If this is your first
exposure to CAP Lessons, you can backtrack the thread from here.
Do we need to understand what
we believe? Augustine says that our faith is “incomplete and unstable until it
is replaced (fulfilled) by knowledge.” He also said that we cannot understand unless we
believe first, but it must be followed by knowledge which comes by sight.
He was a major Christian
leader and writer who lived 1600 years ago. He was a prolific writer. I am
including a condensed version of the introduction to his “On Free Choice of the
Will.”
As you read the following, a
few biblical thoughts come to mind:
“..grow in the grace and
knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” – 2 Peter 3:18
“..you shall know the truth,
and it shall set you free.” – John 8:32
My main point and question:
At what point do we conclude that we have all the truth?
(The following is from
Augustine’s book, as translated by Thomas Williams.)
Augustine – On Free Choice of the Will
With
Introduction by Thomas Williams
Despite its relative
brevity, On Free Choice of the Will contains almost every distinctive
feature of Augustine’s philosophy. It presents the essentials of his
ethics, his theory of knowledge, and his views of God and human nature.
In what follows, therefore, I concern myself chiefly with the two concepts that
figure in the title: freedom
and the will.
The word ‘freedom’ has many senses. One sort of
freedom involves the absence of restraints. We might call this physical
freedom.
I may still be physically
free--- no one has locked me up or tied me down – but it seems that I lack
freedom in some stronger and more interesting sense. I am free to act as
I choose, but my choices themselves are not free. The freedom to choose in a way that is not
determined by anything outside my control is what I shall call metaphysical
freedom.
The view that human beings have metaphysical freedom is
called ‘libertarianism’. Augustine was one of the great defenders of
libertarianism; indeed, he was the first to articulate the view clearly. According to
Augustine, human beings
are endowed with a power that he calls the will. This feature of
the will Augustine calls liberum arbitrium, which can be translated as
“freedom of decision” or (more usually) “free choice.” Thus, the will is not determined by
any external factors. This freedom is what allows us to be responsible for our actions; if
outside forces beyond our control caused us to choose to act in a certain way,
we could hardly be held responsible for acting I that way.
Thus far I have talked
about being determined by external things. But it is not external
states that determine our choices; it is internal states: beliefs, desires, states of
character, and so on. And since it is my desires and my character that determine my choices,
my freedom is not threatened.
A libertarian like Augustine would not be convinced by
this sort of reasoning. The fact that this causal chain eventually wormed
its way inside me, so to speak, determining my choices from within, no longer
seems to guarantee my freedom. It is with such considerations in mind
that Augustine rejects the view (known an ‘compatibilism’) that determinism is
compatible with human freedom and moral responsibility; and since he is convinced that human
beings are in fact free and responsible, he must reject determinism as well.
Because human beings have metaphysical freedom, we are
capable of making a real difference in the world. In this way we can
truly be said to be in the image of God, who created all things distinct from
himself by a free and unconditioned act of the will. Like God, human
beings can introduce genuine change, can bring into being something that except
for their free choice would have never existed.
Unfortunately, this metaphysical freedom can be
used – indeed, Augustine thinks that it has been used – to introduce evil into
the world.
Augustine’s answer is that human beings have metaphysical
freedom, and so the blame for any evil action rests on the person who performed
that action.
Without metaphysical freedom, the universe is just a divine puppet show.
If there is to be any real creaturely goodness, any new and creative act of
love, rather than the merely mechanical uncoiling of a wind-up universe, if there are to be any real
decisions other than those made in the divine will, then there must be
metaphysical freedom, and such freedom brings with it the possibility of evil
as well as the promise of goodness.
There is a third sense of ‘freedom’ that
I shall call autonomy. Augustine describes autonomy as “the sort
of freedom that people have in mind when they think they are free because they
have no human masters, or that people desire when they want to be set
free by their masters”. This sort of
freedom is not freedom in the highest and most genuine sense, Augustine
believes, and so he has little to say about it.
Augustine, however, would point out that if you are your
own boss, you are ipso facto your own slave. And it is not right to be ruled
by what is equal to oneself. One should be ruled only by what is in every respect
superior to oneself, and that is Truth, which Augustine identifies with
God. The unchanging divine truth about what we ought to do is what
Augustine calls the eternal law. The morally grown-up human being
recognizes this law for what it is: an immutable standard of divine
authority, one that binds us unconditionally, quite independently of what we
may happen to desire or believe.
The Kantian doctrine has
an undeniable appeal, but Augustine would point out that evil always has a specious
attractiveness and that error is most dangerous when it is parasitic on some
truth. That is what Augustine means by saving that we must try to
understand what we have already believed. If I think that the moral law
has no higher authority than my own reason, I can easily come to think that it
has no real authority at all.
Augustine, by contrast,
insists on the absolute
objectivity and authority of the eternal law.
This is not the arbitrary judgment of a killjoy God; it
is the natural and inevitable result of trying to live in a law-governed
universe while defying its laws.
This is one reason why
Augustine thinks that it is
important to understand what we have believed.
Our only security against this instability of moral
belief is to attain understanding or knowledge, rather than mere belief, about
moral matters. “Faith comes by hearing,” but knowledge comes by
sight. “Unless you believe, you will not understand.
This may sound like
arguing in a circle, or at least like a kind of proof texting. (“Here’s what I
believe; now I’ll try to prove that I’m right”), but in fact it is a very
plausible position. “You only say that because you’re a physicist.”
Moral truths are no different. Belief is required
for understanding. ”You only say that because you’re a moralist”. So
belief is necessary for the attainment of knowledge, but belief is incomplete
and unstable until it is replaced by knowledge.
Where human beings are concerned, there is no such thing
as being free from a law that is imposed from without; to deny the authority of
the eternal law is not moral adulthood but moral perversity. Moral
uprightness, therefore, consists in submission to this eternal and immutable
truth, which is not of our own making.
But why does Augustine go
on to say that not
merely uprightness, but freedom, consists in submission to the Truth?
This brings us to the
final sense of freedom. Since Augustine thinks of this sort of freedom as
the highest and most
valuable sort, I shall call it genuine freedom. Genuine freedom involves using one’s metaphysical freedom to cleave to the
eternal law, to love what is good, to submit to the truth. So the soul
that submits to the truth and loves the good will be free, while the soul that
is fixed on lesser things is at the mercy of forces beyond its control.
The only genuine freedom, then, is submission to the
truth. In other words, obedience to the eternal law, which is no
arbitrary divine pronouncement but the rules for action that are stamped on our
very nature, is our only security against frustration, dissatisfaction,
confusion and the tyranny of bad habits and misplaced priorities.
