Augustine: Earlier Writings
ON FREE WILL 213 biguity. Why is ambiguity so detestable save that it has no certain unity? Hence it is clear that all things, whether they offend or are offended, whether they delight or are delighted, proclaim or suggest the unity of the Creator. But if ignorance and moral difficulty from which we must set out on the rational life are not natural to souls, they must be undertaken as a duty or imposed as a punishment. I think we have said enough about these matters now. xxiv, 71. What sort of creature the first man was when created is a more important question than how his posterity was propagated. People seem to pose a very acute question when they say: If the first man was created wise, why has he been seduced? If he was created foolish how is God to escape being held to be the author of vice, since folly is the greatest vice of all? As if human nature might not receive some intermediate quality which can be called neither folly nor wisdom! Man begins to be either foolish or wise, and one or other of these terms must necessarily be applied to him, as soon as it becomes possible for him to have wisdom or to neglect it. Then his will is guilty, for his folly is his own fault. No one is so foolish as to call an infant foolish, though it would be even more absurd to call it wise. An infant can be called neither foolish nor wise though it is already a human being. So it appears that human nature receives an intermediate condition which cannot be rightly called either folly or wisdom. Similarly, if anyone was animated by a soul disposed as men are who lack wisdom through negligence, nobody could rightly call him foolish, because he would owe his condition not to his own fault but to the nature with which he was endowed. Folly is not any kind of ignorance of things to be sought and avoided, but ignorance which is due to a man's own fault. We do not call an irrational animal foolish, because it has not received the power to be wise. Yet we often apply terms improperly where there is some similarity. Blindness is the greatest fault that eyes can have, yet it is not a fault in puppies, and is not properly called blindness.
72. If man was created such that, although he was not yet wise, he could at least receive a commandment which he ought to obey, it is not surprising that he could be seduced. Nor is it unjust that he pays the penalty for not obeying the commandment. Nor is his Creator the author of sins, for it was not yet a sin in man not to have v/isdom, if that gift were not yet given him. But he had something that would enable him to attain what he did not have, provided he was willing to make a good