disease. Both of these corporeal limitations weigh heavily on Augustine’s mind and fill him with loathing and disgust, serving as obvious signs of a human nature that has undergone a great change for the worse from its originally divinely intended natural perfection. The kind of body that the first Adam had, Augustine elaborates, was an “animal body,” which is “the kind of body that we have now,” “although it would not have died had he not sinned.” After Adam sinned, however, “its nature was so changed and vitiated by sin that we now stand under the necessity of death.”60
In The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine envisions the wonderful, perfect bodies of Adam and Eve before they sinned:
Why then should it seem beyond belief that He made the bodies of the first human beings in such a way that, if they had not sinned and had not immediately thereupon contracted a disease which would bring death, they would move the members by which offspring are generated in the same way that one commands his feet when he walks, so that conception would take place without passion and birth without pain?61
But this was all to change not just for Adam and Eve but also for us all. For “human nature was so vitiated and changed in [Adam] . . . that he suffered in his members the conflict of disobedient lust.”62
Because it had of its own free will forsaken its superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior servant in obedience to its will. Nor could it in any way keep the flesh in subjection, as it would always have been able to do if it had itself remained subject to God. Then began the flesh to lust against the Spirit. . . . [W]e bear in our members, and in our vitiated nature, the striving of the flesh, or indeed, its victory.63
Should the life we now live rightly even be called life? Augustine asks rhetorically.64
God’s punishment for Adam’s sin was a degradation in the very nature of human nature. The extremity of the vitiation for all humanity of the natural goodness, which the divine punishment instituted and which subsequently was transmitted to all Adam and Eve’s progeny, is made clear by Augustine in this passage:
How happy, then, were the first human beings, neither troubled by any disturbance of the mind nor pained by any disorder of the body! And the whole universal fellowship of mankind would have been just as happy had our first parents not committed that evil deed whose effect was to be transmitted by their posterity, and if none of their stock had sown in wickedness what they must reap in damnation.65
When Augustine discusses the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden in The City of God, he says that the text refers to two deaths: the death of the body and also the death of the soul.66 So Adam died two deaths. “The first death, which is common to all men, was brought about by the sin which, in one man, became common to all.” The “second death . . . [which] is not common to all men,” was that of the soul.67 Yet the story does not end here, of course, for there is a new Adam, Christ. It is Christ, says Augustine, elaborating on Paul, who restores what Adam had perverted, for the first Adam was “of the earth” but the second Adam is the “Lord from heaven.” This animal body “Christ Himself deigned to assume . . . by choice.” It is the “spiritual body,” Augustine concludes, that “Christ Himself as our Head, already has; and this is the kind of body which His members will have at the final resurrection of the dead.”68 At the final resurrection, our spiritual bodies will have the perfect free will of the good angels.
Augustine, summoning all his eloquence and fury, argued for a view of nature utterly antithetical to scientific naturalism.
—ELAINE PAGELS
Augustine’s characterization of all mental operations (divine as well as human) as voluntary and his circumscription of nature to material or bodily processes alone—as automatic, lawful, and mathematically describable—came to have fateful consequences for moral psychology that continue to have a hold on us Westerners, beneath our full awareness. That nature is confined to earth and body and as such is capable of scientific explanation, while the mind is the realm of spirit and cannot be pinned down and predicted, are beliefs that feel as obvious and ubiquitous as the air we breathe and the water we drink. Moreover, the bifurcation of mind and nature also has consequences for how scientists have all too frequently and unreflectively limited science to the investigation of material processes alone, the mind either being considered too free to operate via a natural lawfulness or instead deemed to be irrelevant, static, and not “real” (a position that philosophers call epiphenomenalism). Both of these positions owe a debt for their dualist bifurcation of body and mind as two entirely different kinds of causal orders, the natural-lawful versus the voluntary, to Augustine’s fateful theological turn.
The idea that humans have free choice was mainly a product of the Christian tradition. It is not an idea found in Aristotle’s ethics. . . . [For Aristotle] a person’s choice always expresses her character.
—BONNIE KENT
From Augustine onward it was generally recognized in the Latin Christian West, whose center was Rome—in contrast with Eastern Christianity, whose center was Constantinople and whose languages were Greek, Syriac, and other Eastern languages—that some notion of freedom of choice or will was the standard Christian moral psychology. It was also widely recognized that Augustine, the most important Latin Church Father, was the source of the belief in free will and that his authority stood behind it. The East, of course, was both the site of another Christianity and also under the spreading sway of Islam beginning in the seventh century. The Muslim conquests reached the Iberian Peninsula from North Africa in the eighth century, and almost all of it was under Muslim rule by 720 C.E. Parts of Spain remained under Muslim rule until 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Reconquest with the fall of the last Muslim state, Granada. A fluke of history made Islamic Iberia the site of a tremendous intellectual and scientific flourishing. A prince of the Umayyad caliphate escaped the Abbasid takeover of the Umayyads in Damascus in 750, fled to Spain, and made Cordoba the center of a new Islamic state that became quite independent from the rest of the Islamic world. The area became known in Arabic as Al-Andalus, gradually fragmenting into independent Muslim states. Arabic culture and hegemony survived in portions of the Iberian Peninsula for the next 750 years. Muslim Spain became the site of a society of substantial tolerance as well as sophisticated intellectual and artistic achievements building upon Greek classical philosophy and science in an advanced cultural milieu. Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together in a largely Arabic-speaking society that assimilated and integrated native inhabitants. Cordoba became the intellectual capital of a vibrant scientific, philosophic, and artistic cultural world, expanding and building upon the legacy of ancient Greek rationalism in astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and the arts.
It was in the wake of the expanding conquest of Muslim Spain by Christian forces (which began nearly as soon as the Muslims arrived on the Iberian Peninsula and continued for the next seven hundred years) that Arabic texts of Aristotle and their philosophic and scientific expansions by Iberian philosophers and scientists began to trickle into Latin Christendom. Up till the twelfth century, there were only two Aristotelian books available in Latin: the Categories and On Interpretation.69 Aristotle’s Physics and his Metaphysics had been banned by the Church, while the Nicomachean Ethics had not been. Nevertheless, only the first three books of the Nicomachean Ethics had survived in Latin Christendom, and a complete Latin translation of it did not appear until 1246–47. With the taking over of bastions of cultural and scientific advancement and flourishing in the Iberian Peninsula, the great Arabic libraries fell into the hands of Latin Christendom, generating a great deal of intellectual excitement and foment. Included in the significant influx of writings from the Iberian Peninsula in the late thirteenth century were advanced philosophical and scientific writings of Muslim philosophers and also Arabic translations of and commentaries upon Aristotle by such philosophers as Averroës and Avicenna. There was a flurry to translate texts from Arabic into Latin, and the appearance of these latter texts created a sensation in medieval universities, especially at Paris and Oxford, in the 1260s, particularly in the arts faculties but also among theologians.70
The Arabic philosophical interpretation of Aristotle was for the most part as a radical naturalist in physics, metaphysics, and moral psychology. It was this radical Aristotle that now caught the imagination of the faculties, and an intense and vociferous controversy took hold. This reached a turning point in 1277 when Étienne Tempier, the bishop of Paris, banned 219 Aristotelian claims and positions as contrary to the Christian faith. Three radical naturalizing Aristotelian doctrines were of particular concern, and all three were among thirteen Tempier condemned even earlier, in 1270. Among those thirteen were (1) the eternity of the world, (2) the unicity of all intellects, and (3) the necessity of all events. The first appeared to threaten the biblical account of divine creation. The second implied that all rational minds were in essence one universal mind, and hence it appeared to threaten the afterlife of the individual. The third was the claim of an unbroken, thoroughgoing determinist natural causality, and hence appeared to threaten divine power and also to obviate direct divine intervention or miracles. The latter claim also posed a challenge to free will—certainly God’s but also humans’. Two more of the thirteen propositions condemned in 1270 appeared to directly call into question individual free choice or will: (4) that “the will of man chooses and wills by necessity” and (5) that “free choice is a passive power, and not an active one and it is moved with necessity by the object of desire.”71
Henry of Ghent, a theologian and major figure in the faculty at Paris, was on the sixteen-member commission appointed by Tempier to investigate the writings of the arts masters. It is thought that perhaps he was the moving force behind the condemnation in 1277 of the nonvoluntarist positions.72 In his Quodlibet of 1276, Henry maintained that “it is the will that commands all powers of the soul,” and he called the will “the first mover in the kingdom of the soul”73—the classic position of self-command and the self-origination of action, which to this day broadly defines all versions of voluntarism. He also precisely articulated and held the view that “every disorder of reason is caused by a disorder of will,” a position that Descartes will embrace and elaborate several hundred years later. Historian Bonnie Kent proposes that “of all the articles condemned in 1277, those related to the will probably had the greatest significance for the history of ethics.” More than fifteen of the 219 bans of 1277 were focused on safeguarding free will against any Aristotelian naturalist challenges to it. Their “aim [was] plainly to safeguard the freedom of the will” from any claims of “determination . . . by external powers” which “were seen as a threat to moral responsibility.” Even the moral “agent’s own intellect (reason)” was held to be one of the “external powers” that was not to be allowed to be claimed to have a role in determining action. In addition, “the articles firmly reject[ed] the thesis that all wrongdoing results from ignorance, that anyone who knew better would perforce do better, or even will to do better.”74 We saw above that both these claims—that individuals can be held to be morally responsible, that is, blameworthy or praiseworthy only because of the free origination of their actions and that vice is due not to ignorance but to free choice—are central to Augustine’s moral outlook. As a clearly developed and coherent view, they originate with Augustine, and they were also consciously associated with him as an important dimension of his tradition and legacy. As a result, the battle lines drawn in thirteenth-century Latin Christendom had radical Aristotelian naturalism at one pole versus Augustinian voluntarism at the other.
The radical Aristotelians, dubbed “Averroists” both at the time as well as subsequently, embraced a view of the human moral subject as a necessary product of nature and nurture. Aristotle, of course, did not deny that human beings make choices and decisions. Yet he did not regard these choices and decisions as free in the Augustinian sense. For all choices and decisions, according to Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, are those of the kind of person one is or, rather, has become. Choice is not even possible, Aristotle pointed out, if not determined by disposition, for choice is its necessary expression. Character determines decision and choice, and character is a matter of nurture, of habit. “None of the moral virtues arises in us by nature,” he says. Aristotle distinguishes between two types of reason: practical deliberation and theoretical understanding. Practical deliberation plays a role in determining the means to follow toward ends, goals, which by contrast are set by desires. “We deliberate not about ends but about means,” he insists.75 He defines choice as “deliberate desire of things in our own power.”76 Our desires are who each of us is; they express and reveal character. Choices and decisions are expressions of the desires that constitute character. “For each state of character,” he writes, “has its own ideas of noble and the pleasant.” So character also shapes perception, potentially corrupting the mind’s conceptions; ignorance of what is truly good for human beings is a character state, and hence it is expressed as a state of desire, dictated by character, of certain ends rather than others. Our desires harbor a hidden judgment that their ends are good. “There is,” he says, “no natural object of wish, but only what seems good to each man.” So people always act with some notion of the good in view and from desire, from what Aristotle deemed the “appetitive faculty.” Yet they are potentially prey to a kind of ignorance that is neither simple nor innocent. For their desires, formed by habit, drive their conceptions of the good, which is to say their motivations toward goals and pursuits. In this Aristotelian account of moral psychology there is no room for will, in the Augustinian sense of a capacity to free oneself and one’s actions from necessary determination by the constellation of character, desire, habit, and cognitive judgment. There is no possibility, for Aristotle, of acting “out of character,” or even, over time, of willfully changing one’s character, with all that this implies. Just as we cannot will ourselves well if we have the flu, to use Aristotle’s own metaphor, we cannot will ourselves objectively good.
While good and bad people are responsible for their moral states and actions because those states are their own and result from their character, over which they have some control (at least initially), once character is set, people cannot do otherwise than they do, he says.77 For “it does not follow that if [an unjust person] wishes he will cease to be unjust and will be just.” Moral character is like health, in his estimation, “for neither does the man who is ill become well on those terms.”78 Aristotle holds that while “we are ourselves somehow partly responsible for our states of character,” in the end habit is a social and political phenomenon. So it is “legislators,” Aristotle concludes, who “make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator.”79
It was the growing encounter with this rather socially determinist, character-based Aristotelian moral psychology that raised the alarm of the masters at Paris and led them to circle the wagons. In the wake of the Condemnation of 1277 banning Aristotle’s naturalizing account of moral psychology in terms of character, self-consciously precise and nuanced theoretical articulations of the opposing (neo-Augustinian) free choice alternatives were formulated and crystallized. Voluntarism could now be articulated in clear opposition to the Aristotelian moral psychology as a range of theories that locate moral virtues in the will rather than in moral character.
After the ban, all major Latin Christian thinkers on the topic took issue with Aristotelian naturalism—roughly, the position that human beings act necessarily according to their character and that natural (including mental) processes operate by necessity—if not with Aristotle himself. They either embraced voluntarist positions, in stark opposition to Aristotle, or came up with voluntarist versions of Aristotle sometimes wished upon him in his name. One aspect of the response was a clarified account of free choice according to which it was held to be localized in a distinct faculty of the soul, namely, the will. It could now be maintained that choice was free because it resided in a free will, a part of the soul that had the power to move itself freely, that is, without external determination by, or passivity to, intellect or anything else.80 Bonnie Kent comments that “efforts to reconcile Aristotle with the faith were the rule, not the exception, in the theology faculty.”81 The influx, the fervor, the controversy, and the ban provide the background to the rise of a voluntarist movement in the late thirteenth century.
Versions of voluntarism can be traced, for example, from the important medieval thirteenth- and fourteenth-century theologians and philosophers John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham to the seventeenth-century philosopher Descartes (often called the father of modern philosophy) and even to the nineteenth century’s Immanuel Kant, whose thought is still dominant, alive, and generative today. The great representative of a compromise position that attempted a reconciliation of Aristotle’s notion of naturally acquired virtues of character with some room for free choice of the will was Thomas Aquinas, but quite a number of others can be seen as falling into that camp, including Bonaventure and Walter of Bruges.82 Aquinas, for example, sets forth a compromise position by acknowledging an Aristotelian notion of dispositions as mental tendencies to do things, but he relates them principally to the choices of the will.83 He also claims that “every sin consists principally in an act of will,” thus paying his debt to the Augustinian orthodoxy.84 Many other Christian theologians also straddled both views of the human moral person, at times even attributing—whether unconsciously or deliberately—their Augustine-laced Christian voluntarist compromise to Aristotle himself. Clearly invoking Aristotle’s authority was not at issue, since it was common to claim his imprimatur not only for positions in part inspired by him but even for those quite distant from his. There was a “growing cult of Aristotle,” a bandwagon effect that had its own momentum, drawing many along who invoked his authority for even barely recognizably Aristotelian positions. Yet the appeal to Aristotle horrified other thinkers as a “paganizing trend.”85
The enhanced self-conscious embrace of voluntarism as a movement beginning in the 1270s was characterized by the claims that “the will is nobler than or superior to the intellect”; that “beatitude or happiness consists more in an activity of will than in an activity of intellect, that man’s freedom derives more from his will than his rationality, that the will is free to act against the intellect’s judgment, and that the will, not the intellect, commands the body and the other powers of the soul.”86 Prior to that, the exact role or status of the intellect in relation to the will had been more up for grabs. Positions that leaned toward Aristotelianism—Aquinas’s, for example—compromised in the direction of giving some status to the role of intellect in decision making, but voluntarism proper had by now hardened and narrowed, with a characteristic downgrading of intellect both in power and in dignity. It is also after 1277 that the distinction between free choice and free will became prominent, with the latter implying the superiority of will to intellect, whereas the former could fudge the question or even go the other way. It was only then that “libertas voluntatis” became the rallying cry for opponents of Thomism as well as opponents of radical Aristotelianism. Yet because of the condemnations of 1277 the entire range of legitimate permissible opinions had already been restricted only to those within the free will spectrum, for 1277 had been about safeguarding freedom of the will.
I’ll end this journey into the history of free will in Latin Christianity with a summary of Duns Scotus’s position—not the most extreme in its highlighting of the will in contrast with the intellect but paradigmatic.
Natural agents devoid of reason are determined to one effect as a stone is determined to fall if not impeded. As a rational power, the intellect is capable of opposite acts regarding the same object: it can be pursued or avoided. But because the intellect is a rational power that acts according to its nature, it cannot determine itself to one of the two alternatives, nor can it refrain from acting. The will, in contrast, can act or not so, although it is not the only cause of its own acts, it is the only free cause. Thus it is the will alone that makes any act a free act. . . .
[T]he will is the sole source of freedom . . . [T]he will remains the principal cause of its own acts. Because the will acts freely . . . it alone introduces an element of contingency in the process culminating in bodily action.
Why should this element of contingency be so important? . . . [Scotus] explains what it is that makes an act “imputable,” that is, eligible for praise or blame, reward or punishment. Scotus argues that what all such acts have in common is that they lie within the free power of the agent. . . . It is the freedom of the will that makes our acts our own and so makes us responsible for them.87
We hear in Scotus’s position the resounding echo of Augustine’s insistence that human beings must be endowed with freedom to originate their actions willfully in themselves alone or their moral responsibility would be vitiated and they could be deserving neither of blame nor of praise.
After Scotus the issue of voluntarism continued to be central to the concerns of theologians and philosophers, an ongoing and hotly debated issue. Such was the case at the dawn of modernity, occupying even philosophers whom we now think of as initiating modern scientific rationalism. René Descartes, often thought of as the first modern philosopher to embrace the systematic use of reason in the natural sciences, was also an ardent voluntarist.
When Descartes claims to derive from [Augustine’s method of] reflection [on the soul and God] . . . a new system of philosophy to replace that of Aristotle, he is putting himself forward as the philosopher of the Catholic Reformation.
—STEPHEN MENN
The more learned someone becomes in the teaching of Augustine, the more willingly he will embrace the Cartesian philosophy.
—FATHER MARIN MERSENNE
Standard modern philosophy begins with Descartes. He is regarded as the founder of modern philosophy—alone or with such associates as Bacon and Hobbes—and a major figure in the scientific revolution. Descartes was born in La Haye, France, in 1596 and was educated at a Jesuit college for about eight years starting at age ten before going to the University of Poitiers, where he studied law. While in the army, however, Descartes became very interested in the sciences and perhaps studied engineering. By 1625 Descartes was in Paris and had developed a relationship with Father Marin Mersenne, a member of a Franciscan order, through whom he came into contact with some of the major philosophical thinkers of the day. Mersenne enabled Descartes’s works to reach the important intellectual circles in Paris.
Descartes’s importance may be seen in his coming up with a new way of looking at matter that made it possible to understand physical processes in terms of mechanical explanations. He developed a way of connecting geometry and algebra that was germane to his new way of thinking about matter.88 His Meditations on First Philosophy, a work published in 1641, offered nothing short of “a philosophical groundwork for the possibility of the sciences.”89 Descartes’s stated aim was to break with Aristotelian philosophy and science, especially with Aristotelian causal explanations of physics in terms of purposes and aims, and to replace them with explanation in terms of strictly material causal mechanisms. Mechanistic explanation is iconically captured in the model of billiard balls, in their surfaces coming into contact and movement giving rise to definable changes. The new physics was concerned strictly with the size, shape, motion, and position of bodies, their length, breadth, and depth—all measurable properties—and was not to be concerned, as Aristotle was, with their “qualities,” what made them the types of objects they were. For Aristotle, the essential properties of all things was chalked up to the presence of “mind” or “form” in them, making them the kind of objects they were and dictating the kinds of ways they behaved—heavy things falling because of the presence in them of “heaviness,” for example. That kind of explanation was to be jettisoned in favor of mechanisms that could be captured by mathematics.
When we think of Descartes today, his name is synonymous with an extreme form of mind-body dualism. When we call someone a Cartesian we are likely to be pointing to a position in which the mind is thought of as separable from the body and of an entirely different nature. In fact, only the body is natural, whereas the mind is not within nature, according to Descartes. Descartes understood the nature of the body in terms of its extension (in length, breadth, and depth), whereas the mind’s nature was to think. This position emerged from Descartes’s method of doubt, his methodological skepticism, from which he drew the insight that anything can be doubted except the mind’s activity itself in doubting, and thus thinking must exist even if the whole world, including even one’s own body, is an illusion. Thinking cannot be separated from oneself even in conjecture, although body can be so separated in principle. Hence Descartes’s famous claim “Cogito ergo sum,” “I think therefore I am.” The only knowledge that cannot be doubted is one’s own thinking, one’s own fact of subjective or inner experience (not the correspondence of that experience to the world). By “thinking” Descartes was referring to inner consciousness, awareness, not narrowly to cognition. On the foundation of the indubitability of the inner life, Descartes turned to rebuild knowledge and an external world. An external world, he argued, was real, even though sense perception was unreliable, because God would not be a deceiver and trick human beings into mere illusions. Descartes distanced the person from the material world, including the person’s own body, but at the same time provided ingenious and important ways to come to new understandings of how body and matter operate.
What is of lasting significance, ironically perhaps, are Descartes’s advances in the mathematical explanations of material processes rather than his conception of mind and of the mind-body relation. For his approach to matter removed the mind from natural explanation entirely—a legacy philosophers and scientists and people generally in the West are still in the grips of and perhaps just emerging from. Cartesianism today is likely to bring to mind the view that the mind, unlike the body, is what is really “one’s own,” that the body is a sort of alien carrying case for the mind, and that the mind would have the same thoughts and contents no matter what kind of material it was housed in. This is the notion encapsulated in the phrases “mind in a machine” or “mind in a vat.” Descartes in his moral philosophy The Passions of the Soul portrays mind and body in an unending struggle for mastery over one’s actions. Moral goodness is the triumph of the free will of the mind in dominating the body—its physical urges and those emotional motivations originating in it.
Descartes’s philosophy must be seen not only as contributing to discussions about physics and metaphysics but also in the context of seventeenth-century theology. That theological concerns are central to Descartes is argued systematically and persuasively by the historian of philosophy Stephen Menn in his book Descartes and Augustine. Menn argues there at great length and in detail that “the history of philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is intimately bound up with the history of Christianity.” The Western Christian universities in Descartes’s time were still committed to the Aristotelian approach to philosophy that we have seen had been dominant since the thirteenth century. That settled form of Christian Aristotelianism still structured the curriculum and set the doctrines of Latin Christian theological thought into the seventeenth century. Its advocates and academic masters were not about to give way to a new philosophy deriving from a different set of foundational commitments and beliefs. As a result, “the modern philosophy developed outside the universities, and won its place in them only through protracted struggle.”90 This “modern philosophy” amounted to an Augustinian challenge to the embedded Christian Aristotelianism—itself, of course, as we just saw above, a compromise struck between the Aristotelian and the Augustinian. The Aristotelian approach, standard since the thirteenth century, was now being reevaluated by the Counter-Reformation. The Counter-Reformation, lasting about one hundred years, was the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation. It began with the Council of Trent (1543–63) and initiated a Catholic revival in both doctrine and religiosity. Counter-Reformation thinkers now came to view any theology that leaned toward the Aristotelian as shockingly pagan and corrupting, in contrast with the Bible and especially Augustine’s writings, which were regarded as pristine and authentic. Menn remarks that “from very early on, Augustine had become the chief authority, second only to scripture, for western Christian theology. . . . The body of philosophical doctrine that later thinkers will take to be axioms of Christian philosophy is in fact (at least for the Latin West) the work of Augustine.”91
Menn offers an exhaustive account of both the Catholic theological context of Descartes’s philosophical project and also of its explicit Augustinian revivalist agenda and aims. He exposes Descartes’s conscious intention (often now forgotten or neglected by philosophical interpreters) to develop a philosophy in an Augustinian key, which would meet the demands and hopes of Counter-Reformation advocates and theologians. He documents Descartes’s relationship to Augustinian revivalist movements in the seventeenth century, both Catholic and Protestant, for “in Descartes’ time there were many such Augustinianisms,” Menn points out. “The history of Augustinianism,” he says, “is the history of the many revivals of Augustine by different thinkers, who have each discovered some new aspect of Augustine’s thought, and seen in it a way to answer the philosophical or theological challenges of their own times. . . . Thus, in the early sixteenth century and beyond, Christian reformers of all stripes appealed to the [Church] Fathers over the [Aristotelian] Scholastics as offering a model for Christian thought and practice.”92 And “especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” Menn says, it was “Augustine [who] was the chief human authority and model for many thinkers throughout Latin Christendom who were indifferent or hostile to the thought of Aristotle.”93 Moreover, “the prestige of Augustine [had] gained an added boost from the Reformation. The Protestant reformers had taken Augustine as their chief authority (after the scriptures) for their theology of grace; the Catholics at [the Council of] Trent, sought to reclaim him, and so, individually, did each of the different tendencies of the Catholic Reformation.”94 Descartes’s clear plan was to develop a philosophy based on an authentic Augustinian Christianity to replace the Aristotelian scholastic basis of Christian philosophical theology that was normative in the universities. So what we think of as the founding of modern Western thought, the philosophy undergirding and furthering revolutions in the physical sciences, had a profoundly revivalist, perhaps even reactionary, and certainly theologically conservative Augustinian character and tenor.
Menn says that it is from the Counter-Reformation’s Augustinian angle that he views the entire Cartesian project and philosophy. His book, he says, is a (re)reading of Descartes’s philosophical project and beliefs: an exhaustive argument for the validity of interpreting Descartes through an Augustinian lens. Menn first places Descartes in his Counter-Reformation theological context, both by shining a light on that historical moment and even more by pinpointing Descartes’s own statements of his theological purpose and primary audience. Menn then devotes much of the rest of the book to identifying in equally great detail Descartes’s precise Augustinian methodological approach to philosophizing, and also to exposing the Augustinian doctrinal foundations of Descartes’s central philosophical positions. Augustine’s free will voluntarism is an important part of this story, yet Descartes’s Augustinianism is both deeper and broader and more self-conscious than the mere commitment to free will by itself would entail. Menn reports that there were two crucial turning points in the way that Descartes conceived his philosophical project, the first in 1619 and the second in 1628. “From 1619 on, Descartes was trying to fulfill the general hope for a new philosophy,” Menn says. After 1628, however, Descartes “appear[s] to take up the more specific project of a systematic philosophy based on Augustine.”95
It is documented that earlier in his life, by 1619, Descartes had already envisioned a philosophical project to put forth “a fundamental science developed into a scientific wisdom.” Yet “the fundamental science identified at that [earlier] time . . . Descartes had first intended to be universal mathematics (a general science of quantity).” By 1628, however, in a letter to Picot, Descartes reveals that he has changed his mind about the possibility of basing his new philosophy on mathematical foundations and now intends to turn instead to a metaphysical foundation. He writes in the letter that he will base his new philosophy on the Augustinian (metaphysical) notions of the immortality of the soul and of God. The letter “gives a programmatic statement of two different aspects of [his] philosophical project”: the two principles that Descartes now attests that he will base his philosophy upon are (1) that “God is the creator of all beings and the source of all truth” and (2) that “the human soul is immortal and separable from the body.” Descartes held these principles to be self-evident and universally accepted. They were universal in the sense that they were Augustinian “axioms of Christian philosophy,” as Menn calls them, which had been grafted onto the scholastic Aristotelian philosophy in the Christianizing of it, so that both sides of the Christian philosophical divide accepted them. Descartes proposes that these unassailable and hence reliable principles serve as the foundation from which he would now derive a new physics and other particular sciences.96 Hence a broadly shared but not in any way superficial Augustinianism—minus any vestiges of Aristotelian naturalism—became the foundation upon which the Cartesian modern philosophy and philosophical outlook was constructed.
Descartes had intimate relationships with Counter-Reformation figures in France. These encounters turned out to have a decisive effect on his philosophical intentions. The circle of Counter-Reformers harbored “a hope of constructing out of Augustine a new philosophy to replace that of Aristotle.” Menn introduces biographical descriptions of seminal conversations that Descartes had with Counter-Reformation movers and shakers, who called upon him to become the philosopher of the Counter-Reformation, “demand[ing] in the strongest terms that he apply his method to natural theology, by proving the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.” Descartes came to be the thinker upon whom the Counter-Reformers set their hopes to develop an Augustinian philosophy, and he came to commit himself to “trying to fulfill that hope.”97 It was Cardinal de Bérulle, “the spiritual leader of the Catholic Reformation in France and the leader of the ‘devout party’ at court,” who met privately with Descartes and “told him to begin with metaphysics, and with metaphysics as conceived in Augustinian terms, as a discipline of reflection on God and the soul.” Descartes’s biographer Adrien Baillet regards the “exhortations of the pious cardinal” as a turning point in Descartes’s life. It was “from this time on,” Menn explains, that “Descartes takes such a metaphysics as the fundamental discipline, from which the principles of philosophy must be drawn.”98
Descartes emerged from these fateful encounters, having relinquished an earlier hope for deriving a physics from pure mathematics, to take up the banner of developing a new philosophy, in a work he at first planned to call his Metaphysics, now to be based upon Augustinian notions of God and the soul. His intention was “to circulate the work among the theologians, not only to receive criticisms and improvements on the text, but also to win the endorsement of individual doctors of theology and, if possible, the institutional endorsement of the theological faculty of the University of Paris.” To emphasize even more clearly the Augustinian approach to philosophizing that he was now undertaking, Descartes decided to change the title of the work from Metaphysics to Meditations on First Philosophy, thus pointing to its Augustinian method of reflection. The work is cast as a series of meditations not only on “God and the soul” but also on “immaterial or metaphysical things.” Moreover, Descartes pointedly addressed the dedicatory letter with which he introduced the work to theologians rather than to philosophers. He offered it “to the theologians as the true philosophy of the Catholic Reformation: he will carry into the hostile territory of philosophy the reformers’ struggle to restore the pristine simplicity of [Christian] truth and to eliminate scholastic corruptions.”99
The thrust of Descartes’s Augustinianism is to “reverse the journey of Aristotelian philosophy: beginning, with Augustine, by reflecting on the human soul, he will show that it can be known better and prior to bodies, and that it can subsist apart from them.”100 The soul is fundamentally tied to and of God, rather than akin to the body and of nature.
Descartes’s Augustinianism can be summarized as follows:
Metaphysical knowledge, being purely intellectual, is independent of the testimony of the senses. . . . It will be concerned primarily with God and with the human soul, and not with God and the human soul as they may be inferred from sensible objects. The human soul will be known primarily as a thing that thinks: not as an act of an organic body, but as something only extrinsically related to a body. God will be known primarily as the highest object of our thought, not as the governor of the physical world although he becomes that too when he creates the world.101
In the Meditations, Descartes sets out to prove three theses so as to be able to demonstrate that the direction of establishing true beliefs goes from the understanding of God to sensible things, rather than from the evidence of the senses up to metaphysical entities, as Aristotle had maintained. “He must show that we can know God and the soul without knowing bodies, that we cannot know bodies without first knowing God and the soul, and that we can know bodies once God and the soul have first been known.”102
Descartes’s voluntarism outstrips even Augustine’s own. For Descartes, God freely decrees the laws of nature, rather than recognizing them as intellectual necessities to which he must conform; and the human mind too, made in God’s image, has a freedom that makes it superior to the law-governed natural order, even while it is limited by the constraints of its natural environment.103 In both God and human, the voluntary will is the only source of activating movement and action both for and in matter (which is now defined in geometric terms as occupying space but inert).
Moreover, Descartes goes even further than Augustine in extending the mind’s self-control over its actions, expanding it to include its very beliefs and understanding. Error for Descartes is not the result of simple ignorance but a matter of moral obstinacy; it is an intellectual sin. Descartes thus accomplishes a radical and complete reversal of the Aristotelian and general Greek classical conception of moral failure as a matter of cognitive ignorance and foggy benightedness. “In Descartes’ Augustinian language, to say that error . . . proceed[s] from us and [is] within our power, is to say that [it] depend[s] on the faculty of will,” whereas the Greek classical view reduced morals to knowledge, moral good being a kind of understanding and evil a form of ignorance. Descartes performed a radical reversal of the classical worldview, thoroughly Christianizing even thinking itself. Knowledge was now to be viewed as resulting from a free act of the resolve of the will, while cognitive error was recast as a willful failure or rebellious refusal to use reason. For Descartes, even belief was to be a matter of self-origination and self-control—hence his famous method of doubting everything, even the existence of our own bodies. We can willfully shut those out, he proposed. He regarded our minds as free to such an extent that even the world could possibly be thought to be a mere invention of our minds, rather than as proof that a world of our bodies and environments force themselves upon our perceptions.
For Descartes, body and mind are in constant struggle to control a person’s actions, for (in Augustinian terms) two orders of divine cosmic causal origination and motion are at war here, the natural and the voluntary. The soul can be either passive to the bidding of the body or active in controlling the body and hence its actions. Descartes regarded all the functions of the soul as aspects of its conscious thinking—understanding, willing, imagining, remembering, sensing, and emotional feelings.104 The human moral problem is the struggle between body and soul. The aim is to get the soul, the mind, to have utter control over the body and what the body does. The mind’s willful mastery of the body and of itself—in both its thoughts and initiation of actions—is the aim of ethics, and it is what Descartes points to as moral agency. The emotions must be brought into line by becoming “active,” which means that they must come under the mind’s control, rather than being passive to the causal order of the body and the world. We hear the echo of Augustine’s reduction of emotions to acts of free will here, recalling that even the emotions, for Augustine, turn out to be the effects, rather than the causes or motivations, of the will. We also discern in Descartes’s moral psychology Augustine’s bifurcation of the cosmos into two divine causal orders, the natural (mathematical and bodily) and the voluntary (mental).
Willing and understanding occur in the soul alone, for Descartes, and are both aspects of its voluntary activity. Sense perception, the passions, some memories, and imaginings result from interactions of mind and body. Thoughts can be either passions or actions, depending on whether they originate in the soul and are initiated by it (these are the volitions) or originate outside it in the body and world and hence are passively received and represented by the soul (these latter are the passions). Passion and action refer to internal states of the soul of relative mental weakness or strength in initiating thoughts. When the body acts upon the mind, affecting it, that’s passivity. The result is emotions that we seem to be completely passive to and in the grip of. The internal power of the mind to affect the world occurs when the body is (passively) obedient to the mind’s active bidding. That’s Descartes’s “activity.” When the body is active, or dominating the mind, that’s Descartes’s “passivity”—so the terms are articulated only from the point of view of the soul or mind’s control or domination of body and world. So Descartes’s theory of the passions draws a line between our passive perceptions and our active volitions. That passivity of perceptions and passions thus marks off part of us—certainly the body, but also a division even within the mind—as in a sense exterior to what is the “true” locus of “us” or self. The activity/passivity dichotomy redraws the boundary between self and other, self and world, and relocates it within the customary bounds of the person—the skin. Since only volitions are identified by Descartes as truly our own, or ourselves, what counts as the self is radically narrowed to the will; again we encounter here Descartes’s Augustinianism. It is from the (free) will alone that our control over the often unsettling waves of emotion can arise. The will is the movement that the mind’s judgment initiates. It reverses the direction of passivity from the mind’s pervasion by painful passions to its self-mastery of them. Volition is the activity of the mind par excellence.
Virtue, according to Descartes, consists in judging what is best and then acting with complete resolve on those judgments. Our virtue is thus our strength of will in shaping the self, the body, and the world rather than being shaped by them. The rewards of such virtue are our pleasure in our capacity for self-control and our satisfaction and ease in knowing that the passions emerging from the winds of fortune cannot move us. Descartes regards such joy as not itself a passion because it is strictly interior to the mind. It does not depend at all upon the body, although it moves the body to emotional expression. Emotion that originates strictly from the soul as though the soul were without connection to the body is the ideal for Descartes. That is activity and the active control of self (mind), body, and world. Here we have a somewhat secularized Augustinian account of moral psychology and agency, in which God’s will in relation to the human will, either in grace or in conflict as all-powerful, no longer holds sway, so that the arena of human free will has suddenly taken up the entire space. We have the expansion of the human capacity and responsibility of freedom without the limitations of divine power or original sin. As Menn points out, Descartes’s Augustinianism is that of De Libero Arbitrio, a text that emphasized human free will more than divine power and will. That text was well suited to be particularly inspirational in an era in which humanism had already placed the human person, rather than God, at its center. Yet it is a human person envisioned with a divine-like, miraculous power of will over its actions, its body, and over the natural world.
We have seen how a streamlined and hardened Augustinian conception of free will became foundational to standard modern moral philosophy in the West and came to dominate cultural commonplaces about how our moral capacity is assumed to work. Tendencies of an earlier Greek classical naturalism and intellectualist understanding of moral agency that had seeped in from the Mediterranean East in the thirteenth century underwent a full-scale jettisoning in favor of a purist Augustinian revival in the sixteenth century by both Protestants and Catholics in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In the Mediterranean Eastern orbit, however, the Greek classical naturalist and rationalist understanding of human nature, with its intellectualist conception of the good person as having a kind of knowledge and the bad person as befogged and ignorant, had both flourished and undergone a line of development of its own. While Western Christendom had become more and more under the sway of a purified and radicalized Augustinian conception of human nature, in the Eastern orbit, first in Syriac Christianity and then in an Arabic philosophical school within Islam and Judaism, the opposite tendency had taken hold. Thinking of human nature, not just of the body but of the mind as well, as within nature and explainable by natural causes was the starting point of an alternative account of human moral nature, an account that continued to pay homage to classical Greek moral naturalism and intellectualism. This different conception of human nature and the human moral capacity, while it did not come to have the general cultural dominance that the Augustinian presuppositions did in the West, nonetheless was developed into a clarified, radicalized, and systematically worked out account of how and why human beings act morally and why they don’t. That conception was introduced by the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, writing in Arabic in the thirteenth century, and was developed further and brought into modern dialogue with the Augustinian West by the Jewish Dutch philosopher Spinoza in the seventeenth century.