The Life of the Mind (47 page)

The philosopher's self, ruled by the willing ego that tells him that nothing can hinder or constrain it but the will itself, is engaged in a never-ending fight with the counter-will, engendered, precisely, by his own will. The price paid for the Will's omnipotence is very high; the worst that, from the viewpoint of the thinking ego, could happen to the two-in-one, namely, to be "at variance with yourself," has become part and parcel of the human condition. And the fact that this fate is no longer assigned to Aristode's "base man" but, on the contrary, to the good and wise man who has learned the art of conducting his own life in no matter what external circumstances may well cause one to wonder whether this "cure" of human misery was not worse than the disease.

Still, in this lamentable business there is one decisive discovery that no argument can eliminate and that at least explains why the feeling of omnipotence as well as of human freedom could come out of the experiences of the willing ego. A point we touched on marginally in our discussion of Paul, namely, that all obedience presumes the power to disobey, is at the very center of Epictetus' considerations. There the heart of the matter is the Will's power to assent or dissent, say Yes or No insofar, at any rate, as I myself am concerned. This is why things that in their pure existence—i.e., "impressions" of outside things—depend only on me are also in my power; not only can I will to change the world (though the proposition is of doubtful interest to an individual subject totally alienated from the world in which it finds itself), I can also deny reality to anything and' everything by virtue of an I-will-not. This power must have had something awful, truly overpowering, for the human mind, for there has never been a philosopher or theologian who, after having paid due attention to the implied No in every Yes, did not squarely turn around and demand an emphatic consent, advising man, as Seneca did in a sentence quoted with great approbation by Master Eckhart, "to accept all occurrences as though he himself had desired them and asked for them." To be sure, if in this universal agreement one sees no more than the willing ego's last and deepest resentment of its existential impotence in the world as it factually is, he will also see only another argument here for the illusionary character of the faculty, an ultimate confirmation of its being an "artificial concept." Man in that case would have been given a truly "monstrous" faculty (Augustine), compelled by its nature to demand a power it is able to exercise only in the illusion-ridden region of sheer phantasy—the inwardness of a mind that has successfully separated itself from all outward appearance in its relendess quest for absolute tranquillity. And as the last and ironic reward for so much effort, it will have obtained an uncomfortably intimate acquaintance with the "painful storehouse and treasure of evils," in the words of Democritus, or with the "abyss" which, according to Augustine, lies hidden "in the good heart and in the evil heart."®
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If it is due to Scripture that there is
a philosophy which is Christian,
it is due to the Greek tradition that
Christianity possesses a philosophy.

Etienne Gilson

Augustine, the first Christian philosopher and, one is tempted to add, the only philosopher the Romans ever had,
⁶⁶
was also the first man of thought who turned to religion because of philosophical perplexities. Like many educated people of the time, he had been brought up as a Christian; yet what he himself eventually described as a conversion—the subject matter of his
Confessions
—was utterly different from the experience that changed the extremely zealous Pharisee Saul into Paul, the Christian Apostle and follower of Jesus of Nazareth.

In the
Confessions,
Augustine tells how his heart had first been set "on fire" by Cicero's
Hortensius,
a book (now lost) that contained an exhortation to philosophy. Augustine kept quoting from it till the end of his life. He became the first Christian philosopher because throughout his life he held fast to philosophy. His treatise
On the Trinity,
a defense of the crucial dogma of the Christian Church, is at the same time the most profound and the most articulated development of his own very original philosophical position. But its starting-point remained the Roman and Stoic quest for happiness—"Certain it is, said Cicero, that we all want to be happy."
⁶⁷
In his youth he had turned to philosophy out of inner wretchedness and as a man he turned to religion because philosophy had failed him. This pragmatic attitude, the demand that philosophy be "life's leader" (Cicero),
⁶⁸
is typically Roman; it had a more lasting influence on the formation of Augustine's thought than did Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, to whom he owed whatever he knew of Greek philosophy. Not that the general human wish to be happy had escaped the attention of the Greeks—the Roman proverb seems to have been a translation from the Greek—but this desire was not what made them do philosophy. Only the Romans were convinced that "there is no reason for man to philosophize unless in order to be happy."
⁶⁹

We find this pragmatic concern for private happiness throughout the Middle Ages; it underlies the hope for eternal salvation and the fear of eternal damnation and clarifies many otherwise rather abstruse speculations whose Roman origins are difficult to detect. That the Roman Catholic Church, despite the decisive influx of Greek philosophy, remained so profoundly Roman was due in no small measure to the strange coincidence that her first and most influential philosopher should also have been the first man of thought to draw his deepest inspiration from Latin sources and experiences. In Augustine, the striving for eternal life as the
summum bonum
and the interpretation of eternal death as the
summum malum
reached the highest level of articulation because he combined them with the new era's discovery of an
inward
life. He understood that the exclusive interest in this inner self meant that "I have become a question for myself" ("
quaestio mihi factus sum")—a.
question that philosophy as it was then taught and learned neither raised nor answered.
⁷⁰
The famous analyses of the concept of Time in the eleventh book of the
Confessions
are a paradigmatic illustration of the challenge of the new and problematic: time is something utterly familiar and ordinary so long as no one asks What is Time?—at which moment it turns into an "intricate riddle" whose challenge is that it is both entirely ordinary and entirely "hidden."
⁷¹

There is no doubt that Augustine belongs among the great and original thinkers, but he was not a "systematic thinker," and it is true that the main body of his work is "Uttered with lines of thought that are not worked through to their conclusion and with abandoned literary enterprises"
⁷²
—besides being shot through with repetitions. What is remarkable under the cirmcumstances is the continuity of the chief topics that finally, at the end of his life, he subjected to a searching examination titled
Retractationes,
or "Recantations," as though the Bishop and Prince of the Church were his own Inquisitor. Perhaps the most crucial of these ever-recurring topics was the "Free Choice of the Will" (the
Liberum arbitrium voluntatis),
as a faculty distinct from desire and reason, although he devoted but one whole treatise to it under that title. This was an early work, whose first part is still entirely in the vein of his other early philosophical writings despite its having been written after the dramatic event of his conversion and baptism.

It rather speaks, I think, for the quality of the man and the thinker that it took him ten years to write down in minute detail what to him was the most momentous event of his life—and this not just for remembrance's or piety's sake but for the sake of its mental implications. As his most recent biographer, Peter Brown, puts it a bit simplistically, "he was very definitely not a
type croyant,
such as had been common among educated men in the Latin world before his time";
⁷³
for Augustine, it was not a matter of abandoning the uncertainties of philosophy in favor of revealed Truth but of finding the philosophical implications of his new faith. In that tremendous effort he relied first of all on the Letters of the Apostle Paul, and the measure of his success can perhaps best be gauged by the fact that his authority throughout the subsequent centuries of Christian philosophy became equal to that of Aristotle—for the Middle Ages "the philosopher."

 

Let us start with Augustine's early interest in the faculty of the Will as expounded in the first part of the early treatise (the two concluding parts were written almost ten years later, roughly at the same time as the
Confessions).
Its leading question is an inquiry into the cause of evil: "for evil could not have come into being without a cause" and God cannot be the cause of evil because "God is good." The question, current even then, had "disturbed [him] exceedingly since his youth ... and indeed driven [him] into heresy," namely, into adhering to the teachings of Mani.
⁷⁴
What follows is strictly argumentative reasoning (though in dialogue form) as we found it in Epictetus, and the telling points at this late time sound like a summing up for educational purposes until we reach the conclusion, where the disciple is made to say: "I question whether free will ... ought to have been given to us by Him who made us. For it seems that we would not have been able to sin, if we did not have free will. And it is to be feared that in this way God may appear to be the cause of our evil deeds." At this point Augustine reassures the questioner and postpones the discussion.
⁷⁵
Thirty years later, in a different way, in the
City of God,
he takes up the question of the "purpose of the Will" as the "purpose of Man."

The question whose answer he postponed for so many years is the starting-point for Augustine's own philosophy of the Will. But a close interpretation of Paul's Letter to the Romans was the original occasion of his framing it. In the
Confessions,
as well as in the last two sections of
On Free Choice of the Will,
he draws the philosophical inferences and articulates the consequences of the strange phenomenon (that it is possible to will and, in the absence of any outside hindrance, still be unable to perform) which Paul had described in terms of antagonistic laws. But Augustine does not speak of two laws but of "
two wills,
one new and the other old, one carnal and the other spiritual," and describes in detail, like Paul, how these wills struggled "within" him and how their "discord undid [his] soul."
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In other words, he is careful to avoid his own earlier Manichaean heresy, which taught that two antagonistic principles rule the world, one good and one evil, one carnal and one spiritual. For him now, there is only one law, and the first insight therefore is the most obvious but also the most startling one: "
Non hoc est velle quod posse
" "to will and to be able are not the same."
⁷⁷

It is startling because the two faculties, willing and performing, are so closely connected: "Will must be present for power to be operative"; and power, needless to say, must be present for the will to draw on. "If you act ... it can never be without willing" even if "you do a thing unwillingly, under compulsion." "When you do not act" it may be that "will is lacking" or that "the power is lacking."
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This is all the more surprising as Augustine agrees with the Stoics' main argument for the predominance of the Will, namely, that "nothing is so much in our power as the will itself, for there is no interval, the moment we will—there it is,"
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except that he does not believe that the Will is enough. "The law would not command if there were no will, nor would grace help if will were enough." The point here is that the Law does not address itself to thè mind, in which case it would simply reveal and not command; it addresses itself to the Will because "the mind is not moved until it wills to be moved." And this is why only the Will, and neither reason nor the appetites and desires, is "in our power; it is free."
⁸⁰

This proof of the freedom of the Will draws exclusively on an inner power of affirmation or negation that has nothing to do with any actual
posse
or
potestas
—the faculty needed to perform the Will's commands. The proof obtains its plausibility from a comparison of willing with reason, on the one hand, and with the desires, on the other, neither of which can be said to be free. (We saw that Aristode introduced his
proairesis
to avoid the dilemma of saying either that the "good man"
forces
himself away from his appetites or that the "base man"
forces
himself away from his reason.) Whatever reason tells me is compelling as far as reason is concerned. I may be able to say "No" to a truth disclosed to me, but I cannot possibly do this on rational grounds. The appetites rise in my body automatically, and my desires are aroused by objects outside myself; I may say "No" to them on the advice given by reason or the law of God, but reason itself does not move me to resistance. (Duns Scotus, very much influenced by Augustine, later elaborates on the argument. To be sure, carnal man, in the sense Paul understood him, cannot be free; but spiritual man is not free either. Whatever power the intellect may have over the mind is a necessitating power; what the intellect can never prove to the mind is that it should not merely subject itself to it but also will to do so.
⁸¹
)

The faculty of Choice, so decisive for the
liberum arbitrium,
here applies not to the deliberative selection of means toward an end but primarily—and, in Augustine, exclusively—to the choice between
velle
and
nolle,
between willing and nilling. This
nolle
has nothing to do with the will-not-to-will, and it cannot be translated as I-will-not because this suggests an absence of will.
Nolle
is no less actively transitive than
velle,
no less a faculty of will: if I will what I do not desire, I nill my desires; and in the same way I can nill what reason tells me is right. In every act of the will, there is an I-will
and I-nill
involved. These are the two wills whose "discord" Augustine said "undid [his] soul." To be sure, "he who wills, wills something," and this something is presented to him "either from without through the body's senses or comes into the mind in hidden ways," but the point is that none of these objects determine the will.
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