If one admits, as I have wagered here, that the Confessiones must be organized according to the Augustinian model of confessio, one cannot not observe the striking succession of three decisive passages in book 10 (the central one, where everything turns upside down, from the ego to the scriptures and from the singular to the plural): first, the veritas redarguens (Confessiones X, 23, 34 [Chapter 3 above, §§17–19]), then the love of beauty (“Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua tam nova, sero te amavi!” [X, 27, 38; Chapter 3 above, §§20–22]), but also, still to be conceptualized, the universal sway of temptation over life in its entirety: “Numquid non ‘temptatio est vita humana super terram’ sine ullo interstitio?” (“The life of man on earth, is it anything but a temptation” [Job 7:1] without interruption?) (X, 28, 39, 14, 210). Now having seen that the first two themes did not succeed one another by chance (only the love of truth in the aspect of beauty permits enduring the veritas redarguens without succumbing to its hatred), we surmise that the universality accorded to temptation is doubtlessly articulated together with the dual-action truth that precedes it. We still have to see in what way: is it a matter of a succession, a consequence, or a resistance?
One can hardly be anything but astonished, at least on first impression, that the theme of temptation comes up again and, in fact, especially after the conversion. One cannot but notice, as Saint Augustine admits elsewhere, that conversion does not resolve everything and that, even if baptism erases all faults, the inclination to commit them does not immediately disappear: “Sane ista renovatio non momento uno fit ipsius conversionis, sicut momento uno fiat illa in Baptismo renovatio remissione omnium peccatorum” (To be sure, this renewal does not happen in a single moment, that of conversion, as in baptism renewal by remission of sins is accomplished in a single moment). The renewal that follows conversion is accomplished only “quotidianis accessibus” (by daily advances), “de die in diem proficiendo” (progressing from day to day) (De Trinitate XIV, 17, 23, 16, 408–10). In other words, and to remove all ambiguity: “Sic et post baptismum restat vita christiana in temptationibus” (Thus, even after baptism, the Christian life remains mired in temptations) (Commentaries on the Psalms 72, 5, PL 36, 917). It could even be that temptation does not appear as such, in all its enigma, except once its connection with actual sin has been suspended. For only in this situation does it indeed appear as an unconditioned possibility, which persists precisely as such without having any need of passing into the actuality of a wicked deed. Temptation is already operative entirely within possibility alone and demands nothing more than possibility to operate; it is tempting precisely in opening possibilities. A delay, a belatedness, must be admitted—in short, a differance provoked by the conversion itself because it is only produced in ever having to be reproduced, because it only happens in experiencing a resistance, that of the temptations that continue the combat lost by the sins: “his temptationibus quotidie conor resistere” (each day I strive to resist these temptations) (Confessiones X, 31, 44, 14, 218). Thus, not only does conversion demand time for my decision toward God to free me from what turns me away from him, but it also produces this time because it requires it and allocates it. My resistance to conversion—put otherwise, conversion as resistance of what I have become to what I used to be—renders me different from myself and therefore makes me defer my coming to God, that is to say my coming to myself, more exactly myself coming to itself. Through this differance an arena opens where time plays itself out, or more exactly as we will see, for the time of distentio, the time that sin distends and that provokes resistance.
Temptation thereby assumes its proper status: a state of resistance, as much the resistance to the conversion of my inclination to sin as the resistance of my progressive conversion to this very inclination. In any case it is precisely not a matter of sin but of temptation, which, if it precedes, permits, and possibly produces the sin, is absolutely not identical to it—which, for that matter, is confirmed by the fact that the theme of temptation here comes from a citation of Job 7:1: “Numquid non temptatio est vita humana super terram?” Job, that is, has not sinned, and his unhappiness cannot be understood as a punishment, but it comes upon him solely because God authorizes Satan to tempt him. Disconnected from the actuality of sin, temptation becomes for Job a pure possibility, one that he keeps open as such by stubbornly refusing the counsel of his friends—to once again join unhappiness to sin as effect to cause, so as to put everything again back into effective actuality. Maintained in possibility and exercising itself as this possibility itself, temptation becomes for Job not only the paradoxical occasion for a proof of faith but also an ordeal of self—in short, for a resistance.1 The distinction between sin and temptation is inscribed in time: while each sin is an act, therefore an event that comes and that goes (even if it lets its trace remain), temptation defines a possibility, therefore a disposition that persists without end, to the point of remaining a sort of habitus, even after conversion and baptism—indeed especially after conversion and baptism, which provoke so much resistance. Temptation institutes the resistance in time and gives me my time each day: “his temptationibus quotidie conor resistere” (I strive each day to resist these temptations) (X, 31, 44, 14, 218); “In his ergo temptationibus positus certo quotidie” (Each day, I am exposed to these temptations) (X, 31, 47, 14, 226); “multis minutissimis et contemptibilibus rebus curiositas quotidie nostra temptetur” (our curiosity is tempted each day by a tumult of miniscule and contemptible things) (X, 35, 57, 14, 242); “Temptamur his temptationibus quotidie, Domine, sine cessatione temptamur. Quotidiana formax” (We are tempted each day by these temptations, Lord, incessantly we are. A fiery furnace each day) (X, 38, 60, 14, 248). Thus, temptation counts out my days. This means not only that not one day passes without my suffering a temptation but also that, for me, time always befalls me as an assault against me, which gives me the ordeal of the possibility of sinning but, above all, through this very possibility, imparts to me an ordeal of myself. The time that tempts me tests me, to the point that I undergo myself only in the daily test posed by the daily ordeal of the possibility of sin.
The permanence and universality of temptation become all the more a definition of the vita humana as Saint Augustine sometimes adds “tota” or related words to the verse from Job 7:1: “vita ipsa mortalium tota poena sit, qui tota temptatio est, sicut sacrae litterae personant, ubi scriptum est ‘Numquid non temptatio est vita humana super terram?’” (the very life of mortals is in its totality a temptation, as we hear in the passage from scriptures: “Is not human life a temptation on this earth?”) (De civitate Dei XXI, 14, 37, 438). Or: “Nunc vero quamdiu ‘corpus quod corrumpitur aggravat animam’ et ‘vita humana super terram tota temptatio’” (Now, while “the body that is corruptible oppresses the soul” [Wisdom 9:15] and “human life in its totality is temptation”) (De Trinitate IV, 3, 5, 15, 348). Or again: “Tota enim ‘vita humana super terram, sicut scriptum est, temptatio est’” (For, as it is written, in its totality, “the life of man on earth is temptation”) (Commentaries on the Psalms 74, 1, PL 36, 946). And above all: “Non enim ait scriptura in Job: Temptationibus abundat vita humana; sed ait: ‘Numquid non temptatio est vita humana super terram?’ Totam ipsam vitam temptationem dixit. Omnis ergo vita tua super terram plagae tuae sunt” (For scripture does not say in the book of Job: The life of man abounds in temptations, but, “Is not human life on earth temptation?” It said that this life itself [is] in its totality temptation. Therefore your troubles last all your life on earth).2 Temptation does not come up just from time to time, punctually as it were, but “sine ullo interstitio” (without respite) (Confessiones X, 28, 39, 14, 210), without stop in time, therefore totally and without exception as the constant mark of a human life. Permanent in time, temptation is proven in its universal definition. This means, of course, that the spirit of man finds itself, converted or not, baptized or not, inasmuch as man, radically exposed to the possibility of sinning, in such a way that living in the mode of man is equivalent to the ability to sin. This means, especially, that, in the figure of the possibility of sinning, it is radically exposed to possibility as such.
As universal and permanent determination, temptation confronts life inasmuch as human with possibility as such. For, in it alone appears what each man thinks fundamentally: “Multos interrogant tentationes et tunc apparent cogitationes; multi autem latent” (Many are those who investigate the temptations, and then their thoughts appear; but many hide themselves) (Commentary on the Gospel of John XLVI, 5, PL 35, 1730). Not only what each man thinks, but what he can bear and, finally, what he is: “Omnis enim temptatio probatio est, et omnis probationis effectus habet fructum suum. Quia homo plerumque etiam sibi ipsi ignotus est, quid ferat, quid non ferat ignorat. Qui ferat, quidve non ferat, ignorat; accedit temptatio quasi interrogatio et invenitur homo a seipso” (Every temptation is in effect an ordeal, and every effect of an ordeal has its fruit. Because man is most of the time ignorant, even about himself, he also does not know what he bears and what he does not bear. Temptation comes upon him as an inquisitor and man finds himself).3 Temptation, therefore, has the power to make visible what would remain, without it, hidden, in fact invisible to man himself: his thoughts, his strength, his own self, what he is in himself, but precisely not to himself. From where does it get this power of phenomenalization? Evidently from the fact that it confronts each man with the things themselves but with these things in the truth (theirs and also therefore his own)—that is to say, exclusively insofar as he comes to desire them or not, to love them or hate them. The decisive point resides here: the anima does not relate to the things of the world as to stable beings, accessible and already available, consequently, good to know (vorhanden), but as to moving targets of desire, sometimes all the more desired as they are not available and do not stay at hand, precisely because their mere possibility is enough for desire to enjoy them. In turn, the anima does not remain equal to itself, in the neutrality of the theoretic attitude (in fact, in the natural attitude of metaphysics), nor does it accede to itself as to a permanent object; rather, it appears to itself, without cease, as a pure possibility, which does not know itself except insofar as it is decided, or rather insofar as it has to be decided in the face of temptation, the ordeal of possibility.
Thus, no longer relating to the things of the world as to subsistent beings to be known, but as to possibilities for desiring, no longer relating to itself in and through stable self-knowledge, barred from neutrality by an unceasing temptation, human life finally undergoes the ordeal of itself. Or, more exactly, it experiences itself as the very ordeal of its possibility, of a self outside self. In it, nothing has ever been decided once and for all. It is necessary to decide, nevertheless, with nothing else but it itself able to do so in its place. Never decided, always to decide, the vita humana has no other state besides its indetermination in determining, its always pending possibility. Saint Augustine names this privilege, for it is one, mutability: “Mutantur enim atque variantur” (They change and vary) (Confessiones XI, 4, 6, 14, 280), since “inest ei tamen ipsa mutabilitas unde tenebresceret et frigesceret, nisi amore grandi tibi cohaerens tanquam semper meridies luceret et ferveret ex te” (there is however in it [created wisdom] mutability itself, which would cast its shadow over it and freeze it if, adhering to you by a great love as to a perpetual noonday sun, it did not shine and burn from out of you) (XII, 15, 21, 14, 374). This mutability should not be mistaken for an ontic determination and reduced to a mere opposition to eternity, according to an all too easily supposed “Neoplatonism” on the part of Saint Augustine.4 For it concerns nothing less than what Heidegger will identify as facticity, such that it deploys the radical possibility of what he will name Dasein but that here operates as the vita humana.
Temptation thus imposes on me the possibility, itself inevitable and permanent, of a self-decision. It imposes on me the ordeal of the self as such (the Selbst)—as such, that means no longer as an object or even a being of the world but as a mode, a manner and a style of phenomenality proper—mine insofar as I must, by fait accompli, always already be decided and, in myself deciding, decide for all myself. In facticity no deed, no being, not even the least bit of the world, but a particular mode of phenomenality is at play—that of the humana vita.5 As a mode, facticity grants it the power to undergo the ordeal of self, certainly a privilege, but always also inseparably in an ordeal—a trouble (molestia), a heavy weight (onus): “Oneri mihi sum” (I am a weighty burden to myself) (X, 28, 39, 14, 208). For the vita humana never undergoes the ordeal of itself (of the self) with a light heart because the ineluctable possibility of having to be decided weighs on it as a burdensome charge, which is imposed without its even being able to accept it. The possibility of being decided has itself never been decided, not even (especially not) by me: it weighs therefore on the vita humana with all its weight, the weight of a deadweight. The nondecided possibility of deciding without respite (sine interstitio) my life—in other words, facticity as my ownmost how—weighs more heavily than life itself.
How to interpret this? We owe it to Heidegger, no doubt unique among the moderns, to have taken seriously the weight of the self’s burden to itself, of the onus mihi sum, by thinking it as facticity: “It is necessary to grasp more sharply this fundamental character in which Augustine experiences factical life—the tentatio [trial, temptation]—in order to understand accordingly to what extent [inwiefern] the one who lives in such clarity, and on such a level of enactment, is necessarily a burden to himself (eine Last ist).”6 In 1921 Heidegger did not lead this weight back farther than to possibility (“Possibility is the true ‘burden.’ Heavy!”), therefore to facticity (“the tolerare . . . is born and moves in a characteristic and fundamental direction of factical life, one in which the tentatio finds at the same time its sense and motivation”).7 To this degree the weight of the ordeal of self in temptation remains still undetermined. In 1927, by contrast, Heidegger will determine this weight definitively as a burden, this time precisely, of Being: “Being has become manifest as a burden. . . . A mood [Stimmung, tonality or attunement] makes manifest ‘how one is, and how one is faring’ [‘wie enim ist und wird’]. In this ‘how one is,’ having a mood brings Being to its ‘there.’” “Weighing heavily” (Lastcharakter) from now on characterizes not simply the vita humana in the face of God, where it is a question of love and hate, but Dasein in its Being, where Being itself is at issue.8 The gain the existential analytic aims at through this interpretation of the onus mihi is identified quite clearly: winning an “authentic existential”9 that philosophy could attain only by recourse to an Augustinian (and therefore theological) analysis of the vita humana. But this overturning has a price, and the violence can no longer be ignored: it makes the aim of the vita beata and the truth of the third order, which is to say all that Saint Augustine was seeking, vanish, reducing it to a mere instrument in reasking the question of Being. What served to aim at God, or rather what was set forth only in view of God, therefore rightfully on the basis of this horizon, is devalued and neutralized, becoming an analysis that merely prepares for the opening of another horizon, one totally different, that of Being.10
We cannot not be astonished by such a diversion of facticity coram Deo, nor can we help but wonder if another interpretation of the weight of facticity may remain more legitimate, therefore preferable. But before requalifying it, it is again necessary that it should first be proven possible within the horizon of the confessio.
To reach such an interpretation, one must attempt to think such a weight of the self weighing on me (“oneri mihi sum”) from a decidedly theological point of view—in other words, for Saint Augustine, from a biblical point of view. This can be done if we refer onus mihi to the weight evoked by Christ according to Matthew 11:28, 30: “Venite ad me omnes qui laboratis et onerati estis, et ego reficiam vos; . . . jugum autem meum suave est et onus meum leves” (Come to me, all you who are labored and carry a heavy weight. I will remake you; . . . sweet is my yoke, light my weight).11 Only this rapprochement lets us understand the complete argument, from which Heidegger extracts only the three words onus mihi sum: “viva erit vita mea tota plena te. Nunc autem quoniam quem tu imples sublevas eum, quoniam tui plenus non sum, oneri mihi sum” (alive will be my life [once] filled by you. But right now, as you lighten, relieve, and lift up him whom you fill, and as I am not full of you, I am a heavy weight to myself (Confessiones X, 28, 39, 14, 208). Now this argument is not self-evident since it takes on the allure of a paradox: how is it that what is filled is lifted up, while what remains empty weighs itself down on itself? Shouldn’t we say, in contrast, that what remains empty weighs less than what is filled? It’s of no use to make the correction that here Augustine is talking about the difference between being filled with God (to grow light) or with self (to weigh oneself down), for it would still remain to be understood why filled with God means growing light while filled with self (in fact, the void of God, therefore a void) is crushing.
The response to this conceptual problem comes, as is often the case with Saint Augustine, from his exegesis of the biblical text. Provided one takes the time to look at it, which Heidegger does not do (nor do the majority of other modern readers), one will see that he maintains a steady interpretation of Matthew 11:28–30: “Quidquid enim difficile est in praecepto, leve est in amanti. Nec ob aliud recte intelligitur dictum ‘Onus meum leve est,’ nisi quia dat ‘Spiritum sanctum, per quem diffunditur caritas in cordibus nostris,’ ut amando liberaliter faciamus, quod timendo qui facit, serviliter facit” (All that is difficult in a commandment is light for him who loves. This is the only way to understand correctly the saying “My weight is light,” because “the Holy Spirit by which charity is diffused in our hearts” [Romans 5:5] gives us to do willingly what is done with fear by him who does it slavishly).12 Or else: “‘Jugum enim meum lene est et onus meum leve.’ Non enim poterit labor finiri, nisi hoc quisque diligat quod invito non possit auferri” (“My yoke is sweet and my weight light.” For only he who loves that of which he cannot acquit himself [by doing it] against his liking can come to the end of a task).13 The reasoning thus appears limpid: so long as I remain empty of God, that is to say so long as I love neither him nor his will, the requirements of love take on the figure of the Law, which I cannot accomplish by myself, precisely because I do not love; hence, empty of grace, the Law crushes me under a weight that in fact comes from me, reduced to myself alone and hating the demand of God. But, as soon as grace fills me, I love what no longer appears to me exactly as a commandment but as a demand that I love and that, since I love it, I accomplish with all my heart, with a heart finally light. The weight weighs me down only insofar as I remain empty—but empty of the love of God or, more exactly, of the love with which Christ alone can fill me. For it is indeed a question of Christ: “‘Sarcina mea levis est.’ Alia sarcina premit et aggravat te; Christi autem sarcina sublevat te; alia sarcina pondus habet, Christi sarcina pennas habet” (“The baggage that I impose is light.” Every other weighs you down and crushes you; but that of Christ lightens you, relieves you, and lifts you up. Every other weight weighs you down, that of Christ gives you wings).14 The paradox is clear: the burden becomes light to whoever loves bearing it or rather to whoever loves the one who imposes it on him, but it crushes whoever hates both. In this sense the burden that Christ imposes lightens and relieves the ego of the weight weighing down on it from not only the commandment of the Law, adversarial and impracticable, but, above all, from the decision to remain solely full of self by not loving this burden and him who imposes it—that is to say, the weight of the self reduced to itself alone. I am a weight to myself when I do not love; neither the commandment nor Christ, and therefore in the end not even myself.
The weight of self—more exactly, the weight of the self—therefore manifests facticity, the situation in which the vita humana always already has to decide about itself before deciding about the things of the world. But this facticity does not decide about itself alone in its Being: the weight is not identified with the Being nor with the nothingness of beings within the world. The weight of the self assigns it to deciding between two burdens: that of the self reduced to itself, the weight of a deadweight, or that which I would love and which would lighten me—precisely the weight of the decision by and for myself. And it is this second weight that is at play in the ordeal of temptation, in which it is not a matter of resisting by oneself solely by insisting all the more on and in oneself but of passing from a crushing passivity to a loving toleration, that is, to “the love that bears all” (1 Corinthians 13:7). Temptation teaches one to pass from resistance to toleration by love of the factical weight: “‘Numquid est non temptatio est vita humana super terram?’ Quis velit molestias et difficultates? Tolerari jubes eas, non amari. Nemo quod tolerat amat, etsi tolerare amat. Quamvis enim gaudeat se tolerare, mavult tamen non esse quod toleret” (“Is not human life on earth temptation?” Who bears willingly the troubles and the difficulties? You order us to bear them, not to love them. Nobody loves what he bears, even if he loves [being capable of] bearing them. For though he rejoices [to be successful in bearing] to bear them, he would nevertheless prefer having nothing to bear) (Confessiones X, 28, 39, 14, 210). The question does not consist in bearing or not bearing temptation and the troubles (molestias) it imposes; in all cases it must be done, and nobody can evade it. The only question is the manner of bearing them: either by undergoing them and possibly yielding to them (then the evil undergone will render me evil, too), or by undergoing them without yielding to them, by loving the joy that I experience in not yielding to them. “Quis enim pertinens ad Christum non variis temptationibus agitatur, et quotidie agit cum illo diabolus et angeli ejus, ut pervertatur qualibet cupiditate, qualibet suggestione?” (Who, belonging to Christ and concerned by him, is not stirred by various temptations, stirred by the devil and his angels each day so as to be turned away by some desire, some suggestion?) (Commentaries on the Psalms 62, 17, PL 36, 758). Temptation indeed becomes the permanent and universal condition of the vita humana, a facticity, in which a tonality provokes and also results from a decision to be made without respite. But the stakes for someone who belongs to Christ (pertinens ad Christum) are essentially different from the stakes for someone who is identified with Dasein. In the place where the self in its tonalities (Stimmungen) decides about itself in a decision about Being, the self in its temptations decides if it loves or does not love by deciding about Christ. To this difference a second is added: in opposition to Dasein the pertinens ad Christum decides without knowing if he will be able to decide and how: “et ex qua parte stet victoria nescio” (and I do not know to which side victory will belong) (Confessiones X, 28, 39, 14, 208). For, this decision does not depend on him, since it is about loving and loving must be received. Here an absolutely new principle intervenes: “Da quod jubes et jube quod vis” (Grant what you command, and command what you will) (X, 29, 40, 14, 210). In its radicality it scandalized Julian, bishop of Eclanum, but it is also directly opposed to Heidegger. For this principle postulates that, in the decision that temptation imposes, I can bear the burden by loving him who imposes it on my spontaneous desire only if he gives me to love him more than I hate the burden. I will not love because I will have decided; I will not decide, therefore, because I will have willed it but because I will receive it as a gift: “‘et hoc ipsum erat sapientiae, scire cujus esset hoc donum” (“and the knowledge of him from whom this gift came will itself come from wisdom”) (ibid., 14, 212, citing Wisdom 8:21). Temptation thus becomes the ordeal of self in which the self learns if it loves what it received as a gift and if it loves this gift more than anything else.
It now becomes possible to consider, albeit only briefly, the temptations and their logic. First, the things that occasion temptation must be specified. It is not a matter of things insofar as they are, more exactly insofar as they remain as such beneath the gaze of the neutral knowledge (vorhanden) that would aim only to know them in their present essences. It is a matter of these same things inasmuch as things of use, usual things available for me to use them (zuhanden). It is not a matter solely of things that are desirable because usable, in opposition to others that are not usable and therefore not desired, but of all things that desire can always interpret as usable exactly to the degree that they can, all of them, fall beneath the desiring gaze. Things inasmuch as desired, these obscure objects of desire, Saint Augustine will name libidines—literally, “desirables”—such as they appear from the point of view opened by the unconditioned desire for the vita beata. How do they incite temptation, provoke a decision, and exert the facticity of the vita humana? Without even having recourse to the famous distinction between uti and frui (use and enjoyment of things inasmuch as desired),15 it suffices here to stick with the conclusion: however desirable the libidines appear and might be (if not, would there be a decision to make?), their threat consists in that none of them can claim to grant access to him who gives us to love what he orders. “Nihil eorum esse te inveni. . . . Neque in his omnibus, quae percurro consulens te, invenio tutum animae meae locum” (I found that none of them was you. . . . And in all the things that I run through in consulting you, I do not find the assured place of my soul) (X, 40, 65, 14, 258). The decision consists, when faced with each of the libidines, in choosing between loving it for itself or else, through it, loving what gives it, in deciding between loving the gift given or else what renders it possible. But if “amplius placuit donum hominis quam Dei” (we are pleased more with the gift received from man than with the gift given by God) (X, 36, 59, 14, 248), and if I decide to love the libido itself, without God, then, left alone and to myself, the weight of the self crushes me: “ita praegravatus animus quasi pondere suo a beatitudine expellitur” (thus, as if crushed beneath its own weight, the mind finds itself cast out of happiness).16 The temptation consists in enjoying absolutely what merits only use; the resistance to temptation demands enjoying only what serves no other use.
We can now run through the different temptations. Resuming the canonic threefold distinction established in 1 John 2:16, Saint Augustine distinguishes concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eyes, and ambitio saeculi—in other words, the temptations arising through the five senses (through the auto-affection of the flesh), the temptation of curiositas (from which Heidegger will get Neugier),17 and the desire for praise. Now, in each of these three temptations the issue is always undergoing the ordeal of self: never is the soul experienced as itself, except in undergoing one of the three temptations, thus being decided in relation to one of the three libidines. But, in turn, each temptation leads to the ordeal of self by self, though in the paradoxical mode of an aporia of the self to itself.
Consider first the libidines of the flesh (X, 30, 41–53), in terms of touch, taste (gluttony, X, 31, 43–47), smell (in this case not much of a temptation: “odorum non satago nimis” [X, 32, 48]), and hearing (X, 33, 49–50). I will keep for consideration here only touch, one of the least avoidable temptations from which sexual desire proceeds. Here it is not a matter of a desire that is so to speak real (that of waking life, always in some sense voluntary or assumed), but of unreal desire (experienced in sleep, without consent). Now, marvels Saint Augustine, as much as I can remain inconcussus (unshakable) by real temptation, therefore in principle stronger than it, so too, before the unreal and in principle less-constraining dream, I yield and consent to pleasure. In this situation I become what I do not decide on my own (consenting in irreality to the real pleasure) more so than what I do decide on my own (not consenting really to a possible pleasure). It follows that I am what I do not decide, therefore that I do not decide what I am: “Numquid tunc ego non sum, Domine Deus meus? Et tamen tantum interest inter me ipsum et me ipsum intra momentum, quo hinc ad soporem transeo vel huc inde retranseo!” (Am I, at this moment, not myself, O Lord my God? And yet, there is such a gap between myself and myself, between the instant in which I cross from here to sleep and that in which I return from there to here!) (X, 30, 41, 14, 214). Not only am I not myself and do I not attain my self, but this is not even owing to a default of knowledge or of power to be decided (or to decide about this or that), because now it appears as clear as day that, in this temptation, no decision any longer defines this self; or again that the ipseity of self is neither attained nor any longer accomplished by a decision, nor by the slightest act of will. The self crushes me precisely because I do not have access to it.18
The temptation that comes from the libido sciendi, or the concupiscence of knowing for the sake of knowing, operates first as seeing for the sake of seeing with the eyes (X, 35, 54–58). It puts the vita humana under the sway of the things of the world, exterior and foreign to it, inasmuch as perceived and known.19 In perfect agreement with the doctrine of a truth of the third order, it is necessary to denounce, under the guise of a neutral and disinterested knowledge, a desire to dissipate in things that are not me—solely in order to distract myself from myself with “vana et curiosa cupiditas nomine cognitionis et scientiae palliata” (a vain and curious desire, decked out in the name of knowledge and science) (X, 35, 54, 14, 238). It is not a matter of knowing something real but which would truly bear on me. It is only a question of satisfying the desire to let oneself dissipate, each day, in the knowledge of anything whatsoever, even and especially the tiniest and most futile of matters (“in quam multis minutissimis et contemptibilibus rebus curiositas nostra quotidie temptetur” [how many condemnable and miniscule trivialities each day tempt our curiosity] [X, 35, 56, 14, 240]). In curiosity there is not even any longer a real difference between theater, mathematics, and divinatory astronomy (X, 35, 56, 14, 240ff.) because knowing no longer has as its goal to know something or other, but solely to know knowing—still more paradoxically: to know precisely what does not concern me: “quae scire nihil prodest et nihil aliud quam scire homines cupiunt” (things that do no good, men desire to know nothing other than these) (X, 35, 55, 14, 240). The libido for the things of the world repeats on the outside what the libido of the flesh accomplishes within: putting the self into a crisis vis-à-vis itself.
The temptation of pride—ambitio saeculi—repeats and accentuates this aporia but this time in terms of intersubjectivity. The ultimate temptation is born from my desire for the esteem of men, a desire that is so unconditional that I condemn any possible esteem God might have for me: “tertium temptationis genus . . . timeri et amari velle ab hominibus . . . hinc fit vel maxime non amare te nec caste timere” (a third type of temptation . . . wanting to be feared and loved by men . . . from which it follows, more than anything, that one does not love you [sc. God] and that one does not fear you chastely). There is more: not only do we in fact pay more attention to men’s judgment of us than to that of God regarding us, but in the desire to obtain the praise of men at any price, not only does one not beg for it by virtue of the (possible) esteem that God could have for us, but one begs for it with such excess that one is ready to claim from men the esteem that they owe only to God: “nos amari et timeri non propter te, sed pro te” (we are loved and feared not for your sake, but in your place) (X, 36, 59, 14, 246), and become loved and honored not because of he who made us such as we might possibly merit it, but in his place. Such a masquerade, and one so obvious, should render this temptation perfectly visible and therefore resistible; yet it turns out to be impossible not to yield to it in one way or another. Even the resolute claim to renounce the glory of men (supposing it to be perfect and sincere) can only attract for its part an esteem that is all the more legitimate, which strengthens the temptation all the more (X, 37, 61, 14, 250, 254). I never know therefore if praise touches on me for my own sake or solely for the edification of the others (“non . . . propter me, se propter proximi utilitatem”). That—nothing less than the self that I am in the final analysis—I know it even less than I know God himself: “minus mihi in hace re notus sum quam tu” (in this matter, I am less known to myself than you are to me) (X, 37, 62, 14, 254). Never has the aporia posed to the ego by the self in it, that is the aporia of care of the self, been so radically exposed, not even in the phrase “Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo” (III, 6, 11, 13, 382). For here I know the interior intimo meo (supposed to know me better than I know myself) better than I know the intimum in myself.
Facticity, to which the temptations attest, therefore makes evident the self’s ownmost, but only as an aporia. This aporia does not, however, leave the self undetermined, to the point that its facticity could not assign it to anything or, what amounts to the same thing, that it could not be conducive to an existential analytic. For the universal and necessary condition of temptation discloses cura (which we can legitimately understand as Sorge, or care), and cura itself is recognized by what it aims at, pleasure, more exactly by that in which it delights, its delectation. “Finis autem curae delectatio est; quia eo quisque curis et cogitationibus nititur, ut ad suam delectationem perveniat. Videt igitur curas nostras, qui scrutatur cor. Videt autem fines curarum, id est delectationes, qui perscrutatur renes” (The end of care is delectation; because each of us endeavors in his care and his thoughts to succeed in his delighting. May he see our cares, he who examines our heart. May he also see the ends of our cares—namely, our delights—he who examines our every nook and cranny) (Commentaries on the Psalms 7, 9, PL 36, 103).20 There is only one way to identify care, cura: identifying that for which it cares, that is to say, that where it finds (or at least believes it finds) its delights, its delectatio. But once that is done, the question is not put to rest, for it still remains to understand how each self decides to assume this or that delectatio. And, according to the evidence, this decision rests neither on an objective calculation of interests nor on a pure resolution, since it is carried out in a horizon that is not economic or ontological but strictly erotic, according to what the self can love or believe to love, desire or believe to desire. “‘Pes animae’ recte intelligitur amor; qui cum pravus est, vocatur cupiditas aut libido; cum autem rectus, dilectio vel caritas. Amore enim movetur, tanquam ad locum quo tendit. Locus autem animae non in spatio aliquo est, quod forma occupat corporis, sed in delectatione, quo se pervenisse per amorem laetatur” (The “striding of the soul” is correctly understood as love—which if it is perverse is named desire or concupiscence, but if it is straight, love or charity. That is, love puts it into motion as that toward which it tends. For the place of the soul is not found in some extension or other, which the form of a body would occupy, but in delectation, that it rejoices in having attained).21 The factical self of the ego is indeed experienced in temptation; temptation does indeed lead it to be decided according to its care (its cura). That for which it takes care has nothing to do with stable beings for theoretical knowledge (vorhanden) but everything to do with a useful being (zuhanden) where one can find one’s delights (delectatio). But this cura and delectatio remain unintelligible without the horizon of love and the erotic reduction that provokes them—and they become perfectly problematic within the horizon of being, where beings admit at best an organization according to the diminished authority of utility, without ever being able to incite libido, cupiditas, or, of course, dilectio. Delectatio therefore explains cura only insofar as it is set forth within a radically erotic horizon. It is not enough to mobilize cura and care at the service of beingness for them to become intelligible and remain operative within the pure and simple horizon of Being. It could be that this poaching, by uprooting them from their radically erotic horizon, renders them unintelligible and, essentially, ontologically inoperative.
This is what we find clearly confirmed in the Augustinian interpretation of the will as a mode of love: “Hanc voluntatem non timor, sed caritas habet, ‘quae diffunditur in cordibus credentium per Spiritum sanctum’” (This will is not possessed by fear but by the love that “the Holy Spirit spreads in the heart of believers” [Romans 5:5]).22 The will—or, if one prefers, resolution (Entschlossenheit)—does indeed, in the final analysis, define the self, but in Saint Augustine’s terms, this is because the self is resolved always according as it loves. The paradox of self-will, therefore, is from now on to be formulated in terms of the demands of love. The argument comes up first in the refutation of Manicheanism. Since this ideology, aiming to acquit its clients of evil, had to assert evil’s necessary, natural, and substantial character, therefore putting it finally even in God himself, Saint Augustine refutes it by showing that God does not in any way cause evil, which needs no other cause besides my will: “liberum voluntatis arbitrium causam esse, ut male faceremus” (The free decision of [our] will is the cause of our doing evil) (Confessiones VII, 3, 5, 13, 584ff.). Or: “Nulla res alia mentem cupiditatis comitem faciat, quam propria voluntas et liberum arbitrium” (No other thing renders the mind servant of desire, except its own will and its free choice) (De libero arbitrio I, 11, 21, 6, 178). Or: “Nusquam scilicet nisi in voluntate esse peccatum” (Nowhere is sin to be found except in the will).23 To be sure, this assignation has as its consequence that I am rendered the one most possibly and probably responsible for evil, but this imputation should not hide the liberation thus accomplished: since evil depends only on a will, and moreover one that is mine, it becomes thinkable, if not possible, to restrain it, indeed to suppress it in me, if not already by myself alone. Seeing myself as responsible for evil amounts to declaring myself potentially free from it.24 Whence the privilege of the will. Nothing defines the self more than the freedom of its decision; nothing belongs to me more as my own than my will. This is the first knowledge: “Non igitur nisi voluntate peccatur. Nobis autem voluntas nostra notissima est: neque enim scirem me velle, si quid sit voluntas ipsa nescirem” (One sins only willingly. Our will is perfectly known to us. For I would not know that I was willing if I did not know what my will was).25 I sin only in willing to (if not, there would not be sin, since there would not be any responsibility). Indeed, I sin (who will seriously deny it?); therefore, my will is absolutely known to me, for I could not will (in fact) if I did not know what the will is (its essence), for the will is but one with the act of willing. And what I know perfectly is something of which I also have perfect certainty in the use, even abusive, that I make of it: “Sublevabat26 enim me in lucem tuam, quod tam sciebam me habere voluntatem quam me vivere. Itaque cum aliquid vellem aut nollem, non alium quam me velle ac nolle certissimus eram et ibi esse causam peccati mei jam jamque advertabam” (What lightened me, relieved me and lifted me up was that I knew I had a will and that I was alive. Therefore when I willed or did not will something, I was absolutely certain that there was nobody other than myself who willed or did not will, and I said, for a long time, the cause of my sin lay there [and nowhere else]) (Confessiones VII, 3, 5, 13, 586). What wills in me is me and not something else, whose necessity would alienate me from it, just as all the ideologies claim—that at least is entirely as certain as the fact that I live. In other words, I will insofar as I live, and I live insofar as I will. This does not imply that Saint Augustine reestablishes here with the will the cogito that he had disqualified in the understanding,27 since here it is not a matter of knowing that I am but who I am. What I want manifests my delectatio, therefore my cura according to my facticity (my temptations)—my willings tell and tell me which self is mine. “Interest autem qualis sit voluntas hominis; quia si perversa est, perversos habebit motus, si autem recta est, non solum inculpabiles, verum etiam laudabiles erunt. Voluntas est quippe in omnibus; immo omnes nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt” (What is important in a man is this: which is his will; for if it is perverse, he too will be perverse in his movements; if it is straight, not only will he not be guilty, but even praiseworthy. For in everyone the will is found or, better, everyone is nothing other than a will) (De civitate Dei XIV, 6, 35, 368ff.). What I am, who I am, is summed up in my willings, therefore in my will: “Nihil aliud habeo quam voluntatem.”28 The certainty of this perfect knowledge does not contradict the impossibility of the cogito or of self-knowledge, since I cannot know what I want, indeed not know that I want it, nor in any way foresee it.
The will, inasmuch as radically erotic instance (amor, dilectio, cupiditas, libido, etc.), is the operator of facticity and care in that it wills, in all its willings, only delectatio. The will assumes and assures the self itself. Saint Augustine establishes this privilege, on which he will never compromise, from the very beginning. “Non enim posses aliud sentire esse in potestate nostra, nisi quod cum volumus facimus. Quapropter nihil tam in nostra potestate, quam ipsa voluntas est. Ea enim prorsus nullo intervallo, mox ut volumus praesto est. Et ideo recte possumus dicere ‘Non voluntate senescimus, sed necessitate;’ aut ‘Non voluntate morimur, sed necessitate;’ et quid alius ejusmodi: ‘Non voluntate autem volumus,’ quis vel delirus audeat dicere?” (For you can sense that there is nothing else in our power except that when we will, we do. This is why there is nothing so much under our power as our will. It is at our disposition, immediately and without any delay as soon as we want it. This is why we can say correctly that “we do not grow old willingly, but by necessity,” that “we do not die willingly, but by necessity,” but who would be mad enough to dare say that “we do not will willingly”?) (De libero arbitrio III, 3, 7, 6, 336–38). This factual evidence seems so solid that Saint Augustine posits it as a definitively established, legitimate ground.29 There would be something like a performative contradiction in not being able to will, since to will to will, it suffices to will. For in this case and in it alone, the possibility is equivalent to the actuality, since the will is carried out as a power, therefore in the role of possibility: “Non enim negare possumus habere nos potestatem, nisi dum nobis non adest quod volumus; dum autem volumus, si voluntas ipsa deest nobis, non utique volumus. Quod si fieri non potest ut dum volumus non velimus, adest utique voluntas volentibus; nec aliud quidquam est in potestate, nisi quod volentibus adest. Voluntas igitur nostra nec voluntas esset, nisi esset in nostra potestate” (We can say that we do not have the power only as long as what we will is missing. But as long as we are willing, if the will itself is lacking, it is because we do not truly will it. If therefore it cannot be the case that we did not will while we will, the will is therefore truly there for those who will and nothing is under our power, except what is there for those who will it. This is why our will would not be one if it were not in our power) (III, 3, 8, 6, 340). When the issue is one of having a will (not of willing something other than to will), what I will coincides exactly with the act of willing it, in such a way that it becomes impossible not to actualize what I will, since for that it is enough to will it. Thus, “nihil aliud ei quam ipsum velle sit habere quod voluit” (having what one wants is nothing other than the willing itself) (I, 29, 6, 192). My will is identified with me, to the point that it would become the self itself, this same self, which most often escapes me under other names, under other movements, under the mask of my desires and my temptations. Beneath the multiplicity of facticity, the will alone decides and it decides about the self.
This insistence on the will means that my access and my relation to veritas (lucens or redarguens), therefore that my vita beata (in truth or not), do not depend on knowing something but on a decision. Or better, they are known only insofar as they are decided, decided according as I will: “quicumque aliud amant [quam veritatem], hoc, quod amant velint esse veritatem. . . . Itaque propter eam rem oderunt veritatem, quam pro veritate amant. Amant eam lucentem, oderunt eam redarguentem” ([All] those who love something other [than this very truth] will that this other thing that they love should be [also] the truth. . . . It is thus that they hate the truth, out of consideration for the thing that they love instead of and in the place of the truth. They love the truth insofar as it illuminates [them], but hate it insofar as it accuses [them]) (Confessiones X, 23, 34, 14, 202).30 The truth of the third order, which manifests itself only as loved, is therefore no longer accomplished except insofar as I am willing, insofar as I will it. In this sense the Nietzschean principle that truth results from the will finds a clear forerunner: more original to the truth than itself is, it turns out, the will to truth. Or more exactly, the will for the truth. For it is not a matter of willing it, in the (supposedly plain Nietzschean) sense in which the will to power would establish it starting from and with a view toward its own rise to power, but of letting it itself advance in manifestation, by wanting to support its manifestation and in the measure of this resolution. My will does not take hold of such an authority by force, since it always falls to the truth of the third order to demand deciding about it so as to and even because it manifests itself first by this very demand. Only my decision permits a practice of the truth, a practice that is finally genuinely theoretic.
At the precise moment when the doctrine of the truth of the third order is articulated with facticity, itself accomplished by the will as the resolution by itself of ipseity, there comes to light what Saint Augustine (thrice) names “hoc monstrum” and defines by the paradox that “Imperat animus corpori et paretur statim: imperat animus sibi, et resistitur” (The mind commands the body, which obeys at once; the mind commands itself, and it resists [itself]) (Confessiones VIII, 9, 21, 14, 50). In other words the will is felt (and brings the self to feel itself) precisely insofar as it does not will—more exactly, is able not to will what it wills. When it must decide about anything other than it, it experiences itself as willing and obedient, but when it must decide about itself, it is experienced as not deciding. The relation between the appropriation of the self and the will resolving itself remains, but it begins by inverting itself: there where Heidegger takes it as established that resolution can (and must) in the end come to decide no longer about something other, but about itself, Saint Augustine is astounded by his difficulty, indeed by his impossibility to will and be resolved, as soon as it is no longer a matter of something other than himself. There where Heidegger assumes a possibility and even possibility par excellence, Saint Augustine investigates an impossibility and even the most intimate of impossibilities. In contrast to Dasein, which attains its self in anticipatory resoluteness, precisely because it can (and therefore should) appropriate it in the end, the mens attains its self first and especially in the powerlessness of its will to decide itself. This paradox (for one should thus translate monstrum) structures the entire narrative of the conversion that occupies book VIII of Confessiones. As for the question of knowing if this is an empirical account or a literary reconstruction, it remains, despite the fierce and fascinating debates that the question has long sustained, artificial and without solid basis, so long as the structure of the phenomenon related has not been identified and its issue remains not understood—the irresolution of resolution, the indecision of decision as enactment of the facticity of the self.
The structure of this paradox shows up without any ambiguity. There is no doubt that we can (or could) will the good: first because others have indeed done so, either after a long delay, as in the case of Marius Victorinus (VIII, 2, 3–5, 14, 12), or “ex hac hora” (in a timely fashion), as the emperor’s agents of public affairs (or agentes in rebus) (VIII, 6, 15, 14, 40); second because we, too, perceive clearly and distinctly the truth, now certain: “Et non erat jam illa excusatio, qua videri mihi solebam propterea me nondum contempto saculo servire tibi, quia incerta mihi esset perceptio veritatis: jam enim et ipsa certa erat” (The habitual excuse no longer held for which it seemed I had not yet served you by condemning the world: to wit, because the perception of the truth still remained uncertain to me. For from now on, this very perception was certain to me) (VII, 5, 11, 14, 30). The irresolution that remains can therefore no longer be attributed to the understanding: “Nempe tu dicebas propter incertum verum nolle te abjicere sarcinam vanitatis. Ecce jam certum est” (You do not want to reject the charge of vanity, you said, owing to the uncertainty of the true. Look, now it is certain) (X, 7, 18, 14, 44). I know perfectly at least one indisputable truth: all men want beatitude, without exception, and all agree that it consists in the enjoyment of the truth, gaudium de veritate. In the standard situation (that is to say, in the kingdom of metaphysics) this great light in the understanding should also provoke a great inclination in the will fully in possession of itself, which should (can) will in direct proportion to the knowledge of the true.31 Here precisely is where the paradox comes up: “Imperat animus, ut velit animus, nec alter est nec facit tamen. Unde hoc monstrum? Et quare istuc? Imperat, inquam, ut velit, qui non imperaret, nisi vellet, et non facit, quod imperat” (The mind commands that the mind will; this mind is not something other and yet it does not do it. Whence this paradox? And why? It commands, I say, willingly, since it would not command if it did not will, yet it does not do what it commands) (VIII, 9, 21, 14, 50ff.). The metaphysical rule of the will finds itself suspended, deactivated, and as if bracketed—in short, submitted to the erotic reduction. There no longer subsists any direct connection between the evidence of the understanding and the actualization of the will, between the knowledge of the true and the resolution to enact it. Indeed, they are governed, in contrast, by a relation of inverse proportion: I do not want the truth precisely because I know it. In other words I hate it. For that matter the narrative of the conversion (Confessiones VIII) should, at least at first, be read as that of a nonconversion, of an obstinate refusal to convert, as it already puts into operation what the doctrine of the truth of the third order will define (Confessiones X): the almost insurmountable impossibility of loving the truth and the almost inevitable possibility of hating it, precisely because one can reach it only by loving it: “Cur autem ‘veritas parit odium’ et ‘inimicus eis factus est homo tuus verum praedicans,’ cum ametur vita beata, quae non est nisi gaudium de veritate, nisi quia sic amatur veritas, ut, quicumque aliud amant, hoc quod amant velint esse veritatem, et quia falli nollent, nolunt convinci, quod falsi sint? Itaque propter eam rem oderunt veritatem, quam pro veritate amant. Amant eam lucentem, oderunt eam redarguentem” (Why then does “truth give birth to hatred,” and why does “the man who serves you and declares the truth become their enemy” [Galatians 4:16], seeing as [everyone] loves the happy life, which is nothing other than rejoicing in the truth? Is it not because [everyone] loves the truth in such a way that [all] those who love something else will that this other thing that they love should be [also] the truth, and, as they do not want to be deceived, they do not want [to admit] that they are deceived? This is how they hate the truth out of consideration for the thing that they love in place and instead of the truth. They love the light when it illuminates [them], but hate it when it accuses [them]).32 The narrative becomes intelligible only within the context of this phenomenal description. What is at stake is not found in the literary form but in what structures the historic narrative conceptually: the paradox, monstrum, of a will that cannot will because it hates the truth to the very degree that it receives its evidence.
This must be specified again: the paradox of the will does not consist in the fact that it would be simply lacking, as a simple “weakness of will,” since I do indeed experience its force. What I cannot (or want not to) will, I nevertheless will sufficiently enough to hate it. Hatred of the truth attests that I still will, and even powerfully so, since my will resists the evidence, braces itself on the counterevidence with the energy of a counterwill, stiff-necked and frozen in its obstructed effort. If my will cannot do what it would perhaps will to do (love the truth) but only what it does not will (hate the truth), this does not result from the fact that it is taking on something too great (something no longer falling in its field of action) but, in contrast, from the fact that it takes on the nearest and what, according to good (metaphysical) logic, should offer it the least difficulty: the self itself. The lesson of De libero arbitrio always holds: “Nemo autem vult aliquid nolens” (Nobody wills something without willing it) (II, 13, 37, 6, 286), and “nihil aliud ei quam ipsum velle sit habere quod voluit” (having what one willed is nothing other than the willing itself) (I, 13, 29, 6, 192). In itself the will benefits from the privilege of not contradicting itself because it always comes back to itself. It does what it wills of its own will and accomplishes the self for this reason alone. But here is the paradox: that the will enjoys this privilege when it wants something other than itself: “Tam multa ego feci, ubi non hoc erat velle quam posse” (So often, I found, it was not the same thing to do and to will) (Confessiones VIII, 8, 20, 14, 50)—as is the case when the movements of my flesh (as during this crisis when I tear my hair, fall to my knees, strike my brow, etc.) act on the usual things of the world that are not me. In short, in the majority of cases where it is enough for me to will it to be able to, willing is precisely not equivalent to being able, because my mind (that wills) is not identical with my flesh (that is able, with respect to itself or worldly beings). And if my strengths do not permit me in certain cases to be able to actualize physically what I will of the things of the world, I at least keep intact my power to will to, be it only virtually. I can therefore always will, without a gap from me to me, so long as I will in the faraway. But, if I will in the nearest, namely, if I will that my will wills what I truly know the best, then it happens that sometimes, indeed most often, I lose the privilege of willing what I will. For the sake of what remains far from me, I keep the privilege that I lose for the nearest. “Et non faciebam, quod et incomparabili affectu amplius mihi placebat et mox, ut vellem, possem, quia mox, ut vellem, utique vellem. Ibi enim facultas ea, quae voluntas, et ipsum velle jam facere erat; et tamen non fiebat, faciliusque obtemperabat corpus tenuissimae voluntati animae, ut ad nutum membra moverentru, quam ipsa sibi anima ad voluntatem suam magnam in sola voluntate perficiendam” (And I would not do what I would decide quite amply with an incomparable attunement [Stimmung] and that very thing of which I was able as soon as I willed, because provided that I willed, I would will it absolutely. For here is where this faculty, the will, is found, and where the very fact of willing was already done; and yet that did not happen, and my [fleshy] body would obey more readily the slightest will of my soul to move its members than the soul obeyed itself to carry out its great will in its own will) (ibid.). The will can will (in the sense of actualizing by merely willing) all that it wills, except itself. The will, which can do almost all, because it can always will when it is a matter of what is not it, from far off, cannot will, when it is a matter of the nearest, that is to say of willing to will, of itself willing itself, in short of the self.
A radical suspicion about the will thus arises and forces itself upon us: it is able to will everything and therefore, if its power for actualizing actuality becomes unlimited (which can be imagined conceptually and is being realized factually almost beneath our very eyes), to such an extent that it could be capable of all that it wills, but it cannot itself will itself. The will, as ultimate instance of the self, can, of course, be deployed as will to power, to the point of willing only the increase in power of its very will, in a will to will, which decides in it the Being of beings. But as Nietzsche more than anyone else showed, it cannot decide itself by itself. To pass from nihilism to the great amen, it is necessary to await an event that does not depend on it, even though it happens in it. The will, even to power, does not have power over itself, for it cannot always be able to will as it would will, even if it can always will to be able as it can. It often comes over the will that it is not able to be able to will its own will. The only thing to escape from the will is the will itself: “ego suspirabam ligatus non ferro alieno, sed mea ferrea voluntate. Velle meum tenebat inimicus” (as for me, I panted, tied as I was not by shackles imposed by others, but by the shackles of my own will) (Confessiones VIII, 5, 10, 14, 28). In other words the will can decide about the things of the world and even about its own flesh infinitely more effectively than about itself. So long as it concerns an other being or what in me remains still other to me, I am able to will. The willing of what is not my ownmost remains always possible for me (even if it is not followed by an effect, sometimes all the more). In contrast, the willing of the nearest, therefore of my ownmost, turns out most problematic and most difficult. In contrast to Heidegger, Saint Augustine sees that the pretended “authenticity” (which should be understood more exactly as appropriation of self by self) is precisely not accomplished with the will and resolution. Supposing that it was necessary for oneself to appropriate one’s own self, it would not happen by the will, seeing as the will is characterized precisely by a powerlessness over itself that is as radical as its power over what does not fall under the self. Access of self to self does not depend on me, especially not by the simple return to itself of the will, in which I experience by contrast the inaccessible monstrum of the magna quaestio that I appear to myself.
Temptation bears also on the things of the world (libido sentiendi) but, we saw, not uniquely, since the last two, the most fearsome, concern the libido sciendi and the ambitio saeculi—my curiosity and my pride, which make the things of the world occasions for temptation, which they themselves do not constitute and about which they know nothing. There is not anything that makes me pass from its (legitimate) use to its (illegitimate) enjoyment instead and in place of the truth for the sake of reaching the vita beata. I pass from uti to frui only by a slide of my will, which escapes me and turns me away from what I most desire, to the point of imprisoning me outside my self: “Quippe ex voluntate perversa facta est libido” (To be sure, concupiscence is made from the perverse will) (ibid.). Neither the thing nor the tempter (who does nothing but play on my voluntary servitude) tempts me, but rather my own will, or, more exactly, my will inasmuch as it cannot want what it would want because it can do nothing about itself. I enter into temptation, paradoxically, because I cannot do my own will because my will is not its own, because the will opens no access to my ownmost. Facticity, when care is directed to the will of the self, does not lead to resolution but precisely to the impossibility of deciding oneself and therefore of acceding to the self.
How are we to understand such a powerlessness in willing or, more exactly, in willing to will? Must we oppose a first-order will1 to a second-order will2, the one willing or not willing to trigger the other? Or is it enough to distinguish two wills of the same order in conflict? “Duae voluntates meae, una vetus, alia nova, illa carnalis, illa spiritualis confligebant inter se atque discordando dissipabant animam meam” (My two wills, one old, the other new, the first carnal, the other spiritual, entered into conflict with one another and, in their discord, ravaged my soul) (Confessiones VIII, 5, 10, 14, 30). Does this mean a conflict between two independent and opposed wills or a contradiction of the will with itself alone?
Obviously, the hypothesis that there is a conflict of two opposed wills could be authorized officially, seemingly so at least, from the Christological model. Saint Augustine himself describes the final will of Christ as unifying his two wills (human and divine), de ex duabus voluntatibus una facta, insofar as he submits the first to the second: “Sed contra voluntatem ipsius evenit aliquid; subjungat se voluntati Dei, non resistat voluntati magnae” (But something happens counter to his own will; he submits himself to the will of God; he does not resist a great will).33 But this solution implies that the two wills that confront one another (and finally are in accord) remain really distinct, which is possible only on the basis of two really distinct natures (human and divine), which is possible in turn only if they reside in one hypostasis—conditions that are met only in the exceptional case of Christ and are not found in the monstrum of any man whatsoever. Such a Christological model would even have, in the context of the always active polemic against Manicheanism, a perverse effect: just as in the case of Christ a distinction of natures results from that of the wills, so too, in the case of the average man, would the principle that “tot sunt contrariae naturae quot voluntates sibi resistunt” (there are as many contrary natures as wills in conflict) (VIII, 10, 23, 14, 54) lead to introducing into me several substances, and therefore to establishing an origin of evil that though in me would not be me: “cum duas voluntates in deliberando animadverterint, duas naturas duarum mentium asseuerant, unam bonam, alteram malam” (observing two wills in deliberation, they assume two natures for two minds, the one good, the other evil) (VIII, 10, 22, 14, 52). Now this is not the case: I do not stand behind one will that would correspond to my nature, faced with another will deployed by a hostile nature, from which I would remain safe. In the conflict of wills all the pain and disorder stems from my finding myself, me, one and the same, with my own and unique nature, in the same moment, at once of two minds: “ego quidem in utroque, sed magis ego in eo, quod in me approbabam, quam in eo, quod in me improbabam. Ibi enim magis jam non ego, qui ex magna parte id patiebar invitus quod faciebam volens. Sed tamen consuetudo adversus me pugnatior ex me facta erat, quoniam volens quo nollem perveneram” (I was no doubt in one and the other [flesh and spirit], but more myself in what I approved [spirit] than in what I disapproved [flesh]. Here, I was not myself, I who was undergoing largely despite myself what I was doing nevertheless by willing to. But habit, having become more combative with me, it is indeed myself who had so acted, since it is by willing to that I had come to what I did not will) (VIII, 5, 11, 14, 30). The “violentia consuetudinis” (the violence of habit)34 results precisely from the fact that the very habit that at this moment contradicts my will also results from my will, from a will no doubt anterior but one that gets its present power from its long past, whose powerful momentum still ruins my today. One should not therefore, in the aporia of man to himself, oppose two wills as two natures but confront the monstrum (VIII, 9, 21, 14, 50) of a single will (quite obviously in a single nature) nevertheless in conflict with itself.
Or, we speak of a conflict of wills—reading in this the inner division of the single will playing against itself, removing its strengths from itself so as to be able to contradict itself: “Et ideo sunt duae volunates, quia una earum tota non est et hoc adest alteri, quod deest alteri” (And there are then two wills of the following type: one of them is not complete, and what the one has available to it, the other lacks) (VIII, 9, 21, 14, 52). In other words the other deploys what the first does not put into operation by itself: there are two wills but by division, a will split in two, more exactly, by a shortage. In fact, there is only one will, but one that wills only without power and is split into an empty willing (without power) and an uncontrolled power (without willing): “volunt homines et non valent” (Men will and are not able) to will what they will (VIII, 8, 20, 14, 48). This single will wills without having the means for what it wills because it does not will so much as it yields to its desire, because it does not will so much as it lets itself go in desiring: “Ita certum habebam esse melius tuae caritati me dedere quam meae cupiditati cedere; sed illud placebat et vincebat, hoc libebat et vinciebat” (Thus I had the certainty that it is better to give myself over to your charity than to yield to my desire; but even if your charity pleased me and prevailed, desire was agreeable and tied me down).35 The will wills but without willing with all its heart, without willing wholeheartedly, in short without willing to will: “Sed non ex toto vult: non ergo ex toto imperat. Nam in tantum imperat, in quantum vult, et in tantum non fit quod imperat, in quantum non vult, quoniam voluntas imperat, ut sit voluntas, nec alia, sed ipsa. Non itaque plena imperat; ideo non est, quod imperat. Nam si plena esset, nec imperaret ut esset, quia jam esset” (But it does not will entirely; therefore it does not command entirely. For it commands exactly as far as it wills, and it is the case that it does not command, except exactly as far as it does not will, since just the will gives the command to the will to will, and not to another will, but to itself. This then is what it means that it does not command entirely, and it is also why what it commands does not happen. That is, if it were entire, it would not command that it be, but it would already be) (VIII, 9, 21, 14, 52).36 The will wills only halfway, not entirely: “He only half-willed to accomplish the act, and that is why the act accomplished left him only half-certain.”37 The question does not consist in a conflict between two real wills that would be opposed as two powers but in the powerlessness of one will that is no longer able truly to will (or not to will) entirely and unreservedly.
The will, when it is no longer a matter of willing a good (or an evil) distinct from it, but of willing its own movement of will, when being able to will its own movement of decision is at issue, is not sufficient for willing. “Lex jubere novit, gratia juvare. Nec lex juberet, nisi esset voluntas; nec gratia juvaret, si sat esset voluntas” (The law knows how to order, grace to help. The law would not order were it not for the will, but grace would not help if the will was sufficient). And also: “non sufficit sola voluntas hominis, si non sit etiam misericordia Dei” (the will is not sufficient, if there is not also God’s mercy).38 The will is not sufficient for willing, not only because it often lacks the power to accomplish in the world what it wills (power of will) but also because it lacks willpower (power to will)—in other words, the power of willing to will. The intervention of grace, which starts here, never consists for Saint Augustine in opposing itself to the autonomy of my will, by disarming its power or thwarting its choice—be it only because this will of mine manifests itself first and essentially by its insufficiency, its alienation from itself, and its powerlessness. Grace, if it intervenes, can and must do so as a palliative for the insufficiency of the will, restoring it and rendering to it its power to will. Between grace and the will, the relation is not conflictual but one of assistance to an endangered will. The image of a grace that constrains the will and threatens its autonomy presupposes the very thing whose absence makes for the aporia—that the will can of itself will what it wills, that the will secures for itself its own autonomy—in short, that the will suffices for freedom. In Augustinian terms there is no conflict between grace and will because without grace there simply is no will. Pelagianism does not constitute a sin of pride but first of all an intellectual fault; it assumes the excellence and even the reality of a faculty whose phenomenological description shows its insufficiency and inconsistency.
If one understands that the will is not sufficient for willing, the monstrum is definitively established as a paradox, that of a sickness of the will: “Ego eram, qui volebam, ego, qui nolebam; ego eram. Nec plene volebam nec plene nolebam. Ideo mecum contendebam et dissipabar a me ipso, et ipsa dissipatio me invito quidem fiebat, nec ostendebat naturam mentis alienae, sed poena meae” (It was I who willed, I who did not will; it was I. But when I willed, it was not fully, when I did not will, it was also not fully. This is why I struggled with myself and dissipated myself, and this dissipation occurred against my will, without however manifesting the nature of a foreign mind, but the punishment of mine) (VIII, 10, 22, 14, 54). The will does not will fully, and its powerlessness to will itself (the impossibility of the will to will, of the will to have the will for willing) indicates less a difficulty still to surmount than it diagnoses the disaster of a will that, as such, is defined, in contrast, by the privilege of immediately willing what it wants, from the simple fact that it wants it. Contrary to what philosophy never ceases (and never will cease) to repeat, we do not do evil only out of ignorance but also out of weakness: “Duobus ex causis peccamus; aut nondum videndo quid facere debeamus, aut non faciendo quod debere fieri videamus: quorum duorum illud ignorantiae malum est, hoc infirmitatis” (There are two causes of our sinning: either not seeing what we should do or not doing what we see should be done. The first is the evil of ignorance, the second the evil of weakness).39 The “sickness of the soul” (aegritudo animi) (VIII, 9, 21, 14, 52) consists in the weakness that unplugs, so to speak, the will from itself—so as to make of it a nill.
Concerning this malady of the will, which cannot will entirely what it would like to will, the variety of motives for it—original sin (VIII, 10, 22, 14, 54), “vinculum desideri” (desire’s attachment) (VIII, 6, 13, 14, 34), or “violentia consuetudinis” (the violence of habit) (VIII, 5, 12, 14, 32)—is of little importance here but remains, in what is essential, secondary and matter for a far more vast inquiry. What is of the highest degree of importance consists in the symptom of this sickness: self-hatred, or, more exactly, the hatred inspired in me by my injustice and therefore by myself inasmuch as unjust. Still more exactly, the hatred of myself who loves me unjustly, by holding for true what I love, rather than loving what gives itself as the true: “sic amatur veritas, ut, quicumque aliud amant, hoc quod amant velint esee veritatem. . . . Itaque propter eam rem oderunt veritatem, quam pro veritate amant” (truth is loved in such a way that men will that all that they love, whatever it might be, should be truth. . . . And thus they hate the truth on account of the thing that they love in place of the truth) (X, 23, 34, 14, 202). I hate the truth because I do not will (or cannot will) this truth as such, and I try, out of weakness, to will in its place what holds the place of truth for me and whose falsity I, in fact, know perfectly well. Hatred of the truth therefore flows directly from the unjust love that I bear for myself by way of my preferred falsity. I will therefore not be able to overcome my hatred of truth except by hating it in me: “videbam et horrebam, et quo a me fugerem non erat . . . et tu me rursus opponebas mihi et impingebas me in oculos meos, ut invenirem iniquitatem meam et odissem” (I saw [myself], and I was horrified, and there was no place to which I could flee . . . , and you planted me right before my own eyes, so that I might see my injustice and hate it.)40 It is important to emphasize that here, in contrast to its later avatars (in Nietzsche, in particular, but not Pascal), self-hatred does not bear on the self itself but on the horror inspired in it by its own powerlessness to will the truth, its injustice in wanting falsity in place of this truth. Hatred does not flow from the truth toward the self but is directed against the mode of the self—against its irresolution, its powerlessness to will.
So described, weakness of will means far more than a lack of willing, for the insufficiency goes as far as perversion. Not only can the will not will the truth that it sees and recognizes as such according to its pulchritudo, but it actively prefers a falsity, which it knows in its deformity yet still admits as such. Not only does the will not will truth, but because it loves a nontruth, it actively hates the truth that it should love and that disturbs its love of nontruth. To speak here only of a weakness of the will amounts to hiding what is essential: the will remains still strong enough to at least will negatively, unwilling—in short, to hate truth and to not will it not because it would be ignorant of it or would wrongly identify it but because it recognizes it perfectly as such. Or else, if one still wants to speak about a weakness of the will, this would have to mean a weakness as an inclination for lying, which it wants painlessly and for itself, exactly as it has a weakness for the hatred that it spontaneously prefers. When Saint Augustine understands the deficiency of the will so radically that it ends up at a perversion of the will into a hatred of truth as such, it is a matter of a lie in the strictest sense (“volui tecum possidere mendacium” [Confessiones X, 40, 66, 14, 260]), not just ignorance (in the intellect) or a simple weakness (of willing). But then shouldn’t such a deficiency of the will be forthrightly opposed to what philosophy ordinarily understands by “weakness of the will”?
We cannot here be expected to take into consideration the entire history of this question or even its contemporary developments. It will suffice to examine quickly three representative examples of “weakness of the will” in order to assess at what point Saint Augustine’s doctrine is different from them and even opposed to repeated attempts to reduce the aegritudo animi to a benign affection, confined to the therapeutic means of philosophy.
Saint Thomas, when he undertakes to identify the cause of sin (and thus conceives the three temptations according to the same set of topics from 1 John 2:16 that Saint Augustine followed), means to maintain the thesis, explicitly recognized as Socratic (in fact, Platonic and Aristotelian), that “all the virtues are sciences and all the sins ignorance” (omnes virtutes esse scientias et omnia peccata esse ignorantiae). He must therefore explain sin first by an obscurity in our knowledge of the good, which would provoke weakness of the will as a mere consequence of this ignorance: “The will never moves toward evil, unless what is not good appears by some reason as good” (nisi id quod non est bonum, aliqualiter rationi bonum appareat). The weakness of the will (not being able to will the good and the true) flows from an obscurity in knowledge, more original, but also more known, since it belongs precisely to knowledge, its faculties, and its procedures. Thus led back within the strict limits of the epistemic, the obscurity admits being reduced to a practical syllogism, only poorly constructed. This is either because one knows the universal (for example, that one must not commit fornication), but without coming to see it in the particular (without seeing that this is fornication), the result being that one practices fornication but without knowing it (distractio). Or it is because one mistakes the universal (assuming wrongly, by contradictio, for example, that pleasure is always a good). Or it is because a modification of the body (immutatio corporalis: drunkenness, a dream state, seized by passion, etc.) leads to preferring the particular and contradicting the universal.41 It is therefore not so much the will that fails or wills evil as it is the reasoning that does not correctly define what it should will. Two consequences, exactly contrary to the Augustinian description, follow. First, the decision for evil does not really implicate the decision of the will: “voluntas numquam in malum tenderet, nisi cum aliqua ignorantia, vel errore rationis” (the will would never tend toward evil, were it not for some ignorance or error of reason), and consequently the will properly suffers no deficiency. Next, truth itself, in order to manifest itself in its evidence, demands no decision, not even that of loving or hating it, and it does not put the will in play as condition of phenomenalization but only as a practical consequence of its theoretic evidence.
Kant seems to draw closer to the radicality of Augustine, since in defining “radical evil,” he seems to admit a will to evil as such, therefore a radically evil will. And, in fact, for him it is important not to accord “too little” to radical evil by lowering it to the rank of a mere influence of sensibility on decision; sensibility remains in effect morally neutral, and even its powerlessness to assume the universality of the law still leaves us entirely responsible for our choices. For all that, however, Kant is vigilant about not according “too much” to radical evil by making it run so deep as to become an intrinsic corruption of my practical reason, that is, of the power that gives me laws; for in going this far, the stature of all law would be annihilated, and its constraining authority would be impugned, therefore its power to oblige lost. If I could disobey the law as such and repay evil with evil—in short, if I could transgress the categorical imperative with eyes wide open and scorn the “fact of reason” while looking it in the eye—then I would lose all my dignity as a rational mind. Nothing remains any longer, in Kant’s eyes, but to admit a middle ground: there is indeed a meanness (Bösartigkeit, vitiositas) of the will that does not do the good that it sees as such but clearly prefers to accomplish evil; yet for all that, there is no perversity (Bösheit, malitia) of will, as if it succeeded in eliminating the authority of the law in general (obligation, respect) so as to substitute for it the love of evil as such, without any other instance coming to combat its sway.42 Evil, therefore, always results here from the “fragility” or “impurity” of human nature, which does not will what it nevertheless always sees as its obligation, without that implying a “meanness” radical enough for its will to escape from all moral imperative. Thus, evil is not radicalized to the point of intrinsically compromising the will itself or its dependent relation with the moral law. Kant, therefore, maintains, be it only under the title “fact of reason” (the law and practical reason strangely assuming the very facticity of finitude, instead of and in the place of the will and sensibility), the regulation of the will by knowledge. And respect does not intervene as condition of the manifestation of truth, even reduced to practical reason; to the contrary, it results from it, as the effect in sensibility of a “fact of reason.”
More recently, Donald Davidson has conducted an investigation into the possibility and conditions for a weakness of the will; his attempt does not duplicate either of these two precedents. While Saint Thomas attributed the error as exclusively as possible to faulty knowledge and Kant burdened the will only with a meanness lacking in any perversity by submitting it, at least in principle, to the authority of the law, even when it transgresses it, Davidson introduces another instance in order to pose another question. He asks, in effect, “What is the agent’s reason for doing a when he believes it would be better, all things considered, to do another thing?” The issue is no longer knowing the good to be desired or accomplished (a matter for the intellect alone) as for Saint Thomas Aquinas, nor the will actualizing the desire or the act (and of its possible irregularity) as for Kant, but the cause or reason that holds the place of cause for the action. Thus Davidson no longer presupposes the knowledge of any good whatsoever, its real or imaginary character, nor the rectitude of the will; the only issue is the connection between these two faculties, whatever it might be; and this connection is identified with the cause or reason of the action—the causa sive ratio taking over the question of the action and its morality, so as to integrate it into the common and univocal field of rationality. In fact, the literally metaphysical arrangement of the schema ends up, beneath the appearances of a banality, at a new result: if the agent actually does something other than what he says or thinks (he is obliged) to do, it is because “for that the agent has no reason.”43 If the will does not actually will (to do) what it nevertheless sees in principle as the best (before being done), this is because, in fact, it does not have good or sufficient reasons to will it—or, more exactly, to will it truly. The involuntary agent does not will what he would like to will, precisely because he does not know what he wants or why he would want it. The important point consists in this: the weakness does not come from the fact that the will does not will what it knows well (Kant), nor that it wills what it knows poorly (Thomas Aquinas), but that it does not truly will what it does not truly know. It is no longer an issue of a will that is wrong or misguided but of a false or bogus will; it is also not an issue of a will rendered insufficient by knowledge that is false or impugned but of a will rendered insufficient by itself, one which does not will ex toto but only half wills. It is evident that this is still not Saint Augustine’s position, since the weakness of will remains conditioned by the weakness of causes or reasons, therefore still by knowledge. But it is nevertheless a step in the direction of Saint Augustine since the weakness of will this time really does concern the will and not the understanding. Here lacking reasons, the will, which believes it wills the bad rather than the good, in fact is limited to not willing fully, or to not willing at all. From now on, the weakness of the will does indeed concern the will as such.
Saint Augustine’s position can now be clarified. Evil—or more exactly, the failure of resolution that chooses the worse and rejects the better—flows first neither from a mistaking of the good nor from a contradiction of the will with itself (“imperat animus sibi et resistitur” [VIII, 8, 21, 14, 50]), nor even from an insufficiency of reasons, but from the perversity of a will that wills evil for the sake of evil, in full knowledge, eyes wide open. Here Saint Augustine is no longer speculating but describing what he experienced directly and in the first person, in the course of a theft committed during his early youth: “Et ego furtum facere volui et feci nulla compulsus egestate, nisi penuria et fastidio justitiae et sagina iniquitatis. . . . Nec ea re volebam frui, quam furto appetebam, sed ipso furto et peccato. . . . Malitiae meae causa nulla esset nisi malitia. Foeda erat, et amavi eam; amavi perire, amavi defectum meum, non illud ad quod deficiam, sed defectum meum ipsum amavi” (It is I who wanted to commit the theft, and I did it, driven on by no other need than lack of and distaste for justice and by being fattened on injustice. . . . And I did not even want to enjoy the thing that I coveted but to enjoy the theft and the sin itself. . . . My malice had no other cause than this malice itself. It was horrible, and I loved it. I loved perishing. I loved my failings. I did not love that which I had failed but my failing itself) (II, 4, 9, 13, 344–46). The transgression is carried out as such because the good appears to me so evidently that I decidedly condemn it, because the evil appears to me so evidently that I am clearly decided for it. The transgression does not aim to make me enjoy its forbidden object (here, the stolen fruit), which remains a mere pretext, an occasioning cause, but it makes me enjoy the transgression itself, the evil as evil: “Nam decerpta projeci epulatus inde solam iniquitatem, qua laetabar fruens” (I threw away what I had plucked. I tasted from it only the injustice, which I enjoyed with joy) (II, 6, 12, 13, 350). In this sense the evil will wants only to enjoy the evil, therefore wants to enjoy only itself. But this will to will has a price: not willing anything, therefore a consequence: willing nothingness. Contrary to metaphysics, which will always conceive the evil resolution as a moral fault of the mind (at best a weakness of the will, most often an ignorance of the intellect), Saint Augustine thinks it in an extramoral sense as an aegritudo animi, a sickness of the spirit, which can no longer will anything, not even will willing, except to will nothingness.
This doctrine poses two difficulties. First, how can nothingness play the role of a malitiae meae causa, therefore of a reason for willing, even for willing evil as such? Next how can we admit that defectum meum ipsum amavi, that my fault, my defect, and my failing can be loved, if I can no longer will, therefore love?
For the first difficulty it is necessary to return to the thesis that Saint Augustine alone diagnosed: if I can will what I do not want, this is not a matter of a contradiction of my divided will with itself but of the fact that I do not will truly or ex toto what I say or believe myself to will. It is a matter of only a powerlessness to will: the will that wills evil first wills evilly; it finds itself wickedly short in willing—in willing in the strict sense, that is to say “velle fortiter et integre, non semisauciam hac atque hac versare et jactare voluntatem parte adsurgente cum alia parte cadente luctantem” (to will, strongly and completely, not to turn and twist here and there, a half-wounded will, torn between one part that rises and another that succumbs to the struggle) (VIII, 8, 19, 14, 48). This combat between two wills proves simply that the will no longer resides in a state of willing at all. Its sickness comes from the fact that it no longer has reason or, above all, will to will. Deficiency of cause causes its deficiency. The description of the Confessiones thus perfectly anticipates the doctrine of The City of God: “Nemo igitur quaerat efficientem causam malae voluntatis; non enim est efficiens, sed deficiens, quia nec illa effectio, sed defectio. Deficere namque ab eo, quod summe est, ad id quod minus est, hoc est incipere habere voluntatem malam” (Let nobody seek out the efficient cause of the evil will; for it is not efficient, but deficient, since this will is not effective but defective. For defecting from what is supremely, so as to fall toward what is less, this is to begin to take on an evil will) (XII, 7, 35, 170). Or else, “malae voluntatis efficiens naturalis vel, si dici potest, essentialis nulla sit causa” (for the evil will there is no natural, or if one can put it this way, essential, efficient cause) (XII, 9, 35, 174).44 Willing evil requires no cause (efficient, real, natural, essential, etc.) because evil consists in nothing real and because, for the will, it is not equivalent to gaining or producing something at once evil and real (which would constitute a pure contradiction in terms) but in having a bad time willing, in willing evilly, in evil willing—“Deficitur enim non ad mala, sed male” (For one does not defect toward evil things, but one defects by [turning] evil) (XII, 8, 35, 172). The evil will, ultimately, wills nothing evil (for strictly speaking, nothing is evil inasmuch as it is real), but it doesn’t will anything; it does not will; it is self-deficient, deficient of the self.
The second difficulty finds, paradoxically, an answer by confirming the response to the first. Why, that is, if the evil will simply does not will at all, does Saint Augustine, at the very moment when he was describing the will to evil for the sake of evil, grant it a cause, indeed nothing less than the love of evil? “Malitiae meae causa nulla esset nisi malitia. Foeda erat, et amavi eam; amavi perire, amavi defectum meum, non illud ad quod deficiam, sed defectum meum ipsum amavi” (My malice had no other cause than this very malice. It was horrible, and I loved it. I loved to perish. I loved my defects. I did not love that toward which I was defecting, but my defectiveness itself) (II, 4, 9, 13, 344–46). The first and most simple hypothesis is this: if love causes evil and evil admits only deficient causes, it is necessary that love itself become a deficient cause; but wouldn’t it then lose its privileged status in access to the manifestation of truth? Another hypothesis is possible: that the will in this case truly wills evil; for in the episode of the theft of fruit, one has to see that the will truly wills, without hesitation or reserve. Does it will evil by loving it? The text says nothing other than that. How is this to be understood? By admitting that the will succeeds in willing (even evil, for it often wills evil) only on condition of truly willing, ex toto, fortiter et integre, plena, that is to say on condition of loving. The perversity of evil resides, we know from experience, not only in that I do it but in that I love it. Out of this scandal a light shines, however: willing, truly willing, whether it be the good or evil, means in the final analysis loving. Loving seems to be the name of the will that wills, of the will reborn from the aegritudo animi.
This equivalence between the will truly willing and love—in other words the fact that one wills only when one loves what one wills and to the measure of this love—is a constant doctrine of Saint Augustine beginning with De libero arbitrio: “Voluntas qua appetimus recte honesteque vivere, et ad summam sapientiam pervenire” (The will with which we desire to live rightly and honestly in order to reach supreme wisdom) supposes that “vehementer velis” (you will it strongly) (I, 25, 6, 184). But it will fall to De Trinitate to establish definitively the nature of this vehemence: “Et quia non tantum quam doctus sit, consideratur laudabilis animus, sed etiam quam bonus: non tantum quid meminerit et quid intelligat, verum etiam qui velit attenditur; non quanta flagrantia velit, sed quid velit prius, deinde quantum velit. Tunc enim laudandus est animus vehementer amans, cum quod amat vehementer amandum est” (And, as a mind is not considered worthy of praise only for its knowledge but also for its goodness, one pays attention not only to its memory and its intelligence but also to its will; and not merely to the ardor of its willing but first of all to what it wills, then to its degree of will. That is, one praises a spirit for the strength of its love, when it loves what must be strongly loved) (X, 11, 17, 16, 152).45 These two examples of the strength of will as the strength of love lead to the conclusion of the treatise: “De Spiritu autem sancto nihil in hoc aenigmate quod ei simile videretur ostendi, nisi voluntatem nostram vel amorem seu dilectionem, quae valentior est voluntas” (In this enigma nothing other appears that seems to resemble the Holy Spirit, except our will, or love or dilection, which is only a stronger will) (XV, 21, 41, 16, 532).46 Between the Holy Spirit and me, the image and likeness play together only in one formal univocity, that of the will. But this will, to will truly, must will strongly, that is to say love. I can will truly, fortiter et integre, only if I love. Love does not constitute one of the possible uses of the will but the sole truly efficient (not deficient) mode of the will. It should not be said that the will alone permits loving but that loving alone permits truly willing.
Love does not make up a will like the others, one merely specified by a particular objective and affective modality, but is the sole valentior voluntas, the sole truly strong will, in fact the sole will able to will effectively what it knows should be willed—all the other wills remaining velle that, in fact, are not willed (and that, in fact, are called velles only by antiphrasis). The will can thus be conceived and therefore described only in terms of love and only in the figure of its erotic realization. But, to continue this line of thinking, it could be that the will, inasmuch as love, ends up evidencing characteristics quite different from those that are attributed to the metaphysical concept of will.
The first point is to avoid an initial misreading: if the will becomes itself only in willing to the point of loving, that does not mean that love of the good would permit the will to will truly. For a perfect neutrality permits the valentior voluntas to be exercised as much for evil as for good: “Recta itaque voluntas est bonus amor et voluntas perversa malus amor. Amor ergo inhians habere quod amatur, cupiditas est, id autem habens eoque fruens laetitia; fugiens quod ei adversatur, timor est, idque si accederit sentiens tristitia est. Proinde mala sunt ista, si malus amor est; bona, si bona” (And so the right and straight will is thus a good love, the twisted will a bad love. Therefore the love that aspires to what it loves is desire; that which has it and enjoys it is joy. That which flees an adversary is fear and, if it feels that something happens to it, sadness. Consequently all these things are evil, if the love is evil, and good if it is good) (De civitate Dei XIV, 7, 25, 374). This is not (as it will become in many of the subsequent readers of Saint Augustine) an enumeration, indeed a deduction of the passions, even on the basis of love. It is an erotic reduction of all movements of the mind to motions of the will, itself understood in its vehemence, that is to say as a love. But, since without love the will cannot will, and since the will, when it wills, wills just as much (indeed often much more) evil as good, one has to admit, to explain the will to evil, nothing less than a love of evil itself. This is the ambivalence of love: it renders good or evil what it wills according as it itself intends the good or the evil. “Pes animae recte intelligitur amor, qui cum pravus est, vocatur cupiditas aut libido; cum autem rectus, dilectio vel caritas. Amore enim movetur tanquam ad locum quo tendit. Locus autem animae non in spatio aliquo est, quod forma occupat corporis, sed in delectatione, quo se pervenisse per amorem laetatur” (The stride of the soul is correctly understood as love, which if it is perverse is named desire or concupiscence, but if it is straight, love or charity. That is, love puts the soul into motion as the place toward which it tends. For the place of the soul is not located as if in some space, which the form of a body would occupy, but in delectation, where it rejoices to have come by following its love) (Commentaries on the Psalms 9, 15, PL 36, 124). When I will, it is absolutely necessary that I love, for I cannot will truly, except by willing unreservedly, ex toto, therefore by loving; that holds for the will to evil as well as for the will to the good. To the point that I cannot will evil except by loving what I chose in place and instead of the good: “propter eam rem oderunt veritatem, quam pro veritate amant” (the thing for the sake of which they hate the truth, this was precisely what they love in its place) (Confessiones X, 23, 34, 14, 202). Even if evil perverts love by not loving the good, it cannot, in order to reach something other than the good, not love. The evil will still renders homage to love, since it must still love, even in the opposite direction, in order to will the opposite of the good.
If the will is accomplished only to the degree that it goes all the way to love, it must be concluded that love determines me more originally than the will. In other words I am not individualized by what I think intellectually (everybody, or at least others, can think it as well as me) nor by the will alone and its resolution. In effect, if the issue is my will willing something other than itself, it is perfectly possible for others than myself also to will it, provoking mimetic rivalry or a competition of desires, more so than my individuation. And if the issue is the will willing to be decided, willing itself, one can claim to be individualized by self-resolution, but, as we saw, the will cannot do so on its own, except by passing into love, as valentior voluntas. It therefore has to be admitted that my individuation exceeds will-power and requires that of love in me. I find myself there where I think, but I think there where my pleasure is found: “Ubi cogitatio, ibi et delectatio est” (Commentaries on the Psalms 7, 11, PL 36, 104). Put otherwise, I know what I am by discovering that in which I find my pleasure: “talis est quisque, qualis ejus dilectio” (Homilies on the First Letter of John II, 14, PL 35, 1997). Of course, that in which I find my pleasure is not something I know in advance, as if I could foresee it, or even choose it. I discover it only once the event teaches it to me and discovers it to me. I do not love what I will, or at least what I believe I will. What I will truly I recognize after the fact as what I loved, and what I love I identify after the fact when I enjoy having reached it. Thus it is necessary for me to enjoy what I love in order to know that I loved it and that in fact, knowingly or not knowingly, I desired it beforehand. I am always late to the event and the last to know what I love. The will therefore follows what I love, and what I love precedes my will. I do not find myself there where I am, or where I am thinking, but there where I love, I desire and enjoy. The self’s place precedes where I come from. The radicalization of the will into love reverses the advance—the intentional advance of the I toward the object of its willing reverts into a delay of the I with regard to the place of that which the self loves. The anticipation belonging to resolution yields to the delay of the will inasmuch as it loves. As much as I will by an intentional advance, so much I love in the delay of desire.
This reversal of the advance into a delay is asserted by Saint Augustine in the form of a theological principle: “Da quod jubes et jube quod vis” (Give what you command, and command what you will) (Confessiones X, 29, 40, 14, 210). This principle incited not only the scandal of Pelagius but Pelagianism itself, and it provoked them quite rightly, as it is necessary, in order to get it, first to admit it, the paradox of a will reversed into love. Let us consider the two examples that justify the intervention of this paradox. First is the issue of liberating oneself from sexual desire, something no will can want truly, except when another gift permits the will to do so: “quia ‘nemo enim potest esse continens (ἐγϰρατὴς) nisi tu des, et hoc ipsum erat sapientiae, scire cujus esset hoc donum’ (because “nobody can be continent, unless you give continence to him, and knowing from whom this gift comes is something that itself belongs to wisdom” (Wisdom 8:21) (X, 30, 45, 14, 212). In other words, in the case of continence it goes without saying that the will does not suffice for wanting and that an other love is necessary to it, one that can come to it only from elsewhere. It is necessary that the will let itself be relieved and lifted up by a gift that precedes it and from which it could only proceed. Next is the matter of vanity and the pleasure of flattery, which themselves result from our incurable and unbreakable dependence on the opinion and esteem of others: “Quotidiana fornax nostra est humana lingua. Imperas nobis et in hoc genere continentiam: da quod jubes et jube quod vis” (The tongue of men is the furnace in which we are cooked each day. In this domain, too, you order us to continence: give what you command and command what you will) (X, 37, 60, 14, 248). As we saw (in §24), I can never extract myself from the will to please men, since the very fact of renouncing this (by making it known or, worse, keeping it secret) reinforces all the more their esteem regarding me and, a still more sure outcome, mine for myself. Here, then, are two impossible wills, one in actual fact (sexual continence)47 and one in logic (continence with respect to flattery).
The entire force of the paradox resides in opening a possibility at the very heart of this impossibility: what my will absolutely cannot will, God can permit it to will, provided that he give it to will it. God can order all the impossibilities possible to the powerlessness of my will, provided that he give it also the power for these very impossibilities. In fact, this paradox is sketched out well before the polemics formalized around grace, since from the time at Cassiciacum this demand becomes the rule: “Jube, quaeso, atque impera quidquid vis, sed sana et aperi aures meas, quibus voces tuas audiam, sana et aperi oculos meos, quibus nutus tuos videam” (Order, I ask you, and command all that you will, but cleanse and open my ears so that by them I might understand your words. Cleanse and open my eyes so that by them I see what you are showing me). Why take the risk of asking that one ask no matter what of my will, which I know will not will a great thing? Because the will is now revived and reversed by love and therefore desire and enjoyment precede it: “Jam solum te amo, te solum sequor, te solum quaero, tibi soli servire paratus sum, qui tu solus juste dominaris; tui juris esse cupio” (Now I love only you, I follow only you, I seek only you, I am ready to serve only you, because your dominion alone is just. I desire to be under your jurisdiction).48 God can ask the impossible of my will, which does not will on its own ex toto (and cannot will to will it), because he, more than anybody, can give it to be carried out in a love and to become valentior to the point of willing what remains impossible to a will abandoned to itself. The Pelagians’ misunderstanding about the paradox “Da quod jubes et jube quod vis” obviously stems first from their not understanding the gift such that it precedes, conditions, and surpasses the commandment but, above all, from their blindness in the face of the transformation of the will, inevitably powerless before the impossible, into a love tangentially powerful enough to desire this impossible. “Give what you command” supposes in fact that given to me is to love and what I can love—namely, that which can make me love. This is formulated literally by a second principle and paradox, which alone renders the first intelligible (and which the Pelagians simply have not seen): “Da quod amo: amo enim. Et hoc tu dedisti” (Give what I love; for I love. And that too [that I love what you give to love] you [also] gave) (Confessiones XI, 2, 3, 14, 274). And again: “Da quod amo: amo enim, et hoc tu dedisti” (Give me what I love; for I love and that too [that I love what you give to love], you gave [to me]) (XI, 22, 28, 14, 316). Thus the will becomes valentior and is accomplished ex toto by becoming love; but that, too, it receives as what it can neither will nor give itself. To will truly befalls the will only in the advance, as a gift to love—which is also named a grace.
It follows that we cannot will in the real sense without God giving it to us, by giving us to will in the mode of loving, according to an advance to which we come late. This can also be put this way: we will only in response (see above, Chapter 1, §3), and even the possibility of refusing the gift also turns out given. The will (like love more ancient than myself) comes to me like a gift. “Nam si quaeramus utrum Dei donum sit voluntas bona, mirum si negare quisquam audeat. At enim quia non praecedit voluntas bona vocationem, sed vocatio bonam voluntatem, propterea vocanti Deo recte tribuitur quod bene volumus, nobis vero tribui non potest quod vocamur; . . . nisi ejus vocatione, non volumus” (If we ask if a good will is a gift of God, it would be surprising if someone were to deny it. But because the good will does not precede the call, but the call [precedes] the good will, we rightly attribute the fact that we will well to God who calls, for we cannot attribute to ourselves the fact of having been called; . . . without his call, we simply would not will at all) (Quaestiones VII ad Simplicianum II, 12, BA 10, 470). One could find a problem here however. As regards the will, is it the will in general with its indifference that is given to us (the “Possibilitas quippe illa, quam [Deus] dedit, tam nos facit bona posse, quam mala” [The possibility given (by God), such as it makes us have the power for good things as well as evil ones]),49 or the good will ordered by love (“sic vult homo, ut tam Deus voluntati ardorem dilectionis inspirat, . . . quia, nisi natura esset in qua nos condidit, qua velle et agere possumus, nec vellemus, nec ageremus” [man wills in such a way that God inspires his will with the ardor of love, . . . because if there was a nature, in which we were set up such that we could will and act, then we would not will at all, nor act at all])?50 But this distinction can itself be disputed because it supposes that the possibility of willing (even evil) arises exclusively from nature without passing through (or for) a gift, while the actuality of the vehemens in bono voluntas arises exclusively from the gift without coming by grace. Now, from the strictly Augustinian point of view, this opposition is illegitimate: all of the will, its possibility (still weak) of (not) willing (truly) results as much from a gift as its accomplishment in love. And the reproach he makes to the Pelagians targets precisely the fact that they admit neither the one nor the other as a gift: “Nec alicubi potui reperire, hanc gratiam confiteri, qua non solum possibilitas naturalis voluntatis et actionis, quam dicit nos habere etiamsi nec volumus nec agimus bonum, sed ipsa etiam voluntas et actio subministratione Spiritus sancti adjuvatur” (And I could not find anywhere a confession of this grace that supports not only the natural possibility of willing and acting, which he says to be ours even if we do not want or do the good, but also the will and action done under the guidance of the Holy Spirit).51 In fact, precisely because “Dei donum sit voluntas bona” (the good will is a gift of God) (Quaestiones VII ad Simplicianum II, 12, 10, 470), it was necessary first that all that rendered it possible, including the mere indifferent possibility of (evilly) willing evil, that is to say by loving it (though evil), come from God as a gift. For the advance of love, which makes the will valentior, never arrives to us, in any case, except as a gift.
Whence emerges a final character of the will realized as love: since by definition willing ex toto arises from a gift given in advance and one that gives itself only in the advance of the self of desire ahead of the I of intention, the customary and confused debates about grace and free choice must be revised on the basis of the advance itself—in other words, of my delay to myself (of the I to itself). There cannot be a conflict between freedom and grace, since without grace (that is to say, its transformation into love) the will cannot will well, since, at bottom, it simply cannot will at all: “Ergo et victoria qua peccatum vincitur, nihil aliud est quam donum Dei, in isto certamino adjuvantis liberum arbitrium” (Therefore even the victory over sin is nothing other than a gift of God, bringing into this combat his assistance to free choice) (De gratia et libero arbitrio IV, 8, 24, 110). Or else: “gratiam Dei . . . , qua voluntas humana non tollitur, sed ex mala mutatur in bonam et, cum bona fuerit, adjuvatur” (the grace of God . . . , which does not suppress the human will but changes it from evil to good and, once changed, assists it) (De gratia et libero arbitrio XX, 41, 24, 184). The very hypothesis of a conflict presupposes what it is a matter of overcoming or, rather, what has proven ever since the outset unthinkable: for it to be opposed and distinguished from the gift of the advance (of grace), it would be necessary for freedom to function alone and of itself without grace, while it is realized only in becoming, by grace, valentior, only in becoming a love. “Ecce quemadmodum secundum gratiam Dei, non contra eam, libertas defenditur voluntatis. Voluntas quippe humana non libertate consequitur gratiam, sed gratia potius libertatem” (And it is in this way that the freedom of the will is defended, according to the grace of God, not against it. For the will of man does not obtain grace through its freedom, but its freedom through grace) (De corruptione et gratia VIII, 17, 24, 306). There is no dispute about what freedom could accomplish without grace, since without grace freedom attains absolutely nothing, because it cannot will anything. The (good, but above all effective, valentior) will does not disappear in grace; it comes from it, starting from this very advance. The best confirmation is found in the fact that in the advance of grace the will not only remains, not only attains its efficaciousness, but is finally imputed officially to us ourselves: “Certum est nos velle, cum volumus, sed ille facit ut velimus bonum. . . . Certum est nos facere cum facimus; sed ille facit ut faciamus, praebendo vires efficacissimas voluntati” (It is certain that it is we who will, when we will, but it is God who makes it that we will the good. . . . It is certain that it is we who act, when we act, but it is God who makes it that we act by providing very efficacious strengths to the will) (XVI, 32, 24, 164). God does not dispense grace so that we might dispense with willing (as the Pelagians, on one hand, and the extremists proposing double predestination, on the other, seem to suppose) but so that we might be permitted to will: “Aguntur enim ut agant, non ut ipsi nihil agant” (For God acts in them so that they act, not so that they themselves do not act) (De corruptione et gratia II, 4, ibid., 274). And he permits us to will by giving us to will in the sole efficacious manner, by loving: “Quasi vero aliud sit bona voluntas quam caritas, quam Scriptura nobis esse clamat ex Deo a Patre datam, ut filii ejus essemus” (As if the good will was something other than charity, that scripture proclaims to be given to us from God through the Father, so that we might be his sons) (Liber de gratia 1, 21, 22, PL 44, 371). God does not give us only the power for what we will (or to obtain it by receiving it), nor even to choose well what we want, but above all to be able to will what we will to will; he gives us what is most intimate in us—our willing to will itself: “Nos ergo volumus, sed Deus in nobis operatur et velle; nos ergo operamur, sed Deus operatur et operari pro bona voluntate” (It is indeed we who will, but God operates in us this willing; it is indeed we who operate, but God operates even this operation according to his good will” (De dono perseverantiae XIII, 33, 24, 676). The resolution that defines and decides the self in me belongs to me without, however, coming from me; it comes from elsewhere. God does me the grace of succeeding in willing what I would will to will: “Fit quippe in nobis per hanc Dei gratiam . . . non solum posse quod volumus, verum etiam velle quod possumus” (What arrives by this grace of God . . . is not only that we can what we will but that we will [truly and entirely] what we can [in fact without knowing it or willing it]) (De corruptione et gratia XI, 32, ibid., 342).
It now becomes possible to will what God wills rather than what I on my own believe I will: “Et hoc erat totum nolle, quod volebam et velle, quod volebas” (And the entire affair consisted only in not willing what I willed, but willing what you yourself willed) (Confessiones IX, 1, 1, 14, 70). Not of course because I renounce willing what I want but, exactly to the contrary, because I begin to will truly ex toto, since I will what is given to me to love.