The Will That Cannot Command Itself

Opening: Why can knowledge leave us unchanged?

Alex: Many writers say that seeing the good clearly helps us choose it. Augustine and Thomas à Kempis distrust that simple path. Augustine understands more than he can carry out; Thomas warns that eloquent discussion of holiness can coexist with a life untouched by it. What prevents knowledge from becoming action?

Peter: Habit. I can know a practice is harmful and still repeat it tomorrow. Augustine’s description of a divided will feels practical, even if I do not share every part of his theology.

Eric: But we should not reduce a Christian account of sin and grace to a modern account of habits. Augustine’s central addressee is God. His question is not only how a person changes, but why a person cannot save himself by understanding alone.

Gwen: And Thomas’s advice has a relational cost as well as a personal one. Humility may restrain pride. It may also be invoked to make someone doubt their judgment when they need to resist another person’s authority.

Alex: Good. We can examine the power and danger of inward scrutiny without pretending the books are merely self-help manuals.

Augustine’s pears: a small theft as a difficult question

Peter: The pear theft in Confessions II.4–10 seems absurdly small beside other wrongs. Augustine and friends take fruit they do not need and throw much of it to pigs. Why give this episode so much attention?

Alex: Because its apparent lack of a practical motive threatens an easy moral theory. He cannot say he stole to survive or even because the pears were especially desirable. He asks why he loved the act of doing what was forbidden.

Eric: Yet the account does not leave him with a pure desire for evil. He remembers the company of his friends and the pleasure of boasting. The theft has a social setting. Perhaps what he wanted was belonging and the excitement of defiance, not evil as an isolated object.

Gwen: That matters because he describes the other boys as a group that made shame into a kind of pride. Earlier in Book II he admits boasting of acts he had not committed so he would not seem less daring than his peers. His motive is tangled with how he wanted to be seen.

Peter: So the pears are a case study in a person manufacturing a reason after the fact. The older Augustine asks what the younger one wanted, and the answer keeps changing as he looks closer.

Alex: Exactly. The book is a confession addressed to God but also written for readers. It is a retrospective account. We can take Augustine’s moral examination seriously and still ask whether later theology organizes the memory into a lesson the younger self did not experience in that form.

Eric: There is also a difference between explaining a motive and excusing the action. Showing that peer pressure mattered does not erase choice. Showing that the act was wrong does not make every description of its motive equally persuasive.

Gwen: The scene invites a form of honesty most memoirs avoid: he does not choose only dramatic sins that would make him look interesting. He lets a petty, unattractive act become difficult enough to examine closely.

Book VIII: the divided will

Alex: In Book VIII, Augustine is no longer puzzled mainly by the past. He knows the direction he thinks he should take, yet delays. He describes an old will and a new will struggling within him. What kind of freedom does that leave him?

Peter: He can form a decision, but the decision does not carry the whole person. The older patterns have become strong through repetition. That is a recognizable account of habit: what I have chosen before changes how easily I can choose now.

Eric: Augustine goes further. He argues against imagining two separate minds, one good and one evil. The divided will is still one person’s conflict. That matters for responsibility: he cannot hand the unwanted part of his desire to another self and declare innocence.

Gwen: But if he cannot make himself whole by commanding himself, what does he need from another person or from God? The scene in the garden, where he hears a child’s voice and reads from Paul’s letter, depicts conversion as an event he receives as well as an act he performs.

Alex: Yes. The theological claim is that grace does what self-command cannot. A secular reader may interpret the story differently, but should not silently replace grace with “he finally tried hard enough.” That would reverse the book’s argument.

Peter: I want to ask about the stakes of the choice. It concerns sexuality, marriage, and vocation, not a generic bad habit. Some readers may judge Augustine’s ranking of those goods differently. We can still learn from his analysis of divided desire without adopting his conclusions about every desire.

Eric: And because the author writes after conversion, the narrative gives the decisive moment a strong direction. The scene does not erase all future struggle. Later books continue to examine temptation and uncertainty. Conversion is not a claim that introspection is finished.

Book X: can the self know itself?

Gwen: Book X complicates a simple before-and-after story. Augustine explores memory and discovers that the mind nearest to him is not fully transparent. He can remember joy without feeling it and remember forgetfulness while struggling to say what that means.

Peter: Those examples sound almost playful after the garden, but they serve a serious purpose. If I do not fully understand even the mechanisms of memory, I should be cautious when I say I know all my motives.

Eric: Precisely. Augustine describes memory as vast and difficult to search. His inquiry turns inward, but inwardness does not guarantee certainty. The self he examines cannot entirely contain or explain itself.

Alex: That is one reason “confession” in this work is more than reporting wrong actions. It is praise, petition, self-examination, and inquiry into the creature before God. Augustine does not merely tell us the story of a successful reform. He shows why even a converted person remains a question to himself.

Gwen: It also means that confession before other people is ethically fraught. Augustine chooses what to disclose and how to interpret it. The people affected by his earlier life do not get equal space. We should not mistake the intensity of the narrator’s self-scrutiny for a complete account of everyone in the story.

Thomas: knowledge tested by a life

Peter: The Imitation of Christ seems to answer Augustine’s question with discipline. Its opening chapter asks what use it is to debate the Trinity brilliantly while lacking humility. It says one must shape a life after Christ, not merely speak correctly about Christ.

Eric: We should hear the full claim. Thomas does not say learning is intrinsically worthless. He says knowledge without love and a changed life is spiritually unprofitable. His standard is not whether a person can define contrition, but whether that person has actually turned toward God.

Alex: Book I, chapter II, then links humility to judging others kindly rather than considering oneself superior. That is a social consequence, not just a private feeling. Book I, chapter XIV warns against judging others too quickly. The discipline is partly a check on the pleasure of being right.

Gwen: I see its appeal. Someone who knows their own weakness may be less cruel. But humility can become distorted if it trains a harmed person to blame themselves and bear mistreatment indefinitely. Book I, chapter XVI advises patience with faults that cannot be corrected. We have to ask who decides what cannot be corrected.

Peter: Thomas’s own distinction may help. The text tells readers to help the suffering and says a good work may be changed for a better one. Patience is not automatically passivity. Still, the language of endurance can be misused by anyone who benefits from another’s silence.

Eric: There is also an apparent disagreement with Emerson, whom we read last week. Emerson distrusts inherited authority and tells the self to speak. Thomas distrusts pride in the self and calls it to obedience. But both suspect the social performance of goodness. Their proposed corrections differ radically.

Alex: That comparison works only if we keep the theological difference visible. Thomas’s center is imitation of Christ and divine grace, not the authenticity of personal expression. His humility cannot be lifted out of that center and treated as generic modesty.

What would change count as?

Alex: Across these works, the question “Do I know the good?” is not enough. Augustine shows that desire, habit, memory, and grace complicate the move from knowledge to action. Thomas asks whether knowledge has entered conduct, charity, and humility.

Peter: Then self-knowledge has to be tested over time. The pear theft is remembered differently by an older man. The divided will does not vanish because he names it. A disciplined life cannot be proven by one eloquent paragraph.

Gwen: And action needs an outward test too. Does the practice make a person more truthful and kinder toward others? Or does it give them a more elaborate language for explaining their own virtue while other people bear the cost?

Eric: We should also resist treating every difficulty as an inward defect. Social conditions, obligations, and relationships shape what is possible. Augustine and Thomas write within traditions that emphasize the soul, but a reader can ask how those traditions should meet institutional wrongs.

Alex: These texts make a demanding claim: a human being can believe the right thing, speak movingly about it, and still remain unconverted in practice. The lasting inquiry is how we tell the difference without pretending we can see our own motives perfectly.

Sources and further reading

• The Harvard Classics, Vol. VII (1909), edition record. It lists Edward B. Pusey as Augustine’s translator and William Benham as Thomas’s translator.
• Augustine, Confessions, Pusey translation, with standard book, chapter, and paragraph numbers. Passages discussed: II.3–10, VIII.5–12, and X.14–17.
• Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Benham translation, especially Book I, chapters I–II, XIV–XVI. The linked text includes its own introductory note, which should be distinguished from Thomas’s work.

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