On Free Choice of the Will

Overview

About a hundred and thirty pages, a dialogue in three books, written by Augustine of Hippo across an unusually long span, begun around 388, shortly after his conversion and baptism and while he was still a layman living in a small community at Thagaste, and finished around 395, by which time he had been ordained a priest and was on the verge of becoming bishop of Hippo. This gap of roughly seven years is visible in the text itself: the first book, written earliest, states its central argument with a confidence and completeness that the later books, wrestling with harder objections Augustine had by then encountered or come to see more clearly, do not entirely maintain.

The dialogue form is genuine rather than merely a literary device; Augustine’s interlocutor throughout is his friend Evodius, who raises real objections and pushes back on Augustine’s answers, and the questions Evodius asks track, plausibly, the actual questions that troubled educated Christians and former Manicheans of Augustine’s own circle. Augustine had himself belonged to the Manichean sect for roughly nine years before his conversion, and this personal history shapes the treatise’s opening and underlying purpose directly: Manicheism explained evil by positing a real, substantial evil power at war with a good one, and Augustine’s central task in this dialogue is to show that Christian orthodoxy can account for evil without any such dualism, by locating its origin entirely in the misuse of a good gift, free will, rather than in any evil substance or rival principle.

The argument

Book I: evil as the will’s own turning. Evodius opens by asking directly whether God is the cause of evil, since God is the cause of everything that exists. Augustine’s answer turns on a crucial distinction he develops across the book: between the kind of evil that is suffered, punishment, pain, misfortune, and the kind of evil that is done, wrongdoing itself. The evil that is suffered is, in a sense Augustine will spend real effort making precise, often just, a consequence attached by God’s just order to prior wrongdoing. The evil that is done is what genuinely needs explaining, and Augustine locates its source entirely in the will: wrongdoing occurs when the mind, exercising its own free choice, turns away from higher, unchangeable, shared goods, like wisdom and justice, toward lower, private, changeable goods, like bodily pleasure or personal advantage pursued at another’s expense.

Crucially, Augustine argues that nothing external compels this turning; the will’s own free choice is both necessary and sufficient to explain it, which means there is no need, as the Manicheans supposed, to posit some external evil force or substance working on an otherwise innocent mind. Evildoing is genuinely the agent’s own act, arising from nothing but the misuse of a capacity, free choice, that is itself, considered in isolation, a good rather than a flaw in creation.

Book II: free will as a good, proved through the mind’s access to truth. Evodius presses further: if free will can be misused this badly, wouldn’t it have been better for God not to have given it to us at all? Augustine’s response occupies most of the second book and proceeds by an indirect but ambitious route, first establishing the existence of God through an independent argument, and then showing why free will, properly understood, is a good gift even granting that it can be misused.

The argument for God’s existence, one of the more philosophically influential and independently discussed portions of the whole dialogue, begins from truths the mind discovers rather than invents: the truths of mathematics, that seven and three make ten, for instance, or of wisdom more broadly, which hold the same for every mind that correctly considers them, are unchangeable and are not the private possession or creation of any individual thinker. Because these truths are genuinely common, available in the same form to every rational mind, and because they are unchangeable in a way no individual human mind itself is, Augustine argues they must exist in, or be grounded in, something higher than and prior to any individual human mind, something he identifies with God, understood as unchangeable Truth itself.

Having established this, Augustine argues that free will belongs to a class of goods, alongside the various bodily and mental faculties generally, that are genuinely good even though each is capable of misuse; the possibility of misuse does not, on its own, show that the capacity itself was a mistake to grant, since a world containing beings capable of freely choosing righteousness, and therefore genuinely deserving praise and reward for doing so, is better than a world of beings who could only ever act rightly by compulsion, incapable of either real virtue or real vice.

Book III: foreknowledge, freedom, and the hardest question. The final book takes up the objection that had proven hardest for Augustine himself to resolve fully: if God foreknows, with certainty, every choice anyone will ever make, in what sense are those choices genuinely free rather than simply fixed in advance by God’s prior knowledge of them? Augustine argues, in an analysis later thinkers would develop at much greater length, that foreknowledge and freedom are compatible, on the ground that God’s knowing in advance what you will freely choose does not itself cause or necessitate that choice any more than a person’s correctly remembering what someone did yesterday caused that past free action; foreknowledge, properly understood, is simply certain knowledge of what will, in fact, be freely chosen, not a prior cause compelling that choice.

The book’s harder and, by Augustine’s own later admission in other works, never fully resolved question comes when Evodius asks how a will that God created entirely good could ever have begun to sin in the first place, since sin, by Augustine’s own account, requires a will already turned toward a lower good, which seems to presuppose some prior defect needing its own explanation. Augustine’s treatment here is notably more tentative and searching than the confident argument of Book I, exploring several possible lines of response, including that the very fact of having been created from nothing carries with it, for any creature, an inherent capacity for defection that does not itself require any further positive cause, without ever quite claiming to have settled the matter completely.

How to read it

Read Book I as Augustine’s clearest and most confident statement of the treatise’s central thesis, that evil is the will’s own turning rather than any independent substance, and use it to understand what the later, harder books are complicating rather than abandoning.

Read the argument from unchanging truth in Book II as capable of standing somewhat on its own, independent of the rest of the dialogue’s theological purpose; it has had a long afterlife as a distinct philosophical argument for God’s existence, of a different type than the more famous cosmological and ontological arguments later thinkers developed, and it rewards being considered on its own terms.

Pay close attention to the shift in tone and confidence between Book I and Book III. Augustine himself, later in his life, noted this shift, worrying in his Retractationes that the earlier books might be read, against his intentions, as denying the necessity of grace, and the difference in how confidently the will’s freedom is treated across the three books reflects real development in his thinking over the seven years of composition.

Take the unresolved question at the end of Book III seriously rather than expecting it to be tidily answered. Augustine’s own later, considerably darker reflections on original sin and the bondage of the will, developed at length in his controversy with Pelagius many years after finishing this dialogue, can be read as his continued wrestling with exactly the problem Book III leaves genuinely open here.

Read this dialogue alongside Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, written roughly a century later and taking up the same problem of foreknowledge and freedom in a different register, and alongside the relevant questions in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, where the whole framework Augustine establishes here gets systematized and extended within a fully developed scholastic method.

Questions it raises

• Does locating evil entirely in the will’s own turning, rather than in any external cause, fully answer the Manichean challenge, or does it simply relocate the mystery to how a good will can turn bad in the first place?
• Is the argument from unchanging mathematical and moral truths to the existence of God persuasive on its own terms, independent of the dialogue’s larger theological project?
• Augustine argues that free will is good even though it can be misused, because a world capable of real virtue is better than one of mere compulsion. Is this argument sufficient to justify the actual scale of evil that free will has, in fact, produced?
• Does Augustine’s account of foreknowledge, that God’s knowing in advance does not cause what is known, successfully preserve genuine freedom, or does certain foreknowledge amount to the same practical constraint as causation regardless of the label?
• Book III leaves the origin of the very first sin without a fully satisfying explanation. Is this a genuine gap in the argument, or an honest acknowledgment of a mystery that any account of a good creation producing a bad will must eventually run into?
• How does the shift in confidence between Book I and Book III change how you should read Augustine’s earlier, more assured claims about the will’s power? Should Book III’s caution retroactively qualify what Book I seems to assert?