“Saint Augustine Against the Stoics: On Divine Foreknowledge and the Freedom of the Will”

I am currently rereading two christian classics, written by the same author: Saint Augustine of Hippo. I am going slowly through “Confessions,” written about ca. 400, and “The City of God,” written between ca.413–426. The last time I read both texts when I was working toward my first M.A. degree at the University of Louisville (KY); that was about 16 years ago, I believe.

I have never read anyone so brilliant, captivating, rigid, and eloquent like Saint Augustine, the great North African church father and the most important christian theologian and philosopher who has graced this earth and the Western world. In this post, I would like to share a few statements with you, which I read from “The City of God,” in which Augustine argues energetically and brilliantly for God’s comprehensive foreknowledge and the freedom of the will, concurrently. He was also arguing against Cicero and the Stoic philosophers who denied divine foreknowledge, but championed the possibility of fate to explain the nature of things in the world and how we as volitional agents relate to the future and the events that yet to take place in the time to come.

Notice how Augustine establishes an intimacy between divine omnipresence, divine foreknowledge, and the prayers of God’s people, as well as the choices and actions they voluntarily make, although known by God, without any divine necessity. Also, notice how Augustine refuses to disconnect and thus balance God’s foreknowledge and the freedom of volitional agents, such as human beings. Augustine argues that the eternality of God is intrinsic to his own Being as God and the foreknowledge of God is ontologically a divine attribute. God’s power over death best explains the reality of God as Life and Giver of life as a gift to human beings. Finally, God’s ability to foresee future sins committed by human beings does not necessitate that individuals will actually sin; rather, people will sin in the future lies in their freedom of the will to choose to sin or not to sin. Yet because of God’s comprehensive foreknowledge of the future, he can predict who will sin at a certain point in the future; nonetheless, this divine prediction does not condition future sins of volitional beings. In other words, God freely foresees future events and human beings (and God) freely choose the outcome of the future, concurrently.

“It follows that we need to not be afraid of that necessity which frightened the Stoics into distinguishing various kinds of causes. They sought to free certain causes from necessity while others were subject to it. Among the causes which they wanted free from necessity they reckoned our wills. Obviously, wills could not be free if subject to necessity…
We do not put the life of God and the foreknowledge of God under any necessity when we say that God must live an eternal life and must know all things. Neither do we lessen His power when we say He cannot die or be deceived. This is the kind of inability which, if removed, would make God less powerful than He is. God is rightly called omnipotent, even though He is unable to die and be deceived. We call Him omnipotent because he does whatever He wills to do and suffers nothing that He does not will to suffer. He would not, of course, be omnipotent, if He had to suffer anything against His will. It is precisely because He is omnipotent that for Him some things are impossible.

The conclusion is that we are by no means under compulsion to abandon free choice in favor of divine knowledge, nor need we deny—God forbid!—that God knows the future, as a condition for holding free choice. We accept both. As Christians and philosophers, we profess both—foreknowledge, as a pat of our faith; free choice, as a condition of responsible living. It is hard to live right if one’s faith in God is wrong.

Far be it from us, then, to deny, in the interest of four freedom, the foreknowledge of God by whose power we are—or are to be—free. It follows, too, that laws are not in vain, nor scoldings and encouragements, nor praise and blame. He foresaw that such things should be. Such things have as much value as He foresaw they would have. So, too, prayers are useful in obtaining these favors which He foresaw He would bestow on those who should pray for them. There was justice in instituting rewards and punishments for good and wicked deeds. For, no one sins because God foreknew that he would sin. In fact, the very reason why a man is undoubtedly responsible for his own sin, when he sins, is because He whose foreknowledge cannot be deceived foresaw, not the man’s fate or fortune or whatnot, but that the man himself would be responsible for his own sin. No man sins unless it is his choice; and his choice not to sin, too, God foresaw.”

“Saint Augustine and the Stoics on Divine Foreknowledge and the Freedom of the Will”

I am currently rereading two christian classics, written by the same author: Saint Augustine of Hippo. I am going slowly through “Confessions,” written about ca. 400, and “The City of God,” written between ca.413–426. The last time I read both texts when I was working toward my first M.A. degree at the University of Louisville (KY); that was about 16 years ago, I believe.

I have never read anyone so brilliant, captivating, rigid, and eloquent like Saint Augustine, the great North African church father and the most important christian theologian and philosopher who has graced this earth and the Western world. In this post, I would like to share a few statements with you, which I read from “The City of God,” in which Augustine argues energetically and brilliantly for God’s comprehensive foreknowledge and the freedom of the will, concurrently. He was also arguing against Cicero and the Stoic philosophers who denied divine foreknowledge, but championed the possibility of fate to explain the nature of things in the world and how we as volitional agents relate to the future and the events that yet to take place in the time to come.

Notice how Augustine establishes an intimacy between divine omnipresence, divine foreknowledge, and the prayers of God’s people, as well as the choices and actions they voluntarily make, although known by God, without any divine necessity. Also, notice how Augustine refuses to disconnect and thus balance God’s foreknowledge and the freedom of volitional agents, such as human beings. Augustine argues that the eternality of God is intrinsic to his own Being as God and the foreknowledge of God is ontologically a divine attribute. God’s power over death best explains the reality of God as Life and Giver of life as a gift to human beings. Finally, God’s ability to foresee future sins committed by human beings does not necessitate that individuals will actually sin; rather, people will sin in the future lies in their freedom of the will to choose to sin or not to sin. Yet because of God’s comprehensive foreknowledge of the future, he can predict who will sin at a certain point in the future; nonetheless, this divine prediction does not condition future sins of volitional events. In other words, God freely foresees future events and human beings (and God) freely choose the outcome of the future, concurrently.

“It follows that we need to not be afraid of that necessity which frightened the Stoics into distinguishing various kinds of causes. They sought to free certain causes from necessity while others were subject to it. Among the causes which they wanted free from necessity they reckoned our wills. Obviously, wills could not be free if subject to necessity…
We do not put the life of God and the foreknowledge of God under any necessity when we say that God must live an eternal life and must know all things. Neither do we lessen His power when we say He cannot die or be deceived. This is the kind of inability which, if removed, would make God less powerful than He is. God is rightly called omnipotent, even though He is unable to die and be deceived. We call Him omnipotent because he does whatever He wills to do and suffers nothing that He does not will to suffer. He would not, of course, be omnipotent, if He had to suffer anything against His will. It is precisely because He is omnipotent that for Him some things are impossible.

The conclusion is that we are by no means under compulsion to abandon free choice in favor of divine knowledge, nor need we deny—God forbid!—that God knows the future, as a condition for holding free choice. We accept both. As Christians and philosophers, we profess both—foreknowledge, as a pat of our faith; free choice, as a condition of responsible living. It is hard to live right if one’s faith in God is wrong.

Far be it from us, then, to deny, in the interest of four freedom, the foreknowledge of God by whose power we are—or are to be—free. It follows, too, that laws are not in vain, nor scoldings and encouragements, nor praise and blame. He foresaw that such things should be. Such things have as much value as He foresaw they would have. So, too, prayers are useful in obtaining these favors which He foresaw He would bestow on those who should pray for them. There was justice in instituting rewards and punishments for good and wicked deeds. For, no one sins because God foreknew that he would sin. In fact, the very reason why a man is undoubtedly responsible for his own sin, when he sins, is because He whose foreknowledge cannot be deceived foresaw, not the man’s fate or fortune or whatnot, but that the man himself would be responsible for his own sin. No man sins unless it is his choice; and his choice not to sin, too, God foresaw.”

Reading again through Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: Day 10 (God, the Everlasting Good, and Our True Strength)

“O Lord our God, let the shelter of your wings give us hope. Protect us and uphold us. You will be the Support that upholds us from childhood till the hair on our heads is grey. When you are our strength we are strong, but when our strength is our own we are weak. In you our good abides for ever, and when we turn away from it we turn to evil. Let us come home at last to you, O Lord, for fear that we be lost. For in you our good abides and it has no blemish, since it is yourself. Nor do we fear that there is no home to which we can return. We fell from it; but our home is your eternity and it does not fall because we are away.

Accept my confessions, O Lord. They are a sacrifice offered by my tongue, for yours was the hand that fashioned it and yours the spirit that moved it to acknowledge you. Heal all my bones and let them say Lord, there is none like you.

If a man confesses to you, he does not reveal his utmost thoughts to you as though you did not know them. For the heart may shut itself away, but it cannot hide from your sight. Man’s heart may be hard, but it cannot resist the touch of your hand. Wherever you will, your mercy or your punishment can make it relent, and just as none can hide away from the sun, none can escape your burning heat.

Let my soul praise you, so that it may show its love; and let it avowal of your mercies, so that for these it may praise you. No part of your creation ever ceases to resound in praise of you. Man turns his lips to you in prayer and his spirit praises you. Animals too and lifeless things as well praise you through the lips of all who give them thought. For our souls lean for support upon the things which you have created, so that we may be lifted up to you from our weakness and use the m to help us on our way to you who made them all so wonderfully. And in you we are remade and find true strength.”

Reading again through Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: Day 9 (Man’s Mind is Not Supreme!)

“But I still did not see that the pivot upon which this important matter is the fact that it is all of your marking, almighty God, for you do wonderful deeds as none else. My thoughts ranged only amongst material forms. I defined them in two classes, those which please the eye because they are beautiful in themselves and those which do so because they are properly proportioned in relation to something else. I drew this distinction and illustrated it from material examples. I also gave some thought to the nature of the soul, but my misconception of spiritual things prevented me from seeing the truth, although it forced itself upon my mind if only I would see it. Instead I turned my pulsating mind away from the spiritual towards the material. I considered line and colour and shape, and since my soul had no such visible qualities, I argued that I could not see it.

I loved the peace that virtue brings and hated the discord that comes of vices. From this I concluded that in goodness there was unity, but in evil disunion of some kind. It seemed to me that this unity was the seat of the rational mind and was the natural state of truth and perfect goodness; whereas the disunion consisted of irrational life, which I thought of as a substance, but itself a form of life, although I did not think it had its origins in you, my God, who are the origin of all things. I called the unity a ‘monad,’ a kind of mind without sex, and the disunion a ‘dyad,’ consisting of the anger that leads to crimes of violence and the lust that leads to sins of passion. But I did not know what I was saying, because no one had taught me, and I had not yet found out for myself, that evil is not a substance and man’s mind is not supreme good that does not vary.

Crimes against othet men are committed when the emotions, which spur us to action, are corrupt and rise in revolt without control. Sins of self-indulgence are committed when the soul fails to govern the impulses from it derives bodily pleasure. In the same way, if the rational mind is corrupt, mistaken ideas and false beliefs will poison life. In those days my mind was corrupt. I did not know that if it it was to share in the truth, it must be illumined by another light, because the mind itself is not the essence of truth. For it is you, Lord, that keep the lamp of my hopes still burning and shine on the darkness about me. We have all received something out of your abundance. For you are the true Light which enlightens every soul born into the world, because with you there can be no change, no swerving from your course.”

Reading again through Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: Day 8 (God, the Immutable One, is the Life of souls and the Life of lives)

“Truth! Truth! How the very marrow of my soul within me yearned for it as they dinned it in my ears over and over again! To them it was no more than a name to be voiced or a word to be read in their libraries of huge books. But while my hunger was for you, for Truth itself, these were dishes on which they served me up the sun and the moon, beautiful works of yours but still only your works, not you yourself nor even the greatest of your created things. For your spiritual works are greater than these material things, however brightly they may shine in the sky. But my hunger and thirst were not even for the greatest of your works, but for you, my God, because Truth itself with whom there can be no change, no swerving from your course…

But you, O God whom I love and on whom I lean in weakness so that I may be strong, you are not then sun and the moon and the stars, even though we see these bodies in the heavens; nor are you those other bodies which we do not see in the sky, for you created them and, in your reckoning, they are not even among the greatest of your works. How far, then, must you really be from those fantasies of mine, those imaginary material things which do not exist at all! The images we form in our mind’s eye, when we picture things that really do exist, are far better founded than these inventions; and the things themselves are still more certain than the images we form of them. But you are not these things. Neither are you the soul, which is the life of bodies and, since it gives them life, must be better and more certain than they are themselves. But you are the life of souls, the life of lives. You live, O Life of my soul, because you are life itself, immutable.

My God, you had mercy on me even before I had confessed to you; but I now confess that all this was because I tried to find you, not through the understanding of the mind, by which you meant us to be superior to the beasts, but through the senses of the flesh. Yet you were deeper than my inmost understanding and higher than the topmost height that I could reach.”

Reading again through Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: Day 7 (The Holy Scriptures are Better than the Prose of Cicero!)

“It was my ambition to be a good speaker, for the unhallowed and inane purpose of gratifying human vanity. These prescribed course of study brought me to a work by an author named Cicero, whose writing nearly everyone admires , if not the spirit of it. The title of the book is “Hortensius” and it recommends the reader to study philosophy. It altered my outlook on life. It changed my prayers to you, O Lord, and provided me with new hopes and aspirations. All my empty dreams suddenly lost their charm and my heart began to throb with a bewildering passion for the wisdom of eternal truth. I began to climb out of the depths to which I had sunk, in order to return to you. For I did not use the book as a whetstone to sharpen my tongue. It was not the style of it but the contents which won me over…

The only thing that pleased me in Cicero’s book was his advice not simply to admire one or another of the schools of philosophy, but to love wisdom itself, whatever it might be, and to search for it, pursue it, hold it, and embrace it firmly. These were the words which excited me and set me burning with fire, and the only check to this blaze of enthusiasm was that they made no mention of the name of Christ…

So I made up my mind to examine the holy Scriptures and see what kind of books they were. I discovered something that was at once beyond the understanding of the proud and hidden from the eyes of children. Its gait was humble, but the heights it reached were sublime. It was enfolded in my mysteries, and I was not the kind of man to enter into it or bow my head to follow where it led. But these were not the feelings I had when I first read the Scriptures. To me they seemed quite unworthy of comparison with the stately prose of Cicero, because I had too much conceit to accept their simplicity and not enough insight to penetrate their depths. It is surely true that as the child grows these books grow with him. But I was too much proud to call myself a child. I was inflated with self-esteem, which made me think myself a great man.”

Reading again through Saint Augustine’s “Confessions” : Day 6 (Human Beings Cannot Hide Away from God, the Most Glorious One)

“And now, O Lord my God, now that I ask what pleasure I had in that theft, I find that it had no beauty to attract me. I do not mean beauty of the sort that justice and prudence possess, nor the beauty that is in man’s mind and in his memory and in the life that animates him, nor the beauty of the stars in their allotted places or of the earth and sea, teeming with new life born to replace the old as it passes away. It did not even that the shadowy, deceptive beauty which makes vice attractive–pride, for instance, which is a pretense of superiority, imitating yours, for you alone are God, supreme over all; or ambition, which is only a craving for honour and glory, when you alone are to be honoured before all and you alone are glorious for ever. Cruelty is the weapon of the powerful, used to make others fear them; yet no one is to be feared but God alone, from whose power nothing can be snatched away or stole by any man at any time or place or by any means.

The lustful use caresses to win the love they crave for, yet no caress is sweeter than your charity and no love is more rewarding than the love of your truth, which shines in beauty above all else. Inquisitiveness has all the appearance of a thirst for knowledge, yet you have supreme knowledge of all things. Ignorance too, and stupidity choose to go under the mask of simplicity and innocence, because you are simplicity itself and no innocence is greater than yours. You are innocent even of the harm which overtakes the wicked, for it is the result of their own actions. Sloth poses as the love of peace: yet what certain peace is there besides the Lord? Extravagance masquerades as fullness and abundance: but you are the full, unfailing store of never-dying sweetness. The spendthrift makes a pretense of liberality: but yo are the most generous dispenser of all good. The covetous want many possessions for themselves; you possess all. The envious struggle for preferment: but what is to be preferred before you? Anger demands revenges: but what vengeance is as just as yours? Fear shrinks from any sudden, unwonted danger which threatens the things that it loves, for its only care is safety: but to you nothing is strange, nothing unforeseen. No one can part you from the things that you love, and safety is assured nowhere but in you. Grief eats away its heart for the loss of things which it took pleasure in desiring, because it wants to be like you, from whom nothing can be taken way.

So the soul defiles itself with unchase love when it turns away from and looks elsewhere for things which it cannot find pure and unsullied except by returning to you, All who desert you and set themselves up against you merely copy in a perverse way; but by this very act of imitation they only show that you are the Creator of all nature and, consequently, that there is no place whatever where man may hide away from you.”

Reading again through Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: Day 5 (Honoring and Glorifying God through Reading and Writing, and Thinking and Scholarship)

“Even now I cannot fully understand why the Greek language, which I learned as a child, was so distasteful to me. I loved Latin, not the elementary lessons but those which I studied later under the teachers of literature. The first lessons in Latin were reading, writing, and counting, and they were as much of an irksome imposition as any studies in Greek…But in the later lessons I was obliged to memorize the wanderings of a hero named Aeneas, while in the meantime I failed to remember my own erratic ways. I learned to lament the death of Dido, who killed for love, while all the time, in the midst of these things, I was dying, separated from you, my God and my life, and I shed no tears for my own plight…

This traditional education taught me that Jupiter punishes the wicked with his thunderbolts and yet commits adultery himself. The two roles are quite incompatible. All the same he is represented in this way, and the result is that those who follow his example in adultery can put a bold face on it by making false pretences of thunder…

You, O Lord are my King and my God, and in your service I want to use whatever good I learned as a boy. I can speak and write, read and count, and I want these things to be used to serve you, because when I studied other subjects you checked and forgave me the sins I committed by taking pleasure in such worthless things. It is true that these studies taught me many useful words, but the same worlds can be learnt by studying something that matters, and this is the safe course for a boy to follow….

Grant my prayer, O Lord, and do not allow my soul to wilt under the discipline which you prescribe. Let me not tire of thanking you for your mercy in rescuing me from all my wicked ways, so that you may be sweeter to me than all the joys which used to tempt me; so I that may love you most intensely and clasp your hand with all the power of my devotion; so that you may save me from all temptation until the end of my days.”

Reading again through Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: Day 4 (God, the Infinite Life and the Infinite Being, is One and the Same!)

“I do acknowledge you, Lord of heaven and earth, and I praise you for my first beginnings, although I cannot remember them. But you have allowed men to discover these things about themselves by watching other babies, and also to learn much from what women have to tell. I know that I was a living person at that age, and as I came towards the end of infancy I tried to find signs to convey my feelings to others. Where could such a living creature come from if not from you, O Lord? Can it be that any man has skill to fabricate himself? Or can there be some channel by which we derive our life and our very existence from other source than you? Surely we can only derive them from our Maker, from you, Lord, to whom living and being are not different things, since infinite life and infinite being are one and the same.

For you are infinite and never change. In you ‘today’ never comes to an end: and yet our ‘today’ does come to an end in you, because time, as well as everything else, exists in you. If it did not, it would have no means of passing. And since your years never come to an end, for you they are simply ‘today.’ The countless days of our lives and of our forefathers’ lives have passed by within your ‘today.’ From it they have received their due measure of duration and their very existence. And so it will be with all the other days which are still to come. But you yourself are eternally the same. In your ‘today’ you will make all that is to exist tomorrow and thereafter, and in your ‘today’ you have made all that existed yesterday for ever before.”