Confessions by Saint Augustine & Sarah Ruden
Author:Saint Augustine & Sarah Ruden [Augustine, Saint]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Autobiography, Faith, Catholicism, Theology, Religion, Ancient Rome, Classics
ISBN: 9780812996579
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 2017-06-06T00:00:00+00:00
21. Where does this bizarre phenomenon come from? Let your mercy light my way, and Iâll 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.
Soâwhere does this bizarre phenomenon come from? And how? The mind commands the body, and thereâs instant obedience. The mind commands itself, and thereâs resistance. The mind commands the hand to move, and thereâs 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 isnât a different thing from itselfâyet it doesnât 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 somethingâwhich is not an order it could give unless it wanted toâand yet it doesnât do what it orders. The answer is that it doesnât wholly will the act, and so doesnât wholly order it. It gives an order only to the same extent that it wills what itâs ordering, and what itâs ordering fails to come about to the same extent that it doesnât will it, since the will orders that there be a willânot different from itself, but exactly the same.
This means that itâs not the full will doing the ordering, and so the will isnât the same as what it commands. If it were the full will, it wouldnât be ordering itself into existence, because it would already exist. It follows that to be willing in part and in part unwilling isnât a bizarre phenomenon but a sickness of the mind, because the mind, being top-heavy with habit, doesnât stand up wholly straight in the truth. For this reason, there are two wills, because neither of them is complete, and whatâs present in the one is missing from the other.
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