Hannah Arendt famously called Augustine “the first philosopher of the will.” Although the bishop of Hippo is indeed the earliest philosophical writer to use the phrase “free will” (libera voluntas) with any frequency, recent scholars have emphasized his extensive debts in this area to earlier thinkers. For classicists, the debate is crystallized in a pair of Sather Lectures on “the will,” published three decades apart.[1] Albrecht Dihle claimed that Augustine, influenced and assisted by the vocabulary of Latin, first came to articulate an idea implicit in Jewish thought but alien to Greek philosophy, according to which the will is “distinct from both irrational impulse and decision on the basis of knowledge.” Michael Frede, by contrast, minimized Augustine’s originality, suggesting that his position was in fact a repackaging of the intellectualist Stoic view, “with no trace of voluntarism.” This monograph by Evgenia Moiseeva appears as a welcome addition to the discussion.
Moiseeva treats a baker’s dozen or so of Augustine’s early works, some—like his Pauline commentaries from the mid-390s—likely unfamiliar to most classicists. Her order is roughly chronological, complicated by the fact that several of the texts, notably De libero arbitrio and De diversis quaestionibus 83, were written over an extended period of time. The latest work included is the Confessions, of which only Book 8 is discussed. (Moiseeva takes the Confessions to have been written between 397 and 403; if one posits a quicker drafting, the temporal scope of her study may really be just from 388 to 397.) She defends her decision to end where she does by suggesting that the Confessions offer “une sorte d’aboutissement dans la reflexion sur la nature du vouloir d’Augustin” (p. 15). A fully synoptic study of voluntas in Augustine, one covering works written addressing the Pelagian controversy as well as De trinitate and De civitate Dei, thus remains a desideratum. Even on this more limited terrain, it ends up being difficult to discuss voluntas without examining many other interrelated Augustinian concepts (e.g. delectatio, gratia) as well. In what follows, I will have to focus on just a few select issues.
Moiseeva’s first chapter, treating “les prédécesseurs d’Augustin sur la notion de volonté,” is admirably broad, with sections on pagan philosophy, Paul and patristic texts, and Manichaean sources; the first of these treats Aristotle, Stoicism, Plotinus and Neoplatonism, and “la philosophie romaine” (primarily Cicero, Seneca, Aulus Gellius). Scattered concessions aside, she ignores the vexed question of what Augustine actually read. While it is fair, especially in discussing his early works, to assume access to a wide range of translations and doxographies now lost, it would have been helpful to distinguish conceptually between (1) earlier ancient philosophers whose ideas are helpfully compared with Augustine’s, i.e. mere prédécesseurs, (2) philosophers whose ideas actually influenced him in some substantial way, even indirectly, and (3) specific extant texts that he demonstrably had access to. Aristotle to my mind belongs mainly in the first category as regards the will; Plato, whom Moiseeva strangely declines to discuss on the ground that she will limit herself “aux idées qui ont le plus influencé la conception augustinienne” (p. 25), into the second; Aulus Gellius into the third, but not the first two; while Plotinus belongs in all three. Lack of clarity about this distinction is apparent in Moiseeva’s separate treatment of Stoicism and Roman philosophy. When Cicero, for instance, speaks of action as resulting from the sequence visum, adsensio, and adpetitio, he is reporting the Stoic analysis, not giving his own theory, as Moiseeva’s presentation suggests (p. 43). Her discussion of Manichaean sources, preserved in a variety of languages, is intriguing, although naturally also inconclusive.
There does not, at any rate, appear to be an obvious earlier text where voluntas plays the central and wide-ranging role it does in Augustine. What do his texts suggest about how he arrived at his concept? Voluntas is essentially absent from his earliest extant works, the Cassiciacum dialogues (which are accordingly not treated in Moiseeva’s book). Confessions 7.3.5, where Augustine’s narrator says that he “heard” while in Milan about how sin is due to liberum arbitrium voluntatis, is not examined by Moiseeva.[2] The retrospective account of the composition of De libero arbitrio in Retractationes 1.9, which she does discuss, suggests a different origin story, according to which Augustine and his friends arrived at or adopted the theory of the will as the origin of sin and evil during discussions in Rome after his baptism in 388. Moiseeva points out but does not really explain the fact that voluntas also has little place in several works that Augustine wrote soon after his return to Africa, including De Genesi adversus Manichaeos and De moribus ecclesiae et de moribus Manichaeorum (pp. 186-191). The moral psychology in these treatises involves a conflict between ratio and cupiditas, in which the former either consents to sin or not (see, e.g., De Genesi 2.14.21). This looks like Platonic partite psychology modified to incorporate the Stoic notion of assent. Meanwhile, in the likely contemporaneous first book of the De libero arbitrio, voluntas appears to be an independent element of the soul distinct from irrational appetite and arguably from reason as well. Unfortunately, Moiseeva’s long chapter on that key work is somewhat disappointing: she largely ignores the literary and dramatic aspects of the dialogue, tending to quote lines out of context from across its three books.[3]
Augustine gives a definition of voluntas at De duabus animabus 10.14, where he calls it animi motus, cogente nullo, ad aliquid vel non amittendum vel adipiscendum. In this connection Moiseeva has an interesting discussion of motion in Augustine, according to which he is indebted to Aristotle and Porphyry (pp. 266-270). I would have said that his characterization of voluntas as a motus also or primarily reflects Stoic terminology found in Cicero (e.g. Tusculans 4.11-13). Moiseeva introduces confusion when she claims that Augustine similarly conceives of voluntas as a movement in the De libero arbitrio (pp. 87, 109-110). In fact the thread of his argument from the end of the second book of De libero arbitrio to the beginning of the third crucially depends on a transition from considering voluntas as a thing or substance created by God to an inquiry about the origin of the movement by which voluntas is moved; thus voluntas is not itself a motion. Moiseeva does not touch on how to reconcile the De libero arbitrio with the definition in the De duabus animabus. The definition from the latter perhaps should not be pressed too much—in context, Augustine is explicitly arguing on the basis of common sense, disavowing Platonic metaphysics and the libri obscuri of philosophers—but the solution seems to me to be that Augustine uses voluntas to designate both individual volitions (staying closer to the ordinary meaning of the Latin word) and the faculty of the soul responsible for volitions, with his definition in the De duabus animabus applying to the first sense. Moiseeva in fact makes this distinction between volition and faculty very clearly in her discussion of Confessions 8 at the end of the book (pp. 449-453), but does not apply it earlier (and indeed seems to see no problem in calling voluntas both a mouvement and faculté). Explicitly foregrounding this ambiguity would have been helpful to clarify Augustine’s role in the genesis of the notion of “the will” as a psychic faculty, so foundational for medieval philosophy.
I conclude with a broader issue. Underlying the Dihle-Frede disagreement about Augustine’s place in the history of “the will” is a more substantive philosophical question: does his conception of the will involve some form of indeterminist or libertarian freedom? If, as Frede thought, Augustine closely followed the Stoics—who tried to articulate a basis for moral responsibility that is compatible with universal causal determinism—then the answer is presumably negative. Moiseeva does not face this issue head-on. While she pays lip-service to Augustine’s debt to Stoicism, her formulations often suggest that she sees Augustine as a kind of libertarian.[4] For instance, in her discussion of De libero arbitrio Moiseeva writes: “Le motus volontaire est libre et non-contraint ni de l’extérieur, ni de l’intérieur, car à l’intérieur de l’âme il n’existe pas de force capable de retenir et ou [sic] de diriger le mouvement volontaire” (p. 110). Similarly, she claims that “le mouvement du vouloir est une auto-motion; autrement dit, l’unique source de ce mouvement est la volonté elle-même” (p. 271). Although there are some passages in Augustine that do suggest a view like this,[5] I find it tempting to see in Augustine’s concept of voluntas an amalgam of the Chrysippan idea of assent and the notion of προαίρεσις found in Epictetus. On this picture, the will is a faculty of our mind, shaped by our nature and upbringing and previous choices and experiences and habits (our consuetudo, in Augustine’s vocabulary), that determines what we want—with this mental event of velle being what establishes individual moral responsibility for an action and the justice of divine punishment. This picture does not entail libertarian freedom or the ability to choose between alternate possibilities.
In sum, Moiseeva’s lengthy book leaves open many questions for further exploration. To adapt one of Augustine’s metaphors, Moiseeva deserves credit for taking us up to a forested peak and giving us a glimpse of a wide landscape, populated by lions and dragons of rarely read texts and complex philosophical issues—but she does not quite show us the road leading through them.
Notes
[1] Dihle’s The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (1982) was based on lectures delivered in 1974; Frede’s A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought (2012) was based on lectures delivered in 1997 (BMCR 2011.10.24).
[2] Moiseeva’s remarks about the exact meaning of this important three-word formula (is the genitive subjective or objective?) are brief and obscure (pp. 105-6, cf. 286). The precise phrase is thinly attested before Augustine, appearing first in Cyprian and later (intriguingly, given the chronology of Augustine’s time in Italy) in Ambrosiaster. Ambrose, to whom Confessions 7.3.5 likely alludes, uses slightly different formulations, e.g. voluntate arbitra at De Iacob 1.1.1—the variance is obscured by the French translation of this passage quoted in this book (p. 66). Moiseeva does not go into any of this; it would have been worthwhile to engage with the discussion of the phrase in Sarah Byers, Perception, Sensibility, and Moral Motivation in Augustine (BMCR 2013.10.52), cited in the bibliography.
[3] Here Moiseeva does not take into account the insights of Simon Harrison, Augustine’s Way into the Will (2006), who argues that the concept of voluntas is progressively and deliberately worked out over the course of the conversations in the dialogue (which is far from being a haphazard Flickwerk).
[4] The failure to engage substantively with Suzanne Bobzien’s groundbreaking work on Stoic determinism and compatibilism was a missed opportunity here. As my other notes have suggested, Moiseeva’s treatment of scholarship (especially Anglophone and/or philosophically-minded scholarship) is inadequate. For instance, in her discussion of Augustine’s resolution of the tension between divine foreknowledge and human freedom in De libero arbitrio (pp. 140-144)—the subject of an extensive secondary literature—she cites exactly one article, in French, from 1933. James O’Donnell’s landmark commentary on the Confessions, absent from the bibliography, is mentioned in a single footnote, in a list of editions of the Confessions (p. 426 n.8); Peter White’s more recent commentary on Books 5-9 goes entirely unnoticed.
[5] Notably De diversis quaestionibus 83 8 (discussed by Moiseeva at p. 167). See also the thought experiment of two people aequaliter affecti animo et corpore reacting to the same beautiful body at De civitate Dei 12.6, a star text for the Dihle interpretation.