Agency in Augustine

Augustine in Confessions 7.3:

sed et ego adhuc, quamvis incontaminabilem et inconvertibilem et nulla ex parte mutabilem dicerem firmeque sentirem dominum nostrum, deum verum, qui fecisti non solum animas nostras sed etiam corpora,

Note the etiam, and before, in 6.16, his disquisition on the immortality of the soul: catholic in his sayings, but still in the traditional or platonic philosophical world: it is all about the soul, and the body is a problem. I take his mention of the etiam to be the mark of an effort to remember the body as part of his new belief (or renewed belief) in the transformation of bodies and souls, not only the purification of souls.

nec tantum nostras animas et corpora, sed omnes et omnia;

Again, manichaean belief in the background, in which the explanation for evil requires that the world we perceive is partly or completely evil, if not an illusion. The creation of the world by the same divinity that creates human beings, including their souls, introduces other problems, but sets the moral question at another depth (though the grandeur and stringency of Manichaean views and practices should be properly remembered.)

non tenebam explicitam et enodatam causam mali. quaecumque tamen esset, sic eam quaerendam videbam, ut non per illam constringerer deum incommutabilem mutabilem credere, ne ipse fierem quod quaerebam. itaque securus eam quaerebam, et certus non esse verum quod illi dicerent, quos toto animo fugiebam; quia videbam quaerendo, unde malum, repletos malitia, qua opinarentur tuam potius substantiam male pati quam suam male facere.[1]

This is the crux of the matter. A move towards an incomprehensible divinity (image: anchoring in the depth), which ipso facto grounds moral agency more firmly, though less visibly, and gives it a wider and more difficult compass. It becomes human agency, not celestial or otherworldly. See his page on luck and predictability of human destiny, in 7.6.

[1]Text from Knöll’s Teubner 1909 edition, copied from LCL