Augustine Notes

Augustine: Evil, Sin, Happiness, and Free Will

Augustine of Hippo

  • Augustine of Hippo wrote extensively; his extant works total 5,000,000 words.
  • Comparison:
    • Cicero: 1,250,000 words
    • Shakespeare: 884,647 words

Confessions

  • Written between 397-400 AD.
  • It's considered the first autobiography in the West.
  • The narrative follows Augustine’s spiritual journey:
    • From Manichaeism
    • To Neoplatonism
    • To Christianity
  • Purpose: To demonstrate to others, through his conversion, that conversion is possible for them as well.

Manichaeism

  • An extreme cosmological and moral dualism.
  • Key tenets:
    • Good = the spiritual
    • Evil = the bodily
    • Evil is an independent power, a genuine metaphysical reality.
    • Evil was not created by God but is eternally struggling with God.

The Story of the Pears

  • Augustine recounts an episode from his youth where he and his friends stole pears from a neighbor's tree.
  • Quote: "It is certain, O Lord, that theft is punished by your law…"
  • The pears were not stolen out of need or hunger but for the sake of the act itself.
  • The pears were thrown to the pigs.
  • Literary resonance with the story of Adam and Eve
  • Shows the difference between ancient and Christian understandings of wrongdoing.
  • Plato: doing evil = not knowing/understanding enough (an intellectual weakness)
  • Lack of motive:
    • "I had no wish to enjoy the things I coveted by stealing, but only to enjoy the theft itself and the sin."
    • "But it was not the pears that my unhappy soul desired. I had plenty of my own, better than those, and I only picked them so that I might steal."
    • "I loved nothing in [the act of theft] except the thieving…"

Two Big Points

  • The Moral Slippery Slope
    • Quote: "there was no knowing what I might have done, since I loved evil even if it served no purpose."
  • The Apparent Senselessness of Committing a Crime Without a Reason
    • Quote: "If the crime of theft which I committed that night as a boy of sixteen were a living thing, I could speak to it and ask what it was that to my shame I loved in it."
    • "What was it, then, that pleased me in that act of theft?"

Catiline (108-62 BC)

  • Reference to Catiline, possibly as an example of moral corruption or societal decay.

Action Theory

  • Quote: "When there is an inquiry to discover why a crime has been committed, normally no one is satisfied until it has been showed that the motive might have been either the desire of gaining, or the fear of losing, one of those good things which I said were of the lowest order. For such things are attractive and have beauty…"
  • Two elements in the motivation of a free action:
    • Subjective aspect = pleasure, love, enjoyment ("desire" or "fear")
    • Objective aspect = beauty, sensory pleasure, honor, power, money, friendship ("one of those good things …")

Why Do We Do Bad Things?

  • Why are we unhappy?
  • How can we avoid being unhappy?
  • Quote: "Is not our life on earth a period of trial? For who would wish for hardship and difficulty?…"
  • Quote: "…if two men were asked whether they wanted to serve in the army, one might reply that he did and the other that he did not. If, on the other hand, they were asked whether they wanted to be happy, they would both reply at once and without hesitation that they did. The only reason why one of them should wish to serve in the army and the other not to serve would be that they wanted to be happy."

The Will

  • When the will wills, does it will in an ordinate manner?
  • Quote: "A man whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and then is agonized to lose them"
  • Friendship etc. = "good things of the lowest order"
  • "I was in love with beauty of a lower order…"

The Structure of Reality

  • Not digital but analog
  • Existence = a spectrum
  • "A gradualist ontology"
  • Very Platonic
  • "The great chain of being", i.e. a hierarchy of existence.
  • The Order of Reality:
    • God
    • Angels
    • Human beings
    • (Brute) Animals
    • Plants
    • Inanimate things (stones, etc.)

Soul and Body

  • Confessions X, 14 : “The mind is one thing and the body another.”
  • De quantitate animae 13, 22 (On the amount of the soul): “If you want to define the mind for yourself, and so ask what the mind is, it is easy for me to reply. For it seems to be a certain substance, partaking in reason, and fitted to rule the body.”
  • Human Being =
    • Spirit or soul (rational; immaterial)
    • Body (not rational; material)
  • The soul must rule the body.
  • “Sins of self-indulgence are committed when the soul fails to govern the impulses from which it derives bodily pleasure.”
  • De libero arbitrio (On Free Choice of the Will), I, 8: “…whatever this thing is in virtue of which human beings are superior to animals, whether we should call it ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’ … if it rules and controls the other things that constitute a human being, then that human being is perfectly ordered. For we see that we have many characteristics in common not only with animals but even with trees and plants. We know that trees, which are the lowest level of life, take in nourishment, grow, reproduce, and flourish. We recognize and acknowledge that animals can see and hear, and can sense material objects by touch, taste, and smell, often better than we can. Consider also strength, health, and bodily vigor, ease and swiftness of motion. In all of these respects we are superior to some animals, equal to others, and inferior to quite a few.”
  • Ibid: “Yet we have these sorts of traits in common with animals, although the life of the lower animals consists entirely in the pursuit of physical pleasures and the avoidance of pains.
    There are other qualities that do not appear to exist in animals: for example, joking and laughing. Anyone with a proper understanding of human nature will consider these things distinctively human, to be sure, but of lesser importance. Then there are traits like the love of praise or fame, and the will to power. Animals do indeed lack these traits, but it should not be thought that an inordinate desire for such things makes us superior to animals. When these impulses of the soul are ruled by reason, a human being is said to be ordered. For we should not call it right order or even order at all, when better things are subjected to worse ….”
  • p. 48, ll. 14-17: “things [like friendship and beautiful objects]…can be occasions of sin because, good though they are, they are of the lowest order of good, and if we are too much tempted by them we abandon those higher and better things, your truth, your law, and you yourself.”
  • “…inordinate desire…is the love of those things that one can lose against one’s will.”

God and Eternity

  • God is eternal (= no temporal end, everlasting).
  • “Blessed are those who love you, O God, and love their friends in you and their enemies for your sake. They alone will never lose those who are dear to them for they love them in one who is never lost, in God.”
  • Augustinian Happiness: don’t will anything you can lose against your will; therefore: will (in) God.

Freedom of the Will

  • Nothing can force the will to will something.
  • Several arguments – one is a type of “process of elimination.”
  • De libero arbitrio (On Free Choice of the Will), I.10:
    • 1. "… it would violate perfect order if the weaker controlled the stronger. Therefore, I think the mind must be more powerful than cupidity [= evil desire], precisely because it is right and just for the mind to rule over cupidity."
    • 2. “No vicious [i.e. evil] spirit defeats a spirit armed with virtue”, since virtue is “stronger and more invincible” than is vice.
    • 3. No material object could ever overcome a spirit endowed with virtue, since “a living substance is better than a non-living one, and and one that gives life is better than one that receives it.”
    • 4. No virtuous spirit could force another virtuous spirit to do something evil, since 1) virtuous spirits are of equal excellence (the one could not overpower the other) and 2) just by trying to force another spirit to do something wrong, the other virtuous spirit would become vicious. (and then it would in fact be weaker because the vicious is weaker than the virtuous).
  • Point of departure is that the best universe is the one in which the stronger rules the weaker.
  • What does Augustine eliminate?
    • No evil spirit;
    • No body;
    • No good spirit.
  • Conclusion: nothing forces the will to do evil.
  • De libero arbitrio (On the Free Choice of the Will), I.11: “The conclusions that we have reached thus far indicate that a mind that is in control, one that possesses virtue, cannot be made a slave to inordinate desire by anything equal or superior to it (because such a thing would be just) or by anything inferior to it (because such a thing would be too weak). Just one possibility remains: only its own will and free choice can make the mind a companion of cupidity [= evil].”
  • De libero arbitrio (On the Free Choice of the Will), I.16: “We have determined that the choice to follow and embrace [eternal things or temporal things] lies with the will, and that only the will can depose the mind from its stronghold of power and deprive it of right order. And it has become clear that we should not blame anything when someone uses it wrongly; we should blame the one who uses it wrongly.”
  • “If the things of the world delight you, praise God for them, but turn your love away from them, and give it to their Maker…

Contrast

  • In contrast to Manichaeism, Augustine posits that the body is not the origin of evil and sin.
  • In contrast to Plato, Augustine argues that doing wrong isn't simply a matter of misunderstanding or lack of knowledge.
  • Augustine believes that evil originates in our free will.
  • We choose to give power to things of a lower order, and as a result, they rule over us.
  • This represents a disruption of the order of the universe.

Motivation to Steal Pears

  • Not the pears: “It is true that the pears which we stole had beauty, because they were created by you, the good God, who are the most beautiful of all beings and the Creator of all things, the supreme Good and my own true Good. But it was not the pears that my unhappy soul desired. I had plenty of my own, better than those, and I only picked them so that I might steal.”

    • Companionship
      • “For the sake of a laugh, a little sport, I was glad to do harm and anxious to damage another; and that without thought for myself or retaliation for injuries received.”
    • Imitation of God
      • The reversal of the metaphysical existence hierarchy

Questions Raised

  • What do you think about his “action theory”? Do we always need an object in order to act, an object that we want to acquire or hold onto? Are there any actions that don’t have an object in the way Augustine means? Why is it so difficult to imagine that a motivation to bring some action about is the pleasure of doing something forbidden?
  • There’s a strong metaphysical background to Augustine’s explanation of evil and sin. Do you think that anything of value or significance remains of his explanation without the metaphysical system?
  • Do you agree that evil arises through excessive human desires? Is this a convincing solution to the problem of evil and unhappiness in general?

Next Week

  • Augustine: Learning / Knowledge Acquisition and the Theory of Illumination.