St. Augustine Confession Two Wills

St. Augustine Confession

Two wills and inner conflicts in the life of Augustine

Augustine, who eventually became the Bishop of Hippo, is considered one of the early founding fathers of the modern Catholic Church. He is a revered patriarch, and his Confessions are read as inspirational tale of a man who was once a great sinner, who became a great saint. Given his reputation, it might be assumed that Augustine had an uncomplicated view of the innate freedom of the human will. The belief that human beings possess free will to sin or to choose salvation is one of the tenants of orthodox Christian belief, as opposed to Gnostic Manichaeism. Manichaeism was the heretical credo that Augustine embraced early in his theological career, and then eventually rejected. Manichaeism embraced predestination as well as a dualistic view of the universe as divided into good and evil. However, while Augustine did not accept the Manichean understanding of the world, he did believe that God's grace was necessary to achieve salvation. Salvation could not be achieved through sheer force of the human will alone. Only through divine intervention could the mastery of both physical desires and spiritual urges be undertaken, even while he stressed that human beings did have free will and Manichaeism was heresy.

When he was a young man, Augustine prayed to God to make him good -- but not yet. This famous statement of Augustine is often seen as a dramatic depiction of how someone with a spiritual orientation can be lead awry by the physical cravings and of the body. But this prayer shows that Augustine did not simply act poorly, but that his sincere wish to be good and his internal moral compass was lacking. He was incapable of moral behavior and good, self-restrained actions because his will was half-hearted and weak.

Furthermore, Augustine's great claim to fame as great sinner who became a great saint lies not just in his sexual crimes but also his intellectual and moral crimes. Augustine's sins were internal as well as physically manifest. He stole apples as a child and had a mistress as a young man but just as importantly Augustine was extremely ambitious and ruthless in his professional career. He studied pagan philosophers, preferring their prose to Christian teachings. He also showed a lack of respect to his gentle Christian mother, Monica. He embraced Manichaeism and neo-Platonism as superior systems of thought out of intellectual arrogance before he embraced Christianity. In other words, his sins were spiritual and incorporeal as well as of the body. It took grace from God for him to become a convert, not simply a change in his exterior actions or even his physical urges. In terms of his letting go of his desire for sexual excess, Augustine says explicitly that God took it away, not that he was able to resist these desires more willfully: "And now I will tell and confess unto thy name, O Lord, my helper and my redeemer, how thou didst deliver me from the chain of sexual desire by which I was so tightly held, and from the slavery of worldly business" (10.VI.13).

Only after his conversion and his acceptance of divine grace, were Augustine's body mastered by his mind. It was not simply that his body did not obey his will and that he possessed a stronger spiritual and a physical will after his conversion, but that before his conversion his will was not fully sincere internally. He had not yet accepted God's grace, and submitted to God. Before he was converted he said: "the power of willing is the power of doing; and as yet I could not do it. Thus my body more readily obeyed the slightest wish of the soul in moving its limbs at the order of my mind than my soul obeyed itself to accomplish in the will alone its great resolve" (10.VI.20). When his spiritual will truly accepted Christ, his body followed and God freed him from unwanted desire. He accepted his lack of ability to master his body, and accepted that he needed grace to be good.

Thus although he speaks of 'the body' and 'the spirit,' these things are not two separate entities -- in fact, Augustine condemns the Manichean notion of "two wills" and the notion that the world is evil in its physical essence (10.X.22). The world and the human body, after all, are created by God, and God is good. Augustine's conception of the will is that God must urge to soul to accept Him, and God is always there, but the heart must be open enough to hear God's call to grace. The human soul must freely choose God, even while the soul's perfection and restraint is dependant upon God's grace. If the spirit is truly willing, then the body easily follows. This is seen when Augustine takes up a book, upon the urging of a divine voice and reads the scripture that is the mechanism for his final conversion: "I heard the voice of a boy or a girl I know not which -- coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, "Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it" (10.XII.28). The voice of the child for Augustine is the voice of Christ.