Augustine: Earlier Writings (continued)
ON FREE WILL 167 the course of which you so often and so gladly expressed your assent. The virtues then, whereby Hfe is rightly lived, are great goods. But the forms of bodies, without which life can be rightly hved, are the least of good things. And the powers of the soul, without which there can be no righteous life, are intermediate goods. No one makes a bad use of the virtues. But of the other goods, the intermediate and the small, anyone can make not only a good but also a bad use. No one makes a bad use of virtue, just because the function of virtue is the good use of the things of which we can also make a bad use. No one makes a bad use of anything when he uses it well. Wherefore God in his great and lavish goodness affords us not only great goods, but small ones too, and some intermediate between great and small. His goodness is more to be praised for the great goods than for the intermediate ones, and for the intermediate ones more than for the small ones. But for all, his goodness is to be praised more than if he had given only the great goods and not the lesser as well.
51. Ev,—I agree, but I still have this difficulty. We see that free will makes use of other things either well or ill. How, then, is it to be numbered among the things we use? Aug.—Everything we know scientifically we know by means of reason, and yet reason itself is numbered among the things we know by reason. Have you forgotten that when we were inquiring as to the things we know by reason, you admitted that reason was known by reason? Do not marvel, therefore, if we use other things by free will, and can also use free will by itself Will, which uses other things, somehow also uses itself, just as reason which knows other things knows itself also. Memory, too, contains not only all the other things which it remembers; but because we do not forget that we have memory, somehow memory remembers itself as well as other things. Or rather by memory we remember other things and memory too.
52. Will is therefore an intermediate good when it cleaves to the unchangeable good as something that is common property and not its own private preserve; of the same nature, that is to say, as truth of which we have spoken a great deal, but nothing worthy of so great a theme; when will cleaves to this good, man attains the happy life. And the happy hfe, that is, the disposition of soul cleaving to the unchangeable good, is the proper and first good of man. All the virtues are there which no one can use badly. However great and important the virtues may be, we know well enough that they are not common property, but