Читать реферат по английскому: "Augustine And Freedom Essay Research Paper Augustine" Страница 4

(Назад) (Cкачать работу)

these categories obtain and (1) the conditions of the Fall radically affected human freedom

and (2) redemption restores human freedom, then what is the source of sin? In the company

of Augustine, one cannot discuss human freedom without discussing the origin of evil.

According to Augustine, “There are two sources of sin, a man’s own spontaneous thought, and

the persuasion of a neighbor . . . Both, however, are voluntary.”24 Sin issues from within and

without. There are two mediums through which sin enters: (1) the bodily senses and (2) evil

desires (cf., I Jn. 2:14-15; Jam. 1: 14). In either case the will is utilized. “Sins . . . are to be

ascribed to nothing but to their own wills, and no further cause for sins is to be looked for.”25

That persons are both impotent and ignorant does not make them less guilty before God.

These are the conditions under which unregenerate creatures exist. Ignorance and impotence

are conditions, not causes.

Analogously, a drought is not the cause of hunger; lack of food is. The drought may be the

condition under which hunger occurs, but it is not the cause of hunger. So too, God created

the condition (viz., freedom) from which humans could move closer toward him. Adam

voluntarily chose otherwise and, hence, became guilty. The cause of the guilt is the misuse of

the condition (freedom). In essence, God caused the condition, Adam abused it and,

therefore, became guilty.

Why should not the Author of the soul be praised with due piety if he has given it

so good a start that it may by zeal and progress reach the fruit of wisdom and

justice, and has given it so much dignity as to put within its power the capacity

to grow towards happiness if it will?26

Though God gives freedom at creation he is not to be charged with its misuse. “The soul was

not created evil because it was not given all that it had power to become.”27 The purpose for

which God gifted his creatures with freedom was that they might live righteously. God is

exonerated and humanity, being the efficient cause of evil/sin, is guilty.

One might argue that “Freedom is not possible due to God having foreknowledge. Whether

freedom be defined as power to contrary or self-determination, the creature is certain to

choose what God has already known and, therefore, cannot be free in any sense. A

deterministic or even fatalistic view of God and his creation is the only possible alternative,

given the infallible foreknowledge of God.” Once again, the Bishop of Hippo provides a great

deal of aid in understanding the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom

(either definition).

In De Libero Arbitrio Evodius asks Augustine, “Since God foreknew that man would sin, that

which God foreknew must come to pass. How then is the will free when there is apparently

this unavoidable necessity?”28 Augustine is quick to point out the disjunctive thinking on the

matter. First, it assumes an either/or scenario (bifurcation) and doesn’t offer a third

alternative, viz., that God has foreknowledge of the power to will. Second, this disjunction

assumes, unnecessarily so, that foreknowledge is somehow causative. Once again, this

confuses conditions with causes.

Third, it makes foreknowledge out to be far more than is intended at this point. Augustine

clearly states that foreknowledge is prescience, or knowing beforehand. “God by his

foreknowledge does not use compulsion in the case of future events . . . God has

foreknowledge of all his own actions, but is not the agent of all that he foreknows . . . he has

no responsibility for the future actions of men though he knows them beforehand.”29 God

foreknew, for example, in 1899 that scores of Kosovo inhabitants would be brutely murdered in

1999. This knowledge does not implicate God as responsible.

The dilemma of foreknowledge and freedom has, for more than 17 centuries, troubled

philosophers and theologians to their grave and, no doubt, will continue to do so.30 Central to

both foreknowledge and freedom are (1) the infallible knowledge of God and (2) some idea of

human freedom other than a hard determinism.

Closely related to this problem is the question of God’s relationship to time. There is a sense in

which one cannot begin to wrestle with the dilemma of foreknowledge and freedom until the

issue of God’s relationship to time is resolved. The simplest form of the equation would be to

hold that God is timeless, which appears to be Augustine’s view.

For He [God] does not pass from this to that by transition of thought, but beholds

all things with absolute unchangeableness; so that of those things which emerge

in time, the future, indeed are not yet, and the present are now, and the past no

longer are; but all of these are by Him comprehended in His stable and eternal

presence.31

Certainly it would seem that if God has knowledge of all free choices, past, present and

future, then he would have to have a vantage point outside of time in order to not be

constrained by sequence. On this, Geisler is correct in saying that “God knows everything in

the eternal present but He does not know everything as the present moment in time; He

knows the past as past, the future as future, etc.”32 [italics his]. Therefore, it could be said

that God knows all things a priori, yet sees them as a posteriori.

But how does this position on foreknowledge and freedom cohere with

Похожие работы