sometimes i felt that the chain of argumentation is just not logical, almost as he posed a question and understood he couldnt prove his stance, so he went with the ultimate solution card “God is good so just believe”

Unless I am missing something, I am not sure that Augustine espouses Libertarian freedom in this work the way that the editor thinks he does in the introduction; then again, I am no Augustine scholar and neither am I a philosopher. Someone please correct me?

"Augustine rejects the view known as compatibilism that determinism is compatible with human freedom and moral responsibility' and since he is convinced that human beings are in act free and responsible, he must reject determinism as well" (xiii). Certainly the editor has a bias and that is quite fine; still, however, I think he gets Augustine wrong in a sense. Certainly Augustine modified his view which the editor recognizes, his run-in with the Pelagians made him sharpen his skills and defend a more robust position which led him to his treatises like "On Nature and Grace" and "On the Predestination of the Saints." My point is essentially that this is a very early work of Augustine after his conversion, and leaves a lot of questions unanswered; certainly it is not his final position--the position that so influenced John Calvin and the Magisterial Reformers. Even still, it seems that his view in this early dialogue is still a form of compatibilism.

Much of it was pretty dense to slog through, and one who has not understanding of Ancient Platonic thought would find most of Augustine's arguments extremely weird and uncompelling. Besides the point, Augustine traces through various topics such as freedom of the will, the cause of the will, the origin of evil, the origin of the soul, and many other interesting topics he dealt with much more extensively in his latter years. To all of these questions he pretty much says "well I don't really know."

Here is one great debating tactic I should pick up
"Augustine: Do you want to know?
Evodius: I don't know that either
Augustine: Then don't ask me any more questions" (19).

Some more gems:

"Anyone who does not think that we should admonish people in this way ought to be banned from the human race" (73).

Concerning God's foreknowledge of future events, Augustine rejects that God knows anything contingently, but rather he knows it perfectly: this we can put nicely in God's free knowledge. He states that it would be "irreligious and completely insane attack on God's foreknowledge to say that something could happen otherwise than as God foreknew" (ibid). His Socratic interlocutor then raises the question of how all events do not happen by necessity if God does not know events contingently but perfectly to which Augustine responds, "I think the only reason that most people are tormented by this question is that they do not ask it piously" (ibid). There, as Augustine would come to realize is not a solution but merely an evasion of the problem.

Essentially Augustine says that nothing can happen by necessity (in the philosophical sense) in reference to a will, since a will by its very definition, Augustine reasons, is something that presupposes power. "So our will would not be a will if it were not in our power. And since it is in our power, we are free with respect to it But we are not free with respect to anything that we do not have in our power" (77). What Augustine would come to discover is that the "thing" that is not within our power if the ability to will towards good and not towards evil, or that is, the ability without God's initial first grace, to come to Christ. Indeed, in his later Retractationum written c. 427 A.D. he acknowledged that he was clearly not speaking about grace in this dialogue, but merely the philosophical will contra the Manachians; the issues with the Pelagians, he wrote, had not yet arisen, even while defending this dialogue through the lens of his latter more robust view.

Augustine on God's punitive justice speaks of proximate causes only, viz., the sin that the sinner committed by his free will, and hence God is just in punishing it even though God foreknew it perfectly, "God's foreknowledge does not force the future to happen" (78). At this point Augustine is looking for a grounding of causal events--since in this dialogue he does not want to ground them in the will of God--and he is left empty handed. "The sin is committed by the will, not coerced by God's foreknowledge...[Indeed], the will is the cause of sin, but you are asking about the cause of the will itself? Suppose that I could find this cause. Wouldn't we then have to look for the cause of this cause? What limit will there be on this search? Where will our questions and discussions end? You should not search any further than the root of the issue" (104).

Interesting also is at this time when the origin of the soul is brought up, Augustine lays out four positions, that of creationsim, traducianism, Originism, and Platonism, of which he says he simply has no clue and the Catholic Church has not yet laid out a position on the matter. Even by the end of his life, Augustine could not seem to decide between the former two.

All in all, good read of Augustine for the engagement and learning experience of this erudite Father.

Contra Manichean Cosmology & Anthropology

De Libero Arbitrio Voluntatis is an early Platonic dialogue by Augustine as sophist with a student named Evodius written shortly after Augustine converted around 388. There is no other work that puts on display so clearly his total dedication to Platonic rationalism and education. The very structure is a pure Platonic dialogue using sequential rationality. Here he is attempting to refute the apologetics of Manicheanism. Throughout his life, Augustine balanced between the opposite heresies of Pelagianism and Manicheanism. These two Cosmologies which generate very different Anthropologies are still alive and well today in different versions of Protestantism. The heresy of Manichean Dualistic Anthropology was resurrected in Calvin under a new name (Unconditional Election), and Pelagian understanding of the Will was reborn in Antinominalist Protestantism that is still alive in some forms of Evangelicalism. On Free choice of the Will is focused exclusively on Manicheanism, but Augustine tempers his simplistic statements about Free Will with his later anti-Pelagian works where he writes that the Grace of God proceeds the ability for the human soul to chose faith and good works, which is the doctrine of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and many later Protestant denominations. This is a purely polemic work, and Augustine clearly over-reacts in his refutation of heresy, but De Libero is still a critical work fully within the historic Orthodoxy of the Christian faith.

This dialogue is Augustine's counter-argument against Mani from the perspective of the Privatio Boni: "Everything good is from God. There is nothing of any kind that is not from God....Reason has shown that we commit Evil through the free choice of the will." (Book II Chapter XX) This entire book, written soon after Augustine converted, attempts to oppose Manicheanism's Dualism and its subsequent belief in Predestination. It was Augustine's reply to the Manichean apologetic claim against Christianity that God cannot be All-Good and All-Powerful. To Augustine, Privatio Boni solves the conflict between Ex Nihlio and Omnibenevolence (Theodicy) by arguing that evil perpetrated by humans has no reality, ie, no form. Thus, when we speak of the Providence and sovereignty of God, this does not include evil because it is shadow, a movement of Free will against Being itself. Sin is Defectivus Motus, a vacuum of Goodness, and not a "thing" at all. Thus it is completely accurate to simultaneously state that God did not create nor cause evil, and at the same time, is the Omnipotent Sovereign over all existence. In De dono perseverantiae, Augustine writes, "I showed that God should be praised for all things and that there are no grounds at all for their belief [the Manichees] that there exists two co-eternal natures, one good, one evil, which co-exist together." When the Pelagian heresy arose, Augustine wrote De natura et Gratia to prevent the work from justifying the opposite heresy of Pelagianism. In Retractationes he writes: "unless the will is freed by the grace of God from the bondage through which it has become a slave of sin ... mortal men cannot live rightly and piously." Augustine, swinging between the dual heresies of Manichaeism and Pelagianism, retains the Orthodox position across his works, although he naturally over-corrects when battling each of these heresies in specific works. We see this exact same Cosmological debate raging in the 30,000 denominations of Protestantism, which began in Luther's day with the Antinominalists and Calvinists. Calvinism/ Reformed Theology is a modern resurgence of Manichean Anthropology which selectively highlights Augustine's Anti-Pelagian writings to make it seem like he supported Predestination, which is balanced within Protestantism against the Anti-Nominalism (Neo-Pelagianism) found within Evangelicalism which emphasizes Augustine's Anti-Manichean works.

Later, in his forceful reproach against the British Monk Pelagius, Augustine places a strong emphasis on the Sovereign Grace of God. These passages were taken out of context to prove other heresies he spent his life fighting against, namely the heresies of the Pagan Greek religion concerning the understanding of the Biblical concept of Predestination (from a corporate, Apostolic lens to a Platonic, Individualistic lens). He does "set the scene" for Western Christianity to re-interpret Election in the Torah, Nevi'im, and Pauline Epistles in terms of a Manichean Anthropology (his introduction of Original Sin into Christendom), Rationalistic Epistemology and Individualism. He was the first early church father who did not speak Greek, and his theology reflects this. Augustine made many mistakes in this linguistic vacuum. Later, his works would be cannibalized by Catholics and Protestants trying to superimpose a Pagan conceptualization of Predestination onto the Scriptures, twisting the words of Paul to fit the opinions of the original heretics the Early Church Fathers dedicated their lives (and frequently, their deaths) to erase.

Augustine is addressing the remnants of the Greek Religions Neo-pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism, the various syncretic gnostic religions such as Manicheanism, Valentinianism, Marcionism and Sethianism as well as the heresies which developed within the church, most prominently Arianism and Pelagianism. As such, De Libero Arbitrio Voluntatis is a winding dialogue that explores many dead-end ideas, including Dualism. In De dono perseverantiae, Augustine writes, "I showed that God should be praised for all things and that there are no grounds at all for their belief [the Manichees] that there exists two co-eternal natures, one good, one evil, which co-exist together."

In Book I, Augustine outlines basic Hamartiological concepts about the nature of sin and answers the basic question "Where does evil come from?" Augustine clearly renounces the Pagan Platonic and Gnostic conceptions of Predestination/ Determinism, writing, "Reason has shown that we commit Evil through the free choice of the will." And since God gave mankind free will, it is understandable that God "may appear to be the cause of our evil deeds," as the Manichean heretics assert, but he promises to answer that question in the next book.

In Book II, Augustine answers the charge that God "should not" have given mankind Free Will, and that somehow he is morally culpable for the actions of mankind. This accusation is a non-sequitur to a modern thinker, but to a Neo-Platonist, Manichean or Pelagian, this was a legitimate question. Augustine dismantles this by expounding upon a body-spirit (internal-external) epistemological paradigm, arguing that the ability to reason is itself of divine origin and necessary for humans to understand common truths. Augustine has a strong sense of the Self, arguing that to know oneself is to know God and vice-versa.

Augustine touches on peripheral subjects to free will, including the punishment of crimes. If all people are predestined to commit murder, etc., how could one punish them? He was not a fan of Capital Punishment, but doesn't specifically condemn it:

"The law which his made to govern states seems to you to make many concessions and to leave unpunished things which are avenged nonetheless by divine Providence- and rightly so. But because it does not do all things, it does not thereby follow that what it does do is to be condemned".

In book II Chapter XX he explicitly articulates the Privatio Boni argument: "Everything good is from God. There is nothing of any kind that is not from God." And he solves the conflict between Ex Nihlio and Omnibenevolence (Theodicy) by arguing that evil perpetrated by humans has no reality, ie, no form. Thus, when we speak of the Providence and sovereignty of God, this does not include evil because it is shadow, a movement of Free will against Being itself. Sin is Defectivus Motus, a vacuum of Goodness, and not a "thing" at all. Thus it is completely accurate to simultaneously state that God did not create nor cause evil, and at the same time, is the Omnipotent Sovereign over all existence.

In Part III, Augustine takes closer aim at the excuses that Determinists use to justify their creed. The Platonic and Gnostic Determinists Augustine is replying to insist (as do virtually all Determinists), that their philosophy does not negate moral responsibility and the agency of humankind. Augustine takes aim at this dodge, stating that no denial of real free will can result in mankind being truly responsible for their own evil. Hard Determinism (Soteriological or Cosmological) must result in God being inherently evil, which in the Christian tradition is blasphemy. Manicheans argued this thoroughly, an argument still raging between Calvinists and Hyper-Calvinists. He writes in Book II, Chapter IV and in chapter XVII:

"God's knowledge that man will sin is not the cause of sin. Hence punishment for sin is just.... God's foreknowledge of future events does not compel them to take place... either the will is the first cause of sin, or there is no first cause. If someone says that a stone sins because it falls down through its weight, I will not say he is more senseless than a stone; he is simply insane. But we accuse a spirit of sin when we prove that it has preferred to enjoy lower goods and has abandoned higher ones… No man is forced to sin, either by his nature or another's'... If you wish to attribute sin to the Creator, you will acquit the sinner of his sin. Sin cannot be rightly imputed to anyone but the sinner."

Augustine dogmatically upholds the Biblical teaching of Free Will, both cosmologically and Soteriological, at the individual level. He later avoids Semi-Pelagianism by emphasizing that Free Will exists by the Grace of God. Millenia later, Luther, a student of the Augustinian school, would define sin both as original sin [sin as pretemporal entity i.e., Being] and as one's Act and inhereted guilt. However, even though he was eventually the cause of this new Anthropology in the West, Augustine clearly Predestination here in De Libero and warns about the Sociological ramifications of blaming God for the sins of the free-willed individual. The Manicheans were correct on one thing: if there is no freedom in the human Nuos, then God cannot be all-good. Cosmology is inextricably linked to Anthropology.

A few notable quotes:

"All sins are included under this one class: when someone is turned away from divine things that are truly everlasting, toward things that change and are uncertain"

"Thus is all good is removed [Free Will being a 'good'] , no vestige of reality persists; indeed, nothing remains. Every good is from God. There is nothing of any kind that is not from God. Therefore, since the movement of turning away from good, which we admit to be sin, is a defective movement [defectivus motus] and since, moreover, every defect comes from nothing, see where this movement belongs; you may be sure it does not belong to God."

"What greater security can there be than to live a life where what you do not will cannot happen to you?"

This is an in-depth discourse on why we have free will. This is an excellently written work that is still relevant and meaningful even though this was written by 4th century saint. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of this topic.

just some light weekend reading. if I had my own free choice I wouldn’t have read this. an interesting argument but not particularly illuminating. to me it failed to reconcile the key tensions in the text.

Awesome and essential read. Really an amazing book on free will and the origins of sin. There are also some interesting little nuggets on the topic of law and politics. Overall this is a must read to understand Catholic theology on some very important topics.

Augustine writes saying, “How is it that these two propositions are not contradictory and inconsistent: (1) God has foreknowledge of everything in the future; and (2) We sin by the will, not by necessity? For, you say, if God foreknows that someone is going to sin, then it is necessary that he sin.” Unlike every other point before this, he simply asserts that it is heretical to believe God does not foreknow everything. He does not argue this point, try to reason to it, or use verses to back the claim. This tells me he is basing his argument on a point that he cannot back. To give him a shadow of doubt, he may back this in another writing. I will keep looking.

The only other thing I would like to note is about his circular reasoning. He uses it several times throughout the writing. “Seek and ye shall find” (regarding his circular reasoning)

Fascinating turn in philosophy. Very important work within moral theory (the study of how human beings act within the world and what drives those action). Useful to read in conjunction with Arisotle and the Stoics. A very different Augustine than you will meet in 'Confessions' or 'City of God'. Often mistakingly identified with the 'free will' defense of evil.

This was worth painstakingly working through.

- I really enjoyed the argument for the goodness of Creation, including the lower things of Creation. Just because something could be better doesn't mean it shouldn't exist; there's still good in imperfect things, and the higher things do exist, and the whole of Creation is better with the whole variety of things in it.
- Good thoughts about the nature of truth in Book Two
- I appreciated the straightforwardness and honesty of Book Three, XVII, "The will is the radical cause of all evil." Evodius asks Augustine what causes some wills to choose evil and others to choose good, and Augustine rebukes him, saying if he answered then Evodius would ask what was the cause of the cause. Nothing causes the will to will evil except the evil will itself; according to 1 Timothy, "the root of all evil is avarice," which is the desire to have more than is sufficient for your maintenance as you are, or the desire to overstep God, which is the definition of an evil will. The will to evil is the root of evil.
- I know some of Augustine's opponents claimed his later emphasis on predestination contradicted the emphasis laid on free will in this book, which he rejected. I'm excited to see how his thinking evolves.

A concise and mostly clear refutation of a philosophical determinism which would render God the author of evil. Augustine demonstrates that our free will is rather the cause of our sin in dialogue fashion. An excellent addition to Augustine’s thought.

I love this book. It explains the Catholic belief of free will and the existence of evil very well. I believe that Shakespeare used a lot of Augustinian philosophy in his play Macbeth, and I wrote a paper highlighting some excellent parallels between the two. I got a perfect Ace on the paper at Hillsdale, which is probably why I feel so fond of this work.