On Free Choice Of The Will

At the beginning of the third book, the dialogue has reached the point where several issues have been resolved, but one thing still remains to discuss in detail: the source of evil. Evodius confronts Augustine: “It has been demonstrated to my satisfaction that free will is to be numbered among good things, and indeed not among the least of them, and therefore that it was given to us by God, who acted rightly in giving it. So now, if you think that this is a good time, I would like you to explain the source of the movement by which the will turns away from the common and unchangeable good toward its own good, or the good of others, or lower goods, all of which are changeable” (70). Evodius is content to say that human beings have free will, and that free will is a good given to human nature by God, but he is still unsure of how it is that this good faculty can be put to wicked use.

Augustine continues with a thought experiment and compares the will to an artifact that is only moved from the outside and by necessity. If the will moves by necessity and cannot do otherwise, then there is no blame to be administered because that would be irrational, so the question becomes: “whose movement is it?” (71). In the case of a stone that falls to the earth, it is surely the stone that moves, but the stone cannot be blamed for this movement because it only falls to the earth by necessity, it’s a natural movement. So even if the soul moves itself in a wicked way, there still must be a determination if the soul is to be blamed for a disordered movement. The soul does, however, have the power to choose between various goods, “the soul is not moved to abandon higher things and love inferior things unless it wills to do so. And so the movement of the stone is natural, but the movement of the soul is voluntary” (72).

This revelation causes Evodius to ask a further question: “I very much wonder how God can have foreknowledge of everything in the future, and yet we do not sin by necessity” (73). Since the sin is known by God to occur, and since God’s knowledge is infallible, then the sin must necessarily occur; and if it must necessarily occur, that seems to intimate that the sins of human beings must be necessary. The final answer to this stream of logic becomes clear: “either we draw the heretical conclusion that God does not foreknow everything in the future; or, if we cannot accept this conclusion, we must admit that sin happens by necessity and not by will” (74). Augustine responds by appealing to the nature of human happiness, and to the concept of necessity and that which occurs against one’s will.

He proceeds by asking if things that occur necessarily occur against the will of the person, but this cannot be so. He then asks if God foreknows that you will be happy in the future, does that mean that you will be happy against your will? This would be an absurdity, for who could be happy against their will? Augustine concludes from this that just because God infallibly knows future actions and events does not mean that they happen by necessity and against the will of the individual person in whom they occur. Analogously, Augustine offers, human memory of past events does not force past events to happen. They are simply remembered to have happened and cannot be changed; Augustine again draws a parallel between these actions and God’s volition.

Moving from this discussion to a broader discussion of nature in general, Augustine and Evodius discuss the value of a creature that can sin as opposed to the value of a creature that cannot (and does not) sin, comparing human beings with angels. They admit that the angelic creature that is free and yet still does not sin is more perfect than the human creature, but this fact does not mean that human beings should not exist (as Evodius fears). The solution to this problem is trust in God’s providence and divine mercy, and the willingness to embrace the good that has been given to us as human creatures: “So if you will to escape from unhappiness, cherish your will to exist. For if you will more and more to exist, you will approach him who exists in the highest degree. And give thanks that you exist now, for even though you are inferior to those who are happy, you are superior to things that do not have even the will to be happy…” (84-85). Even those who are unhappy in the present life, or in the present moment, still have reason to live, to live well, and to be thankful, for they at the very least have the power and the possibility to be happy (a reality that lower forms of existence do not have).

When one is unhappy, however, this is due to sin in some capacity, and as Augustine tells Evodius, “There are two sources of sin: one’s own spontaneous thought, and someone else’s persuasion…. Now both of these are voluntary; just as no one sins unwillingly by his own thought, so no one yields to the evil prompting of another unless his own will consents” (91). Sin finds its source from within the human person in all instances, either because it originates there or because it originates in someone else and yet flowers in the person due to their own voluntary consent. Even here, though, we are reminded of the goodness of creation, for the very fact that a creature can become corrupt means that it was good in the first place. Corruption either harms the creature in question, meaning that it was (and still is) good, or corruption cannot harm it at all, in which case it is not corrupt.

This voluntariness is the source of praise and blame, of reward and condemnation: “Every rational nature that was created with free choice of the will undoubtedly deserves praise if it abides in the highest and unchangeable good…But every nature that does not abide there, and does not will to act so that it might abide there, deserves to be condemned” (97). Corruption is only blameworthy where there is a flaw, and in creatures there can only be a flaw when a flaw is voluntary created or accepted, “so; they are flawed to the extent that they fall away from the design of their maker” (100). This is what it means to say that particular sinful acts are contrary to nature, since they are contrary to the nature with which God brought that particular being into existence. All creatures, therefore, owe something to God by the very fact that they exist; in the case of human beings, “if they have received a will by which they can will to be better, they owe it to him to exercise this will and be what they ought to be” (102).

When the will is not exercised in the manner that it ought to be, however, the will is used in an unworthy manner—this is the root of sin and evil. “Therefore, a perverse will is the cause of all evils,” Augustine asserts, “If such a will were in accordance with nature, it would preserve that nature and not harm it, and so it would not be perverse” (104). With this in mind, Augustine takes the argument all the way back to the beginning, raising a common objection to the argument that he has been developing: “It is therefore more important to ask,” he states, “what the first human being was like when he was created than how his descendants were propagated. For many people think they are being quite clever by posing this question: “If the first man was created wise, why was he led astray?” (118).

Augustine thus proposes that there is a middle state between wisdom and folly: if the first man was perfectly wise then he should not have fallen and sinned; if he was foolish, then he could not possibly have been wise; if he existed in a liminal state between the two, however, the will could have moved in either direction. The human was capable of wisdom, without possessing it perfectly from the start: “By reason one becomes capable of receiving a commandment to which one ought to be faithful, so that one does what is commanded. The nature of reason grasps the commandment, and obedience to the commandment brings wisdom” (119). In the case of Adam, reason was not enough to prevent the fall from grace, as he succumbed to the second source of evil—another’s persuasion.