Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
Defining Free Will
Augustine completed Books 2 and 3 of On Free Will several years later, after his ordination as a presbyter.29 In these later books, Augustine explores and argues for the freedom of the will. We need to bear in mind how his opponents viewed things. Manichees saw the human person as a battleground in the war between the Kingdom of Light and the Kingdom of Darkness and located evil within the human body. They also presumed that a certain moral determinism came from being embodied. Augustine came to affirm not only the body's goodness, but also freedom of the will. Our wills, not our bodies, are the real (though still mysterious) origin of evil. In the following passage, Augustine stresses both human freedom and responsibility and the necessity of the grace of Christ. From On Free Will, Book 2:
(19.53) Evil consists in the will's turning away from the changeless good [that God is] and in its turning to goods that are changeable. Since this turning from one thing to another is not done from necessity, but freely, the unhappiness that results is justly deserved.
(20.54) Since the will undergoes movement when it turns from the unchangeable good to changeable goods, you may ask how this movement originates. It is really evil, though free will itself must be considered a good, since it is impossible to live rightly without it. If this movement, namely, the turning away of the will from the Lord, is unquestionably sinful, we cannot say that God is the cause of sin. If this movement, therefore, does not come from God, then where does it come from? If I reply to your question by saying that I do not know, you may be distressed all the more. Yet I would be answering you correctly because that which is nothing cannot be known. Only make sure to hold firm to your religious conviction that any good that you know—either by the senses or by the intellect or in any other way—comes from God. . . . All good is from God and, consequently, there is no nature that is not from God. Hence, that movement of the soul's turning away, which we admitted was sinful, is a defective movement, and every defect arises from non-being. Look for the source of this movement and be sure that it does not come from God. Yet since it is voluntary, this defect lies within our power. If you are fearful of it, then your will is against it, and unless you will it, it will not exist. What could be more secure than to live a life where nothing can happen to you which you do not will? But since a human being cannot rise of his own will as he fell of his own will, the right hand of God, namely, our Lord Jesus Christ, is outstretched to us from above. Let us embrace Him
29. Retr. 1.9.1 (CCL 57:23). Because of the gap between Book 1 and Books 2–3, some scholars have argued for shifts and differences; on this, see Simon Harrison, Augustine's Way into the Will, 17–27. Harrison himself has argued persuasively for treating the work as unified (pp. 28–31, 50–54).