“No one can rob you of your faculty of volition.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.36 (quoting Epictetus)
Volition
Every situation presents us with an opportunity. You may not always get to choose the event but you do get to choose your reaction to it. The consequences feel more severe when we feel like we have to but don’t want to.
Who are you making choices for? Who you are now? Who you want to be?
You decide you are going to be different going forward but fail to live up to it. You want something different, a new idea comes along or you get exhausted fighting something that doesn’t feel right. Sometimes the rules you set are impossible to live up to. So you change.
Is that learning? Is that growing? Is that being a hypocrite?
Privation Theory
Augustine of Hippo gave the church the framework to keep God’s hands clean.
If something exists, it exists because God made it. If God made it, it is a good thing.
Evil is a corruption of that good.
Evil is not its own entity. It’s something that mutates, something that eats away at, something that takes the place of what was there as it is diminished.
Like cancer cells. Rust. As the light leaves, the darkness comes in.
How does that manifest in a person? What does it look like?
Ordered Love
There are things we should enjoy, frui, and things we should use as a means, uti.
If you’re having trouble deciding what things you should enjoy, don’t. It’s God. Everything else should be used as a means to bring you closer to or in accordance with God’s wishes.
Living the good life is ordered love. Living life ruled by vice or ignorance is a deformed love. A step towards malum and a step back from the good.
Augustine also writes that when using others as a means to serve your love of God, you do so in a way that allows them to keep their dignity.
An outside perspective shows an employer trying to motivate their employee. If he has ordered love, he’s pushing the employee because he knows they have more potential. Deformed love is pushing them to exhaustion to raise his quarterly numbers.
The Concubine
Before the church, before baptism, before going to Rome, before becoming a saint, Augustine was an outsider to the heart of Rome.
He was seventeen. He was a student. He was in love.
For fifteen years they traveled together and lived together. They were married in all the ways they could be except for on paper.
As ambition sent him upward, she and their son stayed the same.
Eventually a call summoning him to Rome came from the church. The two of them being together would violate Roman class law. He sent her away so that he could partake in an arranged marriage with someone of the appropriate class.
I see a man torn, striving for godliness, ruled by ambition and choosing that over true love. He was turning away from a gift from God to go be in service of that very same God.
He talks about her as if she was stolen: “my mistress being torn from my side as an impediment to my marriage, my heart, which clave to her, was racked, and wounded and bleeding.”
He made a choice from a deformed love, not because it served God but his ambitions. Self-aware, he admits it in his own writings.
That doesn’t make him evil. That makes him painfully human.
The Donatists
A sect of the church had broken off. The Donatists were saying that the moral condition of the priest mattered. If you were getting baptized by a corrupt priest, your baptism wouldn’t hold.
They wanted to slap a label on a defective person and stop thinking about it. They’re broken. Find someone else.
Augustine’s point was that God could use whatever vessel he saw fit. The sacrament comes from Christ. The human is the instrument.
Did Augustine give the Donatists a chance to maintain their dignity and find their way back to ordered love?
His own ethical structure demanded that to love your neighbor rightly is to will their highest good. You cannot love someone into salvation by force. The forced convert has not turned their will. They have only turned their body.
Did he use it?
No.
He used state violence, backed by the council of Rome, and forced them back into compliance. He doesn’t let them become rational, willing agents.
The inquiry stops. The label is applied.
But he doesn’t have to use a word like evil. Heretic will do.
We should “compel them to come in.”
Parking Lot Theology
Researching and writing about Augustine caused me to do some internal searching. His story is so fascinating because the arc, while smaller in scope, follows a similar trajectory.
I was happy. I had a spirituality that I didn’t have to search for. I believed in the promise of the world before alcohol.
Each time I drank, I gave it a little more of myself until it got to a point that was very hard to come back from. The relief I felt was slowly corrupting my thinking. Rewiring me over the long term.
On the way to work in the morning I tried to white-knuckle it past a gas station. “I’m not going to drink today.” Pulling into the parking lot. “Don’t do it man, just go to work.” Going in the store… buying it. Hating myself, walking back across the parking lot. “Don’t do it.”
Click. Drink.
I didn’t want to be that person. I was a puppet to an impulse. I literally couldn’t stop when I wanted to. I had to pick my kid up that afternoon and my wife had threatened to leave me if I drank again.
I hated who or what I saw when I looked in the mirror. I didn’t want to be that person anymore, but I kept being that person. It was safe, it was predictable.
The thought of total change set off subconscious alarms that did not want me to leave my self-destructive routines.
I sat in that parking lot, a shell of my former self, somehow managing to hate the void where I wanted the better version of myself to be. I wanted to change. I meant it.
Something inside of me was saying, “not yet.”
When Augustine talks about being torn and volition, I’m not reading about a historical figure. I’m reading about me.
The Garden
Torn, he was in between his old life and full conversion.
He wrote in Confessions about his internal war of volition. He knew what he needed to do but could not make himself do it.
He had to learn later through divine intervention, a lesson present in his doctrines and writing. Humans cannot save themselves with moral effort. Purity through willpower is a fantasy.
The vessel doesn’t make the contents less holy.
His intervention came in a beautiful garden. The Donatists didn’t get the same choice in setting.
When he sent the concubine away, she vowed never to be with another man. In one moment of being refused, she acquired the thing that took divine intervention for him to fully grasp.
When sent away by a man who chose his career over her, that was it. She didn’t require something outside of her. She used her will, a concept he couldn’t grasp in the grips of his own weakness.
A Saint, A System, A Label
If Augustine isn’t evil… then what exactly is he?
A confused man, striving for good, failing to meet it while demanding it of others. That’s not evil in the cartoon villain sense. Augustine had power and used it. He labeled a group of people, stopped asking questions and forced them to change who they were. If they were right, then he was wrong.
He later wrote Retractationes where he has the humility to admit where he was wrong and to walk back his mistakes, but not the Donatists. The outcome justified the method. Warts and all, his framework was right. The love was not deformed.
That’s what power can do. It can make new rules for old theologies.
In Confessions, Augustine writes, “Lord, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Not a joke at the time. He was yearning for a virtuous life. He just didn’t want it badly enough to give up what he had to get it.
Plain truth. Rough edges.
Closing Question
When you say “not yet,” what are you protecting: comfort, identity or control?
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