St. Augustine: The Purpose of Free Will

God did not give us free will as part of some kind of crapshoot. He gave it to us for a reason, says St. Augustine.

If man is a good, and cannot act rightly unless he wills to do so, then he must have free will, without which he cannot act rightly. We must not believe that God gave us free will so that we might sin, just because sin is committed through free will. It is sufficient for our question, why free will should have been given to man, to know that without it man cannot live rightly. That it was given for this reason can be understood from the following: if anyone uses free will for sinning, he incurs divine punishment. This would be unjust if free will had been given not only that man might live rightly, but also that he might sin. For how could a man justly incur punishment who used free will to do the thing for which it was given? When God punishes a sinner, does He not seem to say, “Why have you not used free will for the purpose for which I gave it to you, to act rightly”? Then too, if man did not have free choice of will, how could there exist the good according to which it is just to condemn evildoers and reward those who act rightly? What was not done by will would be neither evildoing nor right action. Both punishment and reward would be unjust if man did not have free will. Moreover, there must needs be justice both in punishment and in reward, since justice is one of the goods that are from God. Therefore, God must needs have given free will to man. [On Free Choice of the Will, II.I, p. 36; emphasis added]

If God gave us free will with the intention that we should be free to use it to sin, then it would be unjust for him to punish us if we sin, says St. Augustine: for we would only be putting it to one of the uses for which God gave it to us. But this is wrong; God did not give us free will for that purpose. He gave us free will in order that we might freely do that which is good. Consequently when we sin, we abuse the gift that he has given to us, and thereby become subject to just punishment.

Note also that he insists upon what we have seen before. That is, justice in punishing us for sin demands that we have free will: “What was not done by will would be neither evildoing nor right action. Both punishment and reward would be unjust if man did not have free will.” If we lack free will, and if our sins are compelled in some way, then they are not actually sins, properly speaking; it would therefore be unjust to punish them as though we were actually responsible for them. This is why Catholic moral teaching insists that compulsion removes guilt, either partly or completely (depending upon the compulsion).

Lastly, note again that St. Augustine insists upon the reward that is justly due to those who do good. But this would only be just if there is a sense in which our good works may be truly said to be our own, and this cannot be said if we do not have free will. St. Augustine was Catholic; he firmly believed that our good deeds merit a reward from God (although, of course, they are completely inadequate as a means by which we may receive initial justification; we may only receive that by means of God’s grace alone, as we have seen many times).

St. Augustine: The requirements of justice

On Free Choice of the Will begins with a question (it is framed largely as a dialogue between Augustine and his friend Evodius).

Evodius: Tell me, please, whether God is not the cause of evil.

Of course, as St. Augustine points out, this question is silly for the Christian.

But if you know or believe that God is good (and it is not right to believe otherwise), God does not do evil. Also, if we admit that God is just (and it is sacrilege to deny this), He assigns rewards to the righteous and punishments to the wicked—punishments that are indeed evil for those who suffer them. Therefore, if no one suffers punishment unjustly (this too we must believe, since we believe that the universe is governed by divine Providence), God is the cause of the second kind of evil, but not of the first.

It’s not that God causes or does evil in an absolute sense; that would be heretical (as he says in the first sentence) because God is good. There is a relative sense in which he might be said to do “evil,” though, if we are talking about the punishment of the wicked, says our author: the evil man considers punishment to be an evil thing that happens to him. In point of fact, though, Augustine reminds us that God’s justice demands that he punish the wicked and reward the righteous.

Would it be just if God punished the wicked but did not reward the righteous? It seems not, in Augustine’s view. The complaint that might be offered: “You punish them for doing evil, but you do not reward us for doing well.” Some might pretend that no one does good, but the Bible (Mt. 25:31-46) does not seem to bear them out.

Now the book is on free will, and so of course we ought to expect St. Augustine to address its relation to justice.

[E]ach evil man is the cause of his own evildoing. If you doubt this, then listen to what we said above: evil deeds are punished by the justice of God. It would not be just to punish evil deeds if they were not done willfully. [Emphasis added]

God’s justice demands that he punishes evil deeds, but if we are compelled to do them, it simply cannot be said that we are liable for them.

[Quotations above taken from Book I of On Free Choice of the Will, p. 3]

We see the same thing in Book II, chapter I:

Both punishment and reward would be unjust if man did not have free will. [p. 36]

The fact that God foreknows that we will sin does not mean that we lack free will. St. Augustine offers additional arguments about this in the book, but for our purposes here it is sufficient to remark that what we’ve said above applies here as well. If God’s foreknowledge constitutes a compulsion whereby our free will is removed, he could not justly punish the wicked for sin nor reward the righteous for good.

[L]et us acknowledge both that it is proper to His foreknowledge that nothing should escape His notice and that it is proper to His justice that a sin, since it is committed voluntarily, should not go unpunished by His judgment, just as it was not forced to be committed by His foreknowledge.

[Book III, chapter IV; p. 95]

It might be worth pointing out what we’ve seen repeatedly already (and what we see again above) concerning St. Augustine’s views on the reward that awaits the righteous: in short, there is one. He constantly refers to it as a reward for good deeds done. Although he doesn’t use the word in what we’ve seen above, he steadfastly recognizes this reward as something that one merits by his deeds.