Confessions: A New Translation by Sarah Ruden by St. Augustine & Sarah Ruden

Author:St. Augustine & Sarah Ruden [Augustine, St.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-06-05T17:00:00+00:00

21. Where does this bizarre phenomenon come from? Let your mercy light my way, and I’ll inquire, in case by any chance the lurking punishments inflicted on mankind and the shadowy griefs of the sons of Adam might by any chance be able to give me an answer.

So—where does this bizarre phenomenon come from? And how? The mind commands the body, and there’s instant obedience. The mind commands itself, and there’s resistance. The mind commands the hand to move, and there’s such a great readiness that a person can hardly tell the order from the servile compliance. But the mind is the mind, and the hand is part of the body. The mind commands the mind to be willing, and the mind isn’t a different thing from itself—yet it doesn’t become willing. Where does this bizarre phenomenon come from?

And I want to know how the following happens: the mind gives itself an order to want something—which is not an order it could give unless it wanted to—and yet it doesn’t do what it orders. The answer is that it doesn’t wholly will the act, and so doesn’t wholly order it. It gives an order only to the same extent that it wills what it’s ordering, and what it’s ordering fails to come about to the same extent that it doesn’t will it, since the will orders that there be a will—not different from itself, but exactly the same.

This means that it’s not the full will doing the ordering, and so the will isn’t the same as what it commands. If it were the full will, it wouldn’t be ordering itself into existence, because it would already exist. It follows that to be willing in part and in part unwilling isn’t a bizarre phenomenon but a sickness of the mind, because the mind, being top-heavy with habit, doesn’t stand up wholly straight in the truth. For this reason, there are two wills, because neither of them is complete, and what’s present in the one is missing from the other.

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