Saint Augustine is among the most influential theologians in all Christendom. Google him to find out just how deeply his theology has impacted the Church across time and space.

In this two part series of essays, written to fulfil the taught portions of the Master of Arts degree programme (2015) in Theology and Religion at Durham University, UK, I unpack the evolution of his thinking.

In part two, I examine his highly intricate explorations of human free will in relation to the darkening effects of sin and argue for a path forward that affirms the integrity of both.

My supervisor, Professor Robert Song, was probably too busy handling the administrative duties of the Masters’ Programme that year to work closely with me, but I prefer a hands-off management approach anyway. It gave me freedom to focus on an aspect of Augustine’s thought that intrigued me: his view on free will, which evolves over time, and has been used to legitimate perspectives on divine providence later in history that he probably would not have endorsed.

Working through the vast literature on Augustine was daunting but ultimately rewarding. For my efforts, I received distinctions for these essays.

A Proposal for the Coherence of Augustine’s Theological Anthropology via the Will’s Culpability in Sin

The coherence of Saint Augustine’s theological anthropology, which encompasses his related doctrines of sin, the nature and function of the rational soul, and free will, has been much discussed among theologians and philosophers. It has often been observed that as Augustine’s life circumstances change, from refuting Manichean thought to refuting Pelagian thought, he alters his high view of the power of the rational soul, developed from his Neo-Platonism and the free choice of will that it possesses, such that, sometime after 395-7, he diminishes the role of reason in apprehending divine truths and the will to turn away from sin. Consequently, without divine grace, humanity has no way of knowing God or turning from sin. Some philosophers and theologians, typically committed to the methods and categories of Anglo-American philosophy, have argued that this shift in his thought represents a fatal inconsistency in his theological anthropology, an inconsistency he never found a solution to. [1] Others have been quick to argue that categorizing Augustine’s thought in such a manner would only serve to obscure some of his deeper insights into the nature of the human person, which, like other theologians throughout history, have tended to defy the methods of secular inquiry because they do not share the same assumptions. This essay situates itself in the latter stream and will examine Augustine’s later works within the interpretive framework of his understanding of sin and culpability, which can then be used as an axiomatic key to interpreting those works on the diminishing of reason and will. In so doing, this essay hopes to propose a viable way of affirming the will’s culpability in sin even in his later works, rendering Augustine’s theological anthropology coherent across the shift in his thought.

Early in his life, Augustine had been attracted to the moral dualism of the Manicheans, who believed that the human soul is a fragment of the divine and is entrapped in the body, in the material realm which is evil, and which seeks liberation by ‘obtaining knowledge of itself and of the truth’. This belief system ‘appealed to his intellectual vanity’ and ‘offered him a path to God by the exercise of his reason’ (De Ut. Cred. 2). It was a far more stimulating alternative than his encounter with the Old Latin Bible, which he found to be ‘crude, badly written, and rather vulgar’ (Conf. 3.5.9). However, the problem of evil in the Manichean intellectual system, the logical extension of which relegated the good God to impotence, was a problem that continued to trouble him (Conf. 7.2.3-3.4). His encounter with the well-known Manichee Faustus at 382 in Carthage revealed that ‘his knowledge of philosophy and the liberal arts […] was of a very elementary kind and fell far behind his winning eloquence’ (Conf. 5.6.11). His moving to Milan to take up a post as master of rhetoric in 386 and coming across Neo-Platonism in the works of Plotinus and Porphyry, which were translated by Marius Victorinus (De Civ. Dei 2.8.1-4), the sermons of Bishop Ambrose, and his allegorical approach to scriptural interpretation, [2] finally enabled him to see Christianity as an intellectually respectable belief system and lay his Manichee past behind (De Civ. Dei 2.8.9). He could now see God as omnipotent against evil, and evil as merely a privation of good (Conf.3.7.12) effected by the free will of the rational soul that God has graciously gifted to human beings (Proclus’ 28th Proposition; De Nat. et Grat. 1.3.3). [3] These furnished him with the building blocks with which he formulated his Neo-Platonic theological anthropology. Concerning reason, he believed that ‘in man there seems to be a higher faculty still, which is capable of perceiving, as animals cannot, what is eternal and changeless’ (De Lib. Arb.2.3.8.25-2.5.14.56; see also De Ani. Quant. 13.22; De Gen. contra Mani. 2.2; De Gen. ad Litt. 12). [4] Concerning the existence of free will, he believed that it is self-evident (De Lib. Arb. 1.12.25) in part because it offers to locate the origin of evil and sin in the arbitrary freedom of the human will rather than in any efficient cause from God (De Lib. Arb. 1.11.24), [5] which serves to vindicate God from evil.  

In one of his earlier autobiographical works, Confessiones, occasioned in part to quell suspicions among Christians in Numidia—where, after coming back to Africa from Milan, he was talent-spotted and marked for the episcopate by bishop Valerius—that he no longer held Manichean beliefs and was no longer the lustful youth he had been, Augustine reflects rather extensively on the topic of sin. [6] For him, all sin results from seeking ‘pleasure, sublimity, and truth not in God but in his creatures, in [one]self and other created beings’ (Conf.1.20.31; Rom. 1). This manifests itself in pride (Conf. 1.1.1), the vanity of life (Conf. 1.13.20) and sheer irrationality (Conf. 2.4.9). Against the Manicheans, he argued that evil is merely a privation of good (Conf. 3.7.12). It is people, not some outside force, who bring evil unto themselves which then corrupts their nature and perpetuates it by habitual sin (Conf. 3.8.16; Rom. 1.26). For Augustine, the ability to sin, in Vorster’s words, issues from ‘the perverse manifestation of our godlike faculty of freedom. His concept of original sin, which has been hugely influential in Western Christianity, also finds articulation in his Confessiones. He points out that it is ‘in that first man who first sinned [Adam], in whom we all died and from whom we were all born into a condition of misery’ (Conf.10.20.29; 9.13.34; 5.9.16). Elsewhere, he argues that it is through sexual concupiscence, the over-powering of an originally good desire, that original sin is biologically transmitted from parent to child, bringing both guilt and corruption to all humanity. [7] He justified this from his straightforward interpretation of the Latin translation of Romans 5.12, [8] derived possibly from his adoption of the interpretive logic of Ambrosiaster, a scriptural commentator with whom he became acquainted in 395. [9]

Augustine’s core concept of sin seems to have remained stable between that shift in his thought at 395-7. However, the things that legitimated his concept of sin, the rational soul and the free will that it possesses, became severely diminished after that shift. The reason, paradoxically enough, was because of sin. The external catalyst that motivated this shift was the teaching of an ascetic moralist named Pelagius and his disciples Caelestius, Julian of Eclanum, and Rufinus of Syria. They held that ‘man […] was made good by a good God. […] His faults are therefore his own responsibility, and he can cure them by effort without divine assistance’. Therefore, even though they did not deny that humans can sin [10] they denied the doctrine of original sin and its bringing inherited guilt and corruption onto all humanity. This is because they held that it was ‘unacceptable to require individuals to perform actions that they cannot in fact perform’ (Pelagius Ad Demetriadem 2). Even though Pelagius had the same Latin translation of Romans 5.12, he interpreted it as teaching that ‘sin spread to others because [Adam] set a bad example at the outset’, not because an irrevocable change took place in his nature. [11] Consequently, because of the pressures of the Pelagian controversy,

a controversy in which he will find his earlier words being cited against him—he presents these views in a manner that is austere and uncompromising. So damaging are the effects of the original sin that the human will is free only to sin. Thus, the human race is comprised of a massa damnata, out of which God, in a manner inscrutable to us, has predestined a small number to be saved. [12]

These changes are readily observable in a number of his late works including De Civitate Dei and De Libero Arbitrio.

In 410, Rome, having become a Christian empire because of Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 and Theodosius the First’s ruling that Christianity be the official religion of the empire toward the end of that same century, fell to the Goths. This presented Augustine with the challenge of explaining the downfall of Rome under Christianity, which he readily took up in De Civitate Dei. In it, he argued that the City of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, was not a present political reality, but an eschatological spiritual reality unrelated to the rise or fall of Rome. Within this bleak apologetic context, he reminds readers that even though the rational soul remains ‘the most Godlike part of’ the human person, [13] post-lapsarian rationality cannot seek after the things of God and turn away from sin. He points out that in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, the sins that he lists, which include ‘devotion to idols, sorcery, enmity, quarrelsomeness, jealousy, animosity, party intrigue, envy’ are not faults of the flesh but of the mind (De Civ. Dei 3.14.2; Gal. 5.19-21). He argues that ‘it is not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful; it was the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible’ (De Civ. Dei 3.14.3). He points out that these sins are predominant in the Devil who is without flesh (De Civ. Dei 3.14.3). By arguing that sin arises from the rational soul, turning the will to seek after earthly as opposed to heavenly things, it is no stretch of logic for Augustine to conclude that from the sin of Adam, all humanity became bound to ‘live like the beasts, under the sentence of death, should be the slave of his desires, and destined after death for eternal punishment’ (De Civ. Dei 3.12.22). Because of this, Augustine’s concept of God’s foreknowledge, present in his Confessiones (Conf. 13.23.33) and also in his De Civitate Dei, develops into a kind of fore-ordination wherein, out of the mass of helpless humanity, ‘God also foresaw that by his grace a community of godly men was to be called to adoption as his sons’ (De Civ. Dei 3.12.23; 5.21.12).             

This apparent change in his understanding of human free will, because of his strengthening of the effects of the rational soul’s fall into sin, is most clearly observable in his three-part book De Libero Arbitrio, written across that dividing shift in his thought. The first book, which he began to compose in 388 ‘sought to counter the Manichee’s dualistic explanation of evil, and to demonstrate that evil is not caused by God or inherent in matter, but is wholly attributable to man’s misuse of free will’ (De Lib. Arb. 1.16.34, 1.12.26). However, in the course of Augustine’s own ‘reflection on the question of evil, man’s sinfulness, and the fall of Adam’, in books two and three, which were completed in 397, ‘it now appears that Adam’s sin is the only instance in which man’s will can be said to have acted with entire freedom; his descendants have their vitiated wills blinded, fettered, and hampered as a consequence of his sin and can never again act with complete freedom’ (De Lib. Arb.3.18.52-19.54). [14] These views became further entrenched in his other late works including De Correptione et Gratia, De Dono Perseverantiae, De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio and De Peccatorum Meritis as a result of his sustained engagement with Pelagianism. [15] Like many others, Babcock argues that Augustine’s ‘account of moral agency in evil remains flawed’ because he traded—in modern philosophical terms—a libertarian conception of free will for a compatibilist one while still wishing to retain the notion of moral culpability. In rejecting the libertarian free will that he held in his earlier days (De Daub. An. 7.9-8.10), Babcock argues that he only had two options available to him: the option of saying that evil arises as a random event un-attributable to any will, or else to say that God has arbitrarily caused some to become unable to refrain from sinning by withholding his grace. [16] Both these options would render the notion of moral culpability superfluous.

To defend this essay’s thesis against this commonly held view, the notion of the human agent’s culpability in sin has to be shown to be axiomatic for Augustine in his later works as well. Once that culpability has been shown, a new way of looking at his notion of the freedom of the will, which defies modern philosophical categorization, can then be proposed as a means to viewing his larger theological anthropology as consistent across that shift in his thought. The notion that sin has a penal character (De Lib. Arb. 1.11.22), which is to say that ‘the soul’s turn from the greater to the lesser good’ is ‘self brought’ and therefore attributable to the agent, is present alongside the notion of it being a ‘penalty justly imposed by God’ [17] throughout his late works as well. Early in his Confessiones, which was written between 397-400, he expresses disdain for the fatalism in the astronomy of his time because ‘they make a man not in the least responsible for his faults, […] so that the blame lies with the Creator and orderer of the heaven and stars’ (Conf.4.3.4). Instead he argues that God, who is just, will ‘render every man according to his works’ (Conf. 4.3.4; Rom. 2.6). He affirms this notion that humans are responsible for their actions again in his monologue where he berates his past self for believing that ‘it is not we who sin, but some alien nature which sins in us. It flattered my pride to be free of blame and, when I had done something wrong, not to make myself confess to you that you might heal my soul’ (Conf. 5.10.18). Within this interpretive framework, the rest of his discussions of sin in this book, like his pride, vanity of life, concupiscence, and the meaninglessness of his shameful actions can be seen as the outworking of his own stubborn but free will, thereby invoking his just punishment from God if he had chosen not to repent (Conf. 2.3.7; 1.20.31; 2.4.9).

In his De Civitate Dei, Augustine writes that evil is manifested when ‘the will leaves the higher and turns to the lower. […] It is the will itself, because it is created, that desires the inferior thing in a perverted and inordinate manner’ (De Civ. Dei 3.12.6). He writes that the condition of human beings, even after Adam, ‘was such that if they continued in perfect obedience they would be granted the immortality of angels and an eternity of bliss, […] whereas if disobedient they would be justly condemned to the punishment of death’ (De Civ. Dei 3.13.1). In his 19th book, he juxtaposes the beliefs of the pagan philosophers with Christians and argues that these philosophers have mistakenly held that ‘the Supreme Good lies in themselves’ rather than in a supreme God (De Civ. Dei 5.19.4). Toward the end, Augustine continues to affirm human agency and culpability when he notes that ‘in this life, therefore, justice in each individual exists when God rules and man obeys, when the mind rules the body and reason governs the vices even when they rebel’ (De Civ. Dei 5.19.27). When he contends that no one will know which city they belong to until the end, this is so that believers will be prevented from becoming complacent and will continue to strive to live a life that is worthy of the righteousness that had been graciously given to them. Therefore, what, at face value, seems to be an articulation of his doctrine of unconditional election, turns out to be an affirmation of genuine human free will and culpability (De Civ. Dei 5.20.27). At this late juncture, Augustine does not relinquish his notion of human culpability and contingency. This fact works against the commonly held view that his shift to a compatibilist position on free will concerning sin and election meant that human culpability no longer mattered in his theological anthropology which then made it unintelligible. [18] Nevertheless, critics have rightly pointed out that the problem of finding a legitimate way of affirming culpability in his new theological frame remains. However, the problem remains only because some scholars insist on imposing a modern philosophical framework on Augustine’s understanding of the freedom of the will, relegating his later thought to a compatibilist frame, wherein free will is simply re-defined to be compatible with determinism. Conversely, a closer look at Augustine’s later thoughts on the freedom of the will on its own terms will help tease out some of its subtleties that can open a path to finding coherence in his concurrent affirmation of sin’s culpability with its damaging effects on reason and the will.

To this end, Simon Harrison’s monograph on Augustine’s Way into the Will is particularly instructive. The main purpose of his monograph is to forward the contention that ‘the commonplace [assumption] that Augustine changed his mind in the course of its composition [of De Libero Arbitrio] is […] unfounded’, and that ‘it is the form and structure of On Free Choice of the Will that give philosophical content to Augustine’s theory of will’. He seeks to do this by showing that

Augustine approaches the problem of free will as a problem of knowledge: how do I know that I am free? It turns out that, for Augustine, the fact of the matter about free will is subjective, rather than objective. This subjective knowledge is epistemologically fundamental. It is not simply an illusory belief that may be undercut by a third-person, objective, account, nor an appearance that can be undermined by a deeper reality. Augustine’s ‘way into the will’ therefore is the essence of this ‘theory of will’.     

He argues that the anchoring theological frame of the whole work should be taken from the dialogue between Augustine and Evodius in the first book. For him, having a will is self-evident but acknowledging that one has one is a subjective choice (De Lib. Arb.1.12.25). [19] The notion that God has given his creatures free choice of the will is reiterated at the beginning of book two as being a proposition that Evodius now accepts. For Augustine, his dialogue suggests that ‘unless Evodius wants to know, he is just not going to know’. The question remaining is why Augustine shifts his language of the will from facilitas to difficultas in the third book (De Lib. Arb. 1.12.25; 3.18.51). Simon argues that the shift serves merely to emphasize the ‘punitive character of our condition. It is revealed precisely in the difficulties of acting well in this life that has so impressed the readers of book 3, and so eluded readers of book 1’. [20]   

Therefore, for Simon, Augustine’s approach to free will in De Libero Arbitrio is both self-evident and also deeply subjective. It is only teased out in a dialogue between Evodius and Augustine on freedom, responsibility, and knowledge. He concludes by writing that

what Augustine’s ‘way in’ to the will reveals is an account of human freedom and responsibility that is grounded in a deep notion of subjectivity. Thinking about (free) will is not like deciding a contest between, say, ‘compatibilism’ and ‘libertarianism’, or between ‘God’s grace’ and ‘free choice of the will’—as if we were privy to the perspective of an umpire on a tennis court. It is an exploration of what it is to think about and to understand anything at all, given the only point of view that is open to us as our starting point—that of the first-person singular’. [21]        

This way of looking at Augustine’s understanding of the will, not as a monolithic, objective doctrine, but one that is, by its nature, subjective and person-dependent, allows him to hold in tension the propositions of sin’s darkening the soul’s rational abilities and will, and, at the same time humanity’s culpability for their sinful actions. This approach to understanding Augustine’s thought is echoed in Charles Mathewes’ article on Augustinian anthropology. His central thesis is that ‘a properly Augustinian anthropology understands human agency as always already related to both God and the world; thus, it chastens modern predilections for absolute autonomy while still affirming the subject’s importance’. He points out that Augustine’s view transcends the modern epistemological conundrum between “internalism” and “externalism”. He argues that, for Augustine, knowledge comes from a kind of ontological participation in God where humans are responsible for holding true beliefs about reality and therefore about God because that knowledge is readily available to them. [22] In Mendelson’s words, Augustine seeks ‘to defend the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom by arguing that the free exercise of the will is among the events foreknown by God and that such foreknowledge in no way detracts from our culpability for our acts of willing’ (De Lib. Arb.3.3-4; De Civitate Dei 5.9). [23] These scholars have shown that he is in a way able to do so by anchoring his later works in the axiomatic theological frame that humans must have free will, however severely damaged, so that they can be culpable for their sins and so that God is not the author of evil (De Lib. Arb. 2). [24]

As this essay has shown, scholars who have been more sensitive to Augustine’s approach to sin and will have offered alternative models that can render his theological anthropology coherent across the shift in his thought. Eleonore Stump, a philosopher of religion at Saint Louis University, characterises his view as a kind of ‘modified libertarianism’. [25] Mathewes and Simon Harrison would probably hold to a kind of “open compatibilism” which would reject the notion that God causally determines sin, but would affirm that humanity is somehow self-condemned such that they are, of their own free will, unable to obtain knowledge of God without his grace. Augustine’s theological anthropology also finds common ground, however anachronistically, with the 16th century Jesuit theologian Luis De Molina who argued for the compatibility of human free will with divine causality through his doctrine of middle knowledge, which posits that God knows all true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom logically prior to his creating the world, thereby enabling him to plan his desired world down to the tiniest detail, yet not contravene an iota of the free will of his creatures. [26] There is no doubt that the tenor of Augustine’s work shifted as a result of a number of factors: (1) his possible rediscovery of a literal approach to interpreting the scriptures through Ambrosiaster’s commentaries, (2) his engagements with the Pelagians sometime later, (3) and the context of Rome’s fall under Christian rule. However, this does not warrant the belief that his views became unintelligible. Far from contending that God becomes the only efficient cause in his theological anthropology, Augustine’s very understanding of sin’s penal character and the free choice of the will that it pre-supposes, which remain axiomatic in his late works, necessitates the holding of the concept of free will and the binding effects of sin on the rational soul in tension in his thinking. His inability to articulate clearly how this tension can be satisfactorily resolved does not have to be understood as a fundamental flaw in his theological anthropology, but a capitulation to the fact that all knowledge is necessarily subjective, since he affirms that human subjects are always the ones who are doing the thinking. When this is paired with his belief that the mind’s participation in God’s truth has become darkened by sin, readers can begin to understand the nuances in his theological anthropology, which can be encapsulated by his belief that ‘for now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face’ (Conf. 8.1.1; 1 Cor. 13.12).       

Endnotes

1. See for example William S. Babcock, ‘Augustine on Sin and Moral Agency’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 16 (1988)
2. Carol Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 8, 7, 10, 12.
3. G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 46, 12, 19, 17, 30, 38.
4. In Augustine’s view, ‘as a spiritual entity, the soul is superior to the body, and it is the province of the soul to rule the body’, Michael Mendelson, ‘Saint Augustine’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta.   
5. N. Vorster, ‘Calvin’s Modification of Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin’, In die Skriflig 44, Supplement, 3 (2010), p. 73. Evans writes that ‘there is no difficulty here if we lodge the original sin in the body and say that Adam was physically altered; it is easy then to see how sin must pass from Adam to all men by natural descent, but Augustine had demonstrated that sin begins in the soul. The will is the only source of evil, and the will is a faculty of the mind not of the body. Original sin must therefore affect the will so that it wills evil; from nowhere else can sin proceed’, Evans, Augustine on Evil, p. 124.
6. Henry Chadwick, ‘Introduction’, in Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. xi-xii.    
7. Vorster, ‘Calvin’s Modification’, pp. 76, 71, 77.
8. The Latin translation reads: ‘Per unum hominem intravit in mundem et per peccatum mors, et ita in omnes hominess pertransiit, in quo omnes peccaverunt’. Conversely, the Greek translation reads ‘Διὰ τοῦτο ὥσπερ δι’ ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου ἡ ἁμαρτία εἰς τὸν κόσμον εἰσῆλθεν καὶ διὰ τῆς ἁμαρτίας ὁ θάνατος, καὶ οὕτως εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους ὁ θάνατος διῆλθεν, ἐφ’ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον’. Note that a more accurate translation of the last phrase should be ‘because all sinned’ rather than ‘in whom all sin’. Vorster writes that ‘This mistake casts serious doubts upon Augustine’s doctrine on the transmission of sin’, Vorster, ‘Calvin’s Modification’, p. 77.
9. See Ernesto Bonaiuti, ‘The Genesis of St. Augustine’s Idea of Original Sin’, Harvard Theological Review, 10 (1917), p. 169. Bonaiuti’s argument is also substantiated by Augustine’s adoption of Ambrosiaster’s metaphor of “massa peccati” in his writings.
10. Evans, Augustine on Evil, pp. 117, 126.
11. Carol Harrison provides a contextual explanation for the origin and popularity of the Pelagian position: ‘in an age when Christianity was the religion of the State, and therefore of anyone who sought social standing and respectability, Pelagius’s teaching was welcomed as a means to revive ‘authentic’ Christianity and to identify true Christians or integri Christiani in contradistinction to nominal adherents for whom the faith was something they happened upon through marriage to a Christian or through professional advancement’, Harrison, Christian Truth, p. 103.
12. Mendelson, ‘Saint Augustine’.
13. Evans, Augustine on Evil, p. 30
14. Harrison,Christian Truth, pp. 85, 86. ‘To paraphrase the account of the retractationes,lib.arb. was written out of discussion held by Augustine and his companions in Rome. The second and third books were completed after Augustine’s return to Africa during his period as a presbyter’, Simon Harrison, Augustine’s Way into the Will (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 18-19.
15. Evans, Augustine on Evil, p. 171
16. Babcock, Augustine on Sin, pp. 28, 28.
17. Babcock, Augustine on Sin, p. 38.
18. A progression of objections might go like this: ‘If sinning is beyond our control, how can we be responsible for it? If the purpose of sin is to glorify Christ, how would causally determined sinners be able to appreciate that glorification without also being causally determined to do so (unconditional election)? If that glorification is only meant for the Godhead, why create humans, or a world at all?’
19. He argues that ‘this undeniability (unimpugnability) will hold for the will throughout lib.arb. […] The “will” is now known as a condition for knowledge. Without it I am not going to know anything. There can be, then, no theory (nothing knowable) that can take away this fundamental knowledge of my will. No theory of volitions, mental causation, no theory of rational choice, of sub-rational drive, no theory of action, liberty, or determinism can cancel out this knowledge of the will reached at 1.12.25’, Simon Harrison, Augustine’s Way into the Will, p. 116.  
20. Simon Harrison, Augustine’s Way into the Will, pp. vii, 69-70, 95-97, 115, 127.  
21. Simon Harrison, Augustine’s Way into the Will, pp. 151, 142.
22. Charles T. Mathewes, ‘Augustinian Anthropology: Interior intimo meo’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 27 2 (1999), pp. 196, 200-201.
23. Concerning ‘Augustine’s conversion in book 8. […] All other intentional explanations are excluded. […] He takes the command “tolle, lege” as if it is addressed to him, and he takes the words of St Paul as a command addressed directly to himself: “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts”. He takes them “as if they were addressed to him”. There is, of course, no small dramatic irony, in that they are addressed to him. The exclusion, however, of all other possible external agency, shows how the conversion is both entirely “up to” Augustine (and at the same time, fully the work of God)’, Simon Harrison, Augustine’s Way into the Will, p. 110.
24. In Simon Wei’s article on sexual dreams, he also points out that in his De Genesi Ad Litteram and De Bono Coniguali, Augustine held that the dreamer cannot be morally accountable for his or her sexual dream because ‘they were unable to curb the occurrence of immoral dreams’, and also because the dreamer, ‘while dreaming of sexual sins, did not actually commit them’, Simon Wei, ‘The Absence of Sin in Sexual Dreams in the Writings of Augustine and Cassian’, Vigiliae Christianae, 66 (2012), 365.  
25. See Eleonore Stump, ‘Augustine on Free will’, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine ed. by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). ‘Historical scholars familiar with contemporary philosophical discussions of free will thus tend to ask whether Augustine is a compatibilist or a libertarian. However, these two positions don’t exhaust the possibilities. Stump also locates a third position: “modified libertarianism” which she finds more helpful for reading Augustine’, Simon Harrison, Augustine’s Way into the Will, p. 8.
26. To read a modern defence of the Molinist position see Stanley Gundry, ed., Four Views on Divine Providence (Zondervan: 2011).

Bibliography

• Augustinus, Aurelius, Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum libri quattuor  
• ——— , Confessiones libri tredecim, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
• ——— , De Bono Coniguali
• ——— , De Ciuitate dei libri uiginti duo, trans. by Henry Bettenson (England: Penguin Books, 2003) 
• ——— , De correptione et gratia liber unus
• ——— , De dono perseverantiae liber ad Prosperum et Hilarium secundus
• ——— , De duabus animabus liber unus
• ——— , De Gratia et libero arbitrio liber unus
• ——— , De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim
• ——— , De Genesi aduersus Manicheos libri duo
• ——— , De libero arbitrio libri tres
• ——— , De natura et gratia liber unus 
• ——— , De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptism paruulorum ad Marcellinum libri tres
• ——— , De quantitatae animae
• ——— , De trinitate libri quindecim
• ——— , De utilitate credendi liber unus
• ——— , Enarrationes in Psalmos
• ——— , Epistulae 166
• ——— , Retractationum libri duo
• Babcock, William S., ‘Augustine on Sin and Moral Agency’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 16 (1988)
• Bonaiuti, Ernesto, ‘The Genesis of St. Augustine’s Idea of Original Sin’, Harvard Theological Review, 10 (1917)
• Chapman, John, ‘Fathers of the Church’, The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 6 (New York:  Robert Appleton Company, 1909) <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06001a.htm> [accessed 15 January 2015]
• Drever, Matthew, ‘Redeeming Creation: Creatio ex nihilo and the Imago Dei in Augustine’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 15 (2013)
• Evans, G. R., Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
• ——— , ‘Introduction’, in The City of God, trans. by Henry Bettenson (England: Penguin Books, 2003)
• Freeman, Charles, A New History of Early Christians (London: Yale University Press, 2009)
• Gundry, Stanley, Four Views on Divine Providence (Zondervan: 2011)
• Hampson, Peter J., and Johannes Hoff, ‘Whose Self? Which Unification? Augustine’s anthropology and the psychology-theology debate’, New Blackfriars, 91 1035 (2010)
• Heans, Simon, ‘Original Sin or Original Sinfulness? A Comment’, The Heythrop Journal, (2013)
• Harrison, Carol, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
• Harrison, Simon, Augustine’s Way into the Will: The Theological and Philosophical Significance of De libero arbitrio (Oxford University Press, 2007)
• Jensen, Matt, The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther and Barth on homo incurvatus in se (London: T&T Clark, 2006)
• Kaniaru, Antony, ‘Rethinking Rationality: Theological Anthropology in light of Profound Cognitive Impairment, Relationality, Embodiment and Personhood’, Durham E Theses <http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/6921/>.
• Mathewes, Charles T., ‘Augustinian Anthropology: Interior intimo meo’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 27 2 (1999)
• Mendelson, Michael, ‘Saint Augustine’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta, <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/augustine/>. [accessed 15 January 2015]
• Novum Testamentum Graece, 28^th edition, ed. by Barbara and Kurt Aland, Johannes          Karavidopoulos, Carlo M. Martini and Bruce M. Metzger (Hendrickson Publishers: 2013)
• Otten, Willemien, ‘In the Shadow of the Divine Negative Theology and Negative Anthropology in Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena’, Heythrop Journal, 40 4 (1999)
• ‘Pelagius’, Encyclopaedia Britannica,            <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/449072/Pelagius>. [accessed 15 January 2015]
• Stump, Eleonore, ‘Augustine on Free will’, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine ed. by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
• TeSelle, Eugene, Augustine the Theologian (London: Wipf & Stock, 2002)
• The Works of Saint Augustine (2nd Release) (Charlottesville, Virginia, USA: InteLex Corporation, 2001)
• Vorster, N., ‘Calvin’s Modification of Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin’, In die Skriflig 44, Supplement, 3 (2010)
• Wei, Simon Lienyueh, ‘The Absence of Sin in Sexual Dreams in the Writings of Augustine and Cassian’, Vigiliae Christianae, 66 (2012)
• Weithman, Paul J., ‘Augustine and Aquinas on Original Sin and the Function of Political  Authority’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 30 (1992)
• Wills, Garry, Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives: 1999)