Free Will in the Christian Cosmology: Comparing Paul and Augustine

The Abrahamic God is an awesome god. He is omnipotent, omniscient, omni-benevolent, and omnipresent. Such a being truly deserves our reverence. But could we choose to revere such an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and all-present being such as this? Or would we have no choice in the matter? This is a central question of theologians within any of the three Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. If God exists as a being with the four aforementioned attributes, can human beings be said to truly have free will?1

While numerous religious scholars have approached this essential question, the focus of this paper is Saint Paul, who addresses human beings’ freedom of choice in Chapter 7 of his letter to the Romans, and Saint Augustine, who formulates a defense of free will in his treatise On Free Choice of the Will. Paul lands on a kind of dualism in his discussion of law, human nature, and salvation, and Augustine approaches a robust version of human autonomy in his account of the problem of evil. While both saints manage to fit an articulation of free will within a Christian cosmology without changing the nature of God, Augustine’s account of the will seems to more closely resemble our actual phenomenology, and therefore seems to be the more complete picture of human autonomy in a world created by the awesome Christian God.

Paul's Letter to the Romans

In chapter 7 of “Romans,” Paul writes about the dilemma of reconciling human nature, as it can be defined within the context of the fall of man, with Jewish law, which is essentially in the form of God’s commandments in the Old Testament which all present negative imperatives (“Thou shalt not…”). It is necessary to understand these two concepts before one tries to understand Paul’s grim picture of free will.

“For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh,” writes Paul (7.18). This line, along with others in the chapter which employ the word “flesh” and draw distinctions between the body and mind, points to the fault of the flesh that all human being share, being children of Adam and Eve, the first sinners. These lines also clearly reveal the dualism inherent in most, if not all, Christian thought: “I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin” (7.25). Once these two substances – body and mind – are made separate, one can see clearly Paul’s view of human nature as it is contained in the physical human form.

We are like children told not to take a cookie out of the cookie jar. Before anyone said anything, we would not even think of doing so, but as soon as we are told not to do it, our hand cannot resist the urge to take a cookie. As Paul writes, “Yet, if it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin. I should not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘Thou shalt not covet’” (7.7). Similarly, Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden without any moral knowledge; they had no epistemological basis for distinguishing between right and wrong. But once the forbiddance was there, curiosity, which also springs from the negative command, was provoked. As a result, according to the second creation story of “Genesis,” humans committed the first sin by disobeying God’s command. Significantly, once they acquired knowledge of right and wrong, they immediately felt shame and cognitively knew that what they did was wrong. And so their minds understood, but their bodies acted. All these generations later, so the story as interpreted by Paul goes, we still have bodies – flesh – that are prone to sinful action, even if our minds understand right and wrong. Our flesh did come from those original sinners, after all, while our minds and spirits come from God.

The second foundational idea to Paul’s dilemma is the nature of God’s laws for the Jews. Essentially, “the law is holy and the command is holy and just and good” (7.12), but it is also the law which makes sin possible and leads to our death by reviving sin (7.9). This is inextricably linked to the nature of human beings. While the law as it was put forth in the Old Testament was originally thought to be a guide to reaching closer to God, Paul tells the Romans that the law actually is the root of sin rising in an individual and causing him or her to turn away from God. In these remarks, then, Paul is dramatically reversing long-held tenants of Judaism. It is not through serving the law that one gets close to God, but through faith in Jesus Christ that one is saved from the sinful flesh and able to at least will to do right and “bear fruit for God” (7.4).

Here, then, is the dilemma Christians are faced with, according to Paul. The human body is predisposed to disobey laws presented as negatives, thanks to inheriting flesh from Adam and Eve, yet the mind is capable, through Christ, to will to obey God’s commands. It is a story of mind versus matter, however, in that the mind, even with full knowledge of God’s law2 and full intention to do God’s bidding, cannot control the body and keep it from acting on carnal passions. The will exists and is the way to God, but there is a disconnect between the will and the body. When one does wrong it is not because of one’s will to do wrong, but it is sin that does wrong through the body, and sin comes about through knowledge of the law. Yet knowing the law is necessary, though not sufficient, for knowing God. The other condition which Paul wants to make clear is knowledge of Christ and faith in his salvation. If one knows the law, one’s body will turn away from following the law. But if one knows the law and knows Christ, one’s mind “can will what is right, but [one’s body] cannot do it” (7.18).

If we as readers do some heavy lifting of our own, we can see how this fits alongside God’s omnipotence and omniscience. God knows everything that we will do because our bodies are predetermined by our faulty nature to sin once knowledge of the law is acquired in the absence of Christ. Thus, God is left with a simple modus ponens syllogism for determining the action of an individual: (1) If this person knows the law and he is of flesh, he will sin, (2) This person knows the law and is of flesh, therefore, (3) this person will sin. Paul’s articulation of free will places the will not within the realm of predictable action, since that is predetermined, to an extent, but within the realm of the purely mental. While God can undoubtedly read (past, present, and future) minds, this does not exclude the possibility that a person can choose to set one’s mind toward God. God would know that he or she would do this, but he or she still decides to do so. In fact, this is exactly the kind of heavy lifting that Augustine does in his treatise On Free Choice of the Will.

Augustine's Doctrine of the Will

Augustine’s discussion of the will in On Free Choice of the Will stems from an inquisition into the problem of evil. Indeed, the dialogue opens with Evodius asking, “Tell me, please, whether God is not the cause of evil” (3). Much of the discussion, then, while dealing with an essential nature of human beings (are they determined or autonomous?) is also a defense of the benevolent nature of God. If human beings did not do evil themselves, but it was caused by God, then it would not make sense for God to punish or reward human beings for doing good or evil since they would not be the cause of their own actions (Carlo Filice might say that they would have no “agent credit”). But God does reward and punish people, and all that God does is just, according to Christian doctrine, so God could not be rewarding or punishing essentially determined beings. We therefore must have free will.3

That brief synopsis of his argument is indicative of the reasoning present throughout the treatise. Much of the premises that allow Augustine to come to the conclusions which he eventually does are premises about the perfection of God and the imperfection of humans. This is how Augustine fits free will into a Christian cosmology. In book three, Evonius asks if God’s foreknowledge (he is omniscient after all) is inconsistent with the notion of human autonomy. Augustine’s answer, of course, is no:

“For when [God] has foreknowledge of our will, it is going to be the will that he has foreknown . . . Therefore, the will is going to be a will because God has foreknowledge of it. Nor can it be a will if it is not in our power. Therefore, God also has knowledge of our power over it. So the power is not taken from me by His foreknowledge; but because of His foreknowledge, the power to will will more certainly be present in my, since God whose foreknowledge does not err, has foreknown that I shall have the power” (93).