ABSTRACT
Degrees of freedom Augustine says somewhere: ‘Only let no one so dare to destroy the decision of the will as to wish to excuse sin.’ We have already in the previous chapter observed his vivid sense of sin. And we have also uncovered his intellectual motive for imputing it universally: all men suffer; all suffering is God’s punishment; all God’s acts are just; all punishment not for sins committed is unjust; so all men commit sins. Moreover sin requires freedom. Augustine says of the double souls imagined by the Manichees:
Thus human freedom has to be defended in order to vindicate God as a just punisher. It has to be defended also, as we have seen in discussing the Free Will Defence in the previous chapter, in order to vindicate him as a caring creator. From the defence of it, begun in the De Libero Arbitrio, Augustine never finally retreated in his long life. Belief in ‘free decision of the will’ is the main philosophical difference between him and the Protestant reformers, Luther and Calvin were deeply influenced by him; it was indeed from his own later writings that they drew the materials from which they, unlike him, concluded to what Luther called the bondage of the will.
