The City of God by Augustine - 5 - God's Will and Human Free Will
Book Five
Quote
📝 Now, against the sacrilegious and impious darings of reason, we assert both that God knows all things before they come to pass, and that we do by our free will whatsoever we know and feel to be done by us only because we will it.
Notes
🔥 Why did God grant Rome a great empire when they often acted badly and didn't worship him? Augustine says that all kingdoms, both good and bad, are established by God's providence. Some people say it's fate, but what is fate really other than the will of God?
🔥 A lot of people (at the time) say fate has to do with the constellation of the stars. But that can't be it, says Augustine. What about twins who are born under the same constellation of stars? Twins born at the same time lead very different lives and have different fates. Think of Jacob and Esau from the Bible, for example. Horoscopes and astrology are bunk. "It is chiefly the will of God most high, whose power extends itself irresistibly through all things which they call fate."
🔥 He reviews Cicero's argument that if God knows everything in advance then free will can't exist. There can only be one or the other. If God knows everything in advance, then what would be the point of doing anything? All laws or actions we take to influence events or people's behaviour would all be in vain.
🔥 Augustine disagrees. God's will encompasses and takes account of our free will. Our free will is given to us by God. Just because he knows our free will does not mean it doesn't exist. We need to believe in both the will of God and our own free will, "that we may believe well and live well." We are still responsible for our actions, at least within the spheres we can influence.
🔥 So if the Roman empire wasn't helped by Rome's gods (as Augustine previously demonstrated) and it isn't due to fate either, why would God enable their empire since they didn't acknowledge or worship him (until much later)? Augustine moves now to address this.
🔥 The Romans were motivated by honour, glory, and power. Some pursued these things by the true and virtuous way, others not. And to the extent that they were successful, the power and wealth they achieved corrupted them.
🔥 The Romans loved getting praise, which is a vice but it also tempers other vices (such as lust for power and wealth). But it's better to serve righteousness and justice, whether it earns you popularity/praise or not. Rome did achieve lots of success and glory and got its reward here on earth. But the greater reward is for those who serve God and don't look to the rewards of this world.
🔥 Some Romans were motivated by true virtue, but many served vice. God is still above all: "By me (God) kings reign, and tyrants possess the land." He stands above all kings and kingdoms, both the good and the bad. Rome did have degrees of virtue even if they didn't worship God. Having virtues serve pleasure or personal glory is a flawed motivation that will lead to vice.
🔥 The same is true for Rome's Christian emperors. Their happiness does not come from the earthly rewards or praise they get. It comes from serving God, serving justice, and doing what's right.
🔥 Ultimately God grants power to kings and kingdoms for reasons we cannot know, but we trust his judgments are true and just. He granted power to lots of other empires — Assyria, Persia, Egypt, Rome. They all worshipped different gods. The same goes for victory and defeat in war. God is supreme over everything that happens throughout history.
Key Takeaways
💬 I wonder if this is a move backwards in the development of history. Most early "historical" accounts were more a form of propaganda saying how great a king was and that he had the blessings of the gods. The big breakthrough of historians like Herodotus and Thucydides was to focus on the specifics of what really happened, and to analyze events and causes without the input of mythology or religion.
Augustine is still performing detailed analysis of historical events as the source of evidence for his arguments, but his thesis is still that God is the ultimate cause of everything, empires rise and fall according to his will. There's still a lot left in the book to understand his view on this, but what is the influence of that view on how we understand history? Perhaps it gives us a north star through which we can understand our lives and the course of human history. We will have to see more of how his view on this develops.