On Free Choice of the Will

Context and Structure

On Free Choice of the Will (De libero arbitrio) is an early philosophical work by Augustine of Hippo, composed intermittently between roughly 388 and 395 CE, soon after his conversion to Christianity. Written as a dialogue between Augustine and his interlocutor Evodius, it belongs to Augustine’s more philosophically oriented period and is strongly influenced by Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions as well as Christian scripture.

The dialogue is structured in three books. It begins from a seemingly simple, but theologically dangerous, question: Is God the cause of evil? From this starting point, Augustine explores the nature of free will, moral responsibility, law, and happiness, culminating in discussions of divine foreknowledge and the rational order of reality. The work seeks not only to clarify doctrinal questions but also to guide readers toward an understanding of the inner life of reason and will.

Core Arguments and Themes

Free Will and the Origin of Moral Evil

A central concern of the work is the problem of evil. Augustine aims to show that God, who is good, is not the cause of sin. His key claim is that moral evil originates in the misuse of free will (liberum arbitrium). God creates human beings with a good capacity for freely choosing; this capacity is necessary for genuine virtue and love. However, the will can turn away from what truly ought to be loved—namely, God and the rational moral order—and toward lesser, mutable goods.

Thus Augustine distinguishes:

• The will as created good: the power to choose is itself good and a gift from God.
• The bad use of the will: sin consists in the will’s disordered love, preferring lower goods to higher ones.

By grounding sin in the will’s misuse rather than in any created substance, Augustine denies that evil has a positive ontological status. Evil is understood as a privation or lack of the right order, rather than a thing created by God. This framework allows him to maintain both divine goodness and human responsibility.

Freedom, Happiness, and the Moral Law

Another major theme is the relationship between freedom and true happiness. Augustine rejects the idea that freedom is merely the ability to do whatever one happens to desire. Instead, he argues that:

• True freedom is the ability to live in accord with right reason and eternal law.
• The highest human good is beatitude (happiness or blessedness), which requires a rightly ordered will.

In this context, Augustine introduces a distinction between temporal law (human laws regulating earthly societies) and eternal law (the rational ordering of creation in the divine mind). Good human laws derive their authority from their conformity to eternal law. A will that aligns itself with eternal law attains genuine freedom and peace; a will that deviates becomes enslaved to disordered desires.

Thus, for Augustine, freedom is internally connected to moral order: the more one is ruled by truth and love of the highest good, the more truly free one is. This idea would be highly influential in later Christian moral theology, where “freedom for the good” is contrasted with a purely libertarian conception of choice.

Rational Inquiry and the Ascent of the Mind

On Free Choice of the Will also contains epistemological and metaphysical reflections, especially in Book II and parts of Book III. Through a series of rational exercises, Augustine and Evodius examine:

• The reliability of inner awareness and self-knowledge.
• The existence of necessary and immutable truths, such as mathematical and logical principles.
• The presence of a hierarchy of being and value, ascending from bodily things to the mind, and beyond the mind to the unchangeable truth.

Augustine argues that because the human mind recognizes truths that are higher than itself and not subject to change, it must implicitly relate to an unchangeable source of truth. This source is identified with God as the supreme, unchanging good and the foundation of eternal law. Thus, the investigation of free will leads into a broader metaphysical and theological vision, where the will’s proper object is the highest truth and good.

Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom

A further issue addressed, especially in Book III, is the apparent conflict between divine foreknowledge and human freedom. If God infallibly knows all future events, including our choices, it might seem that these choices are necessary and cannot be otherwise.

Augustine responds by making a distinction between:

• The certainty of God’s knowledge.
• The necessity of the events known.

He contends that God’s knowing what free creatures will do does not cause them to do it, nor does it remove the possibility that they could have chosen otherwise. Events can be known infallibly as free rather than as necessary. Thus, divine foreknowledge and human free will are, for Augustine, logically compatible.

This position avoids a deterministic reading of foreknowledge while preserving the classical attribute of divine omniscience. Later thinkers would continue to debate whether Augustine’s distinction adequately solves the problem, but his formulation became a starting point for much medieval and early modern philosophy of religion.

Influence and Reception

From the Middle Ages onward, On Free Choice of the Will was one of the most widely read of Augustine’s philosophical works. It shaped medieval scholastic treatments of:

• Free will and grace, especially in relation to sin and moral responsibility.
• The nature of law, influencing thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas in articulating the distinction between natural, human, and eternal law.
• The compatibility of divine foreknowledge with freedom, a topic later revisited by figures like Boethius, Anselm, and, much later, Luis de Molina.

Historically, the work also stands at an early stage of Augustine’s developing thought. Some of its emphases, particularly on the power and goodness of free will, are later supplemented—and in certain respects rebalanced—by his more mature reflections on grace and the bondage of the will in the anti-Pelagian writings. This has led scholars to examine On Free Choice of the Will both as a self-contained philosophical treatise and as part of a broader evolution in Augustine’s theology.

In modern philosophy, the text continues to be discussed in connection with theodicy, ethics, and the metaphysics of freedom. Proponents find in it a sophisticated early account of moral responsibility, grounded in an internal conception of freedom and an objective moral order. Critics question whether the appeal to privation adequately explains suffering, and whether the distinction between certainty and necessity fully resolves the tension between foreknowledge and free choice.

Despite these debates, On Free Choice of the Will remains a foundational document for understanding Western conceptions of free will, the moral dimensions of human agency, and the enduring philosophical challenges posed by the coexistence of freedom, evil, and an omniscient God.