Two Wills and Inner Conflict in Augustine's Confessions

Introduction: Augustine's Reputation and the Question of Free Will

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 the inspirational tale of a man who was once a great sinner and became a great saint. Given his reputation, it might be assumed that Augustine held 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 tenets of orthodox Christian belief, as opposed to Gnostic Manichaeism. Manichaeism was the heretical creed 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 do possess free will and that Manichaeism is heresy.

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

Sin Beyond the Body: Intellectual and Moral Transgressions

Augustine's great claim to fame as a great sinner who became a great saint lies not just in his sexual sins but also in his intellectual and moral ones. Augustine's sins were internal as well as physically manifest. He stole apples as a child and kept 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 toward 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 bodily. 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).

Grace, Not Willpower: The Mechanism of Conversion

Only after his conversion and his acceptance of divine grace was Augustine's body mastered by his mind. It was not simply that his body had failed to obey his will, or that he possessed a stronger spiritual will and a weaker physical one after conversion. Rather, before his conversion his will was not fully sincere internally. He had not yet accepted God's grace or submitted to God. Before he was converted, he wrote: "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 inability to master his body on his own and acknowledged that he needed grace to be good. This understanding of grace as the transforming force is central to reading Augustine's Confessions as a theological document rather than merely a moral autobiography.

Conclusion: One Will, Divine Grace, and True Conversion

Ultimately, Augustine's conversion appears to align more closely with the Lutheran model of conversion and salvation — that man is saved by divine grace alone, not by his physical actions in the world — despite Augustine's revered place in the Catholic pantheon of saints. Merely rejecting physical cravings is not enough, and focusing only on mastering the body is not the true path to salvation. For the physical will to be changed and overcome, the spiritual and internal must first be changed, and a divine force is required for that change. Once a real, internal shift occurs, the physical alteration of behavior follows naturally, as it did for Augustine.

Once Augustine prayed with a true heart after his conversion — not merely a false heart wishing to "become good, but not quite yet" — he was reformed. This suggests that there are not "two wills," as the Manicheans falsely believed, but that a sinning body is evidence of a sinning soul, even though the sinner may half-heartedly wish to be good. The path to virtue, for Augustine, is not a contest between body and spirit; it is the wholehearted submission of the entire self to the grace of God.

Works Cited

Augustine. "Confessions." Christian Classics Ethereal Library. 11 Nov. 2008. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confessions.xi.html