AUGUSTINE ON FREEDOM

AUGUSTINE ON FREEDOM

by Contributing Author, Jacob Enwechter

            The question of what it means to be free is at the heart of every religion and comprehensive philosophy.  The Buddhist system seeks to avoid suffering through desire and to be released from the cycle of rebirth.  When that release happens, one is fully free and until then, he must seek to avoid seeking anything with an inordinate covetousness.  The Islamic faith promotes an unyielding submission to Allah’s will.  One must serve and earn his way to paradise which will ultimately be his freedom.  Judaism waits for the Messiah who will liberate them from their constant oppressors and establish a geo-political rule on Earth.  Until then, Yahweh demands obedience to the law and the prophets.  In philosophy, freedom has been sought through various thought experiments. It seems the underlying problem with philosophy that every philosopher knows, is that a given paradigm for understanding the world is likely to be dismissed shortly after it is put to the page.  There is no everlasting truth and so freedom would mean finding the ultimate (and unshakeable) answer to life’s greatest questions.   For any seeker exploring this question of what it means to be free, Saint Augustine of Hippo offers a most profound rendition of the Christian answer.  According to Augustine, freedom is effected in man when Jesus fixes his broken and enslaved will. 

Of course, this answer to the question presupposes a particular problem.  If one is to ask what it means for man to be free, he must first ask what it means for man to be enslaved. What is it about reality that so burden’s and weakens the heart of a human being?  What is the ultimate problem that leads to the evils so prevalent in this world?  Augustine touches on the root of the matter in his Confessions.  As Peter Brown examines this text, he extracts Augustine’s answer to the question of man’s ultimate problem:  “In the Confessions we are faced with the full force of Augustine’s new awareness of the limitations of human freedom…For when a man came to wish to choose the good, he found himself unable to follow his conscious choice wholeheartedly” (166).  All people know the feeling of regret and it is this feeling which flows from a broken will. 

            If one were to step back in a moment of reflection, Augustine would have him notice that an ineffectual will is indeed an odd and strange element of the individual’s experience.  He expresses the perplexity inherent to the issue saying, “What is the cause of this monstrous situation…The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed.  The mind commands itself and meets resistance…The mind orders the mind to will.  The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it” (Conf. VIII, ix, 21).  Why do humans not perform what their wills desire?  This question is in need of an answer.  Did God make man broken?  Was he drunk when he created the world?  What religious or philosophical system most adequately explains this phenomenon?

            Under the influence of Neo-Platonists, Augustine comes up with a rather philosophical answer.  He sees evil as an absence of good and this plays into the general problem with man’s will.  Stanley Hopper clarifies Augustine’s point in a chapter of the book, A Companion to the Study of St. Augustine, saying, “Evil is an unsubstantial negation, and sin arises solely in the weakness of human wills” (161).  From this point of view, man’s weakness is only the result of a loss of his full potential.  This coincides well with the Genesis account of Adam and Eve and explains man’s imprisoned condition.  Augustine concludes, “So the will that commands is incomplete, and therefore what it commands does not happen.  If it were complete, it would not need to command the will to exist, since it would exist already” (Conf. VIII, ix, 21).  From the nature of willing, he sees that there is something inherently dysfunctional about man’s volitions.

            Further, he points out what results from a will in conflict with itself.  He infers, “The consequence of a distorted will is passion.  By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity.  By these links, as it were, connected one to another (hence my term a chain), a harsh bondage held me under restraint” (Conf. VIII, v, 10).  If one desires to do good and desires to do evil, eventually only passion will decide between the unyielding wills.  And that passion leads to habits which come to enslave one against his or her original intentions.  This is Augustine’s answer to the question of what the problem with man is:  he is enslaved to the confusion of his conflicting wills. 

            Now, how does one become free of this bondage?  The Buddhist explanation would be that he ought to cease from desiring a reconciliation of these wills.  One must come to a state of Nirvana where all duality dissolves into the illusion it supposedly is.  On the other hand, Augustine says that mere thought cannot free the will.  Only an act of God’s Spirit and subsequent response from the enslaved can make one free.  Robert Cushman summarizes this saying,

Augustine perceived in the merely rational approach to God an internal contradiction:  it cannot reach God because it does not want to have God.  It withholds commitment until it has sight; but it cannot achieve sight until it yields commitment.  The rational approach to God does not perceive that it founders upon the original sinfulness of the human heart (A Companion, 301).

Augustine thought that a commitment of one’s active life was necessary to reaching a state of provisional freedom. 

            Cushman continues along this train of thought.  He says, “As Augustine will have it, men are born blind in Adam and need Christ to awaken them.  But this is the only shorthand of his real meaning.  Knowledge of God waits upon re-cognition of God” (A Companion, 305).  Freedom only comes through a spiritual encounter with God where the will is surrendered to him.  Cushman elaborates, “It is not that reason is impotent or that it is inherently corrupted, but that it is perverted by the will…Thereby real cognition of God is at the same time the dissolution of the bondage of the will to self-love.” There is an aspect of “surrendering” to God in such an interaction with him.  Augustine’s view is said plainly by Cushman “The will is the problem.  The solution was the divine Visitant and the divine Emancipator.  The Word made flesh, the Mediator, so moves the will that man is enabled to love the good of which he has been aware without acknowledgement” (A Companion, 306).  The implication here is that man is utterly unable to free himself, but must be “enabled” by the Spirit of God.  This is of great concern; for if freedom means no bondage to one’s will, then how exactly is this accomplished? 

            Augustine seems to imply that one’s twisted will makes him responsible before God, but then only allows God to fix it.  If man is incapable of achieving his own salvation, then why is he judged for the sins of his ancient ancestor, Adam?  Why is he “condemned already?”  Augustine’s own words seem to betray him because he sees the will as that which makes one responsible, while positing a supernatural being that “has a grip on” his will.  He blames the Devil for his wretched state saying, “I sighed after such freedom, but was bound not by an iron imposed by anyone else but by the iron of my own choice.  The enemy had a grip on my will and so made a chain for me to hold me a prisoner” (emphasis mine, Conf. VIII, v, 10).  He says it was the enemy and his own choice that enslaved him.  Therefore, it is not purely his own will which kept him imprisoned, but the Devil played a role as well.  Because of this, only another being which is more powerful than Augustine and the Devil could free him.  In fact, this is exactly how he views his conversion.  In book VIII (xii, 30) he says that God converted him through the sound of a child saying, “Pick up and read.”  What does this mean that “God’ converted him?  Did he not make a decision to obey?

            If he believes that every human is enslaved to his or her will, then this implies only another being could free him.  If this is so, then how is he not espousing the kind of gnostic Calvinism that leads ultimately to fatalism?  In his book, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized, John M. Rist seeks to dispel the idea that this is Augustine’s view.  He writes,

He was not denying that the will is free to choose.  He was asserting that only the wrong choices are possible unless the will is properly repaired and maintained by God.  Hence, if it chooses badly, it is nothing but the will that chooses; if it chooses well, the will is ‘prepared’ by God, or, as Augustine eventually puts it, it enjoys full freedom (summa libertas), freedom being a condition in which the soul is in harmony with, and subject to, the truth and the will and love of God (187). 

In this interpretation, Augustine is proposing that the will is enabled to choose the good only by an act of God.  He is not saying that the will must choose the good when it is enabled by God (i.e. irresistible grace).  God does not force the will to choose, but only enables it. 

            If that is his understanding of how freedom is effected then there is great hope for every man.  As the Apostle John said, Jesus is the light “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”  If God’s justice be assumed, then one might guess that God enables every man to choose the good at some point.  Freedom is not found through contemplation, nor through mere submission to God, but through an act of God enabling the will to function aright. 

            This freedom must be qualified because Augustine sees liberty in this life as provisional.  His own conversion was a turning point, not a complete fix of his broken will.  Brown points this out saying, “The tastes of Augustine’s age demanded a dramatic story of conversion…No such dramatic experience should delude his readers into believing that they would so easily cast off their past identity” (171).  To be free in this life means to choose the good as much as the Spirit empowers the will to do so.  It is a foretaste of heaven where God’s presence heals every will in the bond of his love.  Concerning Augustine’s writing, Brown continues, “The amazing Book Ten of the Confessions is not the affirmation of a cured man:  it is the self-portrait of a convalescent.”  Though the convert to Christianity will only be a convalescent in this life, there remains the most profound and immediate sense of freedom in acknowledging Jesus Christ. 

            In searching through the many answers to the question of what it means for man to be free, Augustine’s revelation that it means living according to one’s God-inspired willing, is a profound Christian answer.  Not only does it identify the core problem with every man, but this answer offers a hope for every man through the sacrifice of Jesus.  How many work a daily job under the influence of other factors that confuse their first will?  How many have murdered, stolen, fornicated, hated, or failed at some task which was but a result of a conflicted will?  This is slavery as St. Paul wrote in Romans 6:16, “Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?”  Augustine says that the unredeemed power to choose is overrated; one can only choose sin.  Christ’s Spirit is the only agent that can free the human soul from its inherent brokenness and return it to the purity it once possessed in that garden of innocence.      

Works Cited

Augustine.  Saint Augustine’s Confessions.  Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford:  Oxford       University Press, 1998.

Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography.  Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University Of         California Press. 2000.

Cushman Robert E.  “Chapter XI, Faith And Reason.” in Roy W. Battenhouse (ed.).  A    Companion to the Study of St. Augustine. Grand Rapids:  Baker Book House, 1979.

Hopper, Stanley.  “Chapter VI:  The Anti-Manichean Writings.” in Roy W. Battenhouse (ed.).  A             Companion to the Study of St. Augustine. Grand Rapids:  Baker Book House, 1979.

Rist, John M. Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press,     1995.