Augustine: "I Have Become a Question to Myself" - The Philosopher Who Discovered the Divided Will and the Abyss of Time

Key Takeaways

• The divided will (voluntas divisa): The will commands itself and disobeys itself. In Confessions Book 8, Augustine describes this self-division with clinical precision—fifteen hundred years before Freud. From addiction to procrastination, the structure of "knowing you should stop but being unable to" was first articulated here.
• Time as distentio animi: The past no longer exists. The future does not yet exist. The present refuses to stay. Where, then, is time? Augustine's answer: only in the mind's three activities—memory, attention, and expectation. The analysis in Confessions Book 11 links directly to Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness and Heidegger's Being and Time.
• Evil as the privation of good (privatio boni): Evil has no substance; it is merely the absence of good. Darkness is the absence of light. A man who spent nine years immersed in Manichaean dualism arrived at this answer, and it became the starting point of theodicy in Western theology.

Life and Historical Context

On November 13, 354, a boy was born in the small town of Thagaste in the Roman province of Numidia—modern-day Souk Ahras, Algeria. His father Patricius was a pagan landowner, his mother Monica a devout Christian. The Roman Empire had long since passed its peak. Barbarian incursions pressed along the frontiers; religious conflict intensified within. The Mediterranean world was cracking along the fault line between antiquity and the Middle Ages. This man was born in the middle of the fracture.

The young Augustine was brilliant but wayward. He skipped school, stole pears from a neighbor's orchard, ran wild with friends. The pear theft is analyzed obsessively in Confessions Book 2. He was not hungry. He did not even want the pears. The act of stealing was the pleasure. Evil for evil's sake. The memory of a trivial adolescent crime, dissected in his forties by a bishop writing as though drawing blood. That obsessiveness is Augustine.

In 370 he went to Carthage to study rhetoric—the era's equivalent of law, advertising, and political consulting rolled into one, a ticket to advancement. In Carthage he took a concubine and fathered a son, Adeodatus. Lust and ambition consumed him, he would later judge. But his intellectual hunger was equally fierce. At nineteen he read Cicero's dialogue Hortensius—a work now lost—and caught fire for philosophy. The book is gone, but it survives as testimony that a single text can transform a human being.

The young man's hunger for truth drove him first to Manichaeism. Light against darkness, a cosmic dualism: the world contains a principle of good and a principle of evil. For a young man tormented by bodily desire, the teaching that evil is not your fault but the work of a dark cosmic force must have been a sweet indulgence. For nine years Augustine remained a Manichaean "hearer." But intellectual dissatisfaction grew. In 383 he met the Manichaean bishop Faustus: eloquent but empty. Truth could not be reached here.

From Rome he moved to Milan. Two turning points converged. The first was Bishop Ambrose, who showed him how to read Scripture allegorically, dissolving the intellectual resistance Augustine had felt toward the crudeness of the Old Testament. The second was his encounter with Neoplatonist writings—probably Plotinus's Enneads. Non-material reality exists. The mind is not a body. This insight shattered the materialist dualism of the Manichaeans.

Conversion in 386. Baptism by Ambrose in 387. His mother Monica, having witnessed her son's conversion, died that same year at Ostia. He returned to North Africa. In 391 he was ordained priest at Hippo Regius (modern Annaba, Algeria). In 395 he became the city's bishop. For the next thirty-five years until his death, he never left. He preached, adjudicated disputes, battled heretics, and wrote at a staggering pace. On August 28, 430, aged seventy-five, he died as the Vandals besieged Hippo. He died with the empire.

Mini Timeline

• 354: Born in Thagaste, Numidia
• 370: Goes to Carthage to study rhetoric; takes a concubine
• 373: Reads Cicero's Hortensius; joins the Manichaeans
• 383: Moves to Rome; grows disillusioned with Manichaeism
• 384: Appointed rhetoric teacher in Milan; encounters Bishop Ambrose
• 386: Conversion in the Milan garden ("take up and read")
• 387: Baptized by Ambrose; Monica dies at Ostia
• 391: Ordained priest at Hippo Regius
• 395: Becomes Bishop of Hippo
• 397–401: Writes Confessions (Confessiones)
• 412–426: Writes City of God (De Civitate Dei)
• 430: Dies during the Vandal siege of Hippo

What Did This Philosopher Ask?

The Greek philosophers looked outward. What is the origin of the cosmos? What is being? What is the good life? The arrow of inquiry always pointed beyond the self. Plato's Forms and Aristotle's four causes were attempts to describe structures on the side of the world.

Augustine reversed the arrow. "Do not go outside; return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man" (Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas, De Vera Religione 39.72). This sentence changed the direction of Western philosophy. Truth resides neither in a heavenly realm of Forms nor somewhere beyond the senses. It resides inside me.

But the interior was not a safe place. Peer inside and you find a bottomless pit. The will is broken. Memory is too vast for the self to grasp. Time slips through the fingers.

In Confessions Book 10, Augustine plunges into the depths of memory (memoria). "The vast halls of memory" (campos et lata praetoria memoriae, 10.8.12). Stored there are images of the past, learned knowledge, emotional traces, memories supposedly forgotten. You can recall grief without feeling grief now. Memory is not a copy of experience. Something is transformed in storage. Is the "I" within memory the real "I"? Is the part that has sunk into oblivion no longer "I"? The deeper you trace memory, the more the outline of the self blurs.

What Augustine discovered is that the self is not transparent. The fact of being unintelligible to oneself. "I have become a great question to myself" (quaestio mihi factus sum, Confessions 10.33.50).

This question did not exist before Augustine. Socrates said "know yourself," but for him self-knowledge was achievable through reason. Augustine is different. The more you try to know yourself, the deeper the unknowable becomes. The self is not the solver of the problem. The self is the problem.

Core Theories

1. The Divided Will: "The One Who Commands Is I; the One Who Disobeys Is Also I"

Confessions Book 8 is one of the strangest texts in Western intellectual history. Augustine describes the inner conflict leading to his conversion in almost physical terms of agony.

"The mind commands the body, and the body obeys instantly. The mind commands itself, and meets resistance" (Confessions 8.9.21). Grasp the force of this passage. Command your hand to rise and it rises. But command yourself to abandon desire, and the mind does not move. The one who commands and the one who resists inhabit the same person.

Confessions 8.5.10 maps the escalation of addiction with surgical precision. A warped will produces desire (libido); serving desire breeds habit (consuetudo); unresisted habit hardens into necessity (necessitas). "These links formed a chain that held me in harsh bondage." Will → desire → habit → necessity. This escalation maps with startling accuracy onto the findings of modern addiction research.

Augustine frames the struggle as a battle between two wills: the old will (voluntas vetus) and the new will (voluntas nova). The force of habit bound to the flesh, and the new impulse reaching toward God. Both are the self. Both are sincere. Does a person have two souls? The Manichaeans would have said yes—a good soul and an evil soul at war. Augustine rejects this easy answer. The soul is one. And that one soul is torn against itself.

A concrete scene. Two in the morning. You need to be up early. You know you should sleep. Smartphone in hand. "Just five more minutes." An hour passes. The will commands. The will does not obey. The phenomenon Augustine described sixteen hundred years ago replays in your bedroom tonight.

"When the will does not will fully, it does not command. If it willed fully, it would not need to command" (8.9.21). If you willed completely, the act would already be done the instant you willed it. That you will it and it remains undone means your willing is incomplete. The will can never fully will itself. This fracture, Augustine says, is the consequence of original sin. The fallen human will cannot unify itself by its own power. Only grace (gratia) can heal the rift.

2. The Riddle of Time: "If No One Asks Me, I Know; If I Try to Explain, I Do Not"

Confessions Book 11 is one of the masterpieces of temporal philosophy. Nominally it is a commentary on Genesis—"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." In substance it is pure philosophy.

"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know" (11.14.17). Few sentences have struck the essence of philosophy so precisely. Time is the most familiar of experiences, yet the moment you begin to think about it, it slips from your grasp.

Augustine's analysis runs as follows. The past does not exist—it has already gone. The future does not exist—it has not yet come. The present? The instant you try to seize it, it is already past. Where, then, is time?

Answer: in the mind. The past is present in the mind as memory (memoria). The future is present in the mind as expectation (expectatio). The present is present in the mind as attention (attentio). Time is nothing other than the stretching of the mind—distentio animi.

Augustine illustrates with the recitation of a psalm (11.28.38). Before you begin, your expectation extends over the entire psalm. As you recite, the portion already spoken passes into memory while the portion not yet spoken remains in expectation. Attention clings to the syllable leaving your lips at this instant. Expectation shrinks; memory swells. When the psalm ends, expectation has reached zero and the whole has migrated into memory. This movement is time. Clocks measure physical motion, nothing more. Time exists only in the mind's stretching.

Do not miss the scope of what is happening here. Augustine is describing time not as external reality but as a structure of consciousness. What twentieth-century phenomenology labored over, a fifth-century bishop had already laid bare. Husserl's Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1928) cites Augustine repeatedly. That is no coincidence.

3. The Problem of Evil: Evil as the Privation of Good

If an omnipotent, good God exists, why does evil exist? For Augustine this question was existential, not academic. He spent nine years in Manichaeism precisely because it offered an easy answer: evil is an independent substance—a dark cosmic principle—so your wrongdoing is not your fault.

Through his encounter with Neoplatonism, Augustine reached a different framework. Evil has no substance. It is the privation of good (privatio boni). Darkness is not something that exists; it is the absence of light. Disease is not a substance; it is damaged health. So too with evil. Everything that exists, insofar as it exists, is good. Evil is the corruption (corruptio) of that good.

The answer is elegant but painful. If evil has no substance, then choosing evil is entirely your responsibility. No dark force manipulated you. The sixteen-year-old who stole pears swerved from good by his own will. Manichaeism was a machine for externalizing blame. Augustine stripped it away and held the result up before his own face.

This argument handles moral evil—the evil humans choose by will—convincingly. But what about natural evil? Earthquakes, plagues, childhood leukemia. Whose will chose these? Augustine appeals to the finitude of creation: finite things cannot be perfect; to be breakable is a condition of finitude. He also argues that original sin disrupted the order of all creation. The logic is internally coherent. But stand before a town swallowed by a tsunami and ask whether this answer suffices. That judgment belongs to the reader.

4. Grace and Free Will: Whose Is Salvation?

The will is divided. It cannot unify itself. Can human beings live well by their own power? Augustine's answer: no. Not without grace.

The question exploded in his controversy with Pelagius, a British-born monk (c. 411 onward). Pelagius argued that humans can avoid sin by free will; that Adam's sin does not transmit to all humanity; that grace helps but is not strictly necessary. The position sounds perfectly reasonable.

Augustine was furious. Pelagius did not understand the helplessness of the will. The agony in the Milan garden. The wanting to change and being unable to change. Since the Fall, the human will has been damaged at its root. The optimism that we can be good on our own is self-deception.

Here an enormous problem emerges. If no grace means no salvation, and God decides who receives grace, then the saved and the damned are predestined (praedestinatio). What happened to free will? Augustine does not deny it outright: the freedom to sin exists. But the freedom to accomplish good does not exist without grace. This asymmetry became the great fault line of Western theology. Luther and Calvin stood on it.

5. The Two Cities: History Is Divided by the Direction of Love

In 410, Alaric and the Visigoths sacked Rome. The shock reverberated across the empire. "Christianity weakened Rome," pagans charged. To answer, Augustine embarked on a colossal work: The City of God (De Civitate Dei)—twenty-two books, fourteen years in the writing.

The central thesis is clear. Human history can be read as the intertwining of two "cities" (civitas): the City of God (civitas Dei) and the Earthly City (civitas terrena). What divides them is not borders, not ethnicity. It is the direction of love. Love of God (amor Dei) versus love of self (amor sui).

The famous formulation (14.28): "Two loves built two cities. Self-love reaching to contempt of God built the earthly city; love of God reaching to contempt of self built the heavenly city." Self-love swells, instrumentalizing others. Love of God shrinks the self, turning it toward others. Which love you live by determines which "city" you inhabit—even if you and your neighbor share the same street.

The greatness of Rome was illusion. No earthly state can fully realize justice. Power is contaminated by the lust for domination (libido dominandi). The empire's collapse was not Christianity's fault. The earthly city will perish. Only the City of God endures. This framework harbors a radical skepticism toward political power. Earthly authority is provisional, never absolute. Whenever church and state clashed in medieval Europe, this book was cited.

Guide to Major Works

• Confessions (Confessiones, 397–401): The West's first autobiography, philosophical treatise, and prayer in one. Thirteen books: Books 1–9 narrate Augustine's life up to conversion; Books 10–13 undertake philosophical investigations of memory, time, and creation. Henry Chadwick's translation (Oxford University Press) is the standard. If you read one book by Augustine, read this.
• City of God (De Civitate Dei, 412–426): Twenty-two books spanning historical theology, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. Reading the whole demands commitment, but Book 19 alone—on peace and justice—repays the effort. R. W. Dyson translation (Cambridge University Press).
• On the Trinity (De Trinitate, 399–419): A philosophical grounding of Trinitarian doctrine. In the later books Augustine discovers an analogy for the Trinity within the human mind: memory, understanding, will. Demanding, but the analysis of mental self-reflection is penetrating.
• On Free Choice of the Will (De Libero Arbitrio, 387–395): Traces the origin of evil to free will. Written in dialogue form and relatively accessible. Here you hear the voice of a young Augustine, before the full turn toward grace.

Major Critiques and Controversies

Augustine won. Pelagianism was condemned as heresy. Church doctrine tilted toward grace. But victory has its price. Augustine's enemies saw his dangers more clearly than his friends.

The first blow strikes at the implications of original sin and predestination. Julian of Eclanum, Augustine's great adversary in his later years, attacked the doctrine of original sin as "Manichaean residue." A newborn bearing guilt—does that not undermine God's justice? If predestination holds, is all moral effort by the damned pointless? The critique cuts to the bone. Augustine attempted replies, but he never resolved it cleanly.

Another charge leveled repeatedly from modernity: contempt for body and sexuality. Augustine treated sexual desire as the most vivid scar of the Fall. Desire overrides the will and swamps reason. That, he claimed, is proof of sin. From a modern standpoint, this is hostility toward the body, the root of the guilt Christianity planted in the West. Nietzsche would spit: "despisers of the body." Yet Augustine's observation of the "autonomy of desire"—the phenomenon of desire running beyond the will's control—remains psychologically acute even when stripped of its moral valence.

Hannah Arendt cut from a different angle. Her doctoral thesis (Love and Saint Augustine, 1929) wrestled with Augustine directly. Her later critique targeted the way his inward turn risks neglecting the political space where human beings speak and act with one another. Absorbed in saving the soul, the public world gets left behind. The discovery of interiority was also the loss of the exterior.

Influence and Legacy

The man is everywhere. Dig into the underground currents of Western thought and you hit Augustine almost every time.

Medieval Scholasticism cannot stand without him. Aquinas imported Aristotle but followed Augustine on grace and the privation theory of evil. The Reformation: Luther and Calvin both claimed Augustine. Salvation by grace alone. Justification by faith alone. Luther was an Augustinian friar.

Seventeenth-century Jansenism traces directly to Augustine. Cornelius Jansen's Augustinus (1640) radicalized the doctrine of grace; the abbey of Port-Royal became its headquarters. Pascal's Pensées grew from this soil. The co-habitation of human wretchedness and grandeur, the weakness of fleeing into divertissement. How much Pascal owes Augustine is visible the moment you read them side by side.

Philosophy beyond theology. Descartes's cogito mirrors Augustine's "if I am deceived, I exist" (si fallor, sum, City of God 11.26). Whether Descartes was conscious of the precedent is debated, but the genealogy of the "inward turn" in Western philosophy begins with Augustine.

Phenomenology continues the lineage. Husserl's analysis of time-consciousness draws on Augustine's distentio animi. Heidegger cited Augustine in the footnotes of Being and Time and gave a detailed reading of Confessions Book 10 in his 1921 lecture ("Augustine and Neoplatonism").

Psychoanalysis: the Confessions is an act of exposing the self's darkness, an attempt to articulate repressed desires lurking behind the will. Fifteen hundred years before Freud supposedly "discovered" the unconscious, Augustine wrote that raw, unsparing account of failing to master himself.

Connection to the Present

A bar after the last train. Ordering a third drink while telling yourself "just one more." Four in the morning, eyes burning, fingers unable to close the phone screen. A thumb hitting "purchase" on a shopping site the day before payday. The structure of addiction is Augustine's divided will. Cognitive-behavioral therapy treats the collision of habit and will. But Augustine saw deeper. It is not habit that is broken. It is the will itself. There are regions that technique cannot reach.

Social media: performing an ideal self for the public while suffering private falsehood. Confession—the act of exposing what is ugly in yourself—acquires paradoxical urgency in an age flooded with curated self-images. Augustine confessed before God. On social media, there is no one to receive confession. Only self-deception accumulates.

Just war (bellum iustum): the doctrine traces to Augustine. Earthly peace is imperfect, but restoring order by force is preferable to tolerating injustice unchecked. This logic passed into international law's "just war theory" and is still used to justify military intervention today. Both a useful tool and a dangerous weapon.

Questions for the Reader

• Recall a time you wanted to stop but couldn't. Was the "self that commanded" or the "self that disobeyed" the real you?
• When you remember a past failure, your chest aches. The past no longer exists, yet the pain is in the present. Is time truly "flowing," or is it "stretching" inside your mind?
• The good deed you did today: was it your own achievement? Or the product of environment, education, luck, genetics? How much of what you call "credit" remains?

References

• (Primary): Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, Oxford University Press, 1991.
• (Primary): Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed, Hackett Publishing, 2006.
• (Primary): Augustine, City of God, trans. R. W. Dyson, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• (Study): Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, new ed., University of California Press, 2000.
• (Study): John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• (Study): Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. J. V. Scott and J. C. Stark, University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• (Web): "Saint Augustine", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.