Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 112 - Help Wanted - Augustine on Freedom.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Help Wanted. Augustine on Freedom. Everyone says things they regret. The politician committing an embarrassing gaffe during a debate. The child casually letting slip to her babysitter that if her parents were home, she would have been in bed a long time ago. Eve saying to Adam, sure, I know he's a serpent, but I think he makes some good points. But not many people sit down, look over what they've said, or written, and compose an entire book listing places where they might have chosen their words more carefully. Augustine did. A few years before his death in 430 AD, Augustine composed the Reconsiderations, in Latin, Retractiones, which surveys his own major writings and singles out passages for correction or further comment. This would have been no small task. His writings were staggeringly extensive. An aged Augustine was himself stunned to see, when he counted them up, that he'd written 232 works. But however large the task, Augustine had a good reason to reconsider his words. They had been thrown back at him by opponents, who gleefully seized on passages in Augustine's earlier books. Look, they would say, our view is so reasonable that Augustine himself agreed with it only a few years ago. One example was a work Augustine finished writing in 391, called On Free Choice of the Will. Looking back on this work, Augustine admits that he did not always state his ideas about freedom and divine grace as fully as he might have, but he is adamant that his opponents are wrong to see the earlier Augustine as an ally. Opponents were something Augustine never had in short supply. We've already seen him telling the story of his disenchantment with the Manicheans in The Confessions, and he went on to write numerous works attacking them. In fact, throughout Augustine's mature career, he was always writing attacks on some group or other. This side of Augustine's persona can seem rather unpleasant. As the scholar J.J. O'Donnell said, But this was an age of polemical dispute, and Augustine was far from unusual in turning his finely honed rhetorical skills to the task of written refutation. Augustine's case was unique in another respect though. The theological positions he staked out in the course of these debates became fundamental to Western Christianity, as we see it in the medieval age, in the Protestant Reformation, and still today. Apart from the Manicheans, he had two main groups of antagonists, the Donatists and the Pelagians. The Donatists emerged decades before Augustine's birth. They were born out of the anti-Christian persecutions that occurred at the dawn of the fourth century. The Emperor Diocletian had commanded Christians to engage in sacrifice to the traditional Roman gods and to hand over church property and copies of the sacred scriptures to the pagan authorities. Members of the clergy who complied were denounced by hardliners leading to a split in the church. The church of the hardliners was named after Donatus, a bishop of Carthage. The Donatist movement taught that priests who were guilty of collaboration could no longer perform a legitimate baptism because they were corrupted by sin. They also believed that Christians may need to be baptized a second time to cleanse them of sins committed after their initial baptism. The Donatus church was particularly strong in Northern Africa where Augustine was born and where he became a bishop. He devoted a great deal of energy to destroying it. He was an influential presence at a council in Carthage in 411 which condemned Donatism, and he enthusiastically supported a new imperial edict which, rather ironically, persecuted the Donatists by outlawing their faith and making their property subject to confiscation. Though Augustine's support for this merciless treatment is not attractive, one can see why he found Donatism pernicious. Not only had it led to schism, but its council of perfection threatened to undermine the most basic functions of the church. If the Donatists were right, one would need to know the state of a priest's soul in order to be sure one had been successfully baptized. Worse, even a successful baptism could be only temporary since it could be undone by sin. Augustine's objection was not only practical though. Where the Donatists saw the church as a separate community, purified of sin and destined for heaven, Augustine thought that baptism or no, humans remain prone to sin and constantly in need of God's support to resist that temptation. In the Confessions, he describes his daily struggle against the lure of various pleasures, from food to music to sex. This is not just confession, but a way of making a broader point. His theological conviction and personal experience taught him that the tendency towards sin is an unavoidable part of human life, not something that can be washed away in a single ritual. Baptism is still necessary, of course, but it signifies not the elimination of sinful desires, but openness to God's help in overcoming those desires. So despite his reputation as a grim and demanding moralist, in this debate Augustine was actually leading a fight against moral perfectionism. The same is true of his polemic against the Pelagians. The Pelagians were a group of more recent origin, named after Augustine's contemporary Pelagius. The core of their teaching was that if God commands us to be good, it must be within our power to be good. After all, it makes no sense to command people to do things they are not in a position to do. If I command you to finish listening to this episode, then you have the ability to comply. But if I command you to transform yourself into a giraffe, you'll reject my demand as being not just silly, but impossible. Pelagius further argued that in order to be in a position to follow God's command, humans must possess a capacity for free will. It is in everyone's power to come to virtue by exerting this power of choice. His view was taken up by Julian, bishop of the town of Eclanum in southern Italy. He became the main opponent and target of Augustine, who wrote a series of increasingly hostile and polemical works against the Pelagian doctrine. In Augustine's view, the Pelagians, like the Donatists, were undermining the whole point of the Christian faith. If as they claimed, the human will is sovereign and capable of resisting sin all on its own, then why does God need to send his son and allow him to be sacrificed? In fact, God doesn't need to do anything at all. He can just wait to see who achieves goodness and who doesn't through the exercise of free will, and then dispense reward and punishment as appropriate. On the Pelagian view, Christ seems to be sent more as a moral teacher who encourages us towards virtue than as the indispensable source of salvation. That's a view we found some of the more intellectualist church fathers flirting with, so it is no surprise to see it turning up here in Pelagianism. Against this, Augustine drew above all on the writings of St. Paul, to set forth what may be his most influential teaching, the doctrine of original sin. You will probably be familiar with the basic idea, which is that the sin of Adam is somehow inherited or shared by all subsequent humans. Only the sacrifice of God's Son and his gift of divine grace can allow humans to overcome their fallen state. Thus, Augustine argued in direct opposition to the Pelagian view that we humans do not have the capacity to merit salvation on our own. We can only follow God's command to be good if God helps us to do so. Augustine actually faces two challenges here, the dispute with the Pelagians and the difficulty of reconciling his own teaching with the possibility of free will. That humans do possess free will, and free will that is morally significant, is a fundamental theme throughout Augustine's writings. His early treatise On Free Choice of the Will, the one quoted back at him by Pelagian opponents, could hardly be more emphatic in recognizing the reality of freedom. The work takes the form of a dialogue between Augustine and a friend named Evodius, who had been present at the death of Augustine's mother Monica, and who, like Augustine, went on to be a bishop. At this point in his career, the opponents who trouble Augustine are not yet the Pelagians, but the Manicheans. As we've seen, they believe that suffering in the world is caused by a principle of evil independent of God. Augustine and Evodius want instead to see suffering as a punishment, handed down in accordance with divine justice. Without human sin, there would be no suffering. It's at this stage that free will enters the picture. The two agree that no one can be justly punished for something unless he chooses to do it by his own will. We sin, argues Augustine, when we value things here in the temporal realm rather than that which is eternal. In other works, Augustine restates this idea by saying that all sin can be traced to pride. We are prideful when we bestow on created things the esteem that is due to God alone. Here in On Free Choice of the Will, Augustine instead puts the point in more Platonic language, echoing Plotinus by contrasting the unchanging eternal realm to the world of bodily, time-bound things. But, like Plotinus himself, he depends on arguments that originate with the Stoics. He contends that temporal things should not be valued because they can be taken away from us, and that control of one's own happiness and one's own will depends on valuing what is not vulnerable in this way. For seasoned historians of philosophy like us, Epictetus leaps inevitably to mind. And the Epictetan flavor of the work is one reason Pelagian opponents could find material here to embarrass the older Augustine. He remarks, for instance, that the virtuous mind cannot be enslaved to desire, and that virtue can be had merely by willing it. These remarks fit better with the demanding moral strictures of Stoicism, and Pelagianism, than the theory of grace Augustine will offer in coming years. Since Evodius is not a Pelagian, he has a rather different point to press in his dialogue with Augustine. If it is the power of free will that enables us to sin, then why did God give us this power in the first place? This question sets the agenda for the rest of the work. Augustine's goal will be not so much to vindicate the reality of free will, but to demonstrate that God is not to blame for any evil we see in the created world. He does owe us an explanation here. Having rejected the Manichean solution of explaining evil and suffering by appealing to a second principle opposed to God, he must show that all badness can instead be traced ultimately to human choice. Anything bad must be an evil directly willed by humans, or be sent as a just punishment from God for prior evils willed by humans. Hence Evodius's question, why did God give us free will if it leads to such horrendous results? We saw that in his Confessions, Augustine embraced Plotinus's account of evil as deficiency or non-being. He accepted the solution to the metaphysical problem of evil, the problem of how anything bad can arise in a world that derives solely from a good cause. Now though, Augustine is tackling something closer to the modern problem of evil, that is, why a good and omnipotent being would allow evil to happen. This difficulty arises for him as it did not for Plotinus, because he assumes that God is a free agent who could have arranged things in a very different way. He could, for instance, have decided not to create free creatures foreseeing the evil they would do. So why did he create us nevertheless? Augustine's answer is simple. God gives us free will so that we can use it to be good. When we sin, we are misusing this power. But we should no more conclude that the will itself is bad than we would think that our eyes or hands are bad because they can be used to commit evil. Indeed, it makes no sense to complain that God makes it possible for us to sin. By definition, sin is what God does not want. So if we sin, it must be because we are departing from what God intended us to do with the powers He has granted to us. Thus, the human will is, as Augustine terms it, an intermediary good, that is, something that is necessary for goodness yet can be used for evil. In this, the will falls between greater goods that are necessary for good and never used for evil, like virtue, and lesser goods, like the goods of the body. These are, as the Stoics said, not even necessary for living a good life. But Evodius sees another problem looming. Even if it was not a mistake for God to give us free will, how was it possible for him to do so? After all, God knows everything we will do before we do it. How then can we be free? If Augustine himself could have seen the future, he would have known that this so-called problem of divine foreknowledge would be discussed again and again by philosophers down through medieval times and into early modernity. But a non-theological version of the problem had already been posed before Augustine. Back when we looked at Aristotle's logical works, we discussed the so-called sea battle argument, which he raised in the ninth chapter of his work On Interpretation. There, Aristotle asked, if it is true now that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then is occurrence of the sea battle inevitable and hence necessary? Augustine is considering more or less the same issue. He adds, however, that God knows there will be a sea battle tomorrow. This changes things in two ways. First, one solution available to Aristotle was to deny that there are present truths about such future events. But that solution is now taken off the table. There must be a present truth, because God already knows it. Second, it may make a difference that we have introduced divine knowledge rather than mere truth. For if God really has knowledge of a future sea battle, then He has total certainty about it, He simply can't be wrong. And one might suppose that this certainty yields the necessity of the sea battle where mere truth wouldn't. Another difference is that Augustine's discussion is more narrow than Aristotle's. He is concerned not with all truths about the future, but only God's knowledge of what people are going to will. The solution he offers will work only for this case. He tells Evodius that it is incoherent to worry that God's knowledge necessitates anyone to will anything, for no one can will anything if he is necessitated. This solution looks rather inadequate. Evodius should respond to Augustine by saying, I am not anxious that God necessitates me to choose freely, or to will anything. Rather, I am anxious that because God foreknows what I will do, I do not do it by free choice or by will, even if it seems to me that I do. Evodius doesn't press the issue in this way. If he had, Augustine might respond that it is simply obvious that we do exercise will. This shows that we are not being necessitated, by God's knowledge or anything else. Anything else, Augustine actually does say, might help, which is that in general, no one makes anything happen by knowing it will happen. If I tell you that I will introduce another example involving a giraffe pretty soon, then you might thereby know I will do it, but your knowing this doesn't force me to do it. So if the worry is merely that God causally necessitates our actions, this worry is misplaced. Again, that response doesn't eliminate the whole problem of divine foreknowledge, but it might be enough to secure Augustine what he is after in this work, namely to show that God is not responsible for our evil choices. Can Augustine still absolve God of blame later in his career, once he has developed his doctrine of original sin against the Pelagians? According to this doctrine, I cannot be good unless God offers me the assistance of grace. Doesn't that mean that if God decides not to help me, I am condemned to sin? After all, without grace, I quite literally cannot choose to be good, or at least cannot be effective in so choosing. I will at best be in the situation Augustine so memorably describes in his Confessions, wanting to convert to virtue and purity, but unable to do so because of my lingering sinful desires. Here's a possible solution. Even if I cannot have a good will without God's help, perhaps I can without His help wish to have a good will. This wish is what philosophers nowadays call a second-order desire, that is a desire about another desire. A standard example is wanting to quit smoking. The simple desire to smoke is a first-order desire. The desire to lose this desire to smoke would be second-order. There are also second-order beliefs, as when I believe that my belief that giraffes are tall is a true belief. See, you were right, I did use a giraffe example. I suppose this was inevitable. Now, using this terminology, we can say that even if we can't help having sinful first-order desires for sex, wealth, and so on, we can at least form this second-order desire that these first-order desires go away. As we know from the Confessions, that is exactly what Augustine so fervently hoped in the time leading up to his conversion. Already in On Free Choice of the Will, Augustine seems to be considering this solution. He speaks about the will's ability to apply to itself, that is to have a will to will something or not to will it. Hence our possible solution, it is in my power to will to have a good will, and when I so will, God steps in and helps me to have a good will. This would fit well with Augustine's earlier remark that I can be good simply by willing to be good. But the solution presupposes two things, neither of which Augustine can accept once he sets his face against Pelagianism. First, good second-order will would only be guaranteed to succeed if God must help whoever wants their first-order desires to change. But grace is a gift, not something to be received on demand. Even if God is merciful and does always help those who ask for grace, He does not have to do so. And besides, as we know from Augustine's polemic against the Donatists, it isn't as if we can expect God to change our will from sinful to righteous overnight. Rather, the struggle against bad desire and corrupt will is a lifelong one to be fought one day at a time. Even more problematic is a further assumption of our attempted solution, namely that I can have a good second-order desire on my own, without God's help. Augustine would see this as smuggling in Pelagianism through the back door. Instead, he would say that all human willing, whether first or second order, requires God's help if it is to choose the good reliably. So how can Augustine escape the accusation, pressed by Julian of Eklinum on behalf of the Pelagians, that his God is in fact an unjust monster? This God punishes us for sins we cannot avoid, and our inability to avoid those sins is the result of an original error that was committed not by us, but by Adam. A full response would take us too deep into the realms of Augustine's theology. The short version of his answer is simply that, when somebody wills evil, they are doing exactly what they want. That's the whole point of willing, after all. As Epictetus already pointed out, no one, not even God, can force you to will anything. The fact that you are not in a position to have a better will does not absolve you of the disgrace, the moral failure, and hence the blame-worthiness of willing evil. So, all we can do is fervently pray for God's assistance and fervently praise Him for giving us the capacity to will itself. Or this can be used to choose rightly, at least if God does assist us. With His help, we can turn away from earthly things and towards unchanging eternal goods. When we do so, our values are transformed and aligned with those of another community, a heavenly society. This society gives its name to one of Augustine's greatest works, the City of God. I want you to want to join me to hear all about it next time on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.