The Life of the Mind (49 page)

Some such solution is evidently required, since we know that these conflicts of the willing ego are finally resolved. Actually, as I shall show later, what looks like a
deus ex machina
in the
Confessions
is derived from a different theory of the Will. But before we turn to
On the Trinity,
it may be useful to stop to see how the same problem is treated in terms of consciousness by a modern thinker.

 

John Stuart Mill, examining the question of free will, suggests that "the confusion of ideas" current in this philosophical area "must ... be very natural to the human mind," and he describes—less vividly and also less precisely but in words strangely similar to those we have just been hearing—the conflicts the willing ego is subject to. It is wrong, he insists, to describe them as "taking place between me and some foreign power, which I conquer or by which I am overcome. [For] it is obvious that 'I' am both parties in the contest; the conflict is between me and myself.... What causes Me, or, if you please, my Will, to be identified with one side rather than with the other, is that one of the Me's represents a more
permanent
state of my feelings than the other does."

Mill needed this "permanence" because he "disputed altogether that we are conscious of being able to act in opposition to the strongest desire or aversion"; he therefore had to explain the phenomenon of regret. What he then discovered was that "after the temptation has been yielded to [that is, the strongest desire at the moment], the desiring 'I' will come to an end, but the conscience-stricken T may
endure
to the end of life." Though this enduring, conscience-stricken "I" plays no role in Mill's later considerations, here it suggests the intervention of something, called "conscience" or "character," that survives all single, temporally limited, volitions or desires. According to Mill, the "enduring I," which manifests itself only after volition has come to its end, should be similar to whatever prevented Buridan's ass from starving between two equally nice-smelling hay bundles: "From mere lassitude ... combined with the sensation of hunger" the animal "would cease thinking of the rival objects at all." But this Mill could hardly admit, as the "enduring I" is of course one of the "parties in the contest," and when he says "the object of moral education is to educate the will," he is assuming that it is possible to teach one of the parties to win. Education enters here as a
deus ex machina:
Mill's proposition rests on an unexamined assumption—such as moral philosophers often adopt with great confidence and which actually can be neither proved nor disproved.
⁹⁴

 

That strange confidence cannot be expected from Augustine; it arose much later in order to neutralize, at least in the sphere of ethics and, as it were, by fiat the universal doubt that characterizes the modern age—which Nietzsche, rightly, I think, called the "era of suspicion." When men could no longer
praise,
they turned their greatest conceptual efforts to
justifying
God and His Creation in theodicies. But of course Augustine, too, needed some means of redemption for the Will. Divine grace would not help once he had discovered that the brokenness of the Will was the same for the evil and for the good will; it is rather difficult to imagine God's gratuitous grace deciding whether I should go to the theater or commit adultery. Augustine finds his solution in an entirely new approach to the problem. He now undertakes to investigate the Will not in isolation from other mental faculties but in its interconnectedness with them; the leading question now is: What function has the will in the life of the mind as a whole? Yet the phenonrenal datum that suggested the answer even before it was found and duly outlined is curiously like Mill's "enduring I." In Augustine's words, it is "that there is One within me who is more myself than my self."
⁹⁵

The dominant insight of the treatise
On the Trinity
is derived from the mystery of the Christian trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three substances when each is related to itself, can at the same time form a One, thus insuring that the dogma does not signify a break with monotheism. The unity comes about because all three substances are "mutually predicated relatively" to each other without thereby losing their existence "in their own substance." (This is not the case, for instance, when color and the colored object are "mutually predicated" in their relation to each other, for color has "not any proper substance in itself, since colored body is a substance but color is
in
a substance."
⁹⁶
)

The paradigm for a mutually predicated relationship of independent "substances" is
friendship:
two men who are friends can be said to be "independent substances" insofar as they are related to themselves; they are friends only relatively to each other. A pair of friends forms a unity, a One, insofar and as long as they are friends; the moment the friendship ceases they are again two "substances," independent of each other. This demonstrates that somebody or something can be a One when related only to itself and still be so related to another, so intimately
bound
together with it, that the two can appear as a One without changing their "substance," losing their substantial independence and identity. This is the way of the Holy Trinity: God remains One while related only to Himself but He is three in die unity with Son and Holy Ghost.

The point here is that such a mutually predicated relationship can occur only among "equals"; hence one cannot apply it to the relationship of body and soul, of carnal man and spiritual man, even though they always appear together, because here the soul is obviously the ruling principle. However, for Augustine the mysterious three-in-one must be found somewhere in human nature since God created man in His own image; and since it is precisely man's mind that distinguishes him from all other creatures, the three-in-one is likely to be found in the structure of the mind.

 

We find the first inklings of this new line of investigation at the end of the
Confessions,
the work that most closely precedes
On the Trinity.
There for the first time it occurs to him to use the theological dogma of the three-in-one as a general philosophical principle. He asks the reader to "consider these three things that are in themselves...[and] are far other than the Trinity ... the three things I speak of are, to Be, to Know, and to Will. [The three are interconnected.] For I Am, and I Know, and I Will; I Am Knowing and Willing; and I know myself to Be and to Will; and I Will to Be and to Know. In these three let him discern who can, how inseparable is one life, one mind, one essence; finally, how inseparable a distinction there is, and yet there is a distinction."
⁹⁷
The analogy of course does not mean that Being is an analogy of the Father, Knowing an analogy of the Son, and Willing of the Holy Ghost. What interests Augustine is merely that the mental "I" contains three altogether different things that are inseparable and yet distinct.

This triad of Being, Willing, and Knowing occurs only in the rather tentative formula of the
Confessions:
obviously Being does not belong here, since it is not a faculty of the mind. In
On the Trinity,
the most important mental triad is Memory, Intellect, and Will. These three faculties are "not three minds but one mind.... They are mutually referred to each other ... and each one is comprehended by" the other two and relates back to itself: "I remember that I have memory, understanding, and will; and I understand that I understand, will, and remember; and I will that I will, remember, and understand."
⁹⁸
These three faculties are equal in rank, but their Oneness is due to the Will.

The Will tells the memory what to retain and what to forget; it tells the intellect what to choose for its understanding. Memory and Intellect are both contemplative and, as such, passive; it is the Will that makes them function and eventually "binds them together." And only when by virtue of one of them, namely, the Will, the three are "forced into one do we speak of
thought"—cogitatio,
which Augustine, playing with etymology, derives from
cogere (coactum),
to force together, to unite forcefully.
("Atque ita fit illa trinitas ex memoria, et interna visione, et quae utrumque copulat volúntate. Quia tria [in unum] coguntur, ab ipso coactum cogitatio dicitur."
⁹⁹
)

The Will's binding force functions not only in purely mental activity; it is manifest also in sense perception. This element of the mind is what makes sensation meaningful: In every act of vision, says Augustine, we must "distinguish the following three things ... the object which we see ... and this can naturally exist before it is seen; secondly, the vision which was not there before we perceived the object ... and thirdly the power that fixes the sense of sight on the object ... namely, the attention of the mind." Without the latter, a function of the Will, we have only sensory "impressions" without any actual perceiving of them; an object is
seen
only when we concentrate our mind on the perception. We can see without perceiving, and hear without listening, as frequently happens when we are absent-minded. The "attention of the mind" is needed to transform sensation into perception; the Will that "fixes the sense on that thing which we see and binds both together" is essentially different from the seeing eye and the visible object; it is mind and not body.
¹⁰⁰

Moreover, by fixing our mind on what we see or hear, we tell our memory what to remember and our intellect what to understand, what objects to go after in search of knowledge. Memory and intellect have withdrawn from outside appearances and deal not with these themselves (the real tree) but with images (the seen tree), and these images clearly are inside us. In other words, the Will, by virtue of
attention,
first unites our sense organs with the real world in a meaningful way, and then drags, as it were, this outside world into ourselves and prepares it for further mental operations: to be remembered, to be understood, to be asserted or denied. For the inner images are by no means mere illusions. "Concentrating exclusively on the inner phantasies and turning the mind's eye completely away from the bodies which surround our senses," we come "upon so striking a likeness of the bodily species expressed from memory" that it is hard to tell whether we are seeing or merely imagining. "So great is the power of the mind over its body" that sheer imagination "can arouse the genital organs."
¹⁰¹
And this
power
of the mind is due not to the Intellect and not to Memory but only to the Will that unites the mind's inwardness with the outward world. Man's privileged position within the Creation, in the outward world, is due to the mind which "imagines within, yet imagines things that are from without. For no one could use these things [of the outward world]...unless the images of sensible things were retained in the memory, and unless ... the same will [were] adapted both to bodies without and to their images within."
¹⁰²

This Will as the unifying force binding man's sensory apparatus to the outside world and then joining together man's different mental faculties has two characteristics that were entirely absent from the various descriptions we have had of the Will up to now. This Will could indeed be understood as "the spring of action"; by directing the senses' attention, presiding over the images impressed on memory, and providing the intellect with material for understanding, the Will prepares the ground on which action can take place. This Will, one is tempted to say, is so busy preparing action that it hardly has time to get caught in the controversy with its own counter-will. "And just as in man and woman there is one flesh of two, so the one nature of the mind [the Will] embraces our intellect and action, or our council and execution ... so as it was said of those: They shall be two in one flesh,' so it can be said of these [the inward and the outward man]: 'Two in one mind.'"
¹⁰³

Here is a first intimation of certain consequences that Duns Scotus much later will draw from Augustinian voluntarism: the Will's redemption cannot be mental and does not come by divine intervention either; redemption comes from the act which—often like a "
coup d'ètat,
" in Bergson's felicitous phrase—interrupts the conflict between
velle
and
nolle.
And the price of the redemption is, as we shall see,
freedom.
As Duns Scotus expressed it (in the summary of a modem commentator), "It is possible for me to be writing at this moment, just as it is possible for me not to be writing." I am still entirely free, and I pay for this freedom by the curious fact that the Will always wills and nills at the same time: the mental activity in its case does not exclude its opposite. "Yet my
act
of writing excludes its opposite. By one act of the will I can determine myself to write, and by another I can decide not to write, but I cannot be simultaneously in act in regard to both things together."
¹⁰⁴
In other words, the Will is redeemed by ceasing to will and starting to act, and the cessation cannot originate in an act of the will-not-to-will because this would be but another volition.

In Augustine, as well as later in Duns Scotus, the solution of the Will's inner conflict comes about through a transformation of the Will itself, its transformation into
Love.
The Will-seen in its functional operative aspect as a coupling, binding agent—can also be defined as Love (
voluntas: amor seu di-lectio
¹⁰⁵
), for Love is obviously the most successful coupling agent. In Love, there are again "three things: he that loves, and that which is loved, and Love.... [Love] is a certain life which couples ... together two things, namely, him that loves and that which is loved."
¹⁰⁶
In the same way, Will qua attention was needed to effect perception by coupling together the one with eyes to see and that which is visible; it is only that the uniting force of love is stronger. For what love unites is "marvelously glued together" so that there is a cohesion between lover and the beloved—
"cohaerunt enim mirabiliter glutino amoris
"
¹⁰⁷
The great advantage of the transformation is not only Love's greater force in uniting what remains separate—when the Will uniting "the form of the body that is seen and its image which arises in the sense, that is, the vision ... is so violent that [it keeps the sense
fixed
on the vision once it has been formed], it can be called love, or desire, or passion"
¹⁰⁸
—but also that love, as distinguished from will and desire, is not extinguished when it reaches its goal but enables the mind "to remain
steadfast
in order to
enjoy
" it.