On Free Choice of the Will Book

Unless I am missing something, I am not sure that Augustine espouses Libertarian freedom in this work the way that the editor thinks he does in the introduction; then again, I am no Augustine scholar and neither am I a philosopher. Someone please correct me?

"Augustine rejects the view known as compatibilism that determinism is compatible with human freedom and moral responsibility' and since he is convinced that human beings are in act free and responsible, he must reject determinism as well" (xiii). Certainly the editor has a bias and that is quite fine; still, however, I think he gets Augustine wrong in a sense. Certainly Augustine modified his view which the editor recognizes, his run-in with the Pelagians made him sharpen his skills and defend a more robust position which led him to his treatises like "On Nature and Grace" and "On the Predestination of the Saints." My point is essentially that this is a very early work of Augustine after his conversion, and leaves a lot of questions unanswered; certainly it is not his final position--the position that so influenced John Calvin and the Magisterial Reformers. Even still, it seems that his view in this early dialogue is still a form of compatibilism.

Much of it was pretty dense to slog through, and one who has not understanding of Ancient Platonic thought would find most of Augustine's arguments extremely weird and uncompelling. Besides the point, Augustine traces through various topics such as freedom of the will, the cause of the will, the origin of evil, the origin of the soul, and many other interesting topics he dealt with much more extensively in his latter years. To all of these questions he pretty much says "well I don't really know."

Here is one great debating tactic I should pick up
"Augustine: Do you want to know?
Evodius: I don't know that either
Augustine: Then don't ask me any more questions" (19).

Some more gems:

"Anyone who does not think that we should admonish people in this way ought to be banned from the human race" (73).

Concerning God's foreknowledge of future events, Augustine rejects that God knows anything contingently, but rather he knows it perfectly: this we can put nicely in God's free knowledge. He states that it would be "irreligious and completely insane attack on God's foreknowledge to say that something could happen otherwise than as God foreknew" (ibid). His Socratic interlocutor then raises the question of how all events do not happen by necessity if God does not know events contingently but perfectly to which Augustine responds, "I think the only reason that most people are tormented by this question is that they do not ask it piously" (ibid). There, as Augustine would come to realize is not a solution but merely an evasion of the problem.

Essentially Augustine says that nothing can happen by necessity (in the philosophical sense) in reference to a will, since a will by its very definition, Augustine reasons, is something that presupposes power. "So our will would not be a will if it were not in our power. And since it is in our power, we are free with respect to it But we are not free with respect to anything that we do not have in our power" (77). What Augustine would come to discover is that the "thing" that is not within our power if the ability to will towards good and not towards evil, or that is, the ability without God's initial first grace, to come to Christ. Indeed, in his later Retractationum written c. 427 A.D. he acknowledged that he was clearly not speaking about grace in this dialogue, but merely the philosophical will contra the Manachians; the issues with the Pelagians, he wrote, had not yet arisen, even while defending this dialogue through the lens of his latter more robust view.

Augustine on God's punitive justice speaks of proximate causes only, viz., the sin that the sinner committed by his free will, and hence God is just in punishing it even though God foreknew it perfectly, "God's foreknowledge does not force the future to happen" (78). At this point Augustine is looking for a grounding of causal events--since in this dialogue he does not want to ground them in the will of God--and he is left empty handed. "The sin is committed by the will, not coerced by God's foreknowledge...[Indeed], the will is the cause of sin, but you are asking about the cause of the will itself? Suppose that I could find this cause. Wouldn't we then have to look for the cause of this cause? What limit will there be on this search? Where will our questions and discussions end? You should not search any further than the root of the issue" (104).

Interesting also is at this time when the origin of the soul is brought up, Augustine lays out four positions, that of creationsim, traducianism, Originism, and Platonism, of which he says he simply has no clue and the Catholic Church has not yet laid out a position on the matter. Even by the end of his life, Augustine could not seem to decide between the former two.

All in all, good read of Augustine for the engagement and learning experience of this erudite Father.