Saint Augustine on the Soul, Freedom, and Evil

The Encounter with God

The encounter with God is as follows:

a) Overall: Follow these steps: First, aversion to the outside world; second, search within; third, transcending, jump to the higher.

b) In particular, for power, it would be:

• Memory: "Memory is the power with which the soul is present to itself and yet is aware of the being of God." Memory is either of the sensible or intelligible. The memory is the act of memory, but the memory in St. Augustine also considers this: what I am and what God is.
• Knowledge: Types of knowledge: sensible and intelligible, the latter being the only authentic, and to reach it you must go through a series of steps (aside from the truth).
• Will: The Christian message is love, priority will, distancing of Greek intellectualism. The will is the faculty by which man can love the good and happiness. For him, man is made to be happy. Full happiness, however, can only be achieved if you love the highest good, which is God.
• Love: Has a strength: we love the lower or higher. The love of the bottom is a principle of love; this love is not wrong if it is considered as a first step for the love of the Superior and the love of God. But if we stop at the creatures, then we commit sin.

Book XI

Man is made to love God; animals and minerals have carnal life, and plants cannot love.

Aspects of the Soul

In the soul, two parts are distinguished: the lower rate and higher reason. The inferior seeks knowledge of sensitive truths (science), and the top reason deals with the intelligible, the eternal, and immutable (wisdom).

Human Freedom

The problem of freedom is analyzed from two aspects:

a) Human freedom and divine foreknowledge: Augustine argues that although God is omniscient (knows everything), it can be maintained that man is free.

b) Human freedom and evil: Evil is not a substance; it exists in creation as a defect of goodness, but God has not created it.

Source of Evil

Every created being is good in its origin but flawed by nature; created is mutable, hence, imperfect. Christianity places man in an attitude of responsibility before history, and reappearing, a clear difference with the Greek intellectualism. For this, evil was due to ignorance. Augustine explains that good and evil reside in the will, in human choice. In St. Augustine, there is a predominance of the will to knowledge (voluntarism), but the will to achieve what really makes him happy requires the aid of divine grace that will make her happy. Man's will is certainly weakened by original sin; this desire is in a state of free will. Moral evil depends on the misuse of our freedom. St. Augustine says that all men have present moral principles, just as the human mind can know the ideas of divine illumination. The will meet only with the help of God, although he may reject it. The cause of evil, then, must not be sought in God, but will be away from it. This evil is moral evil, alongside this, there are other ways of evil. However, in religious thought, there is a question: Is not God in charge, ultimately, of the existence of evil? St. Augustine found in Plotinus the solution to this question: evil is not being, but the privation of being.

Summary of Evil at Three Levels

1. From the standpoint of metaphysical-ontological, in the cosmos, there is evil, but lower grades of being compared to God.
2. The actual evil is moral evil, sin. Evil is in the will as tending to the creatures and not God. This is not to apply to bad things, but that goes astray, away from the Supreme Being.
3. Physical evil (disease, pain, death, etc.) is a consequence of moral evil.