1 Augustine of Hippo (Routledge Companion to Free Will) Jesse Couenhoven Given Augustine’s immense standing as the greatest theological “Doctor” recognized by both Catholics and Protestants, his legacy was bound to be contested. Even so, those who attempt to acquaint themselves with the enormous literature on Augustine’s views about free will, sin, and grace might find themselves surprised by the diversity of interpretations on offer. As Eleonore Stump has written, “historians of philosophy read Augustine on free will so variously that it is sometimes difficult to believe they are reading the same texts” (Stump 2001, 124). My suggestion in this essay is that the best way through the fog of scholarship surrounding Augustine’s views about freedom is to take a developmental and historical approach to the complexities of his many writings (cf. the “genetic-historical” approach to Karl Barth in McCormack 1997). From that perspective, a fair amount of what has been said about Augustine is at least partially right. At the same time, those who have not taken the time to attend to the complexity of and developments in Augustine’s views can hardly help but get important points wrong. Augustine revised his views about freedom in important ways, but his views also exhibited a fundamental continuity and consistency for much of his career. Augustine the recent 2 convert may not have been quite sure of his views, but Augustine the bishop was one of the first theological compatibilists, who believed that responsibility is compatible with at least certain kinds of necessity and that human freedom requires determination by divine grace. Augustine on Free Will: A Brief Survey It may be helpful to begin with a brief survey of some influential accounts of Augustine’s views. The later sections of this essay will not focus on these accounts, but readers should not find it too hard to infer where I think they go right, and where they go wrong. Perhaps surprisingly, although Augustine is widely known for his doctrines of original sin and predestination, he is also widely thought to have been among those who consider freedom incompatible with determination. Christopher Kirwan reads him as a confused libertarian: dismissing Augustine’s “oft repeated idea” that the unregenerate are “free” only for sin as unappealing, he bases his claim that Augustine understands free will as a freedom of indifference mainly on his reading of Augustine’s early On Free Choice (Kirwan 1989; William Babcock 1988 similarly concludes that Augustine does not offer a coherent account of moral agency). When he considers whether Augustine’s mature theology of grace coheres with this view, he cites Augustine’s statement in the Retractions that “I tried hard to maintain the free decision of 3 the human will, but the grace of God was victorious” (Augustine 1999e, 2.1) and concludes that Augustine was inconsistent. Eleonore Stump reads Augustine as a “modified libertarian” (Stump 2001). Roughly, he held that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with causal determinism, but not that the ability to do otherwise is necessary for free will or moral responsibility (John Martin Fischer 1994 has called a similar view hyper-incompatibilism. Stump’s account also echoes claims now being made by source incompatibilists). She takes Augustine at his word when he claimed that his early views, expressed in On Free Choice, were consistent with his later, anti-Pelagian views. Throughout his life, she argues, Augustine maintained both that humans are unable to effectively will the good without the aid of grace, and that because we are able to ask God for help in integrating our desires, our own intellects and wills are the ultimate source of our behavior. However, Stump puzzles over how to fit Augustine’s late view of grace into this picture, and concludes that either Augustine set himself a problem he could not solve, or that he may have actually been some sort of compatibilist. Other recent readers have suggested that Augustine developed a view kin to Susan Wolf’s “reason view.” James Wetzel has suggested that both Wolf and Augustine are “maximally 4 intellectualist” in their understanding of freedom (Wetzel 1992, see also TeSelle 2002). That is, both believe our behavior is most our own when it is a product of our perception of the good, and that irrational behaviors are less than free. This seems to account for Augustine’s sense that the heavenly saints are more free than earthly sinners. Yet it leaves open obvious questions about how Augustine considered it fair for God to blame unfree sinners who are trapped in ignorance and weakness. John Rist seeks to make headway on this problem with the suggestion that Augustine believed in two freedoms, a higher teleological freedom associated with perfect rationality and goodness, and a lower freedom associated merely with responsibility. Rist reads Augustine as both a compatibilist and an incompatibilist about this lower freedom. Augustine was a libertarian about Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian freedom, but Augustine’s mature doctrine of grace made him a theological compatibilist about postlapsarian agency. Rist notes that Augustine’s God shapes the human will in a way that leaves no room for human autonomy. Rist finds this combination of views both insightful and an unsatisfactory mess, and he worries that Augustine sometimes gave up too much of human agency in favor of saving divine omnipotence (Rist 1969, 440; Rist 2014, Ch. 2). 5 Gerald Bonner has taken this latter concern further with the argument that Augustine’s doctrines of original sin and predestination eventually led the late Augustine to give up on anything like what we mean by free will (Bonner 2007). Bonner seems to think of free will solely in libertarian terms, however. By contrast, two recent theological readings of Augustine have noted his late emphasis that human agency can be both determined (by original sin or by divine grace) and voluntary—which makes Augustine a compatibilist, though neither reading uses that philosophical terminology. Although Alistair McFadyen (2001, Ch. 8) and Ian McFarland (2010, Ch. 3) draw on Augustine’s texts in quite different ways, both argue that Augustine’s late view of sin has at its core the notion that sinful wills are not so much disempowered as “bent” in their loves. Sinners do what they want, though they lack control over what they find appealing. McFadyen leaves open the question of whether this theme allows Augustine to resolve the questions about freedom and responsibility raised by his theology. McFarland worries that Augustine sometimes also suggests that we can be blamed only for what we undeterminedly choose. Thus, from a different point of view, McFarland echoes Kirwan’s worry that Augustine was inconsistent. On Reading Augustine on Free Will Why is Augustine read so diversely? The most obvious reason is that he can be difficult to 6 comprehend. He rarely defined his terms. Augustine’s views were not systematically expressed; to the contrary, they were often polemically expressed by a master of rhetoric whose aim was as much to impress or delight his audience as to clarify his position or advance a philosophical or theological discussion. For these reasons, among others, Augustine sometimes contradicted himself, or overstated his case, tried out ideas only to drop them, or simply failed to develop the implications of a view he advocated. The challenges of reading Augustine could be better addressed, however, if Augustine’s readers were more careful about being up to the task. One issue is that Augustine’s expositors often lack the philosophical sophistication with ancient and modern discussions of freedom and responsibility needed to fully engage Augustine’s views. Because Augustine is widely categorized as a theologian, it has taken his modern readers some time to see that he was a sophisticated heir of both Stoic and neo-Platonic action theory. A second issue is highlighted by Isidore of Seville’s famous comment that anyone who claims to have read all of Augustine’s works is a liar. Isidore is typically taken to have meant that Augustine wrote too much for any one scholar to have read. Given his historical context, however, it is likely that Isidore was referring to the unavailability of many of Augustine’s works 7 during the early Middle Ages (as Kelly 1999, 131, argues). Both considerations apply to recent scholarship on Augustine. Until recently, the larger part of Augustine’s works were not available in English, which influenced what the English speaking world read of Augustine. Moreover, daunted by the size and variety of Augustine’s corpus, many scholars have sought to break Augustine’s views into manageable pieces. Philosophers often separate Augustine’s “philosophical” early work on freedom from his later “theological” discussions of sin and grace. For their part, theologians and historians who read Augustine have not always been philosophically astute enough to see what Augustine was up to. In various ways, therefore, accounts of Augustine on free will have tended to be selective readings. Augustinian Freedom: A Historical-Developmental Account A better integrated reading of Augustine begins with the recognition that Augustine’s views developed in conversation with his own dynamic and complex intellectual context. It is a truism for some that Augustine was the first to articulate the idea of free will (see, for instance, Arendt 1978, 84ff.). However, this claim is misleading in a number of respects. Because of his status, Augustine has often been wrongly credited with inventing ideas that he inherited and developed. The idea of a just war, which he learned from Cicero and Ambrose, is an example; his infamous doctrine of original sin, which he drew from Tertullian and other African speculation about 8 baptism and inherited guilt, is another (see respectively Mattox 2006, Ch. 1; Couenhoven 2005). The first great theorist of anything like what we have in mind when we speak of free will may have been the first great Christian theologian, Origen, who was a kind of libertarian (see Frede 2011). Rather than the inventor of the idea of free will, therefore, Augustine is a reference point for it, the source of a conversation about free will we have inherited from him through centuries of further conversation partners. A further complexity that must be kept in mind is how deceptive it can be to say that Augustine had a concept of free will as such. He wrote a great deal about the voluntas. Translating that term by “will” can obscure the fact that Augustine did not have a faculty psychology, or an idea of the will as a singular locus of responsible activity. Nor did he distinguish volitional from intellective powers. Given our typical associations with the term, it can be quite misleading to read Augustine as a theorist of free will. It is more illuminating to simply read Augustine as having developed, over time, conceptions of freedom and responsible agency that sought to make philosophical and psychological sense of his theological convictions about original sin, infant baptism, divine foreknowledge and grace, predestination, and related topics. Part of the interest and difficulty of reading Augustine is the fact that he did so in dialogue with his Christian, Platonist, and Stoic forbearers, often both appropriating and dissenting from all of those parties. 9 Augustine’s first major work on these topics, typically translated On Free Choice of the Will, concerned what he called the liberum arbitrium of the voluntas (for more on these terms, see Couenhoven 2013, Ch. 3). In many ways this dialogical work was not the expression of a settled position but an experimental foray. Augustine brought the first two parts of the book to their climax with the claim that what we choose or consent to (liberum arbitrium) is within our power to control. The idea that we non-determinedly choose in ways that allow our ultimate moral and spiritual identities to be up to us was, more or less, the Christian Platonist view Augustine had learned prior to his conversion. It appealed to him in part because it seemed to offer an appropriately non-Manichean solution to the problem of evil. Notably, however, this book was left unfinished until, about six years later, in 395, Augustine returned to his dialogue, adding a third part. In this concluding discussion Augustine raised questions about whether postlapsarian sinners, or saints saved by grace, really have the power for self-determination that his book had been celebrating. Our choices, he suggested, are motivated by the mind’s desires (voluntas), which is too fundamental a part of who a person is to be changed from evil to good via the choices it itself motivates. Change is possible, but only with divine assistance. 10 Augustine did not, at this point, put this psychology to work in his understanding of prelapsarian humanity. Though he had begun to question whether sinners have a libertarian freedom to achieve virtue and vice, he continued to take for granted that Adam and Eve must have had such agency. He still considered a version of the “free will defense” a crucial part of Christian thought (I argue that he later rejected free will theodicy in Couenhoven 2007). Accordingly, he defined sin as “the will to retain and follow after what justice forbids, and from which it is free to abstain” (Augustine 1890, 11.14. This definition was to cause Augustine much trouble in the Pelagian debates about original sin). Although Augustine now believed that sinners cannot make themselves good, he thought they could at least seek God’s grace. Thus, the early Augustine modified his libertarian inheritance without entirely rejecting it. At the same time, by raising questions about the theological and psychological adequacy of the teaching about human agency he had inherited, Augustine had begun to move toward what would become his distinctive view. A year later, in his Replies to [the Manichean] Simplicianum, Augustine had settled on the position that he would develop for the rest of his career, most rigorously in his anti-Pelagian treatises. Augustine’s career as a Christian intellectual is commonly broken into four stages: the neo-Platonic philosophical period right after his baptism, the anti-Manichean period, the anti- 11 Donatist period, and finally the anti-Pelagian period. While this approach captures something important about the changes in Augustine’s major conversation partners and, at points, his writing style, it is important to note the equally significant consistency in the main themes Augustine pursued in his occasional writings throughout his career. Augustine’s “philosophical” period clearly overlapped with his writings against the Manichees; much of his early writing was an attempt to think through his transition away from Manicheanism. I have suggested, in addition, that Augustine’s early writing was a time of questioning and exploration more than it was a time of defending settled views. Once Augustine’s thinking about freedom and agency found its footing, he would make a variety of changes to his position, but only in attempts to develop the radical implications of his starting point (for detailed explorations of the shifts in Augustine’s thought, see Burns 1980; Cary 2008). Augustine’s new starting point was influenced above all by Romans 9, where the Apostle Paul discusses God’s power to save. In response to the Manichees, Augustine indicated that what he learned from Paul was that because God’s election of his people is entirely gratuitous, it is not based on any human merit. This claim expressed Augustine’s growing conviction that in spite of their differences the Roman philosophies and theologies influential in his context shared a conceptual mistake. They taught that a select few can work their way to a salvation that is 12 achieved through self-purification. The means of that purification might differ in one way or another, and so too the nature of the good life that one sought. But what all fundamentally pagan views have in common is a theological error correlated with a psychological error. Because they did not recognize Christ as savior, the pagans were unable to recognize the necessity of being saved by divine help. We are made new in Christ, Augustine thought, because that is the only way for us to be saved at all. God’s saving action thus teaches us who we are and what our situation is like. Those who believe that we can achieve virtue and salvation apart from Christ not only denigrate God’s gracious work but misunderstand themselves. Theologically, therefore, Augustine’s position was that Manicheanism is wrong because human beings do not do anything prior to receiving God’s grace that makes them particularly deserving of it. The psychological corollary is that divine action has priority over human action because the former makes it possible for the latter to be transformed and to have the power to successfully seek the good. Without such grace humanity is trapped in a willing yet helpless bondage to evil. This philosophical theology of human action differed in significant ways from the one to which Augustine was converted, and it took him another twenty years to think his position through. Along the way he changed his mind about a variety of the details of his position. But he would become more and more radically and consistently compatibilist as he argued against a series of 13 opponents he viewed as propounding similar errors that put human moral accomplishments prior to divine grace. The Donatists were an African Catholic sect for whom the power of the sacraments depended on the purity of the priests who administer them. That sacramental theology seemed to Augustine to make the dual errors of trying to add to Christ’s saving work and asking too much of human virtue. The Pelagians, though loosely affiliated and largely Italian, were like the Manichees and Donatists in being spiritual elitists for whom salvation depended on one’s own moral achievements. For them, Christ was another sage, an example for the elite to follow. In City of God Augustine also took aim at the Stoics, who celebrated their own heroic virtue in the belief that they could avoid the morally and spiritually tragic without God’s help, via the power of their free decisions. Thus, whether Augustine was writing about evil, the sacraments, original sin, predestination, or the city built on love, his fundamental theme was the irreplaceable necessity of God’s salvation in Christ, and the corresponding limitations of any purely human effort to achieve virtue. Augustine’s Compatibilism: A Sketch In his late works, Augustine subscribed to compatibilist conceptions of freedom and human responsibility, goods he considered compatible with divine determinations such as predestination. He wrote, for instance, in City of God that “…if necessity is defined in the sense 14 according to which we say that it is necessary for something to be as it is or to happen as it does, I see no reason to fear that it will eliminate our freedom...” (Augustine 2012, V.10). Readers who take Augustine to be a libertarian typically misread him because they pay too little attention to the late works in which he expressed his mature doctrines of original sin and predestination. However, another source of confusion lies in the form Augustine’s compatibilism took. Compatibilists are widely expected to believe in determinism, so it can be surprising to discover that Augustine did not. On Augustine’s mature view, the grace God offers the predestined elect is necessarily accepted by those to whom it is given (Augustine 1999c, 8.13). Those who are not given such grace cannot avoid sin. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, which taught that all human beings procreated without special divine intervention are born with distorted loves (concupiscence), indicated that human beings are necessarily sinful. These views about sin and grace are sometimes thought to be deterministic, but Augustine was keen to argue otherwise (e.g., Augustine 1999c, 10.19. Augustine did not believe in causal determinism, or fatedness by heavenly bodies, and was probably an occasionalist; see Couenhoven 2013, 3.5.) 15 It was essential, Augustine believed, to the definition of sin that God does not cause us to act sinfully, but only permits us to. For something to be sin—and thus evil, a privation of the good— it has to be against the divine will in a way that it could not be if God played a positive role in promoting it. It was also important to his theodicy for Augustine to argue that God does not direct every detail of creation’s existence, and thus that there is no thoroughgoing divine determinism. It is true that God has oversight over all creation. Augustine argued at length in City of God that human kingdoms are established by divine providence. However, Augustine also maintained that “[God] is not the giver of all wills.” (Augustine 2012, V.9). There are many times when God simply allows us to do as we please. Adam and Eve’s fall from innocent perfection into sin is the prime but not the sole example of such a situation, where God foreknew a thing that God did not cause (Augustine 1999c, 10.19). Thus, Augustine’s commitment to predestination did not imply a commitment to thoroughgoing divine determinism. Predestination creates only a positive kind of necessity, one that fulfills the ends for which God made us (Augustine subscribed to what we call single, not double, predestination). And although it is clear that the “blessed necessity” created by grace can limit and direct human choices, Augustine was eager to affirm that it does not remove the ability to act from one’s voluntas, or to consent to the desires one might have. 16 In relation to his doctrine of sin, Augustine left open the possibility that humans might at times be undetermined in their imperfection. For instance, there may be times when one does not find anything attractive enough that it trumps one’s other options. In such cases a person may choose quite randomly. However, Augustine was convinced that indeterminacy of this sort cannot save sinners, since they need a renewed way of being that forms good habits of action. That cannot happen by chance. What made Augustine a compatibilist was not a belief in determinism—for various theological reasons Augustine rejected all the forms of determinism available to him—but his conviction that true freedom requires divine determination and that praise and blame are compatible with being determined by grace or by original sin. As he developed the logic of these claims, Augustine articulated a compatibilist picture of human agency. Augustine on Bondage to Sin and Freedom in Christ As a rhetorician, Augustine delighted in highlighting the paradoxical freedom of those who are slaves to Christ, and the bondage of those who are slaves to sin. Building on the moral psychology he had begun to develop in his early work on the liberum arbitrium of the voluntas, 17 he argued that whenever we consent to a desire and choose to act we do so for reasons; we are motivated to do so by our beliefs and loves. Augustine liked to remind his readers that, as his teacher Ambrose had said, what comes into our thoughts and hearts is not in our power to control—not directly, at least. This means we have limited control over our character, which is composed of what we desire and think about. Since we have limited control over the virtues and vices that characterize us, we also have limited control over our choices or actions, which flow from our character. Augustine’s sense that both the virtuous and the vicious lack control lay behind his willingness to speak of both saints and sinners as serving what they love. Inspired by God’s freedom for perfect relationships, Augustine considered the highest kind of freedom an inability to love wrongly that does not require having alternatives. This freedom, which only the just and good can have, he called libertas. Sinners can achieve libertas only in Christ, who heals their broken voluntas. God’s operative grace, Augustine believed, is not agency-demeaning but agency-enhancing, if we understand the nature of our agency rightly. When grace reshapes human beliefs and desires—when it reshapes the voluntas—God may significantly restrict human choice. God does not, however, undermine but actually enhances voluntary agency. Augustine considered this a fine trade off. As he saw it, choice is only a minor good, an occasional means to an end rather than an end in itself. Choice cannot give us the power 18 to define ourselves because the choices we make are sourced in our existing way of being in the world. By contrast, divine grace enriches human agency by empowering it for the good. Human beings can fully realize themselves only when they are able to wholeheartedly pursue the good, acting as they want and wanting thus for only the best reasons, without the internal division and hesitation that choice bespeaks. From Augustine’s point of view, the agential problem with sinners is not that they are determined—after all, the saints are also determined, by love. The sinners’ problem is that they cannot get what they truly want. Fundamentally, he believed, human beings are dependent, spiritually hungry beings who (whether they know it or not) yearn for relationship with God, and with the goods through which God displays glory. Hence the famous beginning to his Confessions: “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”. (Augustine 1960, 1.1). Sinful desires are self-defeating because they deny this reality, and ask God’s good creation to be for them what it is not—an ultimate rather than a finite good. To be a sinner, Augustine believed, is to be at odds with oneself, trapped by a twisted second nature, original sin, that undermines the good for which human nature was created. He found the agency of sinners lacking in significant respects, and he displayed a good deal of compassion for 19 sinners, among whom he located himself. He acknowledged that his own sin was often involuntary. Often he had thought he was making his life better when in fact he had been making chains for himself out of the things he loved. Augustine’s problem, caused by the original sin inherited from his own origins, was both ignorance and weakness. He was unable to see the good clearly, and he was unable to care wholeheartedly about even the goods he did know. He was divided against himself. In the Confessions Augustine spoke of himself as a person in fragments, not a person of a single will but of partial loves, fears, and wishes. This problem was compounded by the fact that he was unable to be honest with himself—he hid his lust for power (libido dominandi) and greed for love with philosophical and religious pieties. Such, Augustine concluded, is the life of a sinner. It is a life of such severely diminished agency that it is properly thought of as kin to being tied down. Augustine on Responsibility and Blame Augustine’s suggestion that sinners are unfree raises a natural question: how is it fair to blame them? Being trapped by original sin seems a clear case of lacking agency, and thus responsibility. Interestingly, this was a claim Augustine both endorsed and rejected. He endorsed this claim insofar as he recognized the enslavement of the voluntas as an involuntary state that sinners suffer. After Adam and Eve, sinners find evil within themselves before they have any 20 chance to choose it. At the same time, Augustine thought Scripture made it obvious that God blames sinners, and rebukes and even punishes them. He argued that doing so is not without propriety, because it may very well be the case that we, who care what others think about us, will be swayed by rebukes or empowered by admiration (Augustine 1999d, 3.5 and 5.7-6.9). God often ordains our interactions with one another to be instruments by which we are offered teaching and correction. Augustine built on this observation with the further argument that it is proper to offer rebukes or praise because sinners and saints are not simply passive before their vices and virtues. Augustine blamed those who did not believe in God because it was their own voluntas that disbelieved and did not love (on similar grounds, he also gave credit to those who did believe, even though believing was not up to them; Augustine 1999c, 6.11). He made it clear in his Confessions that in spite of his fractured being, it was nevertheless he who had willed career success, who had desired fame and enjoyed the admiration of his peers. He had been a fool, unwise and misguided. He could not say, therefore, that God or original sin had “made” him do these things. He had not been forced. He had loved and believed; it was his own mind that was in the right and wrong. In what might well have been a reference to his old self, Augustine noted that “…when someone 21 says, ‘I cannot do what is commanded because I am conquered by my concupiscence,’ he, of course…recognizes his own evil in himself, and grieves.” (Augustine 1999b, 3.5). Significantly, the fact that Augustine accepted responsibility for his beliefs and desires did not mean that God did not share in that responsibility. After all, God was not only his conversation partner but the one who made Augustine’s testimony possible in the first place. God had permitted him to fall into these paths, and had not stopped him. But Augustine believed that God had done so for the sake of greater goods that God was gradually revealing to him, and which Augustine could begin to see as he looked back over his life. So while God bore some responsibility for Augustine’s wayward life, on the whole Augustine sought to praise God for the turns his story had taken. He did not see that he was in a position to blame God. He did not fully understand God’s ways, but that was precisely why Augustine thought it better to wait and see where things were going (Augustine 1999d, 8.17). Parallel points apply to Augustine’s views about the agency of sinners who have begun to be transformed by prevenient and then operative grace. When God decides to turn a heart toward true love, as Jesus had dramatically done in the case of St. Paul, the target of God’s love cannot reject God’s offer. Yet Augustine sought to avoid fatalism by insisting that the grace God offers 22 to the elect “does not destroy the human will, but changes it from an evil will to a good will and, once it is good, helps it” (Augustine 1999b, 20.41). Only via our own voluntary agency are we able to be genuine partners of God, which means that God’s agency must work through ours if it is to be we who are saved. God may clarify our vision so that we are able to see what is truly worthy of love, and how to love well, but we are the ones who love. Thus, although God often speaks through us, God does not speak for us. So, Augustine urged, “Let no one, then, accuse God in his heart, but let each person blame himself when he sins. And when he does something as God wants, let him not take this away from his own will. For, when he does it willingly, he should call it a good act, and he should hope for [a] reward…” (Augustine 1999b, 2.4). We can summarize Augustine’s claims by saying that though did not think of sinners who sin involuntarily as significantly free, he did consider them responsible and accountable. Likewise, although he insisted that sinners saved by grace cannot claim credit for making themselves who they have become, he did hold them responsible for their renewed beliefs and desires, and the actions that flowed from them. As significant personal agents, whose beliefs and desires make a difference for better and worse, human beings deserve to be praised and blamed for who they are. The personal qualities shown in a person’s attitudes and behavior matter; having the kind of voluntary agency a human being has, and the abilities to think, dream, wish, and so on that go 23 along with it, means that they are responsible agents, accountable for who they are. Thus, Augustine wrote, our believing and willing “are due to [God] because he prepares the will, and both are due to us because they are not done unless we are willing” (Augustine 1999c, 3.7). One image Augustine used to convey his compatibilism is that of prayer. As the activity proper to those who wait upon the Lord to renew their strength, prayer is a metaphor for the Christian life that sums up the dynamic Augustine had in mind when he asked, “What do you have that you have not received?” (Augustine 1999a, 2.3-7.15). The Confessions took the form of an extended prayer because in that text Augustine expressed his sense that whatever sense his life story made was owed to God’s gracious planning. In his prayers he testified about his reliance on God while also displaying his own agency by speaking in his own voice. He was a dependent agent, but not in such a way that he was not also a responsible agent in his own right. He spoke for himself, expressing his own beliefs and desires in the manner appropriate to a genuine conversation partner with God, even if that voice was given to him by his maker. Conclusion: Responsibility and Involuntary Sin Augustine’s philosophical theology of human agency reached its most complex and consistent articulation in his Unfinished Work, which he died while writing. There he emphasized that 24 agency can be both voluntary and necessary. Talk of voluntary agency can seem opaque, but Augustine’s suggestion that it is misleading to call sinners free, and his consistent use of metaphors like fall, stain, infection, and wound to describe the bondage of sin, suggest that he did not associate blameworthy agency with being in control, but rather with ownership of a particular sort. Associating sin with ignorance and weakness implied that we can be culpable for evils that are not simply up to us, or even entirely willing. Responsibility for it depends on the fact that sinners cannot disclaim ownership of the voluntas with which they find themselves, their own twisted beliefs and loves. One sign of this ownership is the fact that we naturally consent to acting out the beliefs and loves with which we find ourselves. Augustine did not, however, argue that responsibility depends on choice or consent (liberum arbitrium). More fundamentally, Augustine believed that evil beliefs and loves are blameworthy in themselves, even when they are not consented to: It is not what I want to that I do. After all, what does the law say? You shall not lust. I too don't want to lust, and yet I do lust; although I don't yield consent to my lust, although I don't go after it. I stand up to it, you see, I turn my mind away from it, I refuse it any weapons, I restrain my members. And yet what I don't want occurs in me. (Augustine 1992, 154.10) The desire Augustine had in mind was not necessarily sexual; it could be a greed for possession 25 or domination of some other sort. The law to which he referred was the tenth of the ten commandments, forbidding covetousness. His point was that even his unbidden thoughts and yearnings reflected on him in a deep way because he was active in them, and they expressed the person he was, whether he liked it or not (a recent philosophical view with some similarities is Smith 2005, 2008). He would not be liberated from such internal conflict until, by grace, that day when his mind would no longer be fractured and he would be able to wholeheartedly love the good for which he was made. 26 Related Topics Free will and grace (Tim Pawl) Free will and providence (Ken Perszyk) Free will and theological determinism (Leigh Vicens) References Arendt, H. (1978) The Life of the Mind, Volume Two: Willing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Augustine, St. (1890) “On Two Souls.” 392-3. The Writings Against the Manicheans and Against the Donatists. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Ed. Philip Schaff. Trans. Rev. Richard Stothert, and Albert H. Newman. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 158-88. Augustine, St. (1960) Confessions. 398. Trans. John K. Ryan. New York: Doubleday. Augustine, St. (1992) “Sermons (148-183).” The Works of St. Augustine, III/5. Ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. Trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. Augustine, St. (1999a) The Gift of Perseverance. 427/8. Ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. Trans. Roland J. Teske, S.J. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. Augustine, St. (1999b) Grace and Free Choice. 426. Ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. Trans. Roland J. Teske. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. Augustine, St. (1999c) The Predestination of the Saints. 427/8? Ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. 27 Trans. Roland J. Teske, S.J. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. Augustine, St. (1999d) Rebuke and Grace. 426/7. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. Roland J. Teske. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. Augustine, St. (1999e) Retractions. 426/7. Trans. Sister M. Inez Bogan, R.S.M. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. Augustine, St. (2012) The City of God. 413. William Babcock. Hyde Park, New York: New City Press. Babcock, W. S. (1988) “Augustine on Sin and Moral Agency.” Journal of Religious Ethics 16: 28-55. Bonner, G. (2007) Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine's Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. Burns, J. P. (1980) The Development of Augustine's Doctrine of Operative Grace. Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes. Cary, P. (2008) Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul. New York: Oxford University Press. Couenhoven, J. (2005) “Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin.” Augustinian Studies 36(2): 359396. ----- (2007) “Augustine's Rejection of the Free Will Defence: An Overview of the late 28 Augustine's Theodicy.” Religious Studies 43: 279-298. ----- (2013) Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ: Agency, Necessity, and Culpability in Augustinian Theology. New York: Oxford Unversity Press. Fischer, J. M. (1994) The Metaphysics of Free Will. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Frede, M. (2011) A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought. A. A. Long. Foreword by David Sedley. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Kelly, J. F. (1999) “Carolingian Era, Late.” Augustine Through the Ages. Allan D. Fitzgerald, Ed. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Kirwan, C. (1989) Augustine. London: Routledge. Mattox, J. M. (2006) St. Augustine and the Theory of Just War. Bloomsbury Academic. McCormack, B. L. (1997) Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909-1936 (Clarendon Paperbacks). Oxford University Press. McFadyen, A. I. (2001) Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin. New York: Cambridge University Press. McFarland, I. A. (2010) In Adam's Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Rist, J. M. (1969) “Augustine on Free Will and Predestination.” Journal of Theological Studies 20: 420-47. 29 ----- (2014) Augustine Deformed: Love, Sin and Freedom in the Western Moral Tradition. Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. (2005) “Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life.” Ethics 115(2): 236-71. ----- (2008) “Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment.” Philosophical Studies 138: 36792. Stump, E. (2001) “Augustine on Free Will.” Cambridge Companion to Augustine. Ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzman. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 124-47. TeSelle, E. (2002) “Exploring the Inner Conflict: Augustine's Sermons on Romans 7 and 8.” Engaging Augustine on Romans. Ed. Daniel Patte and Eugene TeSelle. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 111-46. Wetzel, J. (1992) Augustine and the Limits of Virtue. New York: Cambridge University Press. Further Reading Brown, P. (2000). Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, a new edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Though now dated in some respects this remains the best overall biography of Augustine. Dodaro, R. (2004). Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine, New York: Cambridge University Press. This book insightfully relates Augustine’s politics in City of God to the ideas about human nature being explored in his ongoing debates with the Pelagians. 30 Fitzgerald, A. D., Ed. (1999). Augustine Through the Ages. Grand Rapids, MI, William B. Eerdmans. A massive encyclopedia filled with articles by top scholars, this is an excellent resource. Rist, J. M. (1994). Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rist’s effort to put Augustine’s thought in its ancient context has been widely praised. Wetzel, J. (2010). Augustine: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum. An accessible recent meditation on central Augustinian themes written by a scholar with a reputation for fairmindedness and lyrical prose. 31 Biographical Note Jesse Couenhoven is Associate Professor of Moral Philosophy in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. He is currently finishing an introduction to the doctrine of predestination and the ideas of free will historically associated with it.