The Augustinian person

2. The Faculties of Personality

        T H E FAC U LT I E S O F P E R S O N A L I T Y ;Alasdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? says that according to Augustine: “The rationality of right action .l.l. is not its primary determinant, but a secondary consequence of right willing. Hence faith which initially moves and informs the will is prior to understanding.l.l.l. This .l.l. is something to which Augustine was necessarily committed by his psychology of the will.”1 These remarks presuppose an idea of the human mind as divided into separate, independently operating faculties. We have already noticed (in the introduction ) some of the criticisms, and theological doctrines, to which this very old interpretation of Augustine’s psychology has given rise. Some parts of it have, however, been disputed: for example, Etienne Gilson forty years ago challenged the Jansenistic idea that Augustine thought emotion to be separate from the will.2 The separatist view of Augustine’s psychology has persisted nevertheless and has led to some reservations about the coherency of his thought in this matter; as we have seen, the possibility has been raised that in this connection he mixes categories and that he contradicts himself on the subject of the human mind as the divine image. These considerations have continued to cause some doubt whether the conception of the human  . Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, ), . . Gilson, – nn. –. Cf. James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions,  vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), :. mind on which he bases his doctrine of morality, and consequently much of his theology, is tenable.3 Because of the ways in which he describes the mind’s operations, this general question devolves into three specific ones: On what basis are the mental faculties related to one another and distinguished? What is the relationship between the higher levels of human awareness and those lower ones that, in some fashion at least, are also exercised by the beasts? (As will emerge later, it has been argued that for Augustine the human cognitive dependence on the senses results from the Fall, and is not intrinsic to the human mind.) And how can the mental faculties of a human being not only sufficiently constitute a single mind but also be sufficiently distinct to form, as Augustine claims it does, a human “trinity” analogous to the divine? (Here A. C. Lloyd’s contention that Augustine’s notion of person is based on a category mistake must be considered with particular care.) ; Regarding the first question, two preliminary observations should be made. First, in a sense two modes of mental being are in question: the faculties, such as will and intellect, and their corresponding mental acts, such as volition and understanding. That distinction does not, however, need to be constantly applied here. One differentiates among mental faculties in virtue of a differentiation among mental acts. That is Augustine’s own approach to the matter: what interested him, as E. Hill points out, was the functioning of the soul rather than its structure viewed in the abstract.4 By voluntas, for instance, he commonly means “the act of willing” rather than “the faculty of will.”5 Second, in his mature analyses of the subject Augustine goes beyond his earlier division of the soul’s activities into being, knowing, and willing, and eventually characterizes them either as willing, under-    ⁄  . Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, ), ; Lloyd, . . Hill, . . Ibid.,  n. . standing, and memory or as willing, understanding, and emotion, depending on the context (Conf. ..; De Trin. ..–.., ..– ..; CD .–). Because love, which Augustine treats as obviously an act of will, is for him the essence of morality—the “weight” that draws us to good or to harm—it is appropriate to begin the discussion with his approaches to the concept of the will (Conf. ..–..).6 In a passage from De Trinitate concerned directly with the question of opposition between volition and other activities of the mind, Augustine dissociates himself sharply from the Stoics (De Trin. ..–..). Having established that in order to be genuinely happy one has not only to have what one wants (or wills) but to want (or to will) rightly, he points out that this nevertheless is no easy matter. The Stoics, he says, are naïve enough to “invent for themselves happy lives of their own” based on the absurd assumption...