Where there's a will, there's a God
A critical primer on Free Will in De Civitate Dei
Agony’s fourth volume will be released on August 28th (the feast of St Augustine). To whet your appetite, we present an exclusive piece on St Augustine’s philosophy of the freedom of the will, with special attention to the saint’s magnum opus, The City of God. This is a perfect introduction to a profound and challenging topic.
The author of this piece is Amy Wilson. Amy is a UK-born, Adelaide-based student of philosophy and theology, currently studying at the Australian Catholic University.
St Augustine’s De Civitate Dei was written to address the concerns of some 5th Century Romans who believed that the sack of Rome had been caused by a turning away from traditional Roman gods towards Christianity. In Book V of De Civitate Dei, Augustine is considering why the Roman Empire flourished in the first place. He gives a refutation of the doctrine of fate and an explanation of the Christian doctrine of free will and its consistency with God’s omniscience. He attempts to show that Rome’s success was due to “neither fortune nor fate”, but was due, instead, to the virtue of the Romans, and the role of the Roman empire in God’s plan; to use the Roman empire as a vehicle to spread Christianity across the world. Augustine believed that nothing comes about through fortune or fate, all things are caused by the will of God and the will of men.
Augustine addresses the human will at length in Book V, Chapter X. He begins by affirming the existence of the will of men saying that, while human beings are impacted by some inevitabilities outside of our control, like the inevitability that we will die, our wills are not subject to this type of necessity. We can, and do, act voluntarily in many things, including choosing itself. Further, for Augustine, necessity does not always conflict with free will; God is necessarily all knowing and eternal, but even though He cannot be deceived and cannot die, one would hardly argue that this impedes God’s will.
Augustine does consider situations where people suffer due to actions performed against their will. In these cases, Augustine says that, although the will is hindered by a greater force, it still exists, ineffectual as it may be. Even when a person cannot act in accordance with their own will, Augustine argues that the will itself still exists because God gives the will power. This allows Augustine to explain how our will remains free, even when our actions are constrained. However, Augustine does not explain why some wills are stronger than others, or why God would allow one will to overpower another in certain situations.
For me, this is deeply concerning. Could it be the case that, even if our will is independent, our freedom of choice is so constrained by external factors as to be rendered meaningless? Augustine admits that the will can be rendered ineffectual by a greater force, but he does not seem worried by the possibility that this is the case all the time. If our wills are constantly being constrained by outside forces, then we may not have freedom of choice, which would render our free will all but meaningless. Might the Devil exert this kind of force on God’s creatures? Might God Himself?
Unconcerned by this possibility and moving swiftly along, Augustine turns to God's foreknowledge of our actions. He says that God foresees the content of the will of men, and His foreknowledge is completely compatible with the power of our will. In fact, Augustine argues that our wills must exist for God to be able to foresee them, since no one could foresee something that does not exist. I don’t find this particularly comforting as this only guarantees that my will exists, not that I am able to exercise my will freely.
In his final point of Book V, Chapter X, Augustine concludes that it is right for God to reward good action and punish wrong action. God’s foreknowledge is not the cause of anyone’s sin, and because God sees what we freely choose to do, individuals are rightly held accountable for their sins. He states that “if He who foresaw what was to be in our will foresaw, not nothing, but something, it follows that there is a power in our will, even though He foresaw it.”
But he also states that “whatever a man has to suffer against his will is not to be attributed to the choices of man or of angels or of any created spirit, but to His choice who gives to wills whatever power they have.” This theory, that God grants us free will according to His will, implies that He could choose to take it away again. Augustine does not delve into this possibility in any detail within De Civitate Dei.
Fortunately for us, Augustine went on to write extensively on the will of men and the will of God after De Civitate Dei. Gerald Bonner, in his 2007 book Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom, outlines Augustine’s changing opinion on our freedom of choice. Bonner attributes much of this change to Augustine’s debates with Pelagius.1 His post-Pelagius views on free will and God’s knowledge has far less emphasis on the freedom of the human will, and far more emphasis on our dependence on God’s will, and His power, to grant us the freedom to choose.
Augustine’s writing on the will has always been consistent with his theology that we are created ex nihilo and are completely dependent on God and, therefore, even our freedom of choice is granted to us ultimately by the will of God. However, in his later works, it becomes clear that Augustine believes that, in our post-Fall state, we are completely unable to choose the good without direct intervention by God, who must grant us supernatural grace before we can truly exercise our free will.
This raises some very worrying possibilities. Firstly, what if I fall into sin because God chooses not to grant me the graces required to exercise my free will? What if it is God’s will, and not human will, that causes humans to sin? Secondly, if God chooses to grant me the graces to exercise my free will, am I free to choose whether I co-operate with those graces or not? Or is this determined by God’s will alone? Thirdly, where is the merit in my virtue, or the guilt in my sin, if God’s will is the determining factor, not mine? And finally, how did human will become so corrupted in the first place, that God would need to directly intervene?
In Book XIV of De Civitate Dei, Augustine addresses this final point. He argues that God created the first humans good, with the power to freely obey God’s command, but they chose to disobey God due to the sin of pride. This caused their nature to be corrupted by sin, and they passed on this sin to their descendants. In Chapter XIII of Book XIV, Augustine lays out the series of events. Firstly, he says that, since action always follows the will, the first humans must have already had a bad will before they could perform a bad action. Therefore, the first humans were already guilty when they disobeyed God in the Garden. According to Augustine, it is contrary to the human nature that God created for the will to become bad. So what, according to Augustine, turned the will of Adam and Eve against its original nature? For Augustine, the answer is pride. Pride is the root of all sin, in opposition to humility, the virtue that leads to obedience to God’s will.
But how was it possible for pride to take root? Augustine says:
Notice, however, that such worsening by reason of a defect is possible only in a nature that has been created out of nothing. In a word, a nature is a nature because it is something made by God, but a nature falls away from That which Is because the nature is made out of nothing.2
Therefore, says Augustine, God’s nature, because it was not created, but simply is, is free from any possibility of defect, whereas our human nature, since it was created, is susceptible to defect. On one hand, Augustine is trying to absolve God from blame for our bad will, by arguing that God created our nature to be good but, because of a defect, the first humans were able to permanently corrupt human nature.
This account raises two questions for me: why would God create human nature with the possibility for defect? Surely, He could have created an uncorruptible nature from nothing. I do not think Augustine ever fully explained how human nature could have become corrupted without making God somewhat culpable. Secondly, why did the sin of the first humans necessarily transmit their sin to all of humanity? Augustine attempts to answer this in Chapter XXVI, arguing that, when the first humans fell into sin, human reproduction became corrupted with lust, which meant that all humans thereafter were conceived in lust.
Augustine’s argument, then, is as follows: firstly, the will of man was given to him by God, and this will, by its nature, was able to freely choose the good. Secondly, this will, through the sin of pride, became corrupted and this new, corrupted will is unable to freely choose the good. Therefore, God must intervene and grant us His grace, which allows us to choose the good.
Returning to the aim of Book V of De Civitate Dei, Augustine argues that Rome’s success was due to the virtue of the Romans, and the role of the Roman empire in God’s plan. However, throughout his career as a theologian, the balance shifted for Augustine so as to diminish the role of the virtue of the Romans and as to emphasise the role of Rome in God’s plan.
So, how would Augustine suggest that we apply these theological theories to our own lives? For Augustine, the ultimate goal is, as far as possible, to closely align your own human will with God’s will, and therefore any potential conflict of will is irrelevant. For me, I will ask Augustine to pray for me, that God would grant me the graces to co-operate with His plan with my own will.
Bonner, Gerald. 2007. Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine's Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom. Washington DC: Catholic University of America.
Translations used for all quotations:
St Augustine. 1950. The City of God, Books I-VII. Edited by Etienne Gilson. Translated by Demetrius B. Zema and Gerald G. Walsh. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press.
St Augustine. 1952. The City of God, Books VIII-XVI. Edited by Etienne Gilson. Translated by Grace Monahan and Gerald G. Walsh. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press.