New Intro to Augustine

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new article on Augustine. I wrote it. If I say so myself, it's pretty good. Here's a sample from the intro section:

Any attempt to summarize Augustine is necessarily an exercise in leaving something out. One approach is to apply to Augustine an idea he applied to the Bible. With all its immeasurable tracts of information, Augustine thinks two things summarize everything the Bible teaches: the love of God and neighbor. His thoughts may also be summarized in terms of his efforts to promote the love of God and neighbor.

Here's where I lay out some of the necessary points on Augustine and free will.

In De natura et gratia (On Nature and Grace), he responds to a book of Pelagius, arguing that human nature was created wholly good but was corrupted by the freely chosen sin of Adam in such a way that human beings are no longer able not to sin; if human beings could be saved by their own efforts, the Bible would not teach that faith is necessary for salvation. Only the freely given grace of God can restore the ruined human ability to love and obey God. Pelagius’ mistake was to deny that human nature has been corrupted by sin. In this critique of Pelagius, Augustine emphasizes the same teachings he had wielded against the Manicheans—that evil is not a nature in itself but corruption of a thing which is, in its created nature, good. (Pelagius did not deny that what God created is good, but Augustine did think that he failed to understand how human nature can be corrupted by evil.) . . . Augustine challenges readers to reconsider their understanding of free will. (See Free Will for a contemporary discussion.) The ability to do or not do (libertarian freedom) is not the only definition. There is the well-known compatibilist view of free will—the ability merely to do what you want to do. But there is a third option—the classical teleological account of freedom in terms of the orientation of the will to the good—a free will is one able to pursue the good, and the freest will would be one unable to do otherwise. Notice that this last option, while not defining free will in the libertarian way, nevertheless recognizes freedom in the libertarian sense as one type of freedom. An additional reconsideration is appropriate for a Christian theologian: When we speak of the ability to do or not do a thing, whose ability are we talking about, and just what is it the ability to do? The Augustinian denial of free will focuses on the lack of human ability, after the sin of Adam and prior to God’s graciously healing our corrupted wills, to be without sin. It is possible to deny this ability, while affirming that human beings in the same state have the ability to place their faith in Jesus Christ. Apparently, Augustine eventually denied this ability as well, and this is why he is important in the history of predestinationist theologies, for he thinks that only by God’s completely unmerited kindness in healing our corrupted wills are any of us ever able to have faith. There is also the question whether those who have this ability, those who have received God’s gracious help, retain the ability to not have faith. Augustine seems to think they do.

If you wanna disagree with a Church Father and still be right, this is one of your better bets.

And then there's some of the biographical stuff that's just kinda hilarious, even if it was a rough day for poor Aurelius at the time:

Augustine treasured the relative freedom of his scholarly religious life. He knew that if he were to be ordained a shepherd in the church there would be many pressing and wearying responsibilities, including the obligations he would assume as a teacher in the church (mindful perhaps of James 3:1, a passage to which he refers in the introduction to Retractiones). He also knew that many churches would be interested in ordaining a religious scholar. Accordingly, he avoided visiting any churches that he knew needed a bishop. Unbeknownst to Augustine, the elderly Bishop Valerius of the city of Hippo had been looking for an assistant, particularly one more skilled at Latin than he. (Valerius’ native tongue was Greek.) One day, Valerius exhorted his flock to find someone to help him. They seized Augustine, who was unwarily in their midst at the time. Augustine was ordained a priest under Bishop Valerius, to the joy of Valerius and his church but against Augustine’s tears. The crowd, Possidius explains, misunderstood his weeping; they thought he wanted higher honors—not realizing he was not after any honors at all.

There's more where that came from. And many, many more adventures in philosophy and theology in the books of Augustine himself.