The Divided Will

Today's Reading

Read Romans 7:21-25: "For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?"

Then read Galatians 5:17: "For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do."

Augustine's Insight

Book VIII of the Confessions contains some of the most psychologically penetrating writing in all of literature. Augustine has now reached the point where he intellectually assents to Christianity. He believes it is true. He wants to follow Christ. And yet he cannot make himself do it. The problem is no longer intellectual — it is volitional.

"The mind commands the body, and is obeyed at once. The mind commands itself, and meets resistance."

This observation is staggering in its simplicity. If you want to raise your hand, you raise it. No struggle, no delay. But if you command your own will to stop desiring what is destructive, the will refuses. How can the mind be sovereign over the body but not over itself?

Augustine explains: the will has become divided. Through years of habit, he has forged a chain of desire that now binds him. Each act of giving in created a habit; habit became compulsion; compulsion became a kind of necessity.

"I was held back not by fetters put on me by another, but by the iron chains of my own will. The enemy held my will and made a chain of it and bound me with it."

Reflection

Paul and Augustine are describing the same human experience. The language of Romans 7 — "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing" — could have been written by Augustine himself. There is a war within the self, and the self is losing.

This is not merely a moral problem but an existential one. We are not unified beings effortlessly choosing the good. We are fractured, pulled in multiple directions, capable of sincerely wanting one thing while doing its opposite. Anyone who has struggled with addiction, compulsive behavior, anger, or lust knows exactly what Augustine is describing.

The critical insight is that the chains are self-made. No external force imposed them. The will enslaved itself through repeated acts of consent. This is both the bad news and the beginning of good news: if the problem is the will itself, then only a power greater than the will can set it free.

Going Deeper

Galatians 5:17 frames the struggle as between "flesh" and "Spirit" — not body versus soul, but the self oriented away from God versus the self being drawn toward God. Augustine's divided will is the experiential reality of what Paul describes theologically.

The cry that ends Romans 7 — "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me?" — is the cry Augustine is about to utter in a Milan garden. He has tried self-improvement, philosophical discipline, sheer resolution. None have been enough. The answer Paul gives — "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" — is the answer Augustine is about to discover. But first, the tension must reach its breaking point.