Augustine’s On the Free Choice of the Will
Introduction
In his Theory of Free Will, Augustine concurs with Evodius and believes that free will is indeed something upon which one cannot live rightly. The stamen initiated in other words denotes that for one to live rightly, he or she is required to have free will. To elaborate further his argument, he discusses how through goodwill, for instance, God ended up creating everything existing in the world. Therefore the existence of God in addition to good things presented on earth comes from God. Additionally, according to Augustine, there exists physical hell with individuals who have committed evil deeds separated from God as they are expected to go to hell. For him, the human beings have the living choice on their hands and it’s upon them to choose between following the will of God or rather facing the physical punishment which is going to hell (Brown, Montague, 12). Indeed, Augustine’s on the Free Choice of the Will initiates additional questions based on the freedom of the will that human beings commit sinful acts and that God is not responsible regardless of the various events happening in the universe.
Primary, the best definition of the will in Augustine’s On the Free Choice of the Will is that it is simply the ability to choose something through a means of one’s will. Therefore, through critical thinking of the will, one would further expound on the origin of evil in addition to expanding subjective initiates of the human fraternity. The humans have the will to obey or not to obey the law which to Augustine, people are termed as brave enough to understand what is right or evil. The effects of free will should not be limited to evil however but to the Grace of the Salvation of God.
On the other hand, Augustine claims that it is through the freedom of the will that human beings commit sinful acts, and God is not responsible. One of the primary symbolic meanings of such sentiment is that evils do not exist and instead corruption of goodness of the free will necessitates the abuse. For him, the existence of goodness necessitates evil to exist and that it is initiated by the free will which corrupts the humans calling for God’s Grace to guide them. To Augustine, God is not responsible for the sinful acts committed by human beings as He only created the earth out of nothing and that he did not create the evil. Thus, evil is not attributed to the existence of its rights which means that it is the privatization of good and serves as corruption to God’s perfect creation. Augustine furthermore adds that God created human beings with no suffering or sin and that evil is considered as a punishment to the fall of man. Therefore, for him, the freewill is their core aspect of immoral acts with sinful acts for Adam and Eve corrupting the will of mankind (Reynolds, Andy, and Nicholas Placido, 7). Thus, God is not only blameless but also good and that he is not any at any given point responsible for human sins.
Indeed, Augustine claims that God is the creator of the human will because He is the created human mind. The human history and description were necessitated by God in His ability to identify them as human created in the image and likeness of God and that they have the will to do any act depending with its analyzation and if it’s good or bad. For Augustine, the human will is as initiated by God is out of love and accepted by grace and that through the grace of God, human beings have the will to participate in anything for the good as long as they are yearning for the good.
On the other hand, Augustine reconciles the freedom of the will with God’s absolute foresight of all the events in the universe through explanation on how goodness allows evil to exists which is as a result of fault from the human. As the events of the universe are conjoined to the freedom of will, its might end up corrupting the human mind requiring God’s grace to guide them. Augustine furthermore states through the introduction of divine foreknowledge meant that as a result of the conundrum, God’s omniscience makes him culpable specifically on mankind sins (Wilson, Kenneth, 26). Generally, God gave human the freewill which they have used to both commit evil and sin and that God knew it would happen as his knowledge is timeless. He knows that a person will perform a certain act as omniscience and free will are compatible.
In conclusion, Augustinian theodicy responds to problems of evil and addresses issues connected to God as omnipotent and omnibenevolent. According to Augustine, God remains perfect and that human beings are responsible for their physical punishment as God did not create suffering or evil. For him, evil does not exist in itself but rather fixed to the corruption of goodness linked to free will. For him, the existence of hell serves as a chamber to the punishment of sin and that those who accept the salvation of Christ will go to heaven.
Works Cited
Brown, Montague. “Augustine on God’s Presence to Memory and Will.” St. Anselm Journal 15.1 (2019): 1-17.
Reynolds, Andy, and Nicholas Placido. “A comparison of free will, human agency, and the transtheoretical model.” Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work: Social Thought (2020): 1-11.
Wilson, Kenneth M. Augustine’s conversion from traditional free choice to” non-free free will”: a comprehensive methodology. Vol. 111. Mohr Siebeck, (2018): 23-27.