The Life of the Mind (50 page)

What the will is not able to accomplish is this steadfast enjoyment; will is given as a mental faculty because the mind "is not sufficient to itself' and "through its need and want, it becomes excessively intent upon its own actions."
¹⁰⁹
The will decides how to
use
memory and intellect, that is, it "refers them to something else," but it does not know how "to use with the joy, not of hope, but of the actual thing."
¹¹⁰
That is the reason the will is never satisfied, for "satisfaction means that the will is at rest,"
¹¹¹
and nothing—certainly not hope-can still the will's restlessness "save endurance," the quiet and lasting enjoyment of something present; only "the force of love is so great that the mind draws in with itself those things upon which it has long reflected with love."
¹¹²
The whole mind "is in those things upon which it thinks with love," and these are the things 'without which it cannot think of itself."
¹¹³

The emphasis here is on the mind
thinking
of itself, and the love that stills the will's turmoil and resdessness is not a love of tangible things but of the "footprints" "sensible things" have left on the inwardness of the mind. (Throughout the treatise, Augustine is careful to distinguish between thinking and knowing, or between wisdom and knowledge. "It is one thing not to know oneself, and another thing not to think of oneself."
¹¹⁴
) In the case of Love, the lasting "footprint" that the mind has transformed into an intelligible thing would be neither the one who loves nor his beloved but the third element, namely, Love itself, the love with which the lovers love each other.

The difficulty with such "intelligible things" is that although they are as "present to the gaze of the mind as ... tangible things are present ... to the senses of the body," a man "who arrives [at them] does not abide in them ... and thus a transitory thought is formed of a thing that is not transitory. And this transitory thought is committed to the memory ... so that there may be a place to which the thought may again return." (The example he gives of lastingness in the midst of human transience is drawn from music. It is as if "one were to grasp [a melody] passing through intervals of time while it stands apart from time in a kind of secret and sublime silence"; without memory to record the sequence of sounds, one could never even "conceive of the melody as long as that singing could be heard."
¹¹⁵
) What Love brings about is lastingness, a perdurance of which the mind otherwise seems incapable. Augustine has conceptualized Paul's words in the Letter to the Corinthians: "Love never ends"; of the three that "abide"—Faith, Hope, Love—"the greatest [the most durable, as it were] is love" (I Corinthians 13:8).

To summarize: this Will of Augustine's, which is not understood as a separate faculty but in its function within the mind as a whole, where all single faculties—memory, intellect, and will—are "mutually referred to each other,"
¹¹⁶
finds its redemption in being transformed into Love. Love as a kind of enduring and conflicdess Will has an obvious resemblance to Mill's "enduring I," which finally prevails in the will's decisions. Augustine's Love exerts its influence through the "weight"—"the will resembles a weight"
¹¹⁷
—it adds to the soul, thus arresting its fluctuations. Men do not become just by knowing what is just but by loving justice. Love is the soul's gravity, or the other way round: "the specific gravity of bodies is, as it were, their love."
¹¹⁸
What is saved, moreover, in this transformation of his earlier conception is the Will's power of assertion and denial; there is no greater assertion of something or somebody than to love it, that is, to say: I will that you b
e—Amo: Volo ut sis.

 

Thus far, we have left to one side all strictly theological questions and with them the chief problem free will presents to all strictly Christian philosophy. In the first centuries after Christ, the existence of the universe could be explained as emanation, the outflow of divine and anti-divine forces, requiring no personal God behind it. Or, following the Hebrew tradition, it could be explained as creation having a divine person for its author. The divine author created the world of His own free will and out of nothingness. And He created man after His image, that is, endowed, too, with a free will. From then on, the theories of emanation corresponded to the fatalist or determinist theories of necessity; the creation theories had to deal theologically with the Free Will of God, Who decided to create the world, and to reconcile this Freedom with the freedom of the creature, man. Insofar as God is omnipotent (He can overrule man's will), and has foreknowledge, human freedom seems to be doubly canceled out The standard argument, then, is: God only foreknows; He does not compel. You find the argument in Augustine, too, but at his best he proposes a very different line of thought

Earlier, we took up the basic arguments put forward for determinism and fatalism because of their great importance to the mentality of the ancient world, especially Roman antiquity. And we saw, following Cicero, how this reasoning always ended in contradictions and paradoxes. You remember the so-called idle argument—When you were sick, whether you would recover or not recover was predestined, hence why have called a doctor; but whether you called a doctor or did not call him was also predetermined, and so on. In other words, all your faculties become
idle
once you think along these lines without cheating. The reasoning relies on antecedent causes; that is, it relies on the past. But what you actually are interested in is of course the future. You want the future to be predictable—"it was to be"—but the moment you start arguing along these lines, you are up against another paradox: "If I can foresee that I am going to be killed tomorrow in an airplane crash, then I will not get out of bed tomorrow. But then I will not be so killed. But then I will not have correctly foreseen the future."
¹¹⁹
The flaw in the two arguments, the one relating to the past, the other to the future, is the same: the first extrapolates the present into the past, the second extrapolates it into the future, and both assume that the extrapolator stands outside the sphere in which the real event takes place and that he, the outside observer, has no power at all to act—he himself is not a cause. In other words, since man is himself part and parcel of the temporal process, a being with a past and a special faculty for the past, called "memory," since he fives in the present and looks forward to the future, he cannot jump out of the temporal order.

I pointed out earlier that the argument of determinism receives its actual poignancy only if a Foreknower is introduced who stands outside the temporal order and looks on what is happening from the perspective of eternity. By introducing such a Foreknower, Augustine was able to arrive at the most dubious and also most terrible of his teachings, the doctrine of predestination. We are not interested here in this doctrine, a perverse radicalization of Paul's teaching that salvation lies not in works but in faith and is given by God's grace—so that not even faith is within man's power. You find it in one of the last treatises,
On Grace and Free Will,
written against the Pelagians, who, referring precisely to Augustine's earlier doctrines of the Will, had emphasized "the merits of the antecedent good will" for the reception of grace, which was given wholly gratuitously only in the forgiveness of sins.
¹²⁰

The philosophical arguments, not for predestination but for the possible co-existence of God's omniscience and man's free will, occur in a discussion of Plato's
Timaeus.
Human knowledge is of "various lands"; men know

 

in different ways things which as yet are not, things which are, and things which have been. [But] not in our fashion does He look forward to what is future, nor does He look at what is present nor look back at what is past, but in a manner far and profoundly different from the way of our thoughts. For He does not pass from this to that [following in thought what has changed from past to present to future], but He sees altogether unchangeably; so that all things which [for us] emerge temporally—the future which is not yet as well as the present that already is and the past which is no more-are comprehended by Him in a stable and sempiternal presence: nor does He see differently with the eyes of the body and differently with the mind, for He is not composed of mind and body: nor [does He see] in different fashion the now, the before, the later; for His knowledge, unlike ours, is not a knowledge of three different times, present, past, and future through whose variations our knowledge is affected.... Nor is there any intention that passes from thought to thought in Whose bodyless intuition all things which He knows are present together at once. For He knows all times with no temporal notions, just as He moves all temporal things with no temporal movements.
¹²¹

 

In this context, one can no longer speak of God's Foreknowledge; for Him, past and future do not exist. Eternity, understood in human terms, is an everlasting present. "If the present were always present ... it would no longer be time but eternity."
¹²²

I have quoted this argument at some length because if one can assume that there is a
person
for whom the temporal order does not exist, the co-existence of God's omniscience and man's free will ceases to be an insoluble problem. At the very least it can be approached as part of the problem of man's temporality, that is, in a consideration of all our faculties as related to time. This new view, explicated in the
City of God,
is prepared for in the famous eleventh book of the
Confessions,
to which we now briefly turn.

Regarded in temporal categories, "the present of things past is in memory, the present of things present is in a mental intuition
[contuitus—a
gaze that gathers things together and "pays attention" to them], and the present of things future is in expectation."
¹²³
But these threefold presents of the mind do not in themselves constitute time; they constitute time only because they pass into each other "from the future through the present by which it passes to the past"; and the present is the least lasting of them, since it has no "space" of its own. Hence time passes "from that which does not yet exist, by that which has no space, into that which no longer exists."
¹²⁴
Time, therefore, cannot possibly be constituted by "the movements of the heavenly bodies"; the movements of bodies are "in time" only insofar as they have a beginning and an end; and time that can be measured is in the mind itself, namely, "from the time I began to see until I cease to see." For "we measure in fact the interval from some beginning up to some kind of end," and this is possible only because the mind retains in its own present the expectation of that which is not yet, which it then "pays attention to and remembers when it passes through."

The mind performs this temporalizing action in each everyday act: "I am about to recite a psalm.... Hie life of this action of mine is distended into memory in respect to the part I have already recited and into expectation in respect to the part I am about to recite. Attention is present, through which what was future is conveyed over
[traiiciatur],
that it may become past." Attention, as we have seen, is one of the major functions of the Will, the great unifier, which here, in what Augustine calls the "distention of the mind," binds together the tenses of time into the mind's present. "Attention abides and through it what will be present proceeds to become something absent," namely, the past. And "the same holds for the whole of man's life," which without the mind's distention would never be a whole; "the same [also] for the whole era of the children of men, of which all the lives of men are parts," namely, insofar as this era can be recounted as a coherent continuous story.
¹²⁵
"

From the perspective, then, of the temporality of the human faculties, Augustine in the last of the great treatises, the
City of Cod,
returns once more to the problem of the Will.
¹²⁶
He states the main difficulty: God, "though Himself eternal, and
without beginning,
caused time to have a beginning; and man, whom He had not made previously, He made in time."
¹²⁷
The creation of the world and of time coincide—"the world was made
not
in time, but simultaneously with time"—not only because creation itself implies a beginning but also because living creatures were made before the making of man. "Where there is no creature whose changing movement admits of succession, there cannot be time at all ... time being impossible without the creature."
¹²⁸
But what, then, was God's purpose in creating man, asks Augustine; why did He "will to make him in time," him "whom He had never made before"? He calls this question "a depth indeed" and speaks of "the unsearchable depth of this purpose" of creating "
temporal man [hominem temporalem]
who has never before been," that is, a creature that does not just live "in time" but is essentially temporal, is, as it were, time's essence.
¹²⁹

To answer "this very difficult question of the eternal God creating new things," Augustine first finds it necessary to refute the philosophers' cyclical time concepts, inasmuch as novelty could not occur in cycles. He then gives a very surprising answer to the question of why it was necessary to create Man, apart from and above all other living things. In order, he says, that there may be novelty, a
beginning
must exist; "and this beginning never before existed," that is, not before Man's creation. Hence, that such a beginning "might be, man was created before whom nobody was"
("quod initium eo modo antea nunquam fuit. Hoc ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit").
¹³⁰
And Augustine distinguishes this from the beginning of the creation by using the word "
initium
" for the creation of Man but "
principium
" for the creation of the heaven and the earth.
¹³¹
As for the living creatures, made before Man, they were created "in numbers," as species beings, unlike Man, who was created in the singular and continued to be "propagated from individuals."
¹³²